Author: Jay Shah

Rebels Revisited: Looking Ahead to Season Two

Posted on June 17, 2015by , and

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Any look ahead at Season 2 of Star Wars Rebels must first reflect on what’s come before, and who can forget the end of Season 1, when the Empire Base Delta Zeroed the hell out of Lothal once and for—oh, wait, no, that didn’t happen (yet). Whoops. In reality, Kanan was rescued, the Inquisitor went swimming in a fireball, and Ahsoka Tano showed up to see our heroes safely away from the Empire’s clutches.

There have been two previews for next season so far, the one linked above and the three-minute trailer that premiered at Celebration Anaheim. The hour-premiere, “The Siege of Lothal” airs this Saturday, and whatever the state of the planet at the end of the titular siege, it appears that the Ghost crew, with Ahsoka in tow, will be spending a good chunk of the season out in the rest of the galaxy, evading Darth Vader and/or sparing Lothal from further Imperial attention. Read More

The Pitch: Rebels Season Two Cameos

Posted on June 12, 2015by , , , and Not A Committee

the-noidas

David: Oh hello, Mistah Filoni. Good morning. Nice, uh, hat you got there. Thanks for this chance, by the way! I’m pitching a light-hearted and completely not meta episode that I’m calling for now “It Rhymes, Like Poetry”. Good, huh?

So, picture this… Cold open! The Ghost crew are escaping a massive cloud of TIE fighters and the ship is in pretty bad shape. Zeb is complaining about doing yet another dangerous job for Vizago instead of sticking it to the Empire, and when things look dire Hera jumps to lightspeed!

Our heroes get to the world of Pantora, where they deliver their load to some funny looking dealer, but they have to wait at least one day until the Ghost is repaired. The kids (Sabine, Ezra and Zeb) decide to head to the city. Pantora is nothing like it was in that animatic from Clone Wars. It’s become very industrial and it’s full of merchandise vending machines, and people trying to sell you things everywhere and… well, it’s all very crazy and, uhm, satirical, for the grown ups in the audience, you know. Read More

Alexandra Bracken’s Young Reader Adaptation of A New Hope Looks Really Good And You Should Read It!

Posted on June 10, 2015by

SW_Jackets-ANHLast week, StarWars.com revealed the official covers of the OT adaptations written by Alexandra Bracken, Adam Gidwitz, and Tom Angleburger. The reveal was accompanied by a sampler excerpting the three books. There was some negative play on some sites and on the TFN Literature forum, partly because these are young reader adaptations instead of full novelizations and partly because of the stylistic choices the authors made in their adaptations. I made a thread at TFN Lit advising folks to actually read the sampler before rushing to judgment based on some out of context quotes and/or assumptions that young reader books wouldn’t be any good. The three OT adaptations are very different because the authors were presumably given the liberty to adapt the story for young readers in the way they saw fit. I may write about the ESB and ROTJ adaptations at a future date, but today I’m going to write about Bracken’s ANH adaptation because I think it’s the most promising in the set and its three chapters in the sampler illustrate why folks shouldn’t dismiss a book just because it’s for young readers.

I never read much YR Lit (Percy Jackson/Olympus books excepted, because hey, it’s me) but Star Wars YR is on fire right now. I’ve already delivered high praise for Jason Fry’s two Servants of the Empire books, need to track down Michael Kogge’s well-regarded books, and have high hopes for genre experimentation with the upcoming Lost Stars by Claudia Gray. Alexandra Bracken’s The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy is written for the same age range (8-12) as Fry and Kogge’s books and judging from the sampler, it looks like it’ll be just as good as those.

As indicated by its title, The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy is about the Big Three. Bracken chose to tell the story of the original Star Wars movie through the point of view of each character in turn, and Leia features in the opening section of the book (and consequently, the three sample chapters). At risk of gushing, I have to say that it’s probably already my favorite Leia portrayal in a Star Wars book. The fact that this book is for young readers is of no moment – the characterization is superb, the writing is impressive, and the storytelling is imaginative. Bracken isn’t merely retelling a story we already told, she is genuinely expanding it with material sourced from the radio drama or the old EU, but also with entirely new scenes. Readers who skip this book because it’s for young readers are going to miss a great opportunity to understand more about the film.

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No Sleep Till Bespin – On Hyperspace Travel Times

Posted on May 22, 2015by , , , , and Not A Committee

Hyperspace_falcon

One of the best selling points of the canon reboot has been the opportunity to revisit troublesome details in the worldbuilding of the Galaxy Far Far Away that were either ill-conceived to begin with, or became overcomplicated as the years went on and new stories piled up. One detail that was confusing from the get-go is exactly how fast hyperspace is. For one thing, the film characters call it “light speed”, when it’s clearly got to be way, way faster than that—in fact, the films also tend to suggest each transit takes no more than a few hours; no one brings a change of clothes before departing Tatooine for Alderaan, and Luke doesn’t seem very stiff or grubby when he exits his X-wing on Dagobah.

So maybe you can’t blame the Expanded Universe for never really ironing out these inconsistencies; they didn’t have much to go on. When I raised this topic to the others, David Schwarz pointed out that West End Games’ original table for the transit times depicted in the original trilogy (below) actually contained a typo that suggested all these trips took a matter of days, not hours—which might have been more sensible, but certainly doesn’t seem to be the films’ intent, and isn’t that more important?

Meanwhile, one of my own favorite examples dates all the way back to Heir to the Empire—the Star Destroyer Chimaera, with a hyperdrive faster than even the Falcon‘s, takes five days to travel from Myrkr to Wayland. Look for those two planets on the Essential Atlas‘ galactic map and you’ll find them practically right on top of each other at the coordinates N-7. So if it takes five days to go that tiny distance (and it’s not a freak detail; multi-day hyperspace journeys factor into the Thrawn trilogy alone on multiple occasions), how the hell did Luke survive a trip from Hoth (K-18) to Dagobah (M-19) without his body eating straight through that flight suit? Read More

The New Face(s) of Star Wars: Celebration Anaheim and Diversity

Posted on May 6, 2015by

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Star Wars Celebration Anaheim was a rousing success by most metrics: it set attendance records, the media coverage was 24/7, it had an unprecedented livestream, and fans emerged energized and excited for the new Star Wars films. We had a great time at Celebration, and we propose another metric for the great success of Star Wars Celebration Anaheim: the growth of Star Wars by leaps and bounds into a truly universal community.

To be sure, Star Wars always had near universal appeal (that’s how we all became fans, after all). But Tricia Barr – who hosted the “From a Certain Point of View” panel that we were honored to be part of – said it best: this Celebration was perhaps the most diverse yet, even considered in terms of the people who were on that very panel. Kathleen Kennedy made a great and very well-received statement about Star Wars finally recognizing its female fan base and striving hard to have that recognized on-screen (as it’s starting to be recognized on the page). Many attendees expressed surprise at how well-attended the convention was, both in absolute numbers (something like 60,000 people) and in the geographic representation of the audience. We saw many people who had flown in from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. We saw small children, teenagers, adults, and older folks.

Anyone who thinks that Star Wars is just for a certain demographic, whether a younger-skewed age group or exclusively males, should come to a Star Wars Celebration and realize that Star Wars is for everyone. It always has been, but Celebration Anaheim really drove the point home (and here we hear echoes of “Chewie, we’re home,” the Celebration mantra in more than one way). With the welcome diversity in the novels/comics, Rebels, and now the films it’s become absolutely clear that Star Wars has finally recognized that it is for everyone. Some might ask why this kind of representation matters, if Star Wars already had that universal appeal – well, read on and we’ll tell you why it’s so important.

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