The Pitch – Darth Vader TV Specials

A couple months back, a Disney licensing brochure hit the interwebs outlining several upcoming Star Wars merchandising opportunities over the next two years—Rebels, for example, Lego Star Wars, and of course, Episode VII. But included on the list was the tantalizingly vague “Darth Vader Themed TV Specials”. While the news item included a photo of the brochure and it appears to be a legitimate thing, no official information on these “specials” has been released since. Could they be one-shot episodes from the Rebels team? Tiny interstitial animations like the original Clone Wars Animated Series? Or even fully-produced live action material? No one has any freaking idea.

Could the staff of Eleven-ThirtyEight ask for a better opening? I submit that we could not. Here’s what we’d like to see.
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Abandoned Universe: What Could Have Been

ST_Lightsaber

The Star Wars Expanded Universe has grown quite large over the years, containing everything from comics to novels to video games. Most of these entries exist within the same continuity, a notable few do not, and some linger somewhere between the two in a sort of state of canon limbo, waiting for day that executive judgment comes and their fate is decided one way or the other. All of these stories share at least one thing in common, however: they were published.

They were released and distributed to, paid for, and read by legions of eager (and occasionally less-than-eager) fans. But what of those tales that never quite made it into circulation for public consumption? Those that made the leap off the drawing board, but still fell short of the printing press in the end? It’s true that there are likely countless proposed and discarded concepts of which we will never hear, but a rare few proved sufficiently promising to be formally announced and yet still failed to see fruition.

In today’s feature, we will examine several of these uncommon cases in which stories were revealed and dangled in front of our eyes before being suddenly snatched away and left as mere obscure historical curiosities.

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Dark Horse vs Marvel: The Future of the Comics License

A long time ago, in a galaxy not-so-far-away, in 1977, the first Star Wars movie was released…into a world that already had a Star Wars comic. Marvel published Star Wars #1 a month before the movie’s release. Licensed comics have been a part of the franchise since its inception, and while formats, styles and publishers have changed, I don’t see that changing. With the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, new films pending and the comics industry undergoing a financial recovery, we’re left with a lot of interesting questions about their future…

The History

Marvel originally acquired the rights to publish a limited six-issue adaptation of A New Hope, but it sold so extraordinarily well that they pushed for the opportunity to continue publishing it as an ongoing series. The limitations placed on them meant that they were not able to advance the plot or characters in any significant way, but this pushed them towards expanding outwards, introducing new characters and locations. Tonally, the Marvel comics vary wildly from later installations of the Expanded Universe, and it’s true that as a body of work they sit further down the canonical hierarchy, associated with giant green space bunnies and cheesy predictions of doom. But they also introduced characters such as Lumiya, who returned as a serious villain in Del Rey’s recent Legacy of the Force novel series. They introduced a complicated and well-received backstory for the Mandalorians, one that has proven remarkably resilient to retcons as authors keep finding ways to work it back in. John Jackson Miller states that Archie Goodwin’s work on the original Marvel Star Wars series directly inspired plotlines in his much more recent series, Knights of the Old Republic.
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The Best of the Worst—Awesome Stuff in Atrocious EU

Man oh man, the Bantam era. Not having discovered Star Wars until the Special Editions in 1997, I spent the next couple years racing through dozens of already-published novels before catching up to the “present” right around when the New Jedi Order started. As such, those first fifteen years after Return of the Jedi are kind of a blur for me; though I at least had the advantage of reading them mostly in chronological order. I don’t really remember the stories of that era, for the most part, as much as certain distinct moments—Han crashing the Falcon on Kessel. Bib Fortuna’s brain in a jar. Leia hiding from Thrawn on Honoghr. Anakin on Centerpoint Station. Jaina in her cell.

Cell? What cell? Why, on Hethrir’s worldcraft, of course, in The Crystal Star.

Having abducted all three Solo brats just prior to the opening of the novel (which was admirably in media res of him if nothing else), Hethrir, leader of the Empire Reborn cult, steals away to his worldcraft, which is a spaceship that’s also kind of a planet and…eh, it’s not important. Jacen and Jaina, all of five years old at this point, are locked in separate cells with a bunch of other kids at something of a reeducation camp designed to teach toddlers—the only people who could possibly buy Hethrir’s argument—how great Emperor At least the cover art was pretty in those days.Palpatine was and how thrilled they should all be that Hethrir is bringing evil back. The twins aren’t buying it, of course, and soon enough they lead an exodus with the help of a friendly dragon (no, really).

It’s fairly standard young-reader pablum, really; told well enough, but nothing especially clever or original. Except for one thing.

Hethrir is using the Force to dampen, and monitor, Jacen and Jaina’s still-burgeoning powers; Jaina describes it in her internal monologue as a heavy, wet blanket covering them and preventing them from exerting themselves to escape. So one night in her cell, Jaina starts to experiment—she reaches out to a single air molecule floating in the room. Wiggles it around. Hethrir doesn’t notice. She adds a few more, tries rubbing them together—a light appears! Hethrir still doesn’t notice.
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The Troublesome Notion of Fan Consensus

The other day, I saw a very simple message on Twitter –

Megan @blogfullofwords
Involving the Yuuzhan Vong more in the EU could reinforce Star Wars’ lessons about redemption: http://bit.ly/HtsSMe

My immediate reaction was an emphatic nod of agreement. I like the Yuuzhan Vong, the villains of the sprawling New Jedi Order storyline from 1999-2003, and I’ve been disappointed by their general absence in the more recent Star Wars storylines.

Then I went and read the full article, and I found myself nodding in agreement some more.

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Megan before, but I suspect I’ll pay closer attention in future. Star Wars fan culture is a big space, and it’s always nice to find an interesting new vista within it.

But as soon as I stopped reading, questions started to crowd together in my head. I wrote the first draft of this article immediately afterwards, as a way to get my thoughts straight on the topic.

Then Mike had a gap in his schedule of material for this blog, and, well, here we are.

The thing that struck me was this –

0. Are we sure this is the good idea we think it is?
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