Some of the best Star Wars literary tie-ins

-
(C) 2015 Quirk Books
Since the late 1970s, so many Star Wars movie tie-ins have been published that they’d fill a Star Destroyer’s cargo hold. From novelizations of the screenplays to comic books, radio dramatizations, and even parodies, the publishing industry has given Star Wars fans different means to explore George Lucas’s original six-film space fantasy saga and Star Wars: The Force Awakens over the past 39 years.
With less than five months to go before the premiere of Disney/Lucasfilm’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, let’s explore the brightest shining stars of the Star Wars literary tie-in universe:


  1. Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, George Lucas (ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster. Published by Del Rey in December 1976 with cover art by conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie, Foster’s adaptation of Lucas’s fourth draft of the Star Wars screenplay gave the world its first peek of that galaxy far, far away. The novel sold moderately well before the film opened in May 1977. After Star Wars became a box office hit, the novel (with a new cover by John Berkey) was a runaway best-seller and has been reissued in various editions
  1. The Art of Star Wars, Carol Titleman (editor): Originally published in 1979, this trade paperback was the first book to contain Lucas’s complete screenplay for Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope. As the title implies, The Art of Star Wars is a treasure trove of poster art, production paintings, poster art, publicity photos, and costume designs from the first film of the Star Wars saga
  1. Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, Laurent Bouzerau: Ballantine’s Del Rey Books imprint published the screenplays to Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi in a single volume to coincide with the trilogy’s 1997 Special Edition theatrical re-release. Bouzerau, a filmmaker who specializes in “making of” documentaries for laser discs, DVDs, and Blu-rays, dissects each script and describes how the movies evolved from story treatments to final shooting drafts.
  1. The Complete Star Wars Trilogy - The Original Radio Dramas, Brian Daley: Produced between 1981 and 1996, National Public Radio and Highbridge Audio’s audio adaptations of Star Wars; A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi are among the most popular (and unusual) tie-ins to Lucas’s classic film trilogy. The late Brian Daley’s scripts delved deeper into the films’ backstories and gave the characters more depth and subtle nuances.
  1. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Trilogy: Star Wars - Verily, A New Hope, The Empire Striketh Back, and The Jedi Doth Return, Ian Doescher: Between 2013 and 2014, Star Wars fan and Shakespeare lover Ian Doescher took a page from the parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and created a mashup of the works of George Lucas and the legendary Bard of Avon. Written in iambic pentameter and following the conventions of Shakespearean drama, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars series is a unique and worthy tie-in. A year later, Doescher  completed his reimagined version of Lucas’s universe with a Shakespearean version of  the Prequel Trilogy; Quirk Books published William Shakespeare’s The Phantom Menace: Star Wars Part the First in April 2015, The Clone Army Attacketh: Star Wars Part the Second in July, and The Tragedy of the Sith’s Revenge in November.

  1.  Star Wars: The Prequel Trilogy, Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore, and Matthew Stover: This omnibus edition collects all three novelizations of Star Wars: Episodes I-III. Published in time for Star Wars’ 30th Anniversary in May 2007, The Prequel Trilogy chronicles the tragic rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, a slave boy from Tatooine who trains to be a Jedi Knight, only to be seduced by the dark side of the Force and transformed into the Sith Lord known as Darth Vader.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more