As today is Star Wars day (May the fourth be with you), this is an appropriate time to address an important topic: Baby Yoda! In December while we were crowdfunding to develop the Cranky Uncle game, I ran a contest on social media. At the time, I was drawing caricatures of donors to be used in the game – each cartoon featured a denial technique or logical fallacy. The game will include many, many quiz questions (sooooo many!), allowing players to repeatedly practice critical thinking.
For my contest, whoever could suggest the best fallacy involving Baby Yoda would get drawn as a cartoon in the game. The “official” reason for the contest was harnessing the pop culture phenomenon that was Baby Yoda in order to raise awareness of our crowdfunding campaign. The real reason: I very much wanted to draw Baby Yoda!
The challenge of Cranky Uncle quiz questions is they need to work out of context. You need to be able to identify the fallacy with a minimum of background information. The text also have to be extremely brief – a terse sentence in a speech bubble on a smartphone. Despite these tough constraints, some interesting suggestions came in:
When I saw Dana Nuccitelli’s suggestion, I knew I’d found the winner. The idea that the baby looked like Yoda, so must be Baby Yoda was a clear, simple example of jumping to conclusions. But it also captured the fundamental fallacy underpinning the whole Baby Yoda movement. In the Star Wars timeline, Yoda had died several years before the time of the Mandalorian, but everyone (even people on the set while filming the show) resorted to calling the child Baby Yoda just because they looked alike.
And here’s the wrinkle in the story. Dana is the creator of the “Escalator” graph, an animated GIF (first conceived by Bob Lacatena) that visually and elegantly demonstrates the technique of cherry picking used to cast doubt on global warming. Dana often characterized the denialist argument “it cooled over the last few years so global warming isn’t happening” as going down the up escalator.
It turns out I’d already drawn a caricature of Dana. In an early draft of Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change, I took his analogy of the escalator and drew it literally.
Over the course of 2018 as I developed and refined the book, this page (and the layout design in general) evolved. I tried to reduce the amount of text as much as possible, with the visuals taking as much space as possible (my goal was that every page would engage readers with bright, enticing visuals rather than intimidate them with too much text). This is how the escalator page ended up:
So I dug out that old cartoon and adapted it for the Cranky Uncle game. One response on Twitter was it was confusing how Data was facing downwards if he’s meant to be going upwards – a fair criticism. If I get time between now and the late June release of the game, I will redraw Dana facing upwards and peeking over his shoulder at Cranky Uncle.
And lastly, here is an animated GIF of Baby Yoda blinking. Why? Because I really wanted to animate Baby Yoda blinking!
Hannah Cole
I was just looking at gifs of baby yoda, but this was an interesting read. Thanks!