Holotheatre/18 November 2020 transcript
Holotheatre (18 November 2020), a weekly Star Wars CCG show streamed on the Players Committee Twitch channel, included a six-minute excerpt from Kendall Halman's interview with former Decipher lead designer Jerry Darcy about the Krayt Dragon card and its appearance in The Mandalorian. The rest of the episode featured guests Justin Miyashiro and Kevin Wilson, a tournament director and judge discussion, and the road to the 2020 World Championship. Participants in this segment: Kendall Halman, Jerry Darcy; Dan Tartaglione (host).
Source: Star Wars CCG - 11/18/20 Holotheatre - Guests Justin Miyashiro & Kevin Wilson + Jerry Darcy Interview, Star Wars CCG (Players Committee), YouTube (uploaded 19 November 2020; streamed 18 November 2020). The segment runs from 19:40 to 26:20.
The text below is from the video's automatic captions, corrected for names and card titles; it has not yet been checked against the audio. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].
Transcript[edit]
[19:45] Kendall Halman: Let's talk about the krayt dragon. First of all, what did you have to work with initially with the krayt dragon? What was the established lore, and where did you take creative liberties?
[20:00] Jerry Darcy: What I recall is this, and all praise and credit to the West End Games folks: when we were working on Premiere, it was, what on earth are those bones? And the West End Games folks said those are from a krayt dragon. My brain perked up, because I'm a huge D&D nerd, and I'm like, dragons! There are dragons in Star Wars. That became a fascination to me. And then, Obi-Wan Kenobi did a krayt dragon howl, it would scare off the Sand People. Oh yeah, we're making a card of that. Heck yeah.
[20:59] Jerry Darcy: So the idea got seeded there. Then I remember with Special Edition, our artists were amazing. Most of the work had been cleaning up the images, because they were still grainy and we were using actual film, cleaning up the grain on the film footage. But they were growing as artists, and they were doing not just touch-up work but occasional CGI. These were the very early days of Photoshopping. Like I said in the post that I wrote, I don't remember the moment of "let's make a krayt dragon", but I do remember wanting to do one, and I remember going over and seeing it gradually come to life, the artist Joe Bolton just putting it together and adding stormtroopers running away from it. As excited as I was that there were dragons in Star Wars at the beginning of working on the CCG, now I was actually getting to help put a dragon in Star Wars for real, not just the bones. That's my small part in bringing that thing to life.
[23:00] Kendall Halman: And when it finally came out in The Mandalorian, it looked like the card.
[23:05] Jerry Darcy: Oh my god. I'm serious, like I said, I cried. There was that thing that Decipher had made, and they changed it; it didn't have the arms. But the generalities, like the face: the Lucasfilm people, the Disney folks, made it their own, as they have every right to do. But you could see the basic structure of what we had made, and they had taken it to the next step. You've got to realize, I haven't gotten to touch the Star Wars universe since 2000, and in my bones I still miss it. Every now and then I would see a character I had named, or a character I'd done some background lore for, pop up in a short story or a video game, and I'm like, oh hey, cool, I did that. But this was the coolest thing out there right now in Star Wars, so it was this huge rush of nostalgia, this huge rush of, oh my gosh, I touched Star Wars again. Holy cow. As I say, I was but a small link in that chain, but it was really exciting.
[25:00] Kendall Halman: Disney made it their own, but if you knew what a krayt dragon was and you saw that, even though it looked like a worm at first, you knew that was a krayt dragon.
[25:10] Jerry Darcy: I've seen an article, and someone's told me there's another one, where they reference the Star Wars CCG and show the images: here's where that krayt dragon thing came from, this crazy old game that only nerds played back in the '90s, some obscure group in Virginia. What struck me is that at first they had it tunneling underground, and then they came to the cave and we saw the Tusken Raider approaching the cave, and I was immediately thinking of Krayt Dragon Howl: the Tusken Raiders would be very aware of this kind of creature. And the image of the cave: I swear there was a shot of the cave that, if you take the krayt dragon out of the image on the card, felt so similar to the cave that was on the card. [unclear]
[26:20] Dan Tartaglione: And we are back, everybody. Thanks to Kendall for having that interview. Look for more of that interview; I think it's going to be all audio, on Kendall's podcast, coming soon.
See also[edit]
- Holotheatre/11 November 2020 transcript (first Darcy excerpt: Objectives)
- Jerry Darcy · Kendall Halman · Corran on the Horn · Krayt Dragon · Krayt Dragon Bones · Krayt Dragon Howl