A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Why does it seem that Disney is ignoring the prequel trilogy of Star Wars? Who says that the Walt Disney Company, or, more correctly,  Disney-owned  Lucasfilm, is ignoring the  Star Wars  Prequels? Obviously, in the internal chronology of the films, from an in-universe point of view, the fall of the Republic, the rise of the Empire, and the Great Jedi Purge are almost half-a-century away in the past. Many billions of people in thousands of systems that were born after the Battle of Endor and its immediate aftermath have no memory of Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn, Count Dooku, or even Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, and many of the adults who were young kids and/or teens during the Dark Times know of the last days of the Republic through biased filters depending which side (Rebel Alliance, Empire, or neutral) they were on during the Galactic Civil War. If anything, the people living in the galaxy in the Sequel Era focus more on the events of the Galactic Civil W...

Cover art by Tara Philips. © 2019 Disney-Lucasfilm Press Well, Dear Readers, it's Friday again, and here I am with a new Star Wars book about Padme Amidala, a character who is prominent in the franchise as the secret wife of the Man Who Will Be Vader and the ill-fated mother of the Skywalker Twins (Luke and Leia). Best of all, we get to revisit our favorite galaxy far, far away during a period that has not been explored much since the House of Mouse purchased Lucasfilm from George "the Maker" Lucas almost seven years ago: the Prequel Era. On March 5, Disney-Lucasfilm Press published E.K. Johnston's Star Wars: Queen's Shadow, a novel set four years after the events of Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In this all-new canonical novel by the author of Star Wars: Ahsoka, we get to follow the 18-year-old Padme as she makes the life-changing transition from being the elected monarch of Naboo to the challenging and perhaps even perilous world of galactic p...

Star Wars: The Clone Wars – The Complete Season Five “Ready he is to teach an apprentice. To let go of his pupil, a greater challenge it will be. Master this, Skywalker must.” –  Yoda,  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  (2008) All Good Things… On October 3, 2008, George Lucas’s CG-animated series  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  premiered on cable’s Cartoon Network. The 3D animated show aired two months after the theatrical release of the eponymous animated feature directed by Dave Filoni, the man tapped by Lucas as the TV show’s supervising director. After five seasons on Time Warner-owned Cartoon Network and 108 episodes,  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  ended its run on March 2, 2013. Lucasfilm, now owned by the Walt Disney Company, decided to wind down  Star Wars: The Clone Wars  in order to focus on the new live action Sequel Trilogy of Episodes VII-IX. Lucasfilm also needed its animators to start production on a new animated series,...

If you are a constant reader of noted science fiction author Timothy Zahn's  Star Wars  novels, you may have noticed that he often introduces a character, concept, or strand of storyline in one novel, seemingly leaves it alone for some time, then develops that person, concept, or situation more fully in a later novel. Such was the case when in  The Last Command  (1993), Zahn had Borsk Fe'lya make a comment that a Rebel mission to the Emperor's treasure trove on the planet Wayland could possibly have serious consequences for the Bothan people. In that  Thrawn Trilogy  novel nothing untoward happens, but a later visit to Wayland by Princess Leia and its dire repercussions become prominent plot points in  Specter of the Past  and  Vision of the Future .  One of the more prominent secondary storylines in Zahn's  Thrawn Trilogy  is the tale of Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth and his ambitious plan to seek out new worlds and new civi...

When I was a much younger  Star Wars  fan in my early teens, one of my hopes was that George Lucas would create a TV spinoff based on the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2 as they faced off against the evil Darth Vader and the legions of the Empire. Of course, I had no idea that Lucas had made the film now known as  Episode IV: A New Hope  with two other films in mind, nor did I (being naive and unschooled in the business of filmmaking) realize how expensive it would have been to adapt  Star  Wars from the big screen to the little one and make it work as well as the late Larry Gelbart had done with the TV version  of M*A*S*H. After the disastrous one-time airing of the   misbegotten  Star Wars Holiday Special  in 1978 and the somewhat lackluster live-action set-on-Endor TV movies Lucasfilm released in the early 1980s, I realized that maybe  Star Wars   w...