Even the official material got that line wrong.

The Waru Local to Warminster: Progress Report

Lately I began reading all of the Star Wars novels.

All of them.

And it's a lot.

I had dabbled in Star Wars lit before, and read a handful of the books when I was in middle school and high school. I definitely read the novelizations of the first four movies, and the between-movie pieces "Splinter of the Mind's Eye" and "Shadows of the Empire." I read three of the "Tales" collections about random creatures from the cantina, bounty hunters, and random creatures from Jabba's Palace. I think that I read "Truce at Bakura," "The Courtship of Princess Leia," and "Darksaber." I know that there are a few more, but none that stand out.

Earlier this year, I was moved to reignite my Star Wars geekdom. Part of what drew me to this was a project by Bria at Tosche Station, called "The Waru Express." She read or reread 130 Star Wars novels and posted her insights on what she read, and she made it seem manageable. I'm not sure why it is called "The Waru Express," but Wookieepedia tells me that Waru is a giant gelatinous SPACE WHALE from a book I haven't gotten to yet. I'm too afraid to research more, because spoilers.

So in April, I began what I just dubbed five seconds ago "The Waru Local to Warminster." Unlike The Waru Express, the local has a lot more stops and is significantly slower. I planned on reading all the Star Wars publications, in release order, using this list as a template. The list was a little lacking - it was missing the "Tales from..." compilations mentioned above, as well as a few other releases that I caught - and might still be missing others.

My count comes to 257 books, which might be missing a few newer releases that I'll add when I get there in ninety years. This includes all the young adult books and novelizations, which do not fit as snugly into the SW canon, but excludes the Star Wars Adventure Journals, which were full of canonical and non-canonical short stories, but which are unavailable today for anything which could be considered an acceptable price.

I decided to read in release order, as opposed to chronological order, for a few reasons. My impulse is to discover the new characters, planets, etc, as they are written, since even things that are chronologically earlier are written with this context. Also, it helps keep context straight - everything written before 1999 has the possibility of conflicting with The Phantom Menace, at which point things will fall in line. Same with 2002 for AOTC, and 2005 for ROTS, and probably to a lesser extent in 2008-2012 for The Clone Wars.

At this point, I am 20 books in - 20/257, or 7.77% of the way through my mission. Here are some brief thoughts on the books I've read.

The Star Wars Trilogy - "Star Wars" by "George Lucas," "The Empire Strikes Back" by Donald F. Glut, and "Return of the Jedi" by James Kahn.

Nothing very surprising in any of these. I'm pretty sure you've seen the movies if you're a person in the year 2013, and am certain you've seen the movies if you've bothered to venture. A few brief thoughts - the intro/prologue for "Star Wars" lays out basically the entire plot of the prequels, from what I can remember - or at least the Palpatine arc. Throughout the books, there are some details that are a bit messed-up, due to deleted/revised scenes or wonky concept art - such as a terrible Jabba the Hutt scene in "Star Wars" that doesn't fit in and certainly never should be reinserted into the movie; or lengthy descriptions of a blue Yoda gnawing on his Gimer Stick in "Empire." The only thing of note about the "Jedi" novelization is that Kahn really, REALLY likes to type out onomatopoeias of droid and alien sounds.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster

A chilling glimpse into what the future would hold if Star Wars hadn't made billions of dollars, this one was apparently written as a sequel that could be made on the cheap (i.e. no Harrison Ford, no outer space, nothing particularly exotic or interesting). Also features a lot prose about how super horny Luke is for Leia. That's the only long-lasting impression I have of this, a few months later.

"The Han Solo Adventures" by Brian Daley, and "The Lando Calrissian Adventures" by L. Neil Smith - 6 books total

I was prepared to dislike these books, based on what I'd heard of them, but I thought they were pretty good. Because they took place prior to the trilogy, they didn't rely on characters from the films. The Han Solo series had a few great Star Wars-y sequences, such as the attack on Stars' End. The Lando books were super-weird, including a journey through a temple that played with his size and concept of time, and a journey through the stars with some flying SPACE WHALES. Lando was the much more interesting character in these series - but the books were a lot weirder, and I'd probably favor rereading the Solo books.

"The Thrawn Trilogy" by Timothy Zahn

This has always been a series held to fairly high standards - the start of the modern Star Wars renaissance - and as such, I've been very interested in reading these. Some parts of the series are very good - anything involving the Mara Jade character, for instance; and most of the stuff involving Grand Admiral Thrawn, although his seeming omniscience got to be a bit much. What doesn't hold up particularly well about these books is the level of self-reference. Especially in the first book, "Heir to the Empire," but throughout the books, the original trilogy is referenced constantly. Characters liken everything to a situation from the movies, or make callbacks to dialogue that they, in that universe, said five years prior. In the early nineties when these were THE Star Wars books, it might have been nice, but it gets a bit old and a bit cheesy. Speaking of cheesy, there's a Jedi named Joruus C'boath, a clone of Jorus C'boath, who clones Luke using his old hand and calls him LUUKE SKYWALKER. LUUKE. LUUKE.

"The Jedi Prince" series (6 books) by Paul and Hollace Davids

These were pretty awful. Each of the six books has a small environmental message that doesn't fit into anything and doesn't go anywhere - for instance, "The Glove of Darth Vader" involves saving the space whales. MORE SPACE WHALES. The characters all hung out at Dagobah, Bespin, and Yavin IV, and the Empire set up camp on Hoth. It's like my terrible Episode VII story, which I wrote at age 8, all over again. The series involves TWO three-eyed mutant children of Emperor Palpatine (Triclops and Trioculus), and introduced the world to Chewbacca's world-famous zoochberry pies! The series did improve somewhat as it went and all the people I hated started dying, but really when it starts with a galaxy-wide search for Darth Vader's floppy old glove, it only can go up from there. Makes me regret my decision to include the younger fiction, but I'M ALREADY IN NOW.

"The Truce at Bakura" by Kathy Tyers

A book that, A, gave me a lot of hope after trudging through the six books above, and B, showed a way to calm things down a bit after the last proper novel, Zahn's "The Last Command." Not everything has to be the final battle in a massive war, and the whole fate of the universe doesn't always have to hang in the balance. I'm happy that I got a novel that played around more with character motivations, had a smaller threat (although, let's face it, an alien race threatening possible tech enslavement of mankind is still kind of major), explored new worlds, and contained an unlikely alliance between Our Heroes and the Empire.

So here I sit, 7.77% of the way done. I'm reading "The Courtship of Princess Leia" now, and I'm only 1/4 of the way through, but I have some complaints about Han's characterization, and about how the two men vying for Leia's hand disregard any agency that character has, but maybe these things will be addressed as I continue. After this, it's into the next series, "The Jedi Academy Trilogy" by Kevin J. Anderson. So far, I'm reading at my own pace and enjoying things a lot - fatigue has yet to set in. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up with blog posts, since I'm notorious for blowing stuff like this off - but here we go.

Love,

---

Mikey T.

Star Wars are for kids.

FINALLY we get the origins of Lando's mustache

This is my Star Wars blog. I plan to treat it more like a Star Wars diary than a blog – which means a lot of writing and very little revision. Sry bros.

Until I was about 13, Star Wars was “Return of the Jedi.” I had seen “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” probably, but nothing really gripped me nearly as much as “Jedi.” It had tons of weird aliens! Disguises! A sense of humor! Ewoks! It was everything that Mike ages 0-13 could want. I remember seeing the trailer for the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition in front of Baz Luhrmann’s god-awful “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” and it was like a light turned on. Seeing X-wings flying around. Hearing John Williams’ Force theme. My stomach was in knots through the following movie. “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet” was a piece of shit.

Once the Special Editions came around, I really sat and took in the whole saga – “The Empire Strikes Back” became more than “the boring one.” “Return of the Jedi” stopped being the cool one with the Muppets and became more about the last-ditch effort to defeat the Empire, and the redemption of Darth Vader. I started to look into the mythology and storytelling behind Star Wars – not too much, because I was 13, but a bit. At this point I became, I think, a lifelong fan. I started collecting action figures. I started reading the books. I started playing the video games and buying the music and eating cereal for Star Wars prizes, etc etc etc.

Star Wars Episode I was the thing I wanted most in the world. Before the movie came out, I already had the merch. I had the first run of action figures, and the album, and the Making Of book, and the Pepsi cans, and the Taco Bell cups. I waited in line for hours the week before the release date to make sure I got tickets, and I did get those tickets for 10pm on opening night.

When I got back from that first showing, I felt empty. I remember thinking to myself, “I liked that, right?” There was some cool stuff. The final lightsaber battle. The music. Yoda was there for a few minutes? I saw it three more times in theaters. I kept buying the toys, and the books, and the lollipops, and the hats, and the backpacks, and the Band Aids. I made a website dedicated to collecting all of the pictures, trivia, and information regarding the movie. And still I don’t remember ever getting to a point where I actually cared for the movie. There were certain things about it that I did like – the deepening of the Star Wars lore, the creation of all sorts of new robots and beasts and alien races. It wasn’t until I rewatched the film again, fairly recently (whenever it was rereleased in 3D into theaters) that I really understood why I felt so let down and abandoned by “The Phantom Menace” – the movie was made specifically for children. Jar Jar Binks, and the poop joke, and the 8-year-old protagonist. This was all made to cater to the me that, years before, didn’t really “get” “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” The original films were made for an audience of tweens and teens, and the prequels were made for big dumb babies.

Big dumb babies that also enjoyed lengthy senatorial discussions.

As I was sitting there watching the movie on the big screen again, I couldn’t even focus on the movie. I could only focus on what I disliked about the movie, and how easy it would have been to make those changes in preproduction. Hindsight is 20/20. I know. Cast members were recently interviewed saying how much fun Ahmed Best’s Jar Jar was on set, and that they assumed he would be the breakout character of the movie. People thought that!

So anyway, that whole post, thus far, was just to introduce my “one major tweak to make ‘The Phantom Menace’ a really cool Star Wars movie.” And that tweak isn’t even Jar Jar (although certainly many parts including Jar Jar, could use minor tweaks). The tweak is this:

Change Anakin. He should be around Padme’s age. Making him eight years old is, as far as I’m concerned, nothing but pandering to a specific audience, and it makes things much sillier when he ages ten years and she ages two in “Attack of the Clones.” If he’s going to be a slave, make him a slave. Make it seem like his life sucks. There is no weight to Anakin and his mother’s slavery. Anakin plays with his friends and builds robots and machines all day, and his mom stays at home all day and makes enough dinner for three additional guests to eat, uninvited? Give him a reason to want to escape. Aging him up would also make him a participant in the final battle, instead of a kid who sits in an autopilot starfighter and accidentally blows up a spaceship. What? Garbage.

Anyway, I just killed a half hour of time that would otherwise have been much more boring. Star Wars Blog. Come get it.