problems in a faraway galaxy long ago

Watch "A New Hope" some time and you may notice a few interesting things about the characters and the way they interact, that just don't make sense.

For starters, when they're on Yavin IV and the rebels are getting ready to go up against the Death Star, Luke begs Han to stay and help them in the fight. His exact words are "They could use a good pilot like you. You're turning your back on them." Yet all we've seen Han do so far is to walk around the ship, man the gun turrets against some TIE fighters, and get caught in a tractor beam. How does Luke get the idea that Han is a good pilot, and why doesn't he ask Chewbacca to help, since he presumably was flying the Millenium Falcon while they escaped from the Death Star.

I've tried to rationalize this a couple ways. Bear with me:

1. Luke is a starstruck farm boy, and easily impressed by Han's swagger. Luke has never been off Tatooine at this point. He's never even heard of the Force before, and what he knows of Obiwan Kenobi is that he's something of a mad hermit, yet he still gets impressed by Obiwan pretty quickly and decides to rush off into outer space with him. He's blown away by the thought that C3PO and R2D2 have been with the rebellion, and is smitten immediately with Princess Leia.

His assessment of the Falcon and his initial reaction to Han could easily spring from insecurity; i.e., here's a guy who made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs, a guy who's been to more planets than Luke has brain cells, what can I say that can compare with that? So he gets aggressive and tries to show how much he knows.

It turns out that Luke is a good pilot, but I'd suggest that he has little basis for that claim since all he's flown has been his landspeeder and perhaps some other sort of hovercraft. If the Force -- and Han Solo -- weren't with him, Luke would have been toast.

The movie also suggests that wookies are not especially well known in the empire -- Han has to tell Threepio about their reputation for ripping people's arms out of their sockets when they get mad -- so it could be a case of xenophobia or mere unfamiliarity with wookies that leads to the slight. Or Luke might just be racist.

And let's not forget the possibility that Luke has yogurt for brains. He certainly didn't demonstrate much mental prowess in the movies that I can think of. It was probably all he could do stop from drooling onto his lightsaber.

2. We really don't see the entire flight in either direction. It's possible that Han did a fair amount of flying then as well; in any event, he did get them away from Tatooine, didn't he?

Another interesting question: After the Battle of the Death Star, Han, Luke and Chewie all come forward in some sort of award ceremony at the rebel base on Yavin IV. Han and Luke get medals, while Chewie just stands around and makes growling noises. What's up with that?

I think in one of the adaptations -- it might have been the Marvel Comics adaptation, or the novel -- there is a note made to the effect that Chewbacca was too tall for Leia to put a medal around his neck, and that his medal was awarded separately. But surely it wouldn't have been hard to hand him the medal, wouldn't it?

One also could assume that wookies don't like medals or other outward adornments for religious, social or hygiene reasons. (Most of the other species wear clothes, but even on Hoth, Chewbacca walks around naked. It's just a good thing for the ratings that certain things don't show through that fur.)

It's also impossible that wookies aren't regarded as intelligent creatures. No idea what the basis for this would be, but they simply could be advanced animals or something similar. There's a lot we don't know about Lucas' Galactic Empire for the simple reason that he's never thought it out that fully.

It could be that wookies are discriminated against, and the dialogue on its own does suggest that.
But the possibility also has occurred to me that there could be some sort of institutionalized prejudice against wookies as well. Are they regarded as less advanced than the humans in the empire? Are they less evolved? Chewie seems to be a decent pilot, marksman and mechanic, so I'm not sure about that, but it's an intriguing line of reasoning that probably never occurred to the Emperor when he first drew up the series. (In fact it probably still hasn't. Lucas' main gift is his timing, not his storytelling or artistic vision.)

Also, have you noticed that Chewbacca never gets subtitles for his lines? I guess it's for dramatic purposes. You usually can get the sense of what Chewbacca and Artoo are saying by the reactions and comments of the others around them. But since Greedo and Jabba are actively threatening the heroes, it's important we understand what they're saying faster than reacting to context allows us.

What I found rather amusing when my wife and I watched the Star Wars trilogy last year is that the subtitles aren't really necessary. Greedo and Jabba are speaking English, the same as the human characters, but with accents or something done to alter their speech, like sounds omitted.

I'm serious! Listen closely to the characters as you read the subtitles, and you'll notice the words match. There are consonants missing or something was done to the voice, but the speech recognizably matches the subtitles. I noticed the same thing years ago watching the Sean Connery movie "Medicine Man." At least on the old "War of the Worlds" series, they reversed the audio so it sounded utterly alien. (Or at least like backmasking.)