Thoughts On The Dead

Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Thoughts On Star Wars Without Research, But Not The Movies

September 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments
  • There is a tremendous amount of Star Wars bullshit that is not Star Wars, or Empire, or Jedi.
  • People tell me there were other films made, but you know how people lie.
  • It’s almost more useful to think of the movies as islands of (semi) sanity in the middle of a vast ocean of crazy nonsense.
  • There have been cartoons, video games, comic books, radio plays, hundreds of novels, and a Christmas special we don’t talk about.
  • Life Day, Bea Arthur, etc.: you know that story, lets keep moving.
  • Almost immediately after Star Wars came out in ’77, George Lucas realized folks wanted (and would gladly pay for) more stories about Lonnie Starhumper and Vest Guy and The Chick with the Donut Head and Tobacco the Space Monkey.
  • And them two homo robots. Gold one, blue one; big one, little one. Remember them robots? Lemme ask you, pal, lemme ask you: was them two robots queer for each other? Or did they have their own things going on, but they were friends. And, hey, don’t get me wrong: one of my cousins is queer, and another one’s a robot. I just wanna know for my own knowledge over here.
  • That has been the first and last performance of the one-act play Guy From Brooklyn Inquires About The Sexuality of Threepio And Artoo. We now return to the disjointed ramblings of a weird loner.
  • The comic book license was sold to Marvel before the film came out and all the writers had was the script and some pictures, so in the first issue, Darth Vader looks like his own cheap knockoff toy.
  • The original Marvel run went for hundreds of issues; they were of varying quality.
  • This will be a theme.
  • There was good stuff, with the high adventure and planet-hopping fun we’ve come to expect from Star Wars.
  • Then there was the humanoid rabbit bounty hunter that Han teamed up with, whose name was Jaxson.
  • Maybe Jaxxson?
  • The fact that I don’t know off-hand how many “x”s are in the humanoid rabbit bounty hunter’s name is cold comfort, but it’s all that available to me right now.
  • Marvel was forbidden from crossing over the Star Wars gang with superheros, so we never got to see Captain America’s shield stave off a blow from Luke’s lightsaber.
  • Yes, they’re both good guys, but the first time they met, there would be a misunderstanding and a fight would break out.
  • Chewbacca and Spider-Man would probably hit it off.
  • Never happened; in fact, the SWU is the only one I can think off (without research) that has never had any sort of cross-over.
  • Which is fine, as it has more than enough of its own bullshit without importing any more.
  • Most of this bullshit was created in the novels, and there are a ton of them.
  • If you laid all the Star Wars Universe novels out on the ground, it would make a fine surface to never have sex on.
  • Nerd.
  • The mess started slowly and simply, as everything does: there were a few books and they were okay and they were about minor adventures that didn’t change anything regarding the status quo.
  • The one I remember was a thick paperback with an orange cover; it contained three Han Solo books in one collection, and one of them was Han Solo At Star’s Edge.
  • Han and Chewie had to break into somewhere, or break out of somewhere; part of it was set on a planet that orbited so close to its star that ships could only get there behind a massive Starshield, which was like a giant space parasol.
  • This blew my impressionable young mind.
  • There were others, mostly crap, but it didn’t matter: these books were prices at $1.25 and sold not on shelves, but in spinning racks.
  • The physical book was specifically sized to fit in your back pocket; this was disposable pop junk; it was not canon.
  • Besides, the stories didn’t introduce anything new – they were just your favorite space heroes on wacky, risk-free adventures.
  • I mean: Han wasn’t going to get killed, so the stories lost a bit of suspense.
  • This changed in ’91 (maybe) when Steve Zahn wrote the Thrawn trilogy.
  • This fucker was glossy and impressive: the hardcover might have been printed on better paper than Billy’s book.
  • It wasn’t bad, really: it starts with a good question, which is “Hey, wouldn’t the Empire have a whole galaxy-worth of ships and troops left? And wouldn’t all the admirals and Grand Moffs (that is a rank in Star Wars; do not question me on this) start fighting over who got to be in charge?”
  • Good premise for a book, and then Zahn threw in long-lost Dark Jedi masters and super-hot redhead assassin ladies and I’m sure Han and Chewie had some things to do, too.
  • Plus, the villain was the cunning Admiral Thrawn, who was a blue alien, but was really a classically trained British actor.
  • There was a big publicity push, and the Star Wars-starved public bought the books by the bantha-load.
  • This opened the floodgates for the further adventures of Lou and Hank and Lisa and Tobacco the Space Monkey.
  • The super-hot redhead assassin lady that got sent after Luke turned out to be a Jedi and then married Luke and had younglings together.
  • Luke turned out to be a better father than Anakin.
  • Better with children in all aspects, honestly.
  • Han and Leia married
  • Then, they space-boned.
  • Princess Leia likes to do it Taunton-style.
  • You thought she smelled bad on the outside?
  • Things turned ridiculous and impenetrable and internally illogical within a year of what was termed the Expanded Universe.
  • The Star Wars EU made just as little sense as the actual EU, but Tatooine is less of an economic burden than Greece, and all they do on that planet is farm water.
  • WHY WOULD YOU LIVE THERE?
  • Please, I can’t listen to this rant anymore.
  • IT MAKES NO SENSE. If FTL travel exists and you can live on any number of worlds, why would anyone live on the world so harsh that your main task in life is harvesting enough vapor out of the desiccated air to make blue milk out of? You wanna be a farmer? Move to Endor: shit grows on Endor.
  • Are you finished? You aren’t talking about the movies, remember?
  • Right, sorry:
  • It should be mentioned that the SWU contains two distinct time periods: the New Republic and the Old Republic.
  • The Old Republic was set thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin (this was abbreviated BBY, and I am not making that up) and is quite frankly insulting.
  • They wanted to tell stories with a whole bunch of Jedi and Sith and that nonsense, but couldn’t set it in the EU because if there were a whole bunch of Jedi and Sith punching one another with magic during the time period of Luke and Leia and all of them, then Luke and Leia and all of them would have to be involved.
  • Don’t get me wrong: new Jedi were popping up by the handful in Luke’s adventures – his kids, Han and Leia’s kids, Chewie’s nephew, and dozens of randos.
  • Every time he’d leave the house, Luke would run into a Jedi Master long-thought-dead
  • You couldn’t go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without stubbing your toe on a Jedi Master long-thought-dead.
  • But it was still gonna take some time to get back to full-capacity Jedi, so they created the Old Republic and had simply scads of Jedis and Siths and magic robots and sassy aliens.
  • Except it still had to be Star Wars, right?
  • Lightsabers, blasters, droids, and Hyperspace travel between exotic planets.
  • Which means that technology in the Star Wars universe was almost completely stagnant for millennia, which is inexplicable.
  • You cannot explic it.
  • The Jedi/Sith stuff might be the same; meditating and sword-fighting haven’t changed much in thousands of years on this planet, so that’s not the problem.
  • The problem is that any culture that can build hyperspace lanes and sub-light engines and turbolifts and pulsed energy weapons isn’t going to look at their collection of toys and say, “That’s good enough. No more inventing. Let’s keep this.”
  • The other conceptual flaw of the EU is that it cheapened the events of the movies.
  • Instead of the highlights of a glorious rebellion, the Battles of Yavin, Hoth, Endor became just entries in Luke and Han and Leia’s C.V.
  • Each exploit needed to raise the stakes and the EU seemed to only know two ways to do that:
  • Clones, or…
  • Long-lost/secretly developed super-weapon.
  • There was a fleet of warships lost to a cloaking experiment gone wrong, one or two more attempts at building a Death Star that wasn’t quite so easily blown up, multiple devices that caused stars to go super-nova, and at least one catapult that flung boxes full of spiders at people.
  • And, you know: one loses respect for the bad guys if they get too many super-weapons blown up.
  • It borders on Wile E. Coyote-esque after a while
  • As for the cloning: Luke fought his own clone once or twice, and every third novel featured another clone of the Emperor.
  • And the dipshit always came back in a clone body just as gnarled and decrepit as the old one.
  • They’re growing you a new body: be a Chippendale dancer.
  • Anyway: all of that’s gone now; when Disney bought the franchise, they declared the whole EU null and void and are starting the whole process over again with a new book, which will be followed by another book, and within two or three years, everything will be as incomprehensible as before.

Uncategorized

33 Comments

  1. hugh.c.mcbride

    I’m pretty sure that Tobacco the Space Monkey accompanied Bill Walton on tour through all of 1977 and most of 1978. Some say TtSM is still out there on the road, listening to AUD cassettes & building small shrines to John Wooden in backwater towns all across this great nation of ours. Other say he took a shit in one of Mickey’s drums and was never seen again.

    Also, I doubt that I could ever explain to today’s young ‘uns how much time & effort 11-year-old me spent listening to a vinyl album containing the music & some of the dialogue from the original film in the mid-1970s (and attempting to memorize said dialogue) It was quite a time to be alive and tangentially connected to the popular zeitgeist, my friends. Quite a time indeed.

    Reply
    • maggiemay

      That’s damn cool.

      Reply
    • jk

      You and me both with that album.

      Reply
  2. August West

    From Jedi XXX.
    https://nicedeb.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/_leia20and20chewbacca.jpg

    Reply
  3. FreedomHaul

    Your command of different voices is growing impressive. Also the Thrawn trilogy was one of the first things I got into back as a wee un and you’d be surprised by how well it holds up.

    Reply
  5. Sir Luther Von Baconson

    never seen The Star Wars as well

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPkWZdluoUg

    Reply
  6. Morning Deuce

    http://youtu.be/0ymFxkFfIhU

    Reply
    • spencer

      I had forgotten all about this, many thanks

      Reply
      • Morning Douche

        I’m here to help. Btw, the Brent family tree above is top shelf stuff.

        Reply
      • spencer

        Thanks

        Reply
  7. tor_haxson

    None of you who commented here actually read the whole blog post.

    Reply
    • August West

      All those words. RU crazy? I am waiting for TotD to come out in CliffsNotes format. hahaha
      http://i.imgur.com/Ffb2kJ4.gif

      Reply
    • spencer

      And why do you say that?

      Reply
      • spencer

        I read every word, i understood about 1/16th of them…..so the usual

        Reply

Leave a Reply to maggiemay Cancel reply

The Stacks

Follow Us

Google Verification

Follow Us

Follow me on Twitter

© 2024 Thoughts On The Dead

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑