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This Christmas while in Florida, my family and I visited Disney Downtown, which is the only "free" section, meaning there is no entrance fee. There, in a little shop I found the Disney Build-a-Droid section and excitedly proceeded to put together my own little astromech droid from the parts available.
I really wanted to make one that looked like something in the movies, so it was frustrating to not have any reference with me as to what would be "canon". I did my best with the limited selection they had there; the result looked good to me, and the colors matched nicely, but I soon learned I had put an R4 head on an R7 body! (Not generally acceptable to a purist like myself.)
I decided the best thing to do was not to take it apart and try to find the "correct" parts, but to give it a backstory, as to why it looks the way it does. Like so many things that at first look "wrong", when we learn why they are the way they are, they can come to look "right" to us. Here is my little droid and his story.
R7-D3 Was an accomplished and well-liked member of an Alliance E-wing squadron that flew many successful missions. He was credited with giving his pilot a crucial edge in several battles by tweaking the E-wing's capabilities and pushing it to new limits. But when his pilot was killed and the fighter crashed on a nearby planet, R7-D3 was badly damaged, and his droid brain was fried.
Scavengers picking through the wreckage discovered the droid and repaired him, replacing his destroyed head with an old R4 series head from a Jedi's modified astromech. This gave R7 a new lease on life, but a tragic one: his body was designed to interface with E-wing star fighters, limiting its usefulness in other capacities; however, his "new" brain was not capable of effectively interfacing with star fighters, or, for that matter, with much of the sophisticated hardware of the R7 body. After being resold several times and proving unable to perform many standard astromech duties, R7-D3 eventually found his way to a seedy rim-world spaceport facility where he spent the rest of his days repairing land speeders and doing janitorial work.
