StarWarsClassics

There's a lot of Star Wars TV in the 70s and 80s. It's mostly bad. But, in an effort to fully appreciate the state of play pre- HttE  I watched (some of) it. THE HOLIDAY SPECIAL! What hasn't already been said about this? Yes, it's bad. No, it doesn't make sense. Yes, they ran out of Wookie outfits, leading to this: (Wookieepedia) I'm not going to be the 501st person on the internet to rehash all this. What does  it do? It gives us the first appearance of Kashyyk (and, honestly, it hasn't changed that  much in 45 years), Boba Fett (who is aggressively incompetent pre-1990s), and LIFE DAY!  Beyond that, make sure you watch a version with commercials (AND BUY UNION!). Honestly, I think they could've cut out an act or two, and come up with a passable hour long special here. The cooking bit is half decent. The cartoon is weird, but not unsalvageable. I read there's ~30 minutes of untranslated Shyriiwook, so that's an easy cut. It's the 70s, variet...

Star Wars Video Games Contrary to its modern stature as a video game licensing powerhouse, there weren't any Star Wars games released for the first five years of the franchise. If someone was interested in such things, you could actually do a cool project tracing the evolution of video games as a whole via the Star Wars franchise. From barely a game in the 80s, to primitive versions of genres emerging in the 90s, to AAA titles in later years. That's not this blog though, so I'll just be doing a real quick hits on the first fifteen years or so.       In 1982 (the year before RotJ,  and two after ESB) the marginally famous Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back  finally dropped for the Atari 2600. Atari 2600: ESB Cover Art Whoever came up with Star: Wars: did a great job! (Wookieepedia) It's one of those old games, very typical of the platform, that we'd barely consider a game today. A line of ATATs march towards Echo Base, you shoot them about a million tim...

Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game This was the  go Star Wars cover art for just about anything for 20 years or so      If you read any of the interviews Timothy Zahn, he talks about how he (and it sounds like a lot of the other early EU authors) got a box of West End Games sourcebooks to look at when he wrote HttE. I never played it, but I'd heard passing references over the years to how it was important for establishing this or that. I figured I'd look through a couple, go "Oh, neat, that's where that specific random droid's name came from!" and that would be the end of it.      It is literally impossible to overstate how big of an influence these books had on the original Expanded Universe. It sounds crazy, but if you created an alternate universe where George Lucas never made ESB or RotJ , but somehow still had West End Games make the RPG and Zahn write the novels, I think the books would've come out less  like the ones in our world than if you k...

      The Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka How inaccurate is the cover? is a great game to play with the Star Wars novels (even the good ones!) Today we have another appearance of the non-existent DL-44, the Starcave being a literal cave (it's a nebula) and some questionable ship depictions.   (Wookiepedia) Summary:  Lando and Vuffi Raa find a space stingray starving to death. They feed it literal shit and garbage, and it agrees to make them precious gems (it can/cannot convert matter as the plot demands) and it flies off. A short while later, it contacts them to tell them about a blockade of their nebula by "The Navy" (The Centrality is/is not related to the Empire and is less characterized than the Corporate Sector Authority in the Han Solo books). Lando cons/sneaks his way through the blockade in the one of the book's requisite Sabacc scenes (taking place in the middle instead of the beginning. Smith is stretching his craft to the max here). They...

      The Lando Calrissian Adventures At no point in the trilogy does Lando use a DL-44.  (Wookiepedia) Summary: These books are split into two parts. The better parts are where Lando gets to be Lando. He plays Sabacc, he smooth talks people, etc. In the worse parts, he's just a budget Han Solo, and stumbles along not really affecting the plot until his droid saves him. What it introduces:  Sabacc (technically introduced in a draft for ESB  and heavily revised a few years later by West End Games) That's about it. These are aggressively disconnected from the rest of the EU, even compared to the Han Solo prior trilogy. Commentary: Dropping these two in one week because (again, even compared to the Han Solo books), they're really samey. The third book ( Starcave of ThonBoka) as a little more unique, so I'll pick it up next week. Lando pisses off someone while playing Sabacc, gets sent somewhere to try to get his money back, gets captured (Smith has to be into ...