The Wing and I: AT-ATs

If you're a Star Wars' fan, you don't have to hang around the Bay Area long before you start to see and hear about some oddly StarWarsesque things. For one, there's the Miwok people who lived in the forests of Northern California (sound familiar?) and if you keep a sharp enough eye out it's like living a real life George Lucas in Love.

Well one of the first things that stuck out to me when I first visited Erica back in 2006 were these guys -->

Recognize them?

Do they kind of look like these guys?

I did, and now that I see them up close on the boat, I really do.

Well what are they?

They're shipping cranes, and they're huge!

They sit beside the Oakland/Alameda estuary and load containers onto massive ships that go back and forth from Asia and Europe. When you see them from a distance, altogether, they really do look like an army of AT-ATs bearing down on the rebels.

Now George Lucas has never publicly admitted that these cranes were an influence on him, but then he has been slow to admit other influences in the past.