by Edward Gross
DAN MADSEN
(owner, the Official Lucasfilm/Star Wars Fan Club, 1987–2001)
I did cover [the Ewoks films] for the [Lucasfilm Fan Club] magazine. I didn’t personally cover them, I hired some other writers to cover those. It was a lean time for Lucasfilm when I took over running the fan club. Because Star Wars was over, we had Willow and Indiana Jones—but those were years apart from each other. So, we had things like Maniac Mansion, which was a TV series that Lucasfilm did, and Tucker, which was a movie about the car designer that Jeff Bridges was in. So we had to try and do the best we could. Every issue I tried to throw in something Star Wars. It wasn’t like all this amazing new stuff available for us to cover at that time. We did the best to try and keep interest alive in the whole Lucasfilm/Star Wars franchise, while there was literally nothing new of Star Wars to come out for ten years.
9
ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?: WARS AFTER JEDI
“Prince Xizor, who knew?”
The word “renaissance” would seem superfluous when it comes to the Star Wars franchise, yet as it turned out, that was exactly what was needed in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi. Interest in all things Star Wars seemed to rapidly cool off with the saga apparently wrapping up with the Ewoks and Droids animated series, the pair of live-action Ewok TV movies, and the emergence of new blockbuster franchises like Tim Burton’s Batman arriving on the scene. Howard Roffman, who at that time was the vice president of licensing for Lucasfilm, Ltd., having moved into that position from Lucasfilm general counsel, recognized along with George Lucas himself that while the brand had enchanted hundreds of millions of people—and not just children—it needed to be nurtured and developed into an enduring classic a la The Wizard of Oz, or risk going the way of Flash Gordon itself.
HOWARD ROFFMAN
(former vice president of licensing, Lucasfilm)
When I moved to licensing in 1986, Star Wars merchandise was at a virtual standstill. We had gone through this tremendous period with Star Wars. When it was new, it was a mass market phenomenon and toys were by far the majority of the product being sold and revenues being generated. Things like that normally have a limited life span and the question always is, is there something about them that makes them more enduring or are they a one-shot phenomenon? But in 1985, the toys were over. You couldn’t even mention Star Wars to retailers. There simply wasn’t a lot happening.
BRIAN VOLK-WEISS
(executive producer, The Toys That Made Us)
Things were dead for two reasons, one of them 75 percent responsible, the other 25 percent. It was 25 percent dead because the audience had become smaller and the demand had diminished. Basically, everybody was into Star Wars up until about six months after Return of the Jedi. A year later, it was just hardcore fans, so instead of having a market base of a hundred million people, you had a market base of fifteen to twenty million people. The 75 percent of it is that George didn’t want to do anything.
GEORGE LUCAS
(creator, the Star Wars franchise)
I ran out of energy to do it. Once you have done it a couple of times, then the thrill of it wears off and you really want to get into different territory.
JOE BONGIORNO
(webmaster, starwarstimeline.net)
While Star Wars was not quite the “dead” property that many claim, it was getting close. Four years earlier the Marvel Droids and Ewoks comic book series that told new stories based on the two animated series (both of which had ceased production the year prior) ended, but West End Games had a thriving Star Wars role-playing game that started in that same year in 1987. Through various sourcebooks, supplements, and role-playing adventures, West End Games provided names, races, planets, and backstories for everything seen in the films, as well as new stories and characters set in the universe.
BRIAN VOLK-WEISS
At the time, Kenner had made a gigantic proposal to Lucas and Lucasfilm, and had made mockups of vehicles and extra characters and all of it based on the Clone Wars, and this was before the TV series. Kenner on their own initiative made a run at figuring out what that line of dialogue from A New Hope about the Clone Wars was all about and presented it to George, and George declined it. The way the contract worked was Kenner was entitled to do the toys and merchandise for anything based on the movies or TV shows, but if Lucas wasn’t making movies or TV shows, they couldn’t really do anything.
JONATHAN WILKINS
(editor, Star Wars Insider, 2009–2017)
There was that period where Star Wars was so intense, and then about ’84 or ’85 there was just this massive drop-off. There were no new films, or projects coming. I just remember it being a sudden thing—kids around my neighborhood, we all moved on to Masters of the Universe. I’m so sorry to say that. Then Star Wars had a sort of resurgence in the early nineties, and they had those action figures where Luke Skywalker had the body-building look. I didn’t collect those.
BILL SLAVICSEK
(game designer, West End Games)
West End Games’ Star Wars Role-playing Game line was actually the first thing to show Lucasfilm Licensing that they still had a viable property even without new movies. I was at WEG when we were awarded the license. This was late 1986. The movies were finished. The novels were done. The Marvel Comics line and Kenner toys were winding down. The following year, for the tenth anniversary of the original film, there were only two new Star Wars offerings: Star Tours, which opened in Disneyland, and The Star Wars Role-playing Game from West End Games that debuted in October 1987.
BILL GEORGE
(visual effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic)
I started working on the reboot of Star Tours in 2008, and have ended up working a lot of WDI—Walt Disney Imagineering—since then. It was a project I really thought was interesting, mostly because it was in stereoscopic 3D, but I have completely fallen in love with working on theme park rides. Because it takes the challenges of production, 2D production, and takes it into this whole other world where you have to pay attention to so many different things. It’s compressed, it’s usually in high resolution, you have a story to get across, you usually have a simulator that’s going, you got the stereo. What I call the three S’s. They’ve got this complex melody that is really, really challenging and fun. And then we’ve got the branching storyline with Star Tours, where we’ve got the opening, a detour, the transmission, and an ending—and those can all fit together in different combinations. So that’s really fun.
JOE BONGIORNO
Another important thing that happened was in 1990, when the original trilogy was packaged together for the first time on home video by CBS/FOX, which introduced and reintroduced a generation to the saga who hadn’t previously owned or even seen them. While this wasn’t the first time Star Wars had been on video, it’s significant because the eighties’ releases were cost prohibitive. A VHS tape from that era could run around $80 each. This same year saw the releases of the new Ewok films and various episodes of the Droids and Ewoks animated television series, ramping up interest in what was soon to be called the Expanded Universe. In 1992, the first widescreen (letterbox) VHS set was released in a gorgeous box set boasting a lenticular hologram cover. Derived from the laser discs that had debuted two years prior, it introduced the concept of widescreen as a preferable format, not just for the theatrical experience, but for home viewing. It was an exciting release and the first of many to come.
BRIAN VOLK-WEISS
The first new toy in about ten years was in 1993 with the Luke Skywalker and Star Wars Bend-Ems, and they were garbage. But I bought them all, because there hadn’t been a Star Wars story in ten years. I would argue—and this is not fact, just my opinion—is that the reason Kenner fell to Hasbro in the first place was because George didn’t want to do anything else. With the Bend-Ems, I can’t stress this enough: they’re possibly the nastiest, grossest things toy-related that Star Wars ever did, but they flew off the shelf. One of the things about Lucas is that he w
as always testing things. Like, Howard the Duck was a gigantic test for animatronic technology. The Phantom Menace, and Lucas says it himself on the film’s documentary, was a giant test to do a photorealistic character that ILM would then be able to make for other companies and other movies. So, again, the Bend-Ems were largely a test. Lucas hadn’t approved a new toy in ten years and he approved it just to get some sales data. I don’t know if he intentionally approved the worst toy to say, “Well, if they buy this garbage, imagine what they’d buy if it was good.” Now in case you can’t tell already, I have a sweet spot in my heart for the Bend-Ems, but they’re also an irrelevant piece of history that’s not as sexy to talk about as the Timothy Zahn novels or West End Games.
HOWARD ROFFMAN
With the success of the West End Games, Lucasfilm began to formulate a plan that would take the franchise into new territory, which would not only include games, but novels and comic books as well. It was not an attempt to repeat what had been done before when Star Wars was hot in 1977, and we slowly began building it. It started with the novel, Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, the first in a trilogy, which like many of the novels became bestsellers.
BILL SLAVICSEK
By the time Lucasfilm, Ltd., decided to expand back into novels and comics, WEG’s products were provided to the other licensees as reference material. Tim Zahn tells the story of how he received a box full of game books when he started writing Heir to the Empire. At first, he was a little insulted, but as he dug into the material we had produced, he saw that there was a wealth of material he wouldn’t have to create, including ships, weapons, and aliens. That allowed him to really focus on his story.
JOE BONGIORNO
Howard Roffman correctly ascertained that one of the first things to turn everything around for Star Wars was the Timothy Zahn novel. He would know as he was the one who proposed the idea to Lucas, along with Lucy Wilson, Lucasfilm’s finance director and one of Lucas’s first employees, who literally typed the screenplay of the first Star Wars film in George’s house. Wilson had been longing to see Star Wars return as the publishing venture it had once been, and knew it could be even greater. Although former publisher Del Rey was no longer interested, not seeing the financial value in it, serendipitously, the head of Bantam-Spectra, Lou Aronica, was very interested, having just sent a proposal to them.
HOWARD ROFFMAN
One of the things obvious about Star Wars was that, like Star Trek, it’s a very rich universe with very well-defined characters and situations and creatures and politics. It was very fertile area to let gifted science fiction writers come and play in. Timothy Zahn’s first book turned out to be a smashing validation, if you will, of the theory that people would be interested in good new fiction based on the Star Wars universe.
JOE BONGIORNO
Clearly the Force was at work. Star Wars was meant to expand into a literary saga. The idea was to set new stories after the events of Return of the Jedi. Lucas liked the idea; after all, he was the one who set up Carol Titelman and her team to oversee the expansion of his saga in the pages of Marvel’s Star Wars comics, newspaper strips, and Del Rey novels. However, it had now been five years after his last film and with no new films on the immediate horizon, he had doubts it would sell. Nevertheless, he green-lit the idea, saying that the time period before A New Hope was to be left alone, since if he did ever return to Star Wars on film, it would be in the form of prequels.
TOM DUPREE
(editor, Bantam Books)
The success of the novel surprised everybody. Heir to the Empire hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, which was almost unheard of for a science fiction novel. We were stunned to hear stories about customers at bookstores helping clerks open boxes to find the books. Also, a key difference between our program then and, say, the Star Trek program is that Star Trek is episodic, while ours was part of a larger mega-story. In a typical Trek novel, everything’s okay at the beginning, there’s a problem, they fix it, and then everything is okay at the end—just like an episode of the TV show. We were making our stories work together in the larger Star Wars universe, so if Han and Leia get married in Zahn’s book and you write a book that happens after that, they are married. Each publication added a little bit to the mythology.
TIMOTHY ZAHN
(author, Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command)
When I got the news that I would be writing the first new Star Wars adventures since Return of the Jedi, my reaction was, “Wow” and, then, “Argh!” I had to do something that felt like Star Wars, but wasn’t the same thing as the movies. Part of my goal was to give the feeling of a real universe, which is what George Lucas did with the films. Part of that is the political aspect. Bear in mind that I had a lot more room in three books than Lucas did in the movies, so I could have a lot of exposition. I could do things beneath the surface. In a movie, everything has to be visual or in dialogue. I realized that since it was set about five years after the last movie, in this case the Rebel Alliance had to create a government. That’s not as easy as people like to think. I wanted to get a feel for some of that challenge without letting it take over the whole book.
JOE BONGIORNO
In Heir to the Empire, Zahn eschewed the less popular aspects of Return of the Jedi to focus on a more adult-oriented story, careful to capture the voices of Luke, Han, and Leia as well as to introduce readers to memorable new characters in the form of the still famous Grand Admiral Thrawn (who, along with the Noghri Rukh, would years later transition to the Star Wars: Rebels animated series and perhaps future live-action TV shows). The Emperor’s Hand, Mara Jade, would go on to significant fame: starting out as an assassin intended to kill Luke Skywalker, she would after many years go on to become his wife, and the mother of his son Ben. Zahn’s story was compelling and epic, adding into the mix a mad Jedi named Jorus C’baoth who was a wild card, adding to the edge-of-your-seat tension brought on by Thrawn’s meticulous, Machiavellian, Sherlockian maneuvers.
TIMOTHY ZAHN
When I was developing Thrawn, I wanted someone the reader could understand, someone who would be interesting and someone I could enjoy writing about for three books. In the back of my mind was the original Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror,” the first one with the Romulans, and the Romulan commander’s last line to Kirk was, “In another reality, we might have been friends.” I wanted to put some of that into Thrawn—that in another reality this guy could have really kicked butt for the Rebellion. He understands his people. He understands how to be a leader.
JOE BONGIORNO
Debuting in December 1991 was the first issue of a six-part comic book series by Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy called Dark Empire, from Dark Horse Comics. With no shortage of momentous events, it featured the return of Emperor Palpatine in a cloned body, and Luke Skywalker going to the dark side in an attempt to defeat him. Released only six months after Heir to the Empire debuted, the films on VHS, the book series, and the comic book were a triple-punch knockout that solidified the return of Star Wars in a big way.
PETER HOLMSTROM
(cohost, The Rebel & the Rogue podcast)
The Dark Horse era of Star Wars was a really beautiful time. Every comics publisher in the world was vying for the rights—for obvious reasons—but George Lucas chose Dark Horse because, at the time, Dark Horse was one of the few independent publishers out there. This was before the Image [Comics] Revolution, and the explosion of small publishers. So George was mirroring what he did with NPR years before—supporting the little guy. Advocating for decentralization of the entertainment industry. And those years had some really creative stuff flow out. For many kids, those comics were Star Wars, just as much as the movies.
I know when Lucasfilm sold to Disney, the breakup with Dark Horse was not pleasant. Rumor was that before the sale occurred, there was a handshake agreement to say Dark Horse would keep their license to publish even after the sale, but Marvel would publish the new continuity of s
tories. Couple of years go by, and that deal goes away. Then the 20th Century Fox sale, and Dark Horse loses the Aliens, Predator, Buffy, Firefly licenses—suddenly their paydays aren’t looking so good anymore. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
JOE BONGIORNO
When Zahn discovered Dark Empire, he was aghast at the idea of Palpatine’s return. Whether he generally disliked the idea, or worried that it might upstage his Grand Admiral Thrawn, he contacted his publisher requesting that he ignore it, or that it be deemed a separate continuity. When he discovered Lucasfilm’s intent to establish a single canon across media, he refused to include mention of its events. In fairness to him, having to set Heir to the Empire after the very big events of Dark Empire would’ve necessitated a complete rewrite. So, not wanting to delay its publication, Bantam and Lucasfilm conceded to switch things up and place Dark Empire after the events of Zahn’s forthcoming trilogy. Apart from a few hiccups in Dark Empire that the editors missed (e.g., referencing the Rebellion instead of the New Republic), it worked well enough.
