For August 2007 the What's the Story subject on Hyperspace was Willrow Hood. I was lucky enough to be chosen as that month's winner and you can read the finished piece here.

I know that a lot of fans have an affection for Willrow Hood because of his cult status as the Ice Cream Maker Guy. Even before I knew of the legend of ICMG I was somewhat fascinated by the chap. Lando tells everyone to leg it and the one item he takes with him is a big white thing. So he was an interesting character and when the opportunity to write about him for What's the Story? came up it was quite exciting. It was a surprise and a pleasure to be chosen and I hope you liked the story. So if you're interested I'll show you how it was originally written and explain how it came to be.



Willrow Hood was just a simple man trying to make his way in the universe. He didn't want to be a hero but fate begged to differ.

In the first sentence I used the old Jango quote from Ep II but it was cut. I took the view that Hood was a miner and so he was an ordinary type of fellow. He wanted to help out the Rebels but it wouldn't be in a terribly spectacular way.


Hood moved to Bespin to work for AëroFilter, a mining company specializing in operations on gas planets. The company was sympathetic to the Rebellion and as a trusted employee Hood was put in charge of supplying them cheap Tibanna gas.

You can see that the name of Hood's company was originally different. It seems like that name is a real-life trademark so it couldn't be used. I suppose I should have checked on that myself. The point of the name was that they mined the gas by extracting it from the atmosphere. So I don't know what A'ro actually means unless you consider (as I now do) that it simply means aero, or air. I'm not usually one for names that have apostrophes in them.

The information that was known about Hood stated that his company sold Tibanna gas to the Alliance and so I took the idea that he was involved in the deals as the basis of the story so he would have something exciting to do.


Data on the transactions including the codenames and locations of Rebel agents was held encrypted in AëroFilter's main computer. Hood knew the Empire had spies on Cloud City and, chary fellow that he was, suspected Tian Chyler of being an Imperial agent. She was a little too interested in other people's business for his liking so he avoided her and any questions she had about AëroFilter's business deals. He ensured the Rebels' shipments always had cover stories so they wouldn't appear suspicious.

His involvement with the Rebels became the beginning of explaining what the big white thing he's carrying in the film actually was. I thought for quite a while about what it could be and decided that since it seemed so important to him it could be something to do with his Rebel connections. There didn't seem to be any reason for him to have anything belonging to the Rebels unless it was information. Since he was involved in shipping the gas he would have had to know where to send it and to whom which is how the ice-cream maker came to be the memory core which stored the secret data. In the published version the cover stories for the shipments were said to be 'carbonite-solid' which was a nice addition.

As you may know the previous What's the Story candidate was Tian Chyler, an Imperial agent on Cloud City. Since Hood had Rebel connections it seemed appropriate to include Chyler in his story as I'm sure many others did.


The operation was successful but Hood's life changed abruptly when the Empire took control of the city. He realised he couldn't let the Imperials find the Rebel data in his computer so he removed its memory core and rushed to the nearest waste disposal station to get rid of the incriminating evidence.

So when you see Willrow in TESB he's running with his computer's memory core to get rid of it. He could have just wiped the data but that would have taken time and he had to be sure it was all gone for good. Incidentally, in an earlier version of the story Hood worked with Pucumir Thryss, a character from ROTJ who was also a miner and Rebel agent. As I trimmed down the story though to fit in with the character limit, Thryss became a bit of a one-line wonder and so I took him out altogether. It also made for sense for Hood to destroy the memory core rather than be running to give it to his associate since nobody actually needed to keep the data anymore.


Hood stayed behind for the sake of his fellow miners but the Imperial occupation was a trying time for him. He was arrested as a possible seditionist and held in the security tower. Even under scan-grid torture he did not reveal what he knew and was eventually released.

Since Hood was a nice guy I thought he should stay behind rather than escape the city. It also meant he could still be there later on when the Rebels retook Bespin. He ended up being a hero though since he didn't crack even when given the scan-grid treatment (the same as Han Solo got in TESB).


As the Rebels got the upper hand in the war the disaffected ISB agent Tian Chyler defected. She always suspected that Hood had rebel contacts and now enlisted his help in handing over vital information on the city's defences. Hood was wary but although Chyler was motivated more by self interest he trusted her. Their plan worked and the city was eventually liberated by the Alliance.

Chyler's story stated that she defected and passed information to the Rebels about the city's defences. To explain how she did this I included the detail that Willrow helped her to make contact with the Alliance since he knew some of their agents.


After this exciting period of his life, Willrow Hood was glad to settle back down again to his old life. He'd had quite enough excitement for one lifetime.

And then, at the end, you can see that whilst he had been brave and done the right thing during the Civil War, he was quite glad that it was all over since he had only ever wanted a quiet life.

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this enlightening.