Star Wars Insider #43 (1999) Magazine Review

 Hey everyone! Happy Friday! Kind of. It's super cold out today, so it might not be such a happy Friday for those of you who have to be out in it. Today I'm going to be taking a look at Star Wars Insider issue 43, which is the first issue of the magazine that I ever got, all the way back in 1999. I call it a review, but it really isn't, it's more like an overview because it's a magazine so I don't have story or characters to talk about. So let's get into it.

This issue is the last one to come out before The Phantom Menace came out in May, 1999, before the magazine would have a four issue complete coverage of the new movie, including interviews with some of the film's principal cast. I don't remember where my mom got this issue for me, but, it makes sense that she did, because not only do I love Star Wars, but it had been two years since the Special Editions had come out, Bantam Spectra was wrapping up their line of Star Wars novels after nine years, and the hype surrounding the first new Star Wars movie in 16 years was massive so Star Wars was everywhere.

One of the reasons I like to collect and read these older issues of the magazine is because it's a window into where Star Wars was as a franchise at this point in time, and what the fandom was like too. The internet had just become popular though not everybody had the internet back then. Social media still about a decade away from becoming a thing, so for alot of people growing up, our fandom was limited to our friends in our neighbourhood and at school. For me it was me and my buddies, Garrett and Meagan and that's pretty much it. Garrett had been a Star Wars fan much longer than either Meagan or I had been at that point, as I'd first saw the movies in late 1995/early 1996 when my dad got the 1995, "One Last Time..." VHS boxset of all three movies, and I think Meagan got into it with the Special Editions. I know she didn't see them in theatres, as she'd just seen them when we got back to school after Christmas, around the time I also first started getting into the Animorphs series.

From 1994 when the magazine changed it's name from Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine to Star Wars Insider, to 2005 just after Revenge of the Sith came out, the magazine had a section called "Prequel Update". This was where Fan Club President, Dan Madsen, spoke to Executive Producer, Rick McCallum, about the production of the prequel movies as well as about other stuff going on in terms of Lucasfilm, including the first rumours of a new Indiana Jones movie being in the works, which would end up being true though the movie itself wouldn't come out until 2008, and celebrating the re-release of the Indiana Jones movies on VHS, alongside episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in issue #46.

In this particular issue, "Prequel Update" was just pictures of the main and secondary characters from the new movie, including names, what role they play in the movie, and the actors who play them. Although, oddly enough the CGI characters including Jar Jar Binks and Watto, don't have actors's names attached. Neither do R2-D2 and C-3PO, even though it was long established at this point that Anthony Daniels played 3PO and Kenny Baker played R2. I think in the case of Jar Jar and Watto, there hadn't been interviews with Ahmed Best (Jar Jar) and Andy Secombe (Watto), and because the movie hadn't come out yet when the pictures were put into the magazine, they didn't want to spoil anything, so they kept it a secret until Ahmed Best's interview in #46.

Back then there was a section called "Star News" which is where cast announcements, cast sightings, release dates, and news on toys, comic books, and novels were put. In this issue, along with the final worldwide release dates for The Phantom Menace being announced, "Star News" had an article that announced the release of The New Jedi Order and that R.A. Salvatore was writing the first book, which would later become Vector Prime. I don't know for sure but I think the novel license moving from Bantam back to Del Rey had already been announced in an earlier issue of the magazine due to the fact that the novelization of The Phantom Menace had been published by Del Rey in April 1999, though Bantam still had three books, The Bounty Hunter Wars: Hard Merchandise, X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar, and Tales of the New Republic, on the publication schedule before Del Rey took over completely. Issue #44 would be the debut of their book section, which hadn't been a thing prior to that, despite the comics getting a section devoted to them. 

There are other articles in this issue, such as profiles on all the people who had been working at Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic since production on Star Wars began in 1976, "Prequel Profile" which shined a light on one person working on Episode I, and an article on a Star Wars: The Customizable Card Game tournament being held in Virginia Beach, as part of Decipher's third annual World Championships in November 1998. But "Prequel Update" and "Star News" were the sections I wanted to highlight in this blog post because those are the two sections that best highlight where Star Wars was as a franchise back in 1999.

 While the cover I used for the cover image for this post is the newsstand edition, there were two other covers as well. The first was the subscribers cover, which had Darth Maul in the foreground and Qui-Gon Jinn in the orange background, with a purple Star Wars Insider logo. The third was this one that you see above. It's the Previews Exclusive, which is the one my mom got for me, as I remember Darth Maul being in the foreground, but with the gold Insider logo, with the "Previews Exclusive" stamp right below it. Though I can't confirm it because I lost the front and back covers for my copy of this issue about 23 years ago or so. But like I said, the image above is what I remember the cover of my copy being since I wasn't a subscriber and I know I didn't have the newsstand edition cover. What I find interesting is that the title on the cover says "Revenge of the Sith" simply because that would be the name that George Lucas would give Episode III in either 2004 or very early in 2005. 

I think that's going to be it for me for this week, as well as for this post. I just wanted to go through this issue of Star Wars Insider since it was the very first issue I ever had of the magazine, and I collected it for 21 years before deciding to stop doing so regularly. I'll be back next week with more reviews and posts. Including my review of the 2001 film, The Fast & the Furious. I was requested to review this franchise since I have all of the movies on DVD and Blu-ray and I've never seen any of them. So we'll see what I think of each movie as I go through them. I'll also have comic book reviews, and in two weeks I'll be reviewing the season 3 premiere of Star Trek: Picard. I'm hoping it's good, but given how bad season 2 was, and how much I didn't like in season 1, I do not have high hopes for season 3, despite the entire TNG cast, aside from Wil Wheaton and Denise Crosby, returning for this final season of the show. So we'll see. Until then have a good weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care, and stay warm!