Legends #1: Star Wars in 1976
Howdy friends - Welcome to Legends: A Star Wars Project
The genesis of this (stupid) project came when Disney announced they were going to rerelease some of the more popular Star Wars "legends" books in new fancy hardback editions - I thought about buying these (I like Star Wars, I like nice fancy editions of books), but then a conversation I had with friends struck me - undoubtedly these books were being rereleased in order to gauge which aspects of the de-canonized "Legends" universe were financially viable enough to bring back into the new Disney Star Wars Canon. This isn't particularly surprising and isn't even bad necessarily, find out what people like and make more of it, makes perfect sense. But y'know? I don't trust Disney to curate Star Wars based on profit margins - this inspired me to instead go back and read all the damn star wars books in the order they were released, and ignore "canons" and "timelines" and whatever. I'm going to experience Star Wars as it was, starting 18 years before I was born and continuing up to the sale in 2012 (unless I die first).
Of course once I said that, then I was like: well I can't just read the books, if I'm really gonna do this, I should read the comics. And then once I said that I thought to myself, well if I'm gonna read the comics I should really play the games too. And then once I said that, all bets were off and now I'm going to be reading, watching, playing, and listening to everything I can get my hands on.
The general gist of this newsletter is that I'm going to work my way through every piece of Star Wars media and/or ephemera I can get my hands on in RELEASE order - and I'll write little reviews and blurbs here as I go. To track my progress and what I've got coming up (other than by just reading this newsletter you've subscribed to) check out my spreadsheet here. If you think I'm missing something (keeping in mind I've only filled it out up to the end of 1992 so far) please give me a shout either by replying to this newsletter or finding me on twitter (@alexronjohnston).
So with that bit of housekeeping out of the way lets get into the meat of the very first newsletter.
Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker
Novel by George Lucas (Ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster), published by Ballantine Books on November 12th, 1976
As you can likely guess, this is the novelization of the original Star Wars script, and was released six months ahead of the film. As I noted in my goodreads review, it's pretty fascinating to think about this novel being released as a sci-fi paperback into a world where "Star Wars" didn't exist except maybe, MAYBE as the next project from the director of American Grafitti, which you might know if you were really into movies or something.
Star Wars famously went through a lot of revisions, and if you've watched any of the various making-of documentaries out there you may know the original protagonist of the movie was named "Anakin Starkiller" - you'll be getting none of that here. If anything whats so surprising about this novel is how closely it resembles the finished product. You hear a lot about what a troubled production Star Wars was, and how many changes it went through - but ultimately none of that shows in this novel which varies only slightly from the movie itself.
You can go on the wikipedia page for the book and read about the various differences from the final movie if you want, for my part I'll say there aren't enough textual differences to be worth putting the details in this newsletter. There were a couple things that stood out to me though - lets start with this passage from the prologue, which sets up the origin of The Empire:
Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.
I'll be interested to see how long it takes after this for the name Palpatine to show up again - kind of goes to show how the prequels were always embedded in the original trilogy, even if you couldn't see it on the surface. More importantly, this sets Palpatine up as a puppet emperor being controlled by powerful bureaucrats - very unlike the all knowing evil Sith emperor he ends up being, and much more like the hapless Supreme Chancellor Valorum from Phantom Menace.
Secondly I want to highlight how writing Star Wars as a novel means a lot of the characters inner thoughts are made explicit in the text rather than implied (I realize it doesn't HAVE to be that way, but that's the way Alan Dean Foster did it). Things like the way Han, Luke, and Leia feel about each other, the conflict Ben/Obi-wan feels about how best to train Luke - this adds a bit of interesting depth to the characters on the page which in the movies is provided by the beloved performances.
To be clear, there's not much there that isn't made clear in the performances, but if you've seen the movie (which...at this point who hasn't) it adds something to the experience beyond reading either identical or slightly more stilted versions of the exact dialogue from the movie. There are definitely some lines in here that leave you scratching your head if you try to imagine a human being saying them out loud - in the immortal words of Harrison Ford:
You can write this stuff, George, but I can't read it!
So that is the sole item covered by this initial newsletter, and as far as I can tell it's the only Star Wars thing that came out in 1976 (or earlier of course). Up next for me are the original Marvel Star Wars comics, the original movie (keep your eyes peeled for my discussion of the different versions available!), and a few '77 art and reference books - not sure exactly at what point I'll put out the next newsletter but it'll probably either be when I watch the movie or at the end of '77.
Thanks for reading and abolish IP!
Alex