Splinter of the Mind's Eye Sweet Ralph Macquarie cover art, courtesy of Wookiepedia! Summary: Luke and Leia crash on a swamp planet. Leia has PTSD. Luke has a crush on her. They go looking for the Kaiburr Crystal with cranky Force grandma and replacement Chewie twins. Darth Vader shows up and mostly kicks their asses, but he falls in a hole. What it introduces: Naming things X of the Y : Which would hold for 4 of the 9 movies, 70ish novels, and numerous video games, comics, etc. The Kaiburr Crystal: Shards of which would become the most desirable lightsaber focusing crystals in the later EU. Kyber crystals would make an appearance in the new canon as both lightsaber crystals and part of the Death Star's superlaser. Commentary: Splinter of the Mind's Eye is widely considered the first book in the Expanded Universe. It was published in 1978, about half a year after the original release of Star Wars/A New Hope. Preceding it are a few of the Marvel Comics (which I'll be...
Return of the Jedi Radio Drama Best scene in the ROTJ drama, and possibly the whole trilogy. The Return of The Jedi adaptation has an interesting backstory. After Reagan cut NPR's funding, they weren't able to produce a Return of The Jedi adaptation in the 80s. Highbridge Audio, the company that did the home releases for the first two dramas, eventually got most of the cast (minus Mark Hamill and Billy Dee Williams) and crew signed back on in 1996 so they could sell my dad a Return of The Jedi cd to put in my Christmas stocking. They did still get an NPR premiere. I'm kind of surprised we didn't listen to them live. My dad was an PBS/NPR fan who loved radio dramas, and I obviously loved Star Wars. Seems like something we'd have gone for. It's the last thing Brian Daley worked on. He died a few hours after recording wrapped. Because it wasn't produced until the mid 90s, it contains a few references to the expanded universe. Mara Jade gets a cameo to narrat...
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...
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