Death Star Canteen

Give me penne all’arrabbiata or you shall die. You and everyone in this canteen. Death by tray it shall be.

We’re back with Izzard and in well known territory. A very memorable, much loved and oft-quoted bit – so much so that there’s a Lego remake. Strangely, I remember thinking this as a kid. The concept, I mean.. what *do* baddies do when they’re not being baddies? Are they just arseholes non-stop or what? And the longer you live the more you come to realise: bad people don’t always do bad things. To counter: sometimes good people do bad things. I remember a Big Train sketch once focused on Ming the Merciless (played by comedy legend Mark Heap) going about his daily business, doing household chores and watching the Teletubbies. So I think it’s a scenario that a lot of people have imagined before.

That’s not to say that the Death Star canteen is in any way clichéd. Far from it. Centred around Lord Vader queuing up for pasta at lunch time, he quarrels with a canteen worker who has no idea who he is. In fact, he thinks that he’s a man called Mr Stevens, who happens to be the head of catering in the establishment. If you can call a planet-sized death moon an establishment.

Now, there are plenty of designs relating to the canteen scattered about the internet but the vast majority of them take a bit of an obvious route and go for the standard, NASA-esque font that’s synonymous with the franchise. You know the one. I wanted to go for something a little bit more in depth, so hunted around for further examples of the in-world typography. Thanks, internet. As you can see, we’ve got said design off to the side, as I wanted to include ‘Mr Stevens’ on there as a name tag rather than just have a basic logo across the whole chest. It’s just a little bit more interesting that way, I feel.

You don’t have to have a surname of Stevens to wear this, btw. Or even be a Mr. Ties in quite well with the whole Eddie Izzard timeline really, doesn’t it?