With the second season of Young Jedi Adventures now out in the wild, continuing the story of these younglings and padawans from the High Republic era, Dee Bradley Baker sits down with StarWars.com to discuss his owns Star Wars story, specifically his method to finding the voice of Nubs, the Pooba Jedi initiate who has captured the imagination of audiences everywhere.
As one of several Jedi younglings training on the planet Tenoo, Nubs is unique as he is not human and does not speak Basic (English). But as the show has a target audience of pre-schoolers, subtitles for Nubs’ lines were off the table. It was Baker’s job to make it obvious to a very young audience what Nubs was saying. Improvising is a huge part of Baker’s process of voicing Nubs as he regularly records multiple options for each line after speaking with Young Jedi Adventures creators about what Nubs is trying to get across.
And Baker notes that Nubs’ fellow younglings, Kai Brightstar and Lys Solay, regularly reinforce what Nubs is saying in the series, similar to Han Solo helping to translate Chewbacca for the audience, among other aliens. “For me it tracks back to Greedo in the Cantina [in Star Wars: A New Hope],” Baker adds. “If you took out the subtitles, you could probably understand what the altercation was, but there’s a lot of specifics in there that the subtitles added that were necessary and worked well. I’m going for something a little more specific because this is for children. So, it’s got to be clear what’s being said. It’s almost like with a pre-lingual child or even a dog, where there’s a specific intent with the whining or vocalization. If you’re a parent, you can often read what that is. And that’s kind of what you want with a character like Nubs.” As Nubs speaks with some characters who speak English and others, such as the droid RJ-83 (voiced by Jonathan Lipow) who speak a droid language, Baker focuses on the intent of each character while recording his lines. “Whether they are speaking English words or not, if I know specifically what they are saying, however they say it, then I can do my version of the response that we come up with.”
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