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.

Review: 'The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian'

We fans have a notoriously tough time rallying around any live action Star Wars product that isn’t the original trilogy. Who can blame us? The prequel trilogy was a turgid gasbag. The sequel trilogy got off to a lively and well received start with The Force Awakens, but it began to divide fans as it became clear that the filmmakers were just winging it, and the whole thing ended on a fatuous note with The Rise of Skywalker. Rogue One was a good yarn but too dour to truly love. Solo was dumb. 

Review: 'Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl'

There have been a lot of compilations of album cover art, and they’re usually good for a flip-through but lack focus and insight. Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl is in a whole other universe. Collecting the covers of sci-fi and fantasy soundtracks, Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas’s new book has a specific focus and is atypically enlightening.

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

Review: 'Return of the Jedi: The Original Topps Trading Card Series Volume Three'

Like the movie it chronicled, The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Topps Trading Card Series Volume Two ended on a cliffhanger. Instead of the movie’s lingering questions of parentage, the books’ cliffhanger was “Will Volume Three suffer from the same issues as Volume Two?” The problem with Abrams Books’ second volume in its compilations of classic Star Wars trading cards is that it shrank the images down way too much, reducing its reproductions of Topps’ Empire Strikes Back cards to a size smaller than that of the actual cards. Pages were overwhelmed with wasted white space while you needed a magnifying glass to see those images of the most visually arresting Star Wars movie.

Well, the cliffhanger has now been resolved, and the news is much better than Luke’s discovery that Darth Vader really is his dad. The images are once again back to the oversized dimensions of those in Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series Volume One. That’s great news because although Return of the Jedi does not have the artful visual style of its predecessor, it does have the most interesting looking menagerie of aliens of any Star Wars picture, and you get to ogle the likes of Jabba the Hutt, Bib Fortuna, the Gamorrean Guards, Nien Nunb, Admiral Ackbar, Sy Snootles, and the rest in all their weird glory in Volume Three.

The fact that Return of the Jedi provided many of the trilogy’s most interesting stills—stills that are arguably more interesting than the film, itself—helps to mitigate the fact that the overall presentation is a bit less interesting this time around. There are none of the outtake, behind-the-scenes, or production art images used in the Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back series. Gary Gerani, who wrote the cards’ original captions, seems less enthusiastic this time too, providing far fewer of his witty and colorful comments than he did in the first volume. In the plus column for Topps, the image quality is vastly improved for Return of the Jedi (images on Star Wars and Empire cards tended to be extremely grainy and often blurry) and the card backs feature neat character illustrations. In the plus column for Abrams is the fact that the pictures are no longer being presented at microscopic size. It makes one wish for a fourth volume in Abrams’ series called The Empire Strikes Back: The Non-Tiny Original Topps Trading Cards.

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

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 263

The Date: June 19

The Movie: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

What Is It?: The second Star Wars picture belongs on that short list of sequels that best their predecessors. After battling space yetis and dinosaur trucks, the old gang splits up to get hunted by super-cool bounty hunters with barely any screen time, train with a puppet master, and learn terrible things about their families. The cool blue aesthetic is as enchanting as the snowy, swampy, and cloudy environments.

Why Today?: Today is Father’s Day. I hope your dad is better than the one in this flick.

Review: 'The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Topps Trading Card Series Volume Two'

Spending over ten million bucks on a sci-fi fantasy for kids was a huge gamble in a cinematic era defined by gritty Earth-bound dramas, but as we all knew a week after its release, Star Wars paid off in a big way. So did the equally risky Topps trading card series devoted to George Lucas’s universe of sand and steel, and when he produced its sequel, another Topps series was inevitable. Just as Empire Strikes Back improved on the original Star Wars in a number of ways, Topps’ new cards were a step up too. The images on them covered the most visually accomplished episode more completely than the first series covered Star Wars. They were less repetitious and more eclectic with comic-booky illustrations and Ralph McQuarrie’s enchanting production paintings mingling with the usual promo and production photos, which include outtake scenes and behind-the-scenes moments. The quality of the images was also finer than the grainy, blurry shots on the first Star Wars cards.

The Star Wars Generation

My generation was like none before it because me and my friends and my enemies and all the other small kids in America (and much of elsewhere) had one weird thing that bound us all together. To say it was a movie would be incredibly reductive, because although the whole Star Wars craze—a craze that’s been active for nearly forty years now but pops to the surface periodically like a herpe—obviously began with a movie, it has always been more than a movie. I would wake up every morning on my Star Wars sheets, wearing my Star Wars pajamas, part my Star Wars curtains to allow in the sunlight by which I’d get dressed in my Star Wars sneakers and T-shirt before ambling downstairs to eat Star Wars cereal (C-3PO’s) out of a Star Wars bowl, then strap on my Star Wars backpack and grab my Star Wars lunchbox and head to school where I’d take notes in my Star Wars notebook until 3 PM when I’d return home to play with my Star Wars figures until it was time to gobble down dinner off a Star Wars plate and guzzle some sort of sugar-based formula out of a Star Wars Burger King glass as quickly as possible so I could pop Star Wars into the VCR before going back upstairs to wash my hair with Star Wars shampoo, getting into another pair of Star Wars pajamas, and laying down to dream about Star Wars.

Click to see what my brain looked like when I was six.

This might sound like the behavior of someone suffering from a cripplingly extreme case of OCD if it weren’t for the fact that nearly every little boy (because, let’s be truthful, most of the kids who did this kind of shit were boys... that’s what happens when you create a rich and detailed universe with only one woman in it) I knew did the same exact thing. And today kids of all genders and interests do the same damn thing with Frozen and Kung Fu Chickenbots or whatever else kids are obsessed with these days (amazingly, it’s still Star Wars for a lot of them who weren’t even born in the century that birthed the original trilogy!). Equally amazing is that this kind of thing really didn’t exist before Star Wars. It didn’t. In the sixties, Batman came very, very close, but it was not as pervasive and there was no Batman cereal. Other pop-culture obsessions like Davy Crockett and Planet of the Apes and even The Wizard of Oz essentially came and went.

Watch the Long-Lost Short That Ran with 'The Empire Strikes Back'

While George Lucas was at work on The Empire Strikes Back, he had a brain wave very in  line with his classic-Hollywood approach to movie making: he decided to commission a short film to run before his Star Wars sequel in the UK, Australia, and Scandinavia. Roger Christian, the set decorator of the first Star Wars film, stepped forward with a story that Lucas dug, and the big dog gave Christian the go ahead to make "Black Angel". The resulting 25-minute sword-and-sorcery tale wasn't exactly rich in plot or action, but Christian crafted his sketchy concept beautifully. "Black Angel" is a work of art in terms of atmosphere and cinematography. Special mention must also go to the haunting score from Trevor Jones, who went on to a long career that included scores for The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and Arachnophobia. One must also give Lucas credit for allowing a film that requires a good deal of patience to screen before a movie on which he had so much riding. 

"Black Angel" was instantly influential, inspiring effects in a scene in Empire, as well as the look and feel of John Boorman's Excalibur (also scored by Jones). Sadly, Christian's film's influence did not have a far reach, since it never received home video release and the negative apparently disappeared for 31 years. After being rediscovered in 2011, "Black Angel" screened to much acclaim in 2013, and was supposedly available to stream for a time on Netflix last year and is still available to purchase on iTunes. However Christian has quite thoughtfully uploaded his movie to You Tube free-of-cost with a newly filmed introduction in anticipation of some sort of "Black Angel"-related announcement coming on June 2. Watch it now here:

Review: 'Batman: A Visual History'

Batman must have passed through more dark, goofy, and weird incarnations than any other major superhero. Forget Tim Burton's blockbuster visions and Chris Nolan's grim, gritty, mumbling version of The Dark Knight. Forget the forties serials with its saggy-pajamas wearing Batman who battled racist stereotypes. Forget the camp sixties series (just briefly, of course; then you should remember it again because it's awesome). Batman changed almost constantly in his key medium. On the pages of D.C. comics, Batman might be a nasty customer who thought nothing of gunning down a crook or a colorfully rendered goof dueling with aliens and monsters or a disturbed dude dealing with a Joker who does horrible things Bill Finger never would have envisioned seventy five years ago. It's really hard to keep track of it all, which is why Matthew K. Manning's new book Batman: A Visual History is a necessary research tool.

Review: 'Star Wars Posters'

Cinema has given us some unforgettable still images to introduce its moving ones. Posters for Psycho, Jaws, Chinatown, Eraserhead, Alien, E.T., Ghostbusters, and Pulp Fiction are as memorable as the films they advertise. My personal favorite movie poster is the one Roger Kastel created for The Empire Strikes Back. Inspired by one of George Lucas's favorite posters, Howard Terning's painting for the 1967-rerelease of Gone with the Wind, Kastel's work depicts Han and Leia in a Scarlett/Rhett clutch, Luke front and center on his tauntaun, and the masked eyes of Darth Vader looming in the background. That the kiddie faves Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2 are shrunk and bunched to the side implies the relative adult-nature of Irvin Kershner's movie. The blue-palette perfectly reflects it's snow/sky/swamp aesthetic. Romantic, moody, a touch scary, and instantly evocative of my childhood, Kastel's is a piece of art that gets under my skin like no Mona Lisa or Waterlilies ever could... and I know I'm not alone on that matter.

If you're with me, then you're going to want to grab Abrams Publishing's new book Star Wars Posters. For such a blah title, this is one thrilling book. Kastel's iconic poster is just one of many and varied pieces in the book. The variety of styles that represent these films dazzles: from Kastel's pulp romance to comic book to circus poster to impressionism. The size of the book allows these often intricate works their due space, and select details are blown up further over luxurious two-page spreads. 

There's also a healthy helping of preliminary sketches and concepts that didn't go beyond the board room. These are some of the most fascinating pieces in Star Wars Posters, particularly when they get the films' details wrong. A sketch John Solie did for the first movie portrays Chewbacca as a pipe-wielding gorilla. Several proposals for Empire posters show Princess Leia with her cinnamon-buns hairdo (and one even shows her in unseasonably scanty dress riding sidesaddle behind Luke on his tauntaun!). Ralph McQuarrie's early renderings are the most famous to not reflect the characters accurately, and a few of those are in here too, as are pieces presenting Empire's bounty hunters and Yoda in a fantastical Dagobah more vivid and alive than the film's swamp planet. These are two of the most stunning pieces in the book.

I'm sure you'll be happy to know that although Lucas "curated" this book, the focus remains with the three original movies. A restrained 15 pages of this 180-page book are wasted with the prequel trilogy. There are also pieces devoted to such intergalactic side roads as the 1978 "Star Wars in Concert" event, the Ewok TV movies, the "Clone Wars" and "Rebels" animated series, and various Star Wars video games. Much cooler are the oddball fan-made pieces that finish the book with Empire enlistment posters, ads for faux-pulp horror flicks called Revenge of the Sandpeople and Lair of the Rancor, a psychedelic Max Rebo concert poster, and Sandcrawler, Star Destoyer, and Millenium Falcon travel posters. These pieces are all done in the spirit of fun that is the key to the original trilogy and are as eclectic and expertly rendered as everything else collected in this superb art book.

Twisted and Evil: The Influence of Classic Horror on ‘Star Wars’

“The scene where Anakin actually becomes Vader… it’s in the vocabulary of a time—of the 1930s and 1940s.”

-George Lucas, Starlog 2002

It’s always tempting to place pop fiction in a particular bag, and with its aliens, space ships, and interplanetary jaunts, Star Wars is usually dropped into the science fiction satchel. That’s fine for lazy critics, but the series has always been too much of a dabbler for its sci-fi status to ring totally true. Yes, George Lucas was clearly influenced by such items as Metropolis, Flash Gordon, and Dune. He was also profoundly affected by westerns (The Searchers), Samurai pictures (The Hidden Fortress), historical epics (Lawrence of Arabia), and fantasy (The Wizard of Oz). As the above quote indicates, classic horror also creeped into that yarn set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

The Star Wars saga made its most explicit reference to horror movies in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, when the Emperor plays Dr. Frankenstein by strapping the freshly mangled Anakin Skywalker to a lab table and transforming his protégé into a mechanized monster who lumbers forth like Boris Karloff. The movies “of the 1930s and 1940s” of which Lucas spoke are, of course, Universal’s Frankenstein franchise. Return of the Jedi even attempts to give the series’ nastiest villain a level of Karloff-style pathos by presenting Darth Vader as a conflicted creature. Inverting Karloff’s mute performance, the expressionless Vader conveys this new facet of his once wholly evil character via James Earl Jones’s voice.

David Prowse, the actor who embodies the dark lord, was limited by his bulky costume fitted out with a long, black Dracula cape. However, he did have a strong link to classic horror. Well, at least he had a link to a classic horror production company considering that 1970’s The Horror of Frankenstein and 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell are not two of Hammer Studio’s best products. In the latter film, the hulking Prowse co-starred with Peter Cushing, the actor who has played Dr. Frankenstein more than any other and whose gaunt, angular face is as iconically linked to Hammer as the studio’s logo. That face was always too unique to waste buried beneath mounds of creature make-up. As he did when playing the doctor, Cushing was still able to convey absolute monstrousness without the aid of so much as fake teeth when he played Grand Moff Tarkin, the unrepentant destroyer of worlds who keeps Vader under his thumb. In contrast to his portrayals of Dr. Frankenstein, there is not a wisp of humanity or conflict in Cushing’s work as Tarkin, making this his most evil role-- far more rotten than any he ever played in a pure horror picture.

Perhaps in an effort to link the prequel trilogy to the classic Star Wars trilogy’s links to Hammer, that studio’s other iconic face, Christopher Lee, was cast as the black-caped Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The character’s unfortunate baby-talk name is slightly ameliorated by his title, which reminds us of Lee’s most famous role, Count Dracula. The title also takes advantage of how Stoker’s vampire has forever transformed the very word “count” into a calling card of evil and monstrousness.

Star Wars dips deeper into the horror handbag and comes up with a menagerie of monsters distinct from the more typical egg-headed, big-eyed aliens common to outer-space fiction. H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, a classic of both science fiction and monsterrific horror, seems to have run a number of Star Wars’ creatures through its house of pain. The series is lousy with Wellsian man-beasts with names like Hammerhead, Walrus Man, Yak Face, Amana Man, and Squid Head. For the most part these overly on-the-nose names were coined by the folks at Kenner who had to come up with titles for their line of toys, and they have since been given less descriptive ones in the plethora of Star Wars novels and character guides. But a Walrus Man by any other name still looks like something that should be sunning itself on pack ice, just as Ugnauts and Gamorean Guards don’t look any less like hogs that recently hopped off mad Dr. Moreau’s vivisection table. Lucas’s dog Indiana directly inspired the beloved Chewbacca, a ringer for Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man. 

An actual wolf man of sorts also makes an appearance in the cantina scene of Star Wars, though this weird crossover was the result of too little time and not enough budget to create the exotic array of space creatures Lucas really wanted. In other words, the Wolf Man mask was simply handy. When Lucas fiddled with his film to make the controversial “special edition” of 1997, the one cantina patron he digitally replaced was the Wolf Man, perhaps because he felt that this creature was a step too far in paying homage to overly familiar horror icons. It may be worth noting that these animal aliens are almost never articulate like the creatures in the firmly sci-fi Planet of the Apes (the one exception is the fish-headed Admiral Ackbar, whose race being called “Mon Calamari” is probably the best joke in the entire Star Wars series), making their ties to the groaning, grunting, growling monsters of classic horror stronger.

The Star Wars series is speckled with other horror references, from the bounty hunters Zuckuss and 4-Lom, who apparently borrowed The Fly’s face, to the Jedis’ Dracula-like ability to bend weak minds to the Emperor’s Grim-Reaper cloak to the Blob-like Jabba the Hutt to the AT-AT attack, which plays like an onslaught pulled from some monster movie from 1950s U.S. or Japan (another horrory scene from an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back had Darth Vader feeding a flock of pet gargoyles at his Hellish compound). The series even features one legitimately creepy scene in which Luke Skywalker slips into a gloomy cave to confront a Darth Vader phantom, whose decapitated head explodes to reveal the nightmarish face of Luke, himself . It’s all part of Star Wars’ genre-smorgasbord, which may serve science fiction as the main course, but offers too many delectable side dishes to pass up.