Duncan Lay: What the Maclunkey have they done to Star Wars?

Yet another rewrite of Star Wars’ famous cantina scene between Han Solo-Greedo scene has fans in a lather.

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Just when Star Wars fans thought they could relax and start looking forward to the final Skywalker film, they have been bewildered and outraged by a bizarre new extra line of dialogue that has popped up in a legendary scene.

It’s yet another edit of the Han Solo-Greedo scene from the original film, now called A New Hope.

For those who came late to this party, the original had Han Solo shoot the bounty hunter Greedo under the table, thus establishing him as a ruthless antihero and setting up his brilliant character arc.

But then in 1997’s remastered edition George Lucas edited the scene so that Greedo draws his blaster first. Then we had Greedo actually getting a shot off in later editions.

Now, on the version you can see on Disney+, Greedo shouts: “Maclunkey!” before getting killed.

Never mind that Greedo doesn’t speak English and his conversation with Han has to be subtitled because it’s merely a collection of sounds. I suspect if “Maclunkey” was subtitled, it would probably read: “What the f...” because that’s what fans are thinking.

Fans are outraged about a change to a scene involving Han Solo in the original Star Wars film, now called A New Hope.

It is so ridiculous. Poor Greedo. He had a legendary scene and now he’s just a figure of fun.

Naturally the internet has gone wild for this bizarre new line.

One school of thought was that Greedo, being a bounty hunter, couldn’t afford a landspeeder and had ridden to the cantina. So what he was shouting was actually: “My donkey!”

The conspiracy theorists also worked it into one of the compelling storylines from the new set of movies. The heroic Rey (Daisy Ridley) has been a mystery since we found her, with fans coming up with incredible theories as to who her parents are.

Now perhaps it’s been solved — she’s a Maclunkey!

Greedo has gone from legendary figure to figure of fun in a series of scene rewrites. Picture: YouTube

One of the funniest I’ve seen is Han standing over Greedo with gun pointed at the bounty hunter’s head and the caption: ‘Say Maclunkey one more nerf-herding time ...”

Then we have memes of “Maclunkey” being inserted into just about every movie scene where a codeword is used, from Kevin Spacey’s dying words in LA Confidential to trap his killer to Captain America whispering to Hydra agents to get his hands on the Tesseract.

I have a different theory.

I suspect this is a Star Wars swearword that won’t give the new movie an M rating that could wreck its chances of becoming the highest-grossing film of all time.

Usually swear words are delivered in an alien language or robot squeaks, thus keeping it safe. The worst they have come up with so far is “Bantha poodoo!” which incredibly wasn’t the worst thing about The Phantom Menace.

So is this the solution? Angry characters will start exclaiming: “Maclunkey!” when things go wrong and, thanks to this rewritten scene and the subsequent internet explosion, fans will understand.

If that’s the Maclunkey case, then they need to find whatever Maclunkist came up with this Maclunk-off idea and have their mother-Maclunkey arse kicked around the Maclunkeying block until they beg our Maclunkey forgiveness.

Originally published as Duncan Lay: What the Maclunkey have they done to Star Wars?