Category: Simple Tricks

The Theatrical Trailer – The First 24 Hours

Posted on October 21, 2015by , , , , , , and

Almost exactly eighteen months ago, Lucasfilm announced the reboot of the Star Wars Expanded Universe—or Legendsification, if you will. It happened on a Friday, and it was such a seismic moment for your humble nerds at Eleven-ThirtyEight that I wanted to document the days that followed as accurately as possible. The next Monday, we published Das Reboot – The First 48 Hours, a group piece that, unlike our average Not a Committee, I presented entirely in chronological order, timestamps and all—so readers could feel the sequence of emotions unfold in “real time”.

With Tuesdays being an off day, I thought it’d be fun to cover the first 24 hours after the new trailer the same way—but while the trailer technically went public at about 10pm Monday night, interest was so high that the Jedi Council Forums were down on and off for a couple hours (and then again Tuesday afternoon)! I eventually got a DM off to the gang, though, and below is what followed.

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12:14 AM – Mike: So, JFC, LOL, and TBH, that was a trailer. I’m not even going to try to be especially coherent right now, but there’s just so much to freak out about here: new character voices! A mountain range with a familiar-looking trench in it! Finn’s “oh shit” face when he sees Kylo’s lightsaber! Han and Leia being all tender and stuff! How are you guys feeling? Read More

It’s Not Over Yet – The Return of the Clones

Posted on October 16, 2015by , and

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Ben: Sometimes long-form storytelling doesn’t work out. For example, when The Clone Wars was canceled after five seasons on the air and a movie, it still left many plots and characters hanging. Many fans assumed that there would be no resolution to these things, and not without reason. With new movies in the post-Return of the Jedi era emerging and Rebels taking TCW’s place, a new focus on the original trilogy era seemed poised to doom characters like Ahsoka, Ventress and Rex to obscurity, perhaps not for forever, but for a very long time.

Fortunately for the legions of TCW fans out there, there has been a steady, if much slower than previously, flow of information, references and details from TCW postmortem. Starting with the “Lost Missions” from the unaired sixth season being released on Netflix, we’ve had story threads picked up by a comic series, a novel, and now in Rebels, each one giving us a few clues as to what would have happened if the show had continued into seventh or even eighth seasons.

But what about after the end of the show? Even if the show had continued, there would still have been an end, likely corresponding with the events of Revenge of the Sith. So what would become of those characters in the years after the Republic and Separatist Alliance had collapsed? Read More

Our Journey With Jason Fry, Part Two

Posted on October 14, 2015by and Interviews

jp2-cover2In part one of our latest interview with Star Wars dynamo author Jason Fry, we discussed his two recent Journey to The Force Awakens tie-in books, The Weapon of a Jedi and Moving Target (alongside Cecil Castellucci). Today we’ll move on to his most recent solo release, Servants of the Empire: The Secret Academy (expect us to have more on that next week as well), but first, we caught up on Jason’s own original series The Jupiter Pirates, whose third book, The Rise of Earth, comes out next year—and whose cover Jason was kind enough to share with us for its world premiere!

Man, that was a lot of titles for one paragraph.

 

So Jupiter Pirates is, in many ways, the age of sail in space. There are some family tensions in the second book, Curse of the Iris, and the tension mirrors the long-running argument over whether the Hashoones are pirates or privateers. The family has done and does some shady things in this book, and Tycho is sort of the audience surrogate in saying “hey wait, this isn’t right”—but his family doesn’t always see eye-to-eye about it. How do you romanticize age of sail in space without necessarily romanticizing the awful things that pirates do? And that’s leaving aside people like Mox who are just the worst, of course.

Hmm. Good question. I suppose this is a case where the built-in guardrails of writing kids’ fiction are a good thing – you’re not going to see pirates woolding someone (Google that with caution – it’s upsetting) or raping/slaughtering people. Bad things happen, but they’re mostly offscreen or implied. Which is honestly the way I prefer to work anyway.

Anyway, I think the more interesting debates in The Jupiter Pirates – for a reader of any age – are about other decisions to be made about right and wrong. What’s the right thing to do when you discover you don’t agree with a cherished family tradition? How about when you’re fighting for a larger cause that may or may not justify unsavory actions? (Which is the same question Cecil and I addressed in Moving Target, come to think of it.) Read More

Our Journey With Jason Fry, Part One

Posted on October 12, 2015by Interviews

weaponofajediJason Fry, author of more than thirty books in the Star Wars franchise, has already been gracious enough to grant us biannual interviews since Eleven-ThirtyEight’s inception; but this time was a challenge all around—not only did I have to cover his two different Force Friday releases, The Weapon of a Jedi and Moving Target, last Tuesday’s Servants of the Empire finale The Secret Academy, the upcoming third book in his Jupiter Pirates series, and any potential future projects in fewer than a hundred questions, but Jason himself was double-booked this past weekend (with appearances within a couple hours of each other at both New York Comic-Con and Star Wars Reads Day in the Maplewood Memorial Library in New Jersey). Luckily, we pulled it off—I assume it’s because he’s extra-pumped about the Mets being in the playoffs. Below we’ll discuss his Luke and Leia books; stay tuned for the latest on Zare Leonis, and more, on Wednesday.

 

Might as well get the Force Awakens business out of the way. I’m always very interested in the mechanics of how they tease things from an upcoming film, and my original question was going to be how you ended up using Sarco Plank specifically in The Weapon of a Jedi. Then I read your recent piece on the Official Site, and you say that by the time you came aboard, not just Plank’s role but the general outline of the story was already in place. Is that typical in a situation like this, to be handed not just a character but a rough plot? The TFA elements of Moving Target, on the other hand, remain a little more mysterious; how much of that book was decided before you and Cecil Castellucci became involved?

Every project is different, but I knew from the beginning that Weapon of a Jedi, as part of Journey to The Force Awakens, would be really different. For Weapon of a Jedi the basic plot was set, so I focused on figuring out Luke’s character and his arc – the book flies or dies based on how drawn in you are by Luke’s Force training and what he learns about the Force and himself. Contrast that assignment with, say, Servants of the Empire – for those books I had one episode to incorporate, a cameo to feature, and some story threads to include, but otherwise I had a free hand with the plots and characters. Read More

Starkiller: Superweapons and the Sequel Trilogy

Posted on September 28, 2015by , , , , and Not A Committee

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Buried in the Force Friday blitz at the beginning of this month was the first The Force Awakens-related update to StarWars.com’s Databank section. Naturally, very little new information actually came out of the new entries; many didn’t include pictures, and some of the character entries were nothing but the same one-sentence bios from the back of their action figure cards.

One big new piece of info did show up, though—or rather, if you follow the spoiler reporting, a confirmation of one of the oldest rumors: there’s a superweapon on the table.

I actually stopped reading spoilers a long time ago, but even I had heard bits and pieces to this effect; and sure enough, the exceedingly minimal entry for the First Order’s Starkiller Base nevertheless deigns to include the apparent in-universe reasoning for its name:

“An ice planet converted into a stronghold of the First Order and armed with a fiercely destructive new weapon capable of destroying entire star systems.”

While certain reporting (and certain memes) has tended to paint the First Order as an upstart group of ne’er-do-wells rather than a serious galactic power, the ability to destroy an entire star system? Well, that changes the equation. Superweapons have a mixed reputation among Star Wars fans, though; the Expanded Universe is known for adding a whole bunch of ’em to the lineup (including the Sun Crusher, which did exactly what the Starkiller is alleged to do and was totally invulnerable besides), and even many movie purists will tell you that concluding the original trilogy with a second Death Star wasn’t exactly George’s Lucas’s most creative idea. So I put the question to the staff: is this a mistake? A ham-fisted attempt to replicate the feel of the OT? Or are superweapons a crucial part of Star Wars’s magic formula? Read More