Starwars.com featured a trailer on the upcoming Clone Wars movie. I grabbed the following shots from the trailer to share. My jaw dropped when I finally saw what R2-KT would look like on-screen. COOL!!! From the looks of it, we think she may be the personal droid to Anakin's padawan. We'll see. I couldn't think of a better way for her to make her onscreen debut. And she even hangs out with troopers! Excellent.

If you notice, Anakin's padawan Ahsoka Tano appears in the scene. If R2-D2 is Anakin's personal astromech droid, perhaps R2-KT will be Ahsoka's? The pink color would be a cool tie-in with a female jedi character! Very exciting. It's cool to have some new female characters in the Star Wars universe.

Click here for the report on TheForce.Net

It was February 2008 when I received the call from Mary Franklin at Lucasfilm. She asked me point-blank how I'd feel about R2-KT appearing in the upcoming Clone Wars movie. I was speechless. "Wow, in a real Star Wars film? Are you kidding?" Mary went on to explain that Dave Filoni, director of the Clone Wars movie, had learned of the story of Katie and her pink namesake and was excited at the idea of slipping her in there somewhere.

All that remained was for me to grant permission, because they did not want me to have a problem with the gesture. After all, if a character is featured in a Lucasfilm production, it is open for use by licensees and this would be no exception. So if I had a problem seeing R2-KT pop up in stores on soap-dishes, action figures, backpacks and the like then I'd better say so now. Well, as I see it the R2 design is Lucasfilm's property - all we did was create the color and the name. So my thinking was, as long as no licensee mentions Katie's name in particular and uses her story to sell a product then I'm fine. In fact, if they want to do so and donate a portion of the proceeds to charity (as Hasbro did with the action figure) then I'm fine as well.

Well, Mary was pleased to hear I was cool with the idea. She said since it's a CG film they could easily push a button and make her green or purple or whatever, but Mr. Filoni really wanted it to be R2-KT in there. I couldn't be happier. So, after months of not being allowed to breathe a word of this to anyone out of respect for Lucasfilm, I can finally share the story just as the movie is preparing to come out.

I currently write this while in Japan, guest of the 501st Legion's Japanes Garrison. Mr. Filoni is scheduled to appear at Celebration Japan this weekend, so I look forward to shaking his hand and personaly thanking him for this incredible gesture.