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: 'Ultimate Star Wars'

Part of the appeal of the original Star Wars trilogy is that it was a fundamentally simple fairy tale: orphaned farm boy’s remaining family is slaughtered, so he decides to leave home and fulfill his destiny as a galaxy-liberating superhero, redeeming his evil robo-dad and hanging out with robots, a princess, a pirate, and a giant dog along the way. The twenty-first century decision to make the tale more complicated than it really needs to be necessitates a book like Ultimate Star Wars. It took four writers—Patricia Barr, Adam Bray, Daniel Wallace, and Ryder Windham—to make sense of all the minor characters, planets, and intergalactic politics the prequel trilogy and the TV series “The Clone Wars” and “Rebels” lumped into the mythology. The book attempts to follow a timeline of sorts by using the series’ multitudinous characters, locations, and hardware as springboards for summarizing the major historical events of the Star Wars universe, but its format, which involves a lot of chronological leaps, keeps the story from ever getting totally straight. Plus, the quartets’ writing tends to follow the dryness of the prequels instead of attempting to recapture the childlike fun of the original trilogy, so the book reads like a history textbook. Oh, Star Wars. How far you’ve come since the carefree days of C-3PO’s cereal and Boba Fett Underoos.

The writing and format issues are not necessarily deal breakers, since Ultimate Star Wars is a coffee table book at heart, and it is definitely a great-looking one, overstuffed with big color photos of some of cinema’s most colorful characters. And I assure you that with the  exception of a few background characters (Death Star Droid, Snaggletooth, Ree-Yees, etc.) they are all present and accounted for. Hello, Lobot! Hello, Porkins! Hello, Zuckuss 4-Lom! Hello, 4-Lom Zuckuss! Hello, Imperial Officer that Darth Vader chokes for mouthing off! Hello, Cliff Clavin! There is also a smattering of neat behind-the-scenes snaps. The most priceless one is easily a shot of Irvin Kershner, Darth Vader, and IG88 snuggling together to say “cheese.” It is adorable.

My fellow original trilogy purists should beware that this book really rubs our noses in the “Special Editions” and prequels. It is so excessive that the guy who wore heavy makeup to play Governor Tarkin at a far distance in Revenge of the Sith is used to illustrate that character’s section instead of Peter Cushing. The section on Jabba’s palace contains a still of the universally loathed— and Jedi-free— “Jedi Rocks” song-and-dance number. The one on Greedo contains a shot of the CG laser leaving his pistol before Han Solo has a chance to shoot first. And I thought George Lucas’s relinquishment of Star Wars to Disney would have brought an end to this kind of thing. How naïve I am.

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.