A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Trade Paperback Edition cover art by Christopher Moeller. ©1997 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) In 1996, almost a year before the theatrical release of  The Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition, Lucasfilm's marketing division conceived a massive multimedia campaign called Shadows of the Empire. Centered on Steve Perry's eponymous novel set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the project included an original soundtrack album, Nintendo video game, a set of Kenner/Hasbro action figures, a behind the scenes book by Mark Cotta Vaz, Topps trading cards, and even references to its events in Brian Daley's Star Wars: Return of the Jedi – The Radio Drama.   In Steve Perry's own words, the unofficial tagline for this massive campaign was "Everything but the movie." "Everything but the movie" included, naturally, a comics adaptation, and Dark Horse Comics – an Oregon-based publisher which at the time owned the licensing ri...

Cover Art by: Drew Struzan. (C) 1996 Penguin Random House Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  Steve Perry's Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire , first published in 1996, is the centerpiece of a Lucasfilm multi-media marketing campaign that could be summed up with the tag line "Everything but the movie."   Not only was Perry assigned to write the novel, but Kenner (now Hasbro) rolled out a line of action figures, Dark Horse Comics published a multi-issue series, Nintendo released a console-based game for its Nintendo 64 system, and Joel McNeeley ( The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ) composed an original score. In short, all that was missing was a feature film. And what a film (animated, of course) Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire would have been!   Although the novel is part of the Expanded Universe/Legends series that started with Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, it's the first of the 1990s-era novels to explore the six-month or so time span betw...

(C) 2010 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)  Pros:  Three hard-to-find Star Wars comics series by Dark Horse; great writing; nice art Cons:  Shadows of the Empire has been edited somewhat. In 1996, one year before the 20th Anniversary of Star Wars ' theatrical premiere and almost three years prior to the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace , Lucasfilm Limited commissioned a huge multimedia project titled Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire . With Steve Perry's hardcover novel of the same title at its core, Shadows of the Empire was Lucasfilm's "everything-but-the-movie" bid to tell the untold story of what happened between 1980's Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back and 1983's  Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. In Shadows of the Empire, Luke Skywalker is still reeling from the duel with Darth Vader on Bespin, where he lost his right hand to the Dark Lord's lightsaber and was told that his mentors Ben Ken...

Cover art by John Harris. (C) 2007 Del Rey/Lucas Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) This station is now the ultimate power in the Universe! I suggest we use it.  - Admiral Motti. One of the most important locales in George Lucas'  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope  is the Galactic Empire's gigantic battle station code-named "Death Star." Essentially an armored sphere the size of a small moon (its diameter is stated as being 160 kilometers) and powered by something called a "hypermatter reactor," the Death Star carries nearly 1,000,000 crewers, stormtroopers, TIE fighter pilots, med techs and doctors, political prisoners, bureaucrats, Fleet and Army personnel, and even civilians who have been enticed to open stores and other businesses aboard. At the heart of the Death Star is its Prime Weapon, a planet-killing superlaser which takes time to charge up and requires top-notch gunnery experts to run. These "facts," of course, are well-known to...

Ever since I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in the spring of 1981, I have been a huge fan of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones, the fedora-wearing, whip-wielding, fast-quipping globe-trotting archaeologist-spy-soldier of fortune who risks life and limb going after “rare antiquities” imbued with supernatural powers. Like many Raiders fans of my generation – I was in my teens when that first George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaboration was released – I loved that film and its two sequels partly because of the non-stop action set pieces, partly because John Williams had composed a kick-butt score, partly because they mixed elements of the old Saturday matinee serials and the James Bond flicks, but mostly because Harrison Ford was so likeable playing the Man in the Hat. Now, even though I own all four feature films and the three Adventures of Young Indiana Jones box sets, I only own a few of the novels and novelty books which fill in some of the gaps in Indy’s long car...