Author: M. Dean Cooper

A few weeks back, after the “Wings of the Master” episode of Star Wars Rebels aired, a little tizzy broke out on the Jedi Council Literature forum over a supposed contradiction in the new canon: according to an editor over at Wookieepedia, the reference book Ultimate Star Wars had canonized the Expanded Universe detail that B-wings were developed by Admiral Ackbar. In the most superficial, obtuse sense, this seemed to contradict the role of the Mon Cal engineer Quarrie in the episode, and for a little while there, the community was hard at work alternately brainstorming retcons and debating the degree to which the Lucasfilm Story Group had failed us.

Naturally, something as complex as a starfighter can easily have multiple significant developers, and one idea that I thought was particularly interesting was that Quarrie and Ackbar, upon the former’s arrival in the mainstream Rebellion, developed a relationship along the lines of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison—where one was the real genius, and the other, Ackbar in this case, used his superior marketing and networking abilities to ultimately receive most of the credit and popular recognition.

Ackbar in canon is something of a gruff busybody (if not a true asshole like Edison), and that sort of professional rivalry between him and Quarrie made sense for both characters, I thought, and added an interesting level of complexity to Rebels‘ straightforward account of the B-wing’s origin. In the end, of course, it was a pointless conversation—the claims about an Ackbar credit in Ultimate Star Wars appeared to be flat-out wrong, and there was no contradiction, just an object lesson in fannish overreactions, and the perils of using a wiki as your primary source. Read More

Remember when the theatrical trailer for The Force Awakens came out, and JJ said there wouldn’t be any more? That was a little over a month ago now, and it seems like every other day since there’s either an international trailer (semantics!), a new TV spot, or even an actual clip of the movie coming out. As the new bits and pieces continue piling up, lots of people who started out content to see whatever the marketing people chose to show us have begun wondering if enough is enough.

Going solely by videos on the official Star Wars YouTube account, there are four distinct TV spots so far, but that’s ignoring several others—some which are pretty new and perhaps just haven’t been added to the account yet, and others which are especially short and/or not very distinct from the others. All told, it’s hard to be sure exactly how many different spots are out there.

But what I’ve been wondering is, what does all this material add up to, in terms of actual content from the movie? It feels like we’ve seen a lot—and indeed, too much according to many—but how much distinct footage have we seen already, with a little more than three weeks until the film’s release? I decided to find out. Read More

When you’ve been an Expanded Universe fan as long as I have, the different tiers of canon become sort of a sixth sense. I’m partly referring to the old Lucas-era system of letter grading—G-canon for the movies, C-canon for the novels, and so on—but even now, in the post-reboot phase where everything is considered canon, the more jaded fans out there will be happy to point out that no big-budget film director is likely to change his story because of a line in a years-old novel. That was certainly true of the Thrawn trilogy and its ilk, but many see it as equally true for books like Tarkin or Twilight Company, both of which lay down a lot of pipe, so to speak, regarding the status quo of eras that could easily be the subject of a spinoff film one day. What will happen, on that fateful day? I don’t know, but at a minimum I can understand skepticism on the matter.

But in the meantime, that same forgone conclusion—that the different forms of media constitute a hierarchy rather than a totally level playing field—is already playing out at the fringes of the franchise. Last month saw the US debut of Star Wars Rebels Magazine, a very child-focused periodical that’s been coming out in the United Kingdom since January. The bulk of the magazine is simple puzzles and little splashes of trivia not unlike Adam Bray’s recent Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, but each issue also features an original twelve-page comic story, most by English writer Martin Fisher. The stories are simple, befitting their length, but they’re solidly told and with nice art (Ingo Römling’s in particular) to boot. Twelve pages is about half the length of an issue of a typical American comic book, and with issue #10 having hit the stands in the UK last month, that means these comics have amassed almost as much material on the lives of the Rebels cast as the ongoing Kanan series from Marvel.

But while the latter is written by one of the series’ creators and has even been referenced, if obliquely, in episodes of the TV show, the Rebels Magazine comics are hermetically sealed—they utilize the first season’s complete bag of tricks, but nothing gets out. Read More