Wow.  You’ve got to respect the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Star Wars geek Chris McVeigh.

I mean, if George Lucas wanted to see a Scout Trooper riding a chipmunk, he’d have his crack team of digital artists at ILM fire up their CGI-making machinery.  And then only manage to get 93% of the way to something that looked realistic. And then make $10 million licensing the image for t-shirts and mugs.

Space Cowboy by Chris McVeigh

Not Chris.  He wanted to see a Scout Trooper riding a small forest creature, so he went out in his friggin’ yard with his friggin’ camera and tied a figure to a wild chipmunk with a tiny friggin’ harness.  Yeah.

From his interview on the Official Star Wars Blog:

Earlier in the summer, I made a few trial runs to see how Billy would react to having an action figure on his back. I was stunned at how complacent he was about it. In fact, the only thing that seemed to unnerve him was when the action figure fell off his back — and because his motions were so quick, this happened frequently. The solution was to use to very thin thread to help keep the scout trooper upright.

I guess a mouth-bit and some reins would have been a bit much?

Thanks to Chris for the permission to share his photo.  Check out more of his Scout Trooper’s adventures in  Chris’s Flickr photostream.

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