Review: 'Star Wars Encyclopedia'

Once nothing more than a single extremely, extremely popular space-fantasy flick, Star Wars soon expanded into a line of Marvel comics, then a funky TV holiday special, then a sequel, and then another sequel. Read-along records and Dixie cups aside, that basically brings us to 1983. Over the following four decades, what it means to be Star Wars would continue to swell, ultimately encompassing eight more feature films, numerous cartoons and live-action TV series, countless comics, novel series, and games, and pretty much anything else you could possibly think of. It's only a matter of time before Guerra de las Galaxias: La Telenovela debuts.

So a 1977 film with a half-dozen main characters, a half dozen kooky space vehicles, and a couple of planets has exploded into a baffling welter of gungans, rathtars, U-wings, E-wings, and Mandalorians not named Boba Fett. DK's new Star Wars Encyclopedia underscores the bafflement rather than sorts it out. The back cover of this 435-page bantha boasts "more than 2,200 entries." I cannot imagine anyone being familiar with each and every one of the heroes, villains, aliens, robots, ships, and planets those entries cover. If such a creature exists, we should fear him. 

Any opportunity to make sense of all this material gets blown up like a half-completed Death Star by the decision to present these entries not in alphabetical order but in some sort of chronological order that could only be understood by that rare and fearsome creature I referenced in the previous paragraph. Fortunately, there is a highly detailed index at the back of this book to make locating stuff a bit easier, but the organization of this book is crazier than Yoda playing a crazy hermit to fool Luke in the Empire Strikes Back. More typically encyclopedia-like is the thirteen authors' writing, which is drier than that sand that Anakin hates for being so coarse and rough and irritating. The total lack of information about the specific movies, TV shows, books, games, or whatever that gave birth to all this obscure stuff makes it all the more perplexing, especially when we find ourselves confronted with big-eyed baby Jedis and blue ewoks that look like they've crawled out of some Saturday-morning CG cartoon for toddlers.

However, the abundance of images that illustrate the 2,200 entries brings some semblance of fun, though there is an almost ostentatious refusal to include too many images from the original trilogy, probably to remind us that we should stop getting so hung up on how good Star Wars used to be. But those of us whose Star Wars fandom largely hinges on nostalgia for those three movies aren't the audience for Star Wars Encyclopedia. This for the fan who must read every novel, play every game, and watch every TV show, even if it stars a big-eyed blue ewok. But don't expect entries on Bea Arthur's Ackmena or Harvey Corman's Che Gormaand, because there was no way any of those entries were going to be used to acknowledge the existence of the holiday special.