I haven’t read any of the novels. That’s a different world than my world, but I do try to keep it consistent. We have two universes: my universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.
George Lucas
The sixteen years between the two Star Wars movie trilogies were often referred to by fans as the ‘dark times’, a period devoid of new Star Wars. While there were no new movies, there was plenty of creative activity at Lucasfilm (and beyond) that prepared the way for the prequel trilogy released from 1999. A huge amount of technological progress took place that changed modern filmmaking, while the development of the ‘Expanded Universe’ proved there were many more Star Wars stories to be told in all sorts of media. There was also a very receptive audience patiently waiting to hear them . . .
The Expanded Universe of Star Wars adventures began in the world of comic books. First to tell an all-new Star Wars story was Marvel’s Pizzazz Magazine. Running across nine issues (October 1977 to June 1978), ‘The Keeper’s World’ by Roy Thomas and Archie Goodwin saw Luke and Leia involved with a quartet of android children and their computerized ‘Keeper’, a plot more reminiscent of Star Trek. A second adventure – ‘War on Ice’ – followed, but remained incomplete when the magazine was cancelled in January 1979. The story was only finished when collected in 1981.
Following the six-issue adaptation of the original movie, the Marvel Star Wars comic book (released in September 1977) embarked upon all new stories beginning with ‘New Planets, New Perils’. Writer Roy Thomas and artists Howard Chaykin, who had adapted the movie, developed the new stories along with others at Marvel, including Don Glut, Archie Goodwin and Chris Claremont. The initial story sees Han and Chewie fall foul of space pirates – led by the notorious Crimson Jack – when on their way to settle their debt with Jabba the Hutt.
Star Wars had come along at just the right time for Marvel. According to Marvel editor Jim Shooter, the company was in turmoil in the mid-1970s, admitting that ‘sales were falling. It seemed like the company as a whole was in a death spiral. Then Roy Thomas proposed we licence some upcoming science fiction movie called Star Wars. The prevailing wisdom at the time was “science fiction doesn’t sell”. Adapting a movie with a hokey title like Star Wars seemed like folly to most.’
According to Shooter, the strong opposition to taking on Star Wars (despite the approaches from Lucasfilm’s Charles Lippincott) included company head Stan Lee. Despite that, Thomas prevailed. ‘Driven by the advance marketing for the movie, sales were very good,’ said Shooter. ‘Then about the time the third issue shipped, the movie was released. Sales made the jump to hyperspace. Not since The Beatles had I seen a cultural phenomenon of such power. The comics sold and sold and sold. It is inarguable that the success of the Star Wars comics was a significant factor in Marvel’s survival through a couple of very difficult years.’
Despite being instrumental in bringing the comic book to Marvel, Thomas wouldn’t stick with Star Wars as he found working with Lucasfilm’s then-developing continuity ‘rules’ to be limiting (he’d had the same experience with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate when working on Tarzan). Thomas told Alter Ego magazine that Lucas and Lippincott ‘thought Star Wars might appeal to the same people who read Marvel comics’. According to Thomas, Lippincott outlined the Star Wars plot and showed him the pre-production concept artwork. ‘My head was spinning,’ he admitted, but it was only when he saw the artwork featuring Han Solo that he said, ‘I’ll do it!’ That character gave Thomas a handle on the as yet unmade movie. The presence of Alec Guinness among the cast list caused Stan Lee to change his mind, especially as the terms of the deal were now more favourable to Marvel.
Between 1977 and 1986, the Marvel run of Star Wars comics would comprise 107 issues and three special editions. Each of the subsequent movies would be adapted (The Empire Strikes Back in issues 39–44, while Return of the Jedi was published as a ‘Super Special’ which was then reprinted with new splash pages as a separate four issue mini-series). Although the Marvel comics were aimed at younger readers, the creators of the stories had a relative freedom that those who followed would be denied. The accumulation of stories across the years (in all media) resulted in a tangled web of continuity of which Lucasfilm attempted to keep track (it now has a full-time member of staff who fills this role). In later years potential stories and time periods in the saga would be off limits, as they were reserved for Lucas himself to explore.
The light-hearted Marvel tales usually ran for two or three issues, with Luke, Han and Leia meeting new adversaries. Occasionally Darth Vader would turn up, sometimes with a part-cyborg female Sith sidekick named Lumiya. More often, the film’s heroes would encounter members of crime lord Baron Orman Tagge’s family. Perhaps the most notorious character Marvel introduced was the smuggler Jaxxon, a six-foot tall green carnivorous rabbit – an influence on the prequel trilogy’s Jar Jar Binks?
The Marvel stories resulted in some continuity glitches that would be superseded by later films and novels. An early Marvel story established Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader as two separate people (was this approved by Lucasfilm to mislead fans, or had Lucas not fully developed their relationship at that stage?). Similarly, Jabba the Hutt appeared in the comics as a yellow-skinned humanoid character before Return of the Jedi established him as a giant slug-like creature.
The Marvel Star Wars comics, along with the Star Wars newspaper strips, would form the cornerstone of the Expanded Universe – a term that came to encompass almost all the non-movie Star Wars material created, including comic books, novels, videogames, TV series and film spin-offs, even toys. From this small acorn, a mighty empire called Lucas Licensing would grow.
The Alan Dean Foster Star Wars novelization was only published due to the tenacity of Charles Lippincott. The deal with Del Rey was initially seen (like the comic book) as a marketing opportunity, a chance to pre-sell the movie to science-fiction fandom. However, after the success of the film Lucasfilm investigated producing a second novel that would fall between the first two movies. This time Alan Dean Foster would get his name on the cover. Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was the first original Star Wars novel, and it would eventually lead to a thriving industry in spin-off fiction.
The possibility of a second book had been built into Foster’s contract, with any story developed intended to double up as the basis of a low-cost sequel should the first film be a less-thanstellar success. Given the unprecedented impact of Star Wars, such considerations were now unnecessary. Foster was allowed simply to develop the outline (drawn from concepts in Lucas’s source material) as he saw fit. However, the novel remained something of a hangover from the original concept of a low-budget sequel, with locations and props from the movie reused and the setting of a jungle-covered, mist-shrouded planet intended to make the film easy to shoot. Han Solo and Chewbacca were absent from the novel, suggesting that Lucas was prepared to make a sequel without them. The focus was on Luke and Leia and their quest for the mysterious Kaiburr crystal, a Force-amplifying artefact (included in early drafts of ‘The Star Wars’ as the ‘Kiber’ crystal).
In the swamplands of the planet Minban (an opening space battle was cut at an early stage to make any resulting film cheaper), Luke and Leia – accompanied by faithful droids C-3PO and R2-D2 – hunt for the Force-enhancing gem while battling Imperial stormtroopers, the elements and, eventually, Darth Vader. The novel climaxes in a lightsaber duel between Luke and Vader in which Luke severs Vader’s arm (an inconsistency with both the second movie and all the following Expanded Universe material). Additionally, the novel plays upon the sexual tension between Luke and Leia, suggesting that their familial connection had not yet been devised (further reinforced by Lucas teasing their will-they, won’t-they status at the end of The Making of Star Wars TV special). Lucas later claimed he left that element of the story intact in order to indicate the pair had feelings for each other, but that they did not yet understand the true nature of their connection.
The second novel’s sales proved there was an audience for non-movie related Star Wars paperbacks, making viable a new series of novels. Between April 1979 and August 1980 (following the release of The Empire Strikes Back) a trilogy of adventures featuring Han Solo and written by Brian Daley were released. Set two years before the events in Star Wars, the novels told of the previous adventures of Solo and Chewbacca in their smuggling days. Han Solo at Stars’ End launched the trilogy and saw the Millennium Falcon’s pilot pals trying to track down ‘Doc’, a missing outlaw technician, in the company of two droids (with the unusual names of ‘Bollux’ – changed to ‘Zollux’ in the UK for obvious reasons – and ‘Blue Max’). Two more novels followed – Han Solo’s Revenge and Han Solo and the Lost Legacy – that saw Solo and Chewbacca caught up in a slavery ring and embarking on a treasure hunt for the lost loot of the Xim. The third book saw the pair preparing to borrow money from Jabba the Hutt in order to embark on the Kessel Run, a smugglers’ route, making a direct connection with the beginning of Star Wars.
A growing awareness of the need for continuity within the burgeoning Star Wars universe saw Daley constricted on the elements he could use in his novels. ‘I was told that it had to take place before, not after [Star Wars],’ said Daley. ‘I could not use the Force or any other powers. I could not use Vader, the Empire, TIE fighters, the rebellion, or any of the other major characters from the movie, save Han and Chewie. [I was allowed] nothing about gambling or a resort planet because comic strip [writers] were developing [those] ideas. I was very much hemmed in, but I understood why. If some of the tie-in folks had gotten the bit in their teeth, they’d have been all over the galactic landscape.’ It would be a sign of things to come as Lucasfilm began to exert more direct control over the creation of Expanded Universe material.
Following the second and third movies – and the publication of novelizations by Donald F. Glut, Lucas’s old film-school friend, and James Kahn respectively – Lando Calrissian was the next character to get the trilogy novel treatment. Collectively known as The Adventures of Lando Calrissian, the three novels were titled The Mindharp of Sharu, The Flamewind of Oseon and The Starcave of ThonBoka, and were released between July and December 1983. Written by fantasy author and political activist L. Neil Smith, best known for his alternate American history series set in the Gallatin universe, that trilogy turned out to be the last adult Star Wars novels for eight years. Despite the success of the books, in the mid-1980s Lucas wanted to move his company away from Star Wars and concentrate on other projects. ‘My heart is in other areas now,’ he said. ‘I can make more Star Wars and make zillions of dollars, but I don’t really have the interest right now.’
Having started at Lucasfilm as Lucas’s assistant, Lucy Autrey Wilson had been put in charge of the company’s publishing programme. In the early 1990s, in consultation with Bantam Books, she felt the time was right for a return to publishing original Star Wars novels. However, no one at Lucasfilm or the publisher could be confident that the books would sell beyond the hardcore Star Wars fans that had stayed loyal to the franchise during the ‘quiet’ period. Fantasy novelist Timothy Zahn was contracted to write a new trilogy, to be set in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi and to be released in hardback over a three-year period from 1991. He would be asked to draw on an unusual, non-movie source as his core reference for Star Wars continuity.
Starting in 1987,West End Games began publishing a Star Wars Roleplaying Game system. This consisted of a handbook, a series of guidebooks and several scenarios that allowed groups of players to run their own Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games. Despite its limited appeal to a gaming subset of Star Wars fandom, the material created for this game would – through Zahn’s work – feed further into the foundations of the Expanded Universe.
Zahn’s resulting novel – Heir to the Empire – was effectively sold as an official sequel to the Star Wars trilogy. It was a strategy that worked, propelling the novel on to the New York Times bestseller list, and kick-starting a whole new era of Star Wars publishing. Set five years after the defeat of the Empire, the novel has Han and Leia married while Luke is training a new generation of Jedi. However, the remnants of the Imperial fleet regroup under the leadership of Grand Admiral Thrawn and attack the Republic once more. Alongside other movie characters, like the droids and Lando Calrissian, Zahn introduced several new characters that became fan favourites. These included smuggler Talon Karrde and Mara Jade, who sets out to kill Luke Skywalker in revenge for the death of the Emperor (only to later marry him in a spin-off comic book). The planet of the Wookiees – Kashyyyk – is depicted for the first time in depth (beyond The Star Wars Holiday Special) and Zahn named the homeworld of the Republic as Coruscant (taken up by Lucas in the prequel trilogy). Two further books – Dark Force Rising and The Last Command – appeared in 1992 and 1993, respectively. Combined sales of Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy would eventually hit fifteen million copies, and 2011 would see a twentieth anniversary edition of Heir to the Empire published with copious notes from the author.
The twenty years between those two editions saw an unstoppable boom in Star Wars novels. Kathy Tyers picked up the Star Wars baton post-Zahn with The Truce at Bakura in 1994, with a host of authors following including Dave Wolverton, Kevin J. Anderson, Roger MacBride Allen and Barbara Hambly. By 1996, Michael A. Stackpole was chronicling the adventures of Wedge Antilles’s ‘rogue squadron’ in a series of X-Wing novels, while other post-Return of the Jedi adventures continued throughout the later 1990s. Shadows of the Empire gave the novel series a sales and promotional boost in 1996 (see Chapter 10), with the entire novel series relaunched in the wake of Star Wars: Episode I –The Phantom Menace. Vector Prime by R. A. Salvatore was the first in the new series (under the umbrella title ‘The New Jedi Order’). That novel took the radical step of killing off the much-loved character of Chewbacca, the first time someone significant from the movies had been killed off in the Expanded Universe. The publishing arm of Lucasfilm sought the approval of Lucas, and it certainly brought the Star Wars book series a welcome wave of new publicity. Between 1999 and 2003 the nineteen-book ‘New Jedi Order’ series would chronicle the adventures of a more mature Han, Leia and Luke (and their children), with the stories set up to two decades after Return of the Jedi. The series introduced a villainous new species, the fierce alien Yuuzhan Vong, who invade the galaxy.
Hundreds of Star Wars novels across over two decades have hugely expanded the universe of characters, creatures and locations that now make up the saga beyond the films. Many dedicated Star Wars fans follow the adventures of their heroes in print as they did at the movies, with the depth of the Expanded Universe growing month on month with every new novel published.
From the 1920s until the popular advent of television in the 1950s, there was a golden age of radio drama in the United States. Although variety entertainment and soap-operas (domestic dramas, so called due to their sponsorship by soap powder manufacturers) were family favourites, it was the pulp dramas of the 1930s and post-war years that caught listeners’ imaginations. Hollywood movies were often adapted, while thrilling fantasy series like Lights Out and Suspense entertained a young George Lucas.
By the 1970s, though, radio drama in the United States had gone into a dramatic decline (although it continued to thrive in the UK and elsewhere in Europe). One last outpost was the part-publicly funded National Public Radio (NPR), where Richard Toscan – associate dean of the University of Southern California School of the Performing Arts – was trying to keep the artform alive. He had been encouraged by John Houseman, then USC’s artistic director. He had once been Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air producer, responsible for the controversial 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Starting with the NPR-affiliated campus station, KUSC, Toscan adapted the short stories of Raymond Carver to audio.
In the early 1980s, NPR Playhouse was looking to expand its radio drama productions, but wanted a property that would benefit fully from advances in audio technology and the full range of dynamic audio and music effects now available. While Houseman and Toscan began a search for suitable material, it fell to Joel Rosenzweig – one of Toscan’s students – to suggest ‘Why don’t you do Star Wars?’ Toscan, Houseman and NPR producer Frank Mankiewicz immediately recognized the challenge – movies had been adapted before for radio, especially during the golden age, but Star Wars was one of the most visually impressive and successful movies of all time. How could they capture the sheer excitement and drama of Star Wars on radio? The serial nature of any adaptation would draw on those old movie serials, like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, which had inspired Lucas in the first place. The movie also had the kind of broad appeal that NPR was looking for, as it saw its dramas as a way of attracting new, perhaps younger audiences to its long established service.
The USC connection offered by Toscan and Houseman would pay off when the plan was put to Lucasfilm. The fact that Lucas’s old school had originated the idea went a long way to it getting a favourable hearing, as well as the feeling that adapting Star Wars to radio would both be breaking new boundaries and going some way to restoring radio drama to its long-lost place as a prime American art. The rights to the radio version of Star Wars were quickly offered to KUSC, the university station, for the token amount of just $1, including the rights to the use of all Star Wars music and sound effects.
That deal saved the station a lot of money, but nonetheless the cost of adapting the hit movie to audio (involving writing a script, hiring actors, renting studio space and hiring technicians) was budgeted at around $200,000. While NPR had an annual $21 million budget, there was no funding available for this particular project. Looking for international partners, NPR’s Mankiewicz persuaded Britain’s BBC to become involved as a co-production partner, giving it the right to air the serial in the UK. The quid pro quo on the deal was that the BBC would supply key members of the production team, due to its long-standing experience in audio drama. This brought twenty-nine-year-old director John Madden on to the production (later the director of such award-winning films as Mrs Brown, 1997, and Shakespeare in Love, 1998). Madden was teamed with US sound engineer Tom Voegeli, with Toscan and Lucasfilm’s Carol Titelman acting as executive producers.
After a failed attempt at adapting the movie by an unnamed BBC-nominated writer, the task fell to Brian Daley, writer of the Han Solo trilogy of Expanded Universe novels. Over three months, Daley devised scripts for a thirteen-episode version of the story that would run for almost six hours, about four hours longer than the movie. Daley’s scripts were witty and fast-moving, finding solutions to many of the daunting problems of adapting droid dialogue and Wookiee wails to radio. He had access to early drafts of the Star Wars script and as a result the 1981 radio version included several scenes cut from the movie and many others expanded or invented for audio. The entire first episode is built around cut scenes exploring Luke Skywalker’s pre-rebellion life on Tatooine, while the method by which Princess Leia acquires the plans for the Death Star is expanded. Han Solo has an encounter with another of Jabba the Hutt’s agents (not just Greedo) named ‘Heater’, while Vader’s interrogation of Leia is longer and Admiral Motti’s attempts to use the Death Star as a political tool are deepened. Some of the ideas came from Alan Dean Foster’s novel, itself based on early movie material that was cut. Daley’s innate understanding of myth and fantasy in storytelling helped him reorder Lucas’s original material to the best advantage of audio drama.
Recording took place in Los Angeles in June 1980. Casting the radio drama should have been an easy matter, with the film actors reprising their roles, but that was not to be in several key cases. While Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels were available to play Luke and C-3P0 respectively, Harrison Ford was busy making the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Given those circumstances, Solo was played by American voice actor Perry King (who had auditioned for the film role), while Ann Sachs performed Leia, due to Carrie Fisher’s unavailability. Brock Peters (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982) gave new voice to Darth Vader, while Bernard Behrens played Luke’s Jedi mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi. A variety of lesser-known voice actors filled out the other parts, although some – like David Paymer, Jerry Hardin and Adam Arkin – would rise to later prominence. With union minimum performance fees of $200 per day for the actors, Madden recorded the drama’s thirteen instalments in a swift thirteen days, with Daley on hand to edit or rewrite scenes as necessary.
The resulting serial was given a big push by NPR, including a star-driven launch at Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory, where an episode was played in concert with a starry light show. Broadcast from March 1981 on NPR (and on the youth-oriented BBC Radio 1 in the UK), the unusual series brought a 40 per cent rise in NPR’s audience, with 750,000 listeners. More than mere quantity, however, NPR was delighted with the demographic results that saw the network’s all-important twelve to seventeen age group soar fourfold. Promoted with the slogan ‘You may think you’ve seen the movie; wait ’til you hear it!’, the Star Wars radio drama brought very positive critical reaction endorsing the cliché that the pictures are always better on radio.
Madden knew why the radio version succeeded so well: ‘Anyone who’s ever listened to radio drama will testify to the fact that a play you hear will remain in your mind; twelve years later you’ll remember it vividly. And the reason you’ll remember it vividly is because you’ve done the work . . . it lives in your imagination.’
Demand for a sequel was high, and with The Empire Strikes Back the material was ready and waiting. Just as the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, went before the cameras, the second was being adapted to audio, again for NPR. The same $1 deal was struck for the rights, and the core cast was already established, making the set-up simpler. Some new key roles had to be filled, including wise Jedi Master Yoda (with John Lithgow replacing the movie’s Frank Oz), while Star Wars screen newcomer Billy Dee Williams reprised his role of Lando Calrissian. As before, Daley’s scripts (this time forming a four-hour, ten-episode version of the film) expanded upon some key scenes, notably those involving a rebel attack on an Imperial convoy that comes before the movie starts, and additional conversations between Han and Luke when they are trapped in Hoth’s snowy wastes.
Recorded in just ten days at the start of June 1982, much effort went into the post-recording sound mixing, adding music and effects, a role that again fell to Tom Voegeli. He regarded his work on The Empire Strikes Back as a step up from his efforts on Star Wars as he now felt more comfortable in the audio version of Lucas’s universe. New digital production methods only just available to KUSC sped things up and allowed for much more dynamism in the sound production. Promoted like a movie (complete with a new poster), The Empire Strikes Back was premiered at the Hayden Planetarium in New York during a blizzard on 14 February 1983. Success with listening audiences followed, suggesting that the third movie, Return of the Jedi, would be rushed into audio production.
Except it didn’t happen, at least not then. US Republican President Ronald Regan’s public funding cutbacks hit NPR hard in early 1983, causing the planned audio version of Return of the Jedi to be scrapped. The $400,000 cost for ten episodes (or even the estimated $250,000 for just six) was now beyond the organization. The first two dramas were repeated to continuing acclaim, but nothing could be done to salvage plans for the third.
NPR eventually returned to the project in the mid-1990s. Writer Brian Daley was contacted by Lucasfilm directly in 1995 and asked if he wanted to finish the job he had started over ten years before. There was one big problem: the forty-seven-yearold had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
Daley had moved on to other things since Star Wars, including his epic GammaLAW novel series. His writing partner and later Star Wars novelist Jim Luceno took over that series, while Daley committed to the welcome task of finishing the Star Wars trilogy. It was clear there was a new audience for audio Star Wars. With the post-Timothy Zahn growth of the Expanded Universe and the advance of CDs and sales of audio books, Lucasfilm and NPR were sure they could recoup the costs of production by selling the complete trilogy to fans.
Audio sales company Highbridge Audio bought the rights to the first two audio dramas, and cassette and CD sales were so high it decided to complete the trilogy itself, selling the finished drama directly to NPR for broadcast and to fans on cassette and CD. Highbridge, however, did not normally produce full-cast audio dramas, focusing instead on single-actor readings of novel manuscripts. The challenges involved and the high cost seemed too much for the company. The only way to achieve the production to the standards of the previous entries was to limit the running time to around three hours, meaning a six-episode version of the movie rather than the expansive audio versions of the previous films. Daley completed his scripts by the end of 1995, but was unable to commit to revisions due to his failing health. Others, including John Whitman, who had scripted the audio books of the Star Wars Dark Empire graphic novel series for Time Warner Audio, worked on preparing the final scripts for production.
Daley was able to include some significant expanded scenes within the three hours he had available for Return of the Jedi. His scripts opened with additional Tatooine scenes that saw Luke back in the company of his old pals Fixer and Camie. The nascent Jedi Knight saves his friends from a ‘Gunmetal’ warbot battle droid, before preventing them from joining Jabba’s gangster gang. Lucasfilm nixed these scenes, replacing them with Luke constructing his own lightsaber in Ben Kenobi’s old Tatooine hovel. This scene had been shot but cut from the movie (and was finally seen, complete with effects, in the deleted scenes on the 2011 Blu-ray release).
Recording on the final Star Wars audio drama took place in February 1996, although neither Mark Hamill nor Billy Dee Williams returned. Instead, Luke was voiced by Joshua Fardon and Arye Gross (from then-popular TV sitcom Ellen) played Lando. Ed Begley Jr provided the vocals for the taciturn character of Boba Fett, while acclaimed actor Ed Asner (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant) vocalized Jabba the Hutt. BBC radio stalwart Martin Jarvis appeared, as did The Simpsons voice-actor Yeardley Smith (the voice of Lisa Simpson), with David Birney giving voice to the small but important role of Anakin Skywalker (as distinct from Brock Peters’ Vader). C-3PO’s Anthony Daniels was the only actor to appear in all three Star Wars films and all three radio dramas. The actor was particularly taken with Daley’s interpretation of his character on audio as he had to function properly as a protocol droid, translating many of the sounds made by other characters into English (or ‘basic’ as it is known in Star Wars).
On 11 February 1996, mere hours after the cast completed recording on Return to the Jedi, Daley succumbed to his illness and died at home in Maryland. His handwritten final lines in the drama’s script saw Luke Skywalker speak of the Jedi’s return: ‘Our fire is back in the universe . . . Let it burn high and bright, to be seen by friend and foe alike. The Jedi have returned.’
Since 1982, LucasArts has been a top computer games company behind a variety of games, from traditional adventure games to first-person shooters and puzzle-based amusements. Many of its games were based around movies, such as Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). The Monkey Island series, starting with The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), helped build the company’s reputation as a groundbreaking videogame developer.
The first Star Wars videogames were licensed to Atari, with The Empire Strikes Back debuting on the Atari 2600 console in 1982. Further games, including Death Star Battle and Jedi Arena, followed the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983. In the 1990s, LucasArts took over control of the Star Wars videogames directly, launching the X-Wing series of flight simulator and combat games from 1992. A host of games followed, including the popular Rebel Assault (1993) and first-person shooter Dark Forces (1995).
The launch of the prequel trilogy of Star Wars movies from 1999 would see a flood of computer games released across a variety of platforms. The business continues to be hugely successful in the post-prequel world, launching games based around The Clone Wars animated TV series and the LEGO Star Wars range of construction kits.
The second publisher of Star Wars comics was established in 1986, around the time that Marvel concluded its nine year run of tie-in titles. Dark Horse Comics was founded by comic storeowner Mike Richardson with the declared aim of creating ‘sequels to the movies we love’. The company started with licensed tie-ins to 1980s movie franchises Aliens and Predator. In 1991 Dark Horse secured the licence for Star Wars comic books, starting with Dark Empire. Originally in development at Marvel Comics, and written by Tom Veitch and illustrated by Cam Kennedy, Dark Empire was published between December 1991 and October 1992. Set six years after Return of the Jedi, the series explored several story threads, including a bounty offered on Leia for the death of Jabba the Hutt and the creation of a clone of Emperor Palpatine. Sticking to the Star Wars trilogy formula, that successful six-issue series was followed by two sequels, entitled Dark Empire II (1994–5) and Empire’s End (1995).
Dark Horse launched several other Star Wars series in the 1990s, including Tales of the Jedi (1993–8) set during the height of the Old Republic 4,000 years before the Star Wars movies; Jabba the Hutt (1995–6); and Droids (1994–7), aimed at younger readers like the original Marvel strips. Other series would be based around the character of Boba Fett or drawn from Star Wars novel series such as X-Wing or Jedi Academy. The end of the decade saw the Crimson Empire series chronicle the exploits of the formidable red clad Imperial Guards seen briefly in Return of the Jedi.
Mike Richardson wanted to take the Star Wars comics in a more grown-up direction, given that the original Star Wars fans from 1977 had grown older themselves. According to Richardson, Dark Horse banned ‘giant rabbits with ray guns’, preferring to ‘make [the comics] very cinematic and as close to the films as possible’. The company would also publish comic book adaptations of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy of novels, to huge sales.
The 1999 release of The Phantom Menace (and the following films) gave Dark Horse a whole new set of characters and environments to explore. However, the company found the sheer amount of available material at the start of the twenty-first century across all media (plus a revitalized toy line from Hasbro, taking over from Kenner) hit it hard, and sales actually fell. According to Dark Horse editor Randy Stradley, ‘Sales stayed at that lower level pretty much across the board until after the release of Revenge of the Sith. There was so much Star Wars available that fans were forced to make choices. After the third film, as the product wave subsided, our sales went back up . . .’
Dark Horse produced a plethora of new titles exploring the previously off-limits prequel era, while continuing to create new adventures for the cast of characters from the original trilogy. A series of titles, under the Infinities banner, explored a few ‘what ifs?’ of the Star Wars universe. Alternative retellings of the original movies explored the consequences of slight changes in circumstances, allowing these alternative histories to unfold free of Lucasfilm’s usual continuity restrictions. The period after the final movie, Revenge of the Sith, saw Dark Horse continue to develop new and old stories, including a third entry in their Crimson Empire series, more explorations of the Old Republic era and various mini-series and ongoing comic books.
All George Lucas had hoped for in 1977 was a successful movie that might cover its cost of production and maybe even make a little profit. Instead, Star Wars became a phenomenon and launched a fan movement that endures to this day. The first Star Wars fans were kids in 1977, most aged between eight and twelve years old, Lucas’s self-declared target audience. Alongside them were the older science-fiction fans, from their teens into their forties, for whom the last great science-fiction film had been 2001: A Space Odyssey almost a decade earlier (although many held a secret affection for the Planet of the Apes series). Star Wars was a science-fiction film that was both serious in its intention and fun in its execution, using cutting-edge special effects to show what many science-fiction fans could only previously have imagined. The acceptance of Star Wars by the already established, well-connected science-fiction fan community allowed the new ‘franchise’ to rise quickly.
However, it was those fans that were kids in the late 1970s that would go on to form the basis of Star Wars’ enduring fandom. They had been too young to see Star Trek on first transmission in the United States in the late 1960s, but could well have caught it in the endless reruns of the 1970s. Certainly in Britain, Star Wars caught up many fans of the BBC’s mid-1970s screenings of Star Trek and those who had followed the various incarnations of DoctorWho on Saturday nights since 1963. Star Wars fans moved through their teen years with the original trilogy. Those who were ten-years-old in 1977 were hitting sixteen in 1983 when Return of the Jedi was released. They had stuck with the trilogy through the dark middle chapter of The Empire Strikes Back, but many now older fans were dismayed by what they saw as the ‘kiddie’ element of the Ewoks in the third – and at the time final – movie. However, ten-year-olds coming to Return of the Jedi for the first time didn’t react the same way, enjoying the antics of the Ewoks that their older brothers disparaged.
Lucasfilm made an early attempt to organize Star Wars fandom with the establishment of The Star Wars Fan Club and its newsletter, Bantha Tracks, in 1978. The newsletter, edited by Lucasfilm’s first Director of Fan Relations Craig Miller, ran until 1987, by which time the Star Wars juggernaut had virtually come to a halt in the wake of the last movie. Bantha Tracks was replaced by the Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine in 1987 (covering other Lucasfilm projects such as the Indiana Jones movies and Willow, as well as Star Wars), which ran for twenty-two issues before being replaced by the widely available newsstand magazine Star Wars Insider in 1994 (which continues today having endured the prequel era).
Many Star Wars fans would prove to be very creative and rapidly filled the gap left by the absence of new Star Wars movies or any new Star Wars adventures in the 1980s beyond the child-focused Ewoks TV movies and Ewoks and Droids TV cartoons (see Chapter 10). Fan fiction boomed, published by aspiring writers in fanzines distributed through the mail to local fan groups or traded for other fanzines. The first fan-written Star Wars story (a tradition established in the late 1960s by Star Trek fans) appeared in the fanzine Warped Space #28 in 1977, primarily a Star Trek fanzine. By 1978, Sharon Emily had written the first novel-length piece of fan fiction, entitled Dark Interlude, while the first dedicated Star Wars fanzine, Empire Star, appeared from Australia. That same year saw a boom in Star Wars dedicated fanzines, including Falcon’s Flight, Falcon’s Lair, Moonbeam and the Mos Eisley Tribune, many of which featured fan fiction. Skywalker was the first Star Wars only fan fiction fanzine, launched in 1978 and lasting for six issues.
The arrival of The Empire Strikes Back was a catalyst for the growth of Star Wars fandom. Science-fiction movie and TV magazine Starlog had pre-empted one of the big revelations of the movie by publishing a rumour that Darth Vader was, in fact, Luke Skywalker’s father in a February 1980 issue. The release of the film did little to dampen fan speculation on the subject, with many arguing that Vader may have been lying, while others speculated that the ‘other’ Force-sensitive figure spoken about by Yoda must be Han Solo (Return of the Jedi revealed Vader’s relationship to Luke to be true and Luke’s sister, Leia, to be the ‘other’ that Yoda mentioned). This early tendency by fandom to appropriate the story for themselves and reshape it according to their own imaginations would store up trouble for the future when Lucas returned to Star Wars with the prequel trilogy, disappointing many long-term fans who had their own version of Vader’s iconic genesis in their imaginations.
The second movie also saw Lucasfilm become more concerned about fan appropriation of their ‘intellectual property’. In August 1980 Maureen Garrett, director of the Official Star Wars Fan Club, sent several fanzine editors an official letter asserting Lucasfilm Ltd’s ownership of the Star Wars characters and settings, and warning of possible litigation, especially if fan publications contained ‘pornography’. This was a reference to the increasing tendency of fan writers to put the Star Wars characters into sexual scenes, often homosexual in nature (known as ‘slash fiction’, a term developed to cover homosexual Star Trek stories concerning a Kirk/Spock relationship and drawn from the ‘slash’ between their names). Irate fans responded by publishing an ‘adult’ fanzine called Organia in 1982. Described as an ‘adult fanzine of ideas’, Organia featured heterosexual stories and art, but was criticized by some fans for going against Lucasfilm’s warnings. The creation of ‘original’ Star Wars material by fans was taken one step further in 1983 when John Flynn submitted ‘Fall of the Republic’ as a ‘fan script’ for the third Star Wars movie. Many fans who came across the script, prior to the release of Return of the Jedi, were convinced it was the real thing.
Participation in fandom and the creation of material became much easier in the mid-1980s with the arrival of affordable home computers and the implementation of early computer bulletin board systems (a precursor of internet newsgroup and web pages or blogs). A new age of fan communication dawned, in which isolated individuals or small local groups could communicate with a much larger fandom worldwide. By the 1990s, the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.starwars was a popular host for fan fiction, while ‘A Certain Point of View’ (between 1996 and 1998) became established as a dedicated fan-fiction review site. By 1997 and the arrival of the Star Wars Special Editions in cinemas, Lucasfilm had become much more reconciled to the existence of fan fiction (six years after establishing its own line of official tie-in fiction). In Wired in October 1997, Lucasfilm’s then director of internet development, Marc Hedlund, confirmed that the company would ‘tolerate’ the publishing of fan fiction as long as it was a not-for-profit activity or commercial gain and that it ‘did not sully’ the family image of the Star Wars characters. It was a welcome – if late – development, although Lucasfilm would face a much more challenging time with the internet during the Star Wars prequel era of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Others would pursue their fandom through their love of drawing and painting, creating Star Wars-inspired artwork (some would later go on to become officially recognized Lucasfilm artists). Others used the newly available video equipment (most often used in the 1980s to capture family vacations) to make backyard movies with their friends, some more professionally put together than others. The ‘fan film’ phenomenon, driven by cheap video equipment and the development of digital special effects and editing packages, was officially recognized by Lucasfilm with their Fan Film Awards. From 2002 onwards, Lucasfilm allowed the use of their intellectual property in non-profit, fan-created short films, as long as the ‘family friendly’ stricture was observed. From spoofs and comedy skits, to serious, earnest dramas and animated versions of the saga, fan films flourished with this official recognition, making ‘stars’ of some of their creators within Star Wars fandom.
Other fans would go beyond simply collecting Kenner/Hasbro’s Star Wars action figures and would build life-size stormtrooper armour or character costumes for them and their friends to wear (sowing the seeds of the later 501st Legion, a worldwide Cosplay fan group that raises money for charity). All this activity proved one thing to Lucasfilm: there was still an audience for new Star Wars material even through the 1980s when they were not producing anything of any significance. Star Wars fandom was now well-established and here to stay.
While the ongoing series of novels and comic books of the 1980s and 1990s had fed fans appetites for new Star Wars stories, their biggest desire was always for a new trilogy of films. From the first rumours in 1993 that George Lucas would be returning to Star Wars, it looked like fans’ hopes were finally to be fulfilled and a sense of excited anticipation swept Star Wars fandom.