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What Does That Screen Say?

 

What? You want PROOF?

We can prove that this is a repeating - and meaningless - pattern by finding these strings of letters elsewhere. Another screen from ROJ, also from when Vader's shuttle transmitted clearance codes, provides two opportunities to test the theory.


Thanks to Michael Donley for the screen capture

The first opportunity is the large red word at the top of the screen. This matches the last line of "the screen":

The second opportunity is the first paragraph from "the second screen". It's a shortened version of the first paragraph of "the screen", almost:

The difference is the last three letters from each example. By filling in the blanks, we see that "the second screen" actually helps fill in one of the blanks from "the screen".

Now, there are other words on "the second screen". Although they are pretty hard to make out (George, I'm still waiting for my DVD), I'm fairly sure they don't match anything found on "the screen". That doesn't disprove anything. The other words are probably just random letters selected from another block of text that we haven't seen.

It's true we may never know if someone at ILM or Lucasfilm - perhaps even Joe Johnston himself - had gone through the trouble of assigning English letters to the letters seen on the screens from ROJ. But regardless, the letters are not used in a meaningful way. They are randomly selected from repeating patterns. To sum up, what we are left with is a little mood gibberish, if you will.

[By the way, if you can get any high-resolution "Aurebesh" screen captures from ROJ, please e-mail me, as I'd love to be able to break down as many screens as I can. Thanks!]

[[And if you feel like you haven't gotten anything out of this, there's always my free Galactic Basic font, which wouldn't be here if I hadn't spent all this time analyzing.]]

 

This page last modified on 8/25/2006
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