As a bonus justification to the recently released edition of Jedi Justifications, I determined to
address a little something that always bothered me in Return of the Jedi,
but never enough to have considered it for this feature – the maudlin reaction
of the Rancor Keeper to the untimely demise of his charge at the hands of Luke
Skywalker. However a recent appearance of The Rantcor Pit at G33K3 Con. It was during a
live recording of the show at this convention that someone from the audience
posed the question, “Why do you never see a Rancor in the wild?”
He was speaking of
course of the Rancor Monster from Jabba’s Palace which was, out of necessity, a
captive beast. While a playful illustration that makes the rounds online
depicts the Rancor Keeper adopting the creature as a juvenile and raising it
into Jabba’s favorite means of dispatch for those who slighted him and its
presence in one of my favorite books, The
Wildlife of Star Wars, this justification duly ignores both as Expanded
Universe. In each case there is express or implicit indication that the
monster was indigenous to Tattooine. In that context the answer to the
question of finding such an animal in the wild is answered with ease.
However, Jedi Justifications is solely about what might be suggested by what is
presented on screen.
In this case there is
little to go on, really. It would be a simple leap of logic to join
others in declaring that the Rancor is another denizen of Tattooine and
therefore something one might find in its natural habitat somewhere on that
planet. This was not the approach I took with my off the cuff answer to
the question presented. I suggested instead that the reason they are not
found outside of captivity is that Jabba the Hutt possesses the sole remaining
specimen known in the universe. I extrapolated further saying that on its
native world, the Rancor was hunted to near extinction. Ultimately only
the one Jabba owns remained and found itself in his possession due in no small
part to his wealth and standing.
To take this further I
would posit that disregard for this dangerous species led to its extinction in
the wild and was coupled with a failure at any viable captive breeding program
until the animals numbers dwindled to a single-sex population. Over time
all captive Rancors would succumb to disease or old age leaving only one in
existence. A prized possession, Jabba’s specimen was put in the care of a
trusted team of handlers headed up by the man who would come to be known as
Malakili for the purposes of EU writings and a later action figure
release. The Rancor’s keeper would have known only too well the unique
nature of the creature in his care and would have diligently seen to its well being for a great many years before the arrival of Luke Skywalker.
The portly keeper, along with a trusted staff, would have come to
look upon the maintenance of the
troublesome beast as a welcome relief from duties “topside” in the palace
proper. Court politics in the Hutt’s
palace affected nearly everyone from the most well placed sycophants and
popinjays to the most wretched of Jabba’s captives. That is, except those who held positions that
no one else wanted. One such was the care
and feeding of the gangster’s dangerous pet.
Such a massive and belligerent creature would be impossible to control
and difficult at best to train toward simple concepts like moving back into the
holding pen when not devouring poor unfortunates that Jabba had sent down into
the chamber below his throne room. Those
who feed and, worse yet, cleaned up after, the Rancor were largely ignored by
the rest of the court. Absolutely no one
was vying for their place in the hierarchy, so the job provided a welcome
repast for Malakili and his staff.
Then came the fateful day when a self-styled Jedi Knight came down
the tube with one of the Hutt’s loyal guards.
The Gamorrean suffered the same fate as all who had previously taken the
deadly plunge and the intended victim looked to be providing a bit of sport
before his inevitable death. Then the
impossible happened. The intended victim
managed to escape the Rancor’s maw and its grip and flee into the holding
pen. While the staff dutifully harassed
the captive, it was a dangerous proposition to have the beast seek prey in the
section of its pit where live food was never offered. It had taken considerable effort to train it
to distinguish the two sections of its habitat and taking a live meal in the
wrong section could undermine the routine.
But this was of little consequence ultimately in the life of the
Keeper.
The potential for havoc aside, the Jedi’s next action once he
found no means of escape at his disposal led to the undoing of Malakili. A stray skull proved an ideal missile for the
intended victim to use to trip the manual control of the massive overhead door
that separated the holding pen from the arena pen. This naturally led to the demise of the
titanic monster and the end of its species for all time. Yet the overwhelming shock of the death of an
animal that represented the last of its kind paled in comparison to the realization
that the relatively soft duty and freedom from palace politics so long cherished
my Malakili and his staff was instantly a thing of the past. It is little wonder that the otherwise stoic
Rancor Keeper was reduced to a blubbering mass of raw emotions.
There is a silver lining to the cloud of grief exhibited on the
silver screen, however. Given his
position in the palace hierarchy, Malakili was not an invited guest or even on
staff when his employer embarked on a pleasure cruise into the Dune Sea to
dispatch his enemies, including the author of the Rancor caregivers abrupt
unemployment, with a little help from one of Tatooine’s deadliest indigenous
species. While his exclusion from the
journey was in this case, as always, a relief, the resulting destruction of the
Hutt’s sail barge and all on board relieved the former caretaker of any
servitude to Jabba. Ultimately he would
likely have secured a civilian position clearing dianogas from the trash
compactors of the second Death Star where he could live out his remaining days
in something akin to comfort.
