I found it odd this morning when Star Wars: Episode VII director JJ Abrams did not appear on the Star Wars Force for Change winner announcement video. Abrams made his presence felt on previous updates regarding the charity drive for UNICEF Innovation Labs, but it looked as if he was too busy to chime in and congratulate the winner, DC Barns.
That turned out to not be the case as JJ did in fact have a message for everyone that participated in the charity, aa special message for DC Barns, and a little Star Wars: Episode VII teaser for everyone else. He shared the message via the Bad Robot Twitter feed this morning and that teaser imagery deserves some discussion.
Let’s rewind back a month or two to when a huge Star Wars: Episode VII plot spoilers summary started making the Internet rounds. It suggested that the opening crawl panned down not to a ship, but to a severed robotic hand that once belonged to Luke Skywalker. The hand would find its way to a planet and help kick off the adventure.
Take a look at the Bad Robot tweet and the robotic hand grasping the JJ Abrams note.
#ForceForChange @starwars #EpisodeVII @omaze @UNICEF #uinnovate @UNICEFinnovate pic.twitter.com/pCAbhcjKxn
— Bad Robot (@bad_robot) August 11, 2014
Clearly that hand is humanoid in shape with an opposable thumb and fingers. It could be a droid hand, but there’s something familiar about it, as Luke Skywalker would say.
Take a look at this image of Anakin Skywalker’s robotic hand from the prequel era.
Notice the similarities between the JJ Abrams tease and Anakin’s hand? I’m not stating that we’re definitively looking at a replacement hand for a human character, but the similarities suggest that as viable speculation.
What we can see of this hand tease looks a little too clean for something that may have been floating in space for decades. Unless the hand/arm was recently severed, in which case the glove might fit. It’s hard to ignore the coincidence of JJ Abrams sharing the robotic hand following the rumor report, whether’s he’s simply winking at the potential plot leak or not.
