Review: 'A Disturbance in the Force: How and Why the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened'

For years, it seemed like some sort of weird dream. Yet I could remember every detail of staying up late at the age of four at my grandmother's house to watch the first piece of Star Wars visual entertainment since Star Wars. I could remember sitting right in front of the screen in a wood paneled den and the names of every member of Chewbacca's family and their UFO-shaped house in the trees and dozing off while struggling to remain awake and the creepy sensation of listening to Princess Leia sing that gross song. If my grandma and I hadn't spent the next few years laughing over the names "Lumpy" and "Itchy," I might have concluded that none of it had really happened, because there was no Internet to remind us that The Star Wars Holiday Special really did air on November 17, 1978, on CBS. George Lucas certainly wasn't going to remind us. 

Review: 'Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Star Wars'

No film's history has been sifted through more often than Star Wars'. After phenomenally thorough tromps through force-lore by the likes of Michael Kiminski, John Phillip Peecher, Alan Arnold, and J.W. Rinzler, it’s unrealistic to expect that any chronicler would find anything new to say about George Lucas’s phenomenon. At least Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman take a novel approach by presenting their Star Wars study as an oral history. I really loved their book in this format about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, so I was looking forward to reading their Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Star Wars even though I wasn’t certain I would learn anything new from it.

Review: 'Star Wars (BFI Film Classics)' (2nd Edition)

In his 2009 monograph for the British Film Institute, Will Brooker states that he is the first writer to take Star Wars seriously enough to study the film as a text rather than as a piece of technology or pop cultural milestone. I’ll admit that I’ve read a lot of books about the film’s development, making, history, influence, and success, but I have not read much in the way of formal analysis.

Review: 'Star Wars: The Classic Newspaper Comics Volume 2'

Russ Manning had been illustrating the Star Wars comic strip since it started running in newspapers in 1979, but terminal health issues forced him out of the job in mid-1980. After a seven-month period in which Alfredo Alcala took over, the project officially fell onto Al Williamson’s drafting table. With all due respect to Manning, who’d done a more than capable job, Williamson was the best person for the job. While Manning’s artwork was less cartoony than the work illustrators such as Howard Chaykin and Carmine Infantino had been doing in Marvel’s comic books, Manning didn’t make much effort to really capture the likenesses of the likes of Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford or the costumes of Darth Vader and Chewbacca. When Williamson delivered an adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back for Marvel, comic book readers received the closest experience to watching the movie at home in the days before its VHS release. With an illustrious background that included work on E.C.’s sci-fi titles and Flash Gordon, Williamson was not surprisingly George Lucas’s first choice for the job even before Manning got it.

8 Essentials for Living the Original Star Wars Life

When Twentieth Century Fox took a major gamble on a goofy space fantasy imagined by that goofy kid who’d made American Graffiti, neither that company nor George Lucas could have imagined we’d still be so ensconced in Star Wars forty years later. In fact, fans are now able to ensconce themselves more completely in that wacky universe of wookiees, droids, banthas, and wampas than they could back in the late seventies even though it seemed that every conceivable object had some sort of Star Wars equivalent back then. However, compared to a time when anyone can snooze in a tauntaun sleeping bag, make waffles shaped like the Death Star, or dab on Lando-scented cologne, the late seventies was a comparable Tatooine-desert of Star Wars merchandise. You couldn’t even watch the movies on your TV set yet, so those who wished to never leave Lucas Land had to make do with the essential bits of Star Wars-ernalia available. So for you contemporary kids who don’t understand how good you have it, here are eight examples of Star Wars essentials every fanatic worth his or her salt owned back when nobody knew what the hell A New Hope was.

1. Kenner Toys

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The most effective way to melt into the Star Wars universe aside from watching the films has always been to get down on the floor surrounded by little bits of Star Wars-shaped plastic. The history of Kenner’s Star Wars figures has been regurgitated many, many, many times. I’m sure you already know about how unprofitable movie-tie-in toys had been, how Lucas made his fortune by retaining merchandising rights, how the toys weren’t ready for X-mas 1977 so Kenner sold cardboard “Early Bird” vouchers for Luke, Leia, Chewie, and R2-D2 figures instead. Blah, blah. Equally important is how nifty these little figures that could fit into scale Millennium Falcons and TIE-fighters were, how kooky the decisions to make figures of barely-on-screen characters like Prune Face and not-on-screen-at-all characters like Cloud Car Pilot was while neglecting more prominent characters like Tarkin and Uncle Owen because they didn’t look as cool, and how holding one of these tiny things in your hand today draws up childhood memories like biting into a Proustian Madeleine. And let’s not neglect all of those other variations of Star Wars playthings, like the too-big-to-fit-into-a-plastic-X-Wing “large size” figures that did such an effective job of capturing character likenesses and that plush Chewbacca toy that inspired so many of us to toss our teddy bears in the bin.

2. Listening Materials

Farewell, Miguel Ferrer

Sad news today. Miguel Ferrer, the gruff actor beloved here at Psychobabble for his unforgettable turn as Special Agent Albert Rosenfield on Twin Peaks and in the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, has died of cancer at the age of 61. Ferrer had quite a resume. As well as being the show-biz offspring of Rosemary Clooney and José Ferrer (who also worked with David Lynch in Dune), he was a drummer who played on Keith Moon's cuckoo solo album Two Sides of the Moon, and of course, an actor. Throughout his very prolific career he appeared in such cool items as the underrated Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the genuine cult classic Robocop, and Tales from the Crypt. In a sad coincidence, he also ran lines with Carrie Fisher when she was gearing up to audition for Star Wars. However, it was his embodiment of the  cynical special agent who also professes to live in the footsteps of Gandhi and King that may have won him the most fans. As Rosenfield, Ferrer was off-puttingly hilarious, and his statement of purpose to Sheriff Truman was one of the most brilliant scenes in a show with now shortage of them. Fortunately, we'll get to see him in the role one more time this May. 

I love you Sheriff Truman. Love you Agent Rosenfield, too.

And Now for No Other Reason Than She Is Awesome, Here Are Five Plastic Carries!

Farewell, Carrie Fisher

Like most kids born in the seventies, I lived a Star Wars childhood, and that means Carrie Fisher has been a part of my life for most of my life, mostly in the form of an outer space comic book heroine reciting improbable dialogue while wearing an even more improbable hairstyle. As the real woman reminded us so many times, and as recently as her wonderful new memoir The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher was much more than the sum of the Topps trading cards, Dixie cups, T-shirts, and plastic, 3-inch figures bearing her likeness that surrounded so many of us during our formative years. She was a great and honest wit, an excellent writer, a fearless and vocal representative of and advocate for people with mental illness and addiction issues, a pioneering feminist role-model in the entertainment industry, and certainly more than all that to the people fortunate enough to have known her as more than a public figure. Between her new book and return to the screen in the new line of 'Star Wars' movies, Carrie Fisher had been especially vital in the current culture, which makes her death all the more unexpected and stinging. She spent so much of her life giving so much of herself to fans she owed absolutely nothing, so it's appropriate that she continued doing that until her final days. Of all the great celebrity artists we lost throughout this malignant year that just won't fucking end, Carrie Fisher is the only one who makes me feel like I lost a member of my family. I'm certain I'm not the only seventies kid who feels that way.

Review: 'The Princess Diarist'

Carrie Fisher had written six books, two of which are memoirs, but she had yet to fully address the cinnamon-bun-haired, unusually petite elephant in the room. Even in her previous book, Wishful Drinking, which came packaged in a teasing jacket depicting a soused Alderaanian princess passed out on a bar, Fisher’s most famous role only starred on a few pages.

With Star Wars so vengefully back in the pop culture consciousness, and Carrie Fisher, herself, finally back in Star Wars, the writer/actress could not ignore Leia any longer. So everyone who owns a tiny, plastic reproduction of Carrie Fisher will surely rejoice in the idea of 250 pages of undiluted Star Wars memories in her seventh book, The Princess Diarist.

Review: 'Star Wars Year by Year: A Visual History' Updated and Expanded Edition

Star Wars so saturated late twentieth-century culture that it’s kind of amazing to realize that only four movies were released between 1977 and 1999. Fortunately, there were plenty of other Star Wars items to fill the vast gaps between movies: toys and games and comics and novels and cartoons and blatant rip-off movies and theme park rides and tape dispensers. Originally published in 2010 and updated two years later, Star Wars Year by Year: A Visual History managed to plug relevant events into nearly every month of every year from George Lucas’s conception of Star Wars in 1973 to the present when that property had assuredly recaptured entertainment following the prequels, The Clone Wars, and a new rash of toys, comics, games, and presumably, tape dispensers.

10 Reasons Marvel’s ‘Star Wars’ Comic Is The Most

A long time ago, right in the galaxy that you and I babble and drool in every day, there were no prequels. There were no CGI animated cartoons. There was no J.J. Abrams (at least not one who made movies or possibly even had gotten his first zit yet). There was no Timothy Zahn, no “Ewok Adventures”, “Droids” cartoons, or even a Return of the Jedi, Empire Strikes Back, or Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Way back in 1977, there were only two ways you were going to get “Star Wars” stories: by seeing the movie or by reading Marvel’s brand-new line of Star Wars comics.

It all started on April 12, 1977, with writer Roy Thomas and artist Howard Chaykin’s faithful six-issue adaptation of the first film. The successful comic was not going to end there, though, and since George Lucas’s proper sequel was still more than two years away, Marvel’s writers had to get a bit creative with the “Star Warriors,” as they christened Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, and C-3PO (interestingly, without any muscle to throw around or vocabulary, the ever-popular R2-D2 was very rarely given much to do in the comics’ ten-year run). Before Star Geeks debated endlessly and exasperatingly about what was and wasn’t “canon,” these illustrated adventures could get pretty daffy, but that was a big part of the fun. At times, Marvel’s Star Wars comics could even be genuinely thoughtful and dramatic. Fans who don’t take a trio of children’s films about wookiees and jawas too seriously will find plenty of reasons to agree that those old Marvel comics were the most. Here are ten of them.

1. Deleted Scenes