Unwrapping the Star Wars LEGO Advent Calendar: Day 16

You know that classic scene in Zoolander when our titular hero, Derek Zoolander, throws the architectural mockup of the “The Derek Zoolander Center for Children Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too” on the floor? He knocks that thing right down, breaks it all to pieces, because, as he astutely notes: “How can we be expected to teach children to learn how to read if they can’t even fit inside the building?” After all, is it a school for ants?

That’s kind of how I feel about opening day 16 of the 2023 Star Wars LEGO Advent Calendar. What do these little gray bricks build? Arguably, the tiniest deflector shield generator in the known and unknown galaxies. It’s cute, I guess—if you hold it at a distance, you can quite nearly feel as though you, too, are trekking through the forest moon of Endor, surrounded by Ewok traps, chasing after Stormtroopers, desperate to incapacitate this thing so that your friends up in the skies above can blow that second Death Star to pieces.

But I mean, at this scale, my Princess Leia minifigure can basically kick it over. You’d be hard-pressed to fit two ants in this little build.

I’m being unfairly hard, I know. I appreciate the iconic nature of this build. It is, after all, pivotal to the Rebel victory over the Empire; it drove much of the second half of Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi. And how many times have you and I blown this thing up ourselves in one video game after another? It’s a frequent target, is all I’m saying.

So, maybe it’s good that it’s not too complicated to build. The thing takes a beating. And I think we’re about to get a swath of tiny forest moon builds in the coming days, so the deflector shield generator better hope it’s got some defenders hiding behind those cardboard doors.