The Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter: November 14, 2025

Now with 87% more Loth-cats!

Hello there

What’s this, a Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter on a Friday? I know, these days it’s rarer than finding a kyber crystal in the middle of Corsucant. It’s a shorter Death Star HR than normal, but I’m trying to get back on my usual schedule. This week I talk about one of the weirder Star Wars shows in recent memory, touch on The Hunt for Ben Solo because that’s the only thing we can talk about, and contemplate adopting a Loth-cat.

As always, thanks for reading Death Star HR. If you’re reading this and you’re not a subscriber, I’d love it if you entered your email below and smashed that subscribe button. There’s also an official Death Star HR Instagram and an official Death Star HR YouTube page as well and I’d love it if you subscribed there as well.

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This Is Where The Fun Begins

Had this one saved for Halloween and completely forgot to post it.

Instagram doesn’t seem to be embedding correctly these days. Maybe Zuckerberg is fighting with Substack? But the original is here.

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Star Wars: Visions Has an Incredibly Disturbing Vision

This is decidedly one of those better late than never type of posts. A couple weeks ago, before Halloween, I sat down with Taco the Loth-cat to watch Star Wars: Visions, Volume 3. Not season, volume. It sounds classier than seasons. Anyway, I hit play, Emperor Palpatine’s #1 Fan came in needing to talk to me about something. And then I just got sidetracked. Life happened. Work happened. I went out of town for a weekend. You know how it goes. So finally this week I got to sit down and watch Visions.

Note the Bo-Katan Funko on the speaker.

For those unfamiliar, Star Wars: Visions really represents Star Wars creativity at its finest. Various animation studios were basically just told, do a Star Wars story. I’m sure there were rules attached, you can’t show Yoda turning to the Dark Side and murdering Luke Skywalker on Dagobah or something that. Nothing that contradicts canon with major characters. Actually I would bet that the animators were told no main characters. Which is fine, actually preferable. It’s a big galaxy, not everything has to be about the Skywalkers.

Volume 3 gets back to Visions’ roots, so to speak. Volume 1, released in 2021 featured nine shorts produced by seven different Japanese animation studios. Volume 2, released in 2023 expanded the, well, vision to go worldwide. Probably the best known studio from Volume 2 was Aardman Animations out of the United Kingdom. Even if you’re not familiar with Aardman’s name, you’ve probably seen their style in Wallace & Gromit or Chicken Run. Volume 3 goes back to all Japanese studios.

I am not going to recap eight of the nine shorts in Volume 3. If you want to read about them, friends of Death Star HR Ahch-Tu Baby and Hoth Off The Press have some good write-ups. Instead, I want to talk about the last one in the series, Black.

All the other stories in Visions are familar if you’ve ever seen a Star Wars. There’s Jedi and Sith. There’s humans and strange aliens and droids. There’s bounty hunters and smugglers and Stormtroopers. The plot of the story might be different, the style of the animation might change. But everything hits the notes of Star Wars. This isn’t a criticism. I mean, if you watch a Star Wars show you want it to be Star Wars-y.

And then there’s Black. It’s the shortest of the all the segments. There’s no real dialog. There’s no plot. There’s no Jedi or Sith. How does the Mothership describe Black?

In david production’s new short, written and directed by Shinya Ohira, explore a stormtrooper’s internal conflict amid an epic battle. On the cusp of defeat, a psychedelic journey intertwines the past and present, light and dark, and life and death for the Imperial trooper.

That’s honestly selling it short.

It’s not the Eye of Sion

Black is an hallucination set to a bouncy soundtrack. Seriously, the first tune on the soundtrack sounds like something you’d hear coming from a bar while walking down Frenchman Street in New Orleans. It “tells” the story of a Stormtrooper on the second Death Star right after Lando, Wedge, and Nein Nunb (in this house Nein Nunb is a hero of the Rebellion) hit the main reactor control tower and the battlestation is about to explode. We see the Stormtrooper fighting with another Stormtrooper, or maybe it’s him fighting with himself. We see flashbacks to the Battle of Hoth and other battles the Stormtrooper was in. There’s a flashback to a wife and maybe a marriage. And maybe, just maybe, a little bit of hope at the end.

Black asks the question, if you were trapped on a space station the size of a small moon that was minutes or maybe seconds away from exploding, what would go through your mind?

I was thinking about this after I got done watching, how much Star Wars media is there from the perspective of your average Stormtrooper? I can’t think of much. There’s plenty about the Clone Troopers. We get Finn’s story in the Sequel Trilogy but that’s focused on his time as an ex-Stormtrooper in the Resistance. In the Expanded Universe, the “Look Sir, Droids” Stormtrooper gets a story in Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina and the Stormtrooper that stops Luke and Obi-Wan in A New Hope gets a story in From a Certain Point of View. There’s Death Troopers, but that’s really less about Stormtroopers and more a Star Wars horror story. I can’t remember if there’s a Stormtrooper in novel Death Star. Maybe that’s an untapped area of exploration, especially the Stormtroopers of the OT era. Did they sign up or were the conscripted? Were they true believers or did they abandon ship after Alderaan? The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire does touch this, but more in footnotes than the story.

What’s everybody’s take on Visions? Any preferred segment of it?

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We Are All The Hunt For Ben Solo

Eventually we will either get The Hunt for Ben Solo (not likely) or the fanbase will move on to something else (likely). But for now, it’s our “I am Spartacus” moment. Star Wars fans continue to demand the Ben Solo redemption story gets made. We’ve seen missing posters. We’ve seen planes with banners. Twice now.

A plane with the banner “Shareholders Want The Hunt for Ben Solo,” the latter part being the hoped-for movie’s title, flew over Disney’s Burbank-based headquarters in the 11 a.m. hour Thursday, just hours after the company had its earnings call.

And now the cosplay crowd is getting in on it. Rachel (only one name like Prince), better known on Instagram as @reychelofjakku staged a one woman protest outside of Walt Disney Studios. In full Rey cosplay, she held a lightsaber and a sign that just read “where’s Ben Solo?” The question of the ages.

The question we all want answered: Source.

There is a part of me that wants to snark on this. But I’m trying to just say let people embrace what brings them some joy. And if dressing as Rey outside Disney Studio makes her day and maybe brings a smile to the people driving by, then go for it.

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Great Moments in Star Wars Merchandising

So the intent behind Great Moments in Star Wars Merchandising is two fold. The first goal occasionally showing off something from my person collection. Outside of far too many Expanded Universe paperbacks, I really don’t have a ton of Star Wars stuff. Not as much as you’d think someone who writes a weekly Star Wars newsletter would have. I had a really nice collection of action figures at one point. The second goal is to have fun with the weird and outrageous stuff that Lucasfilm signed off on. And some times, there’s something normal but I still like it. Like this week. Two words: Loth. Cats.

Pspspsps. Source.

I mean, I’m not sure how my real cat will react. But I wouldn’t mind a Loth-cat of my own. And now you can get one.

StarWars.com has your first look at a newly revealed Loth-cat collectible toy, which will be available on DisneyStore.com and at Disney Parks as part of Gift of the Galaxy starting this Life Day on November 17, 2025. Inspired by Murley’s ever-present frown, brown spotted fur, and mischievous eyes from Star Wars: Ahsoka Season 1, now on Disney+, this screen-accurate Loth-cat comes in a Star Wars Galactic Archive Series box designed to look like a space kennel.

We’re probably less than a year away from Ahsoka season 2, and I’m really hoping they answer the biggest cliffhanger. Who’s feeding Sabine’s Loth-cat while she’s stuck on Peridea?

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This Day in Star Wars History

I thought for some reason I had already done This Day in Star Wars history for November 14th, but nothing listened seemed familiar. So here we go.

• Motion picture editor Paul Hirsch was born in 1945. Hirsch, along with Richard Chew and Marcia Lucas won an Oscar for Film Editing on A New Hope. Or as it was called then, Star Wars.

• Actor and comedian Dana Synder was born in 1973. Synder voiced Graballa the Hutt in LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures. I don’t think I’ve ever watched this one, but need to since Wookieepedia describes Graballa as “a Brooklyn mobster guy” and “likened his rendition of Graballa to a Hutt speaking a ‘Southern accent.’” Don’t know how a Brooklyn mobster and southern accent are going to work, but I kinda want to find out.

• Ukrainian actress and Ahsoka star Ivanna Sakhno was born in 1997. The same year the Special Editions came out. I am officially old. Best just to move along.

• Star Wars: The Ultimate Action Figure Collection by uber collector Steve Sansweet was published in 2012. I always like these books, but since action figures are always being released, it feels like they’re out of date upon release.

• The High Republic novel The Eye of Darkness by George Mann was released in 2023. One of these days I’m going to tackle The High Republic like I did with the New Jedi Order series.

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From the Depths of Wookieepedia

Oh yeah, always a good day when the Wookieepedia randomizer gives me a Knights of the Old Republic entry. This week we’ve got Yuthura Ban’s Jedi Master. No, not Yuthura Ban. Don’t worry, she’s got her own entry but this one is for her unnamed Jedi Master.

Recognizing her Force potential the master took Yuthura to Dantooine, to be trained as a Jedi, taking the young Twi’lek as his Padawan. The partnership would not last long, however, as Yuthura, consumed with hatred towards the slave trade, and infuriated by the Jedi’s apathy toward it, left the Order, eventually joining the new Sith Empire of Darth Revan and Malak. Yuthura returned to the Jedi after being redeemed by a reformed Revan and upon seeing his old apprentice, the Jedi wept.

I know this entry is about Yuthura’s Jedi Master and not Yuthura herself, but she’s not really wrong to be infuriated by the Jedi’s apathy towards slavery. I mean, Qui-Gon Jinn meets two slaves, both basically walking remote controlled bombs, and just kinda shrugs.

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News From the HoloNet

Hollywood Bowl Dedicates Stage to John Williams

Can’t really disagree with this. It was nice they did it while Williams is still alive.

John Williams: The Anthology – Vol. 1 1969-1990 is the First Volume in a Historic Collection

Immediately adding this to my Discogs want-list. Hat tip to my father-in-law Bob A. Fett for making me aware of this.

5 Star Wars “Facts” You Probably Believe (And Shouldn’t)

I generally don’t click or share listicles, but I was curious on this one. For the record, I knew 4 of the 5 facts weren’t facts at all. And the last one seems to be still be a bit of a question.

George Lucas’ Museum Will Finally Open September 2026

Still waiting on my Death Star HR media credential for the opening.

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That’s it for this week. If you like what I’m doing, please subscribe. I’ll catch you next week, and may the Force be with you.