If you’ve spent more than a few minutes in any of the hundreds of LEGO Star Wars groups on Facebook in the last day and a half there are two things that won’t have escaped your notice – lots of fans are only just finding out that May The 4th Be With You (aka Star Wars Day) is nearly upon us and that a surprising number of people can’t comprehend that LEGO uses a number of languages on its packaging.
Spreading across the internet like the meme* that it is are a stupendous number of posts by people expressing confusion/dismay and/or excitement that they have found a misprint/rare variant.
It’s not, it is just Darth Vader in another language – French to be precise and a quick visit to the French version of the product page on LEGO.com will confirm that this is a legitimate translation of the Dark Lord of the Sith’s full and proper name.
Normally the graphics on a LEGO box are so eye-catching that the text is often ignored, but in the case of the new 75305 Darth Vader helmet that was added to the 18+ subtheme a few days ago, the black helmet on the black box doesn’t stand out as much as the white text – and the Dark Vador on the top flap is getting all the attention.
Following the focus that The Razor Crest received when it fell foul of a trademark battle last year, many fans have started to take note of what is printed on the boxes that their sets come in and while some have recognized the different text, others haven’t caught on that North American boxes include English/Spanish/French wording to cover the main language groups of the continent. It’s worth noting that since the early 90s boxes in Europe don’t have set names because there are just too many languages to easily accommodate, and the Australia-Pacific market just has English on them.
If you don’t believe LEGO.com or our research then try using the Google translation service, or check out the etymology of Darth Vader, a name that combines two European languages.
Hopefully this explanation will get as much traffic as the Dark Vador posts, and eventually the furore will die down.
* by which we mean definition first coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain how ideas replicate, mutate, and evolve (memetics), and not an image with “One does not simply…” on it.
Ok so I have a question if the top of the box is suppose to say dark then what about the ones that say darth???
Like the article says, they’re the ones from Australia or New Zealand.
You will be telling us next that The Third Gathers – Backstroke of the West is legit next!
And that there was a fourth Indiana Jones movie.