Small Wonders: Drop Your Baggage and Believe

Posted on January 6, 2015by and

rr-ezratemple

Ben: Let’s be clear about something: Star Wars fans can be cynical. The old guard has been around long enough to know better than take marketing hype and pre-release buildup at its word. The Phantom Menace, Revenge of the Sith, The Force Unleashed, The Clone Wars, none of it has ever fully lived up to the standards nostalgia and the original trilogy have given most of us. Even the good stuff, books, comics, video games, whatever they might be, aren’t bulletproof, because they all have to walk the fine line between appealing to nostalgia and striking out into something new. On top of that, the Disney purchase has raised that standard even higher. Nothing done in the post-Lucas era could ever stand up beside the greatness of ESB, could it?

So what happens when a show like Rebels comes along? Rebels had a terribly hard row to hoe right out of the gate, aping elements of the original trilogy while doggedly knitting in elements from the prequels and TCW alike. “It’s too cartoony”, some say, “it’s obviously being made for kids.” “It’s not enough like TCW,” others grumble, “it’s too light and not mature.” Another complaint heard a lot is “It’s beating Star Wars into the ground, all Disney cares about is money.” Read More

There’s Something Weird Going On With the Jedi Temple

Posted on January 5, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

temple-comic

While we’ve spoken here at great length about the extent to which the canon version of the Star Wars galaxy has remained the same as it was before the reboot, one of the benefits of being an Expanded Universe junkie these days is that when changes do show up, even subtle ones, they stand out. And buried amidst Tarkin‘s onslaught of EU references and allusions was one definite change: five years after Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine is living in the Jedi Temple. His personal quarters, in fact, are more or less in the Jedi Council’s living room.

Early in the novel, Tarkin visits Coruscant after an extended absence. While being escorted inside by Mas Amedda, whose position in the early Empire Jay has already discussed, Tarkin reflects on the aesthetic, almost cultural, shift since his last visit:

“Tarkin was familiar with the interior, but the expansive, soaring corridors he walked years earlier had contained a rare solemnity. Now they teemed with civilians and functionaries of many species, and the walls and plinths were left unadorned by art or statuary.”

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The 2015 Star Wars Holiday Special

Posted on January 2, 2015by , , , and Not A Committee

chewiehouse

Approximately eleven months from now, the holiday season will be back in full swing again. Halls will be decked, mangers will be awayed, bells will be caroled, all that good stuff. But one thing will be different: there will be a new Star Wars movie about to come out. Exactly one week before Christmas, in fact. A holiday release is unprecedented for Star Wars “episodes”, but not for the franchise as a whole: until this year, the terms “Star Wars” and “holiday” have only ever been uttered in the same breath in reference to, well, you know what.

But this is a new era—and if ever there were a time to go there, to revisit the idea of a Holiday Special, now would be it. So let’s join Chewbacca’s family once again as they prepare for their Life Day festivities… Read More

The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. X – The Death Star Plans

Posted on December 29, 2014by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

deathstar-playset

As I’ve noted previously, the current batch of Expanded Universe Explains topics has focused not just on general questions about the Galaxy Far, Far Away, but specifically on the areas that were overexplained—events referenced or implied by the films that were then, by virtue of their movie connection, explained multiple times in the EU. The granddaddy of all of these, any EU fan will tell you, is the very first one: the theft of the plans for the Death Star.

While literary portrayals of the event weren’t abnormally common (like most things prior to A New Hope, early novelists actually treated it with a certain careful reverence), if you played a Star Wars video game at basically any time in the nineties, odds are good you had the plans in your possession at some point—almost as good as the odds that you eventually blew the damn thing up yourself.

It’s almost impossible to present a coherent timeline of the myriad versions of the story that exist in what is now the Legends continuity; I’m going to do my best, but it should be noted that where events flatly contradict each other it’s generally accepted that there were multiple sets of plans floating around that only formed a complete picture after being assembled. Whether Artoo had all of them during ANH or just one piece is also debatable. Read More

The Eleven-ThirtyEight Gazetteer, Vol. V

Posted on December 26, 2014by Simple Tricks

republic-city

The Pithy Reader’s Companion

While Eleven-ThirtyEight has no formal relationship with TheForce.Net, we make no secret of the fact that most of us got to know each other on their Jedi Council Forums—in the Literature section, for the most part. Almost a year before ETE began, I started a thread there called One Sentence or Less, which harnessed the collective wit of the forums to summarize the plots of numerous Expanded Universe works in, well, one sentence or less. While I did my best to encourage brevity, each winner was chosen by popular vote, so in a way I had very little to do with the results—but that didn’t stop me from compiling the first year of winners into the three-volume Pithy Reader’s Companion here, named after Pablo Hidalgo’s Essential Reader’s Companion. While activity died down a lot in the second year of the thread, eventually enough new winners were compiled that I was able to put together Volume IV just a couple months ago—which took us all the way up to the reboot, so when and if I get to Volume V it’ll be all canon—how exciting!

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