Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Today I wanna have a general chat about what Star Wars was like in the 90's. Because it was unique. The internet was just starting to be a thing, social media, including YouTube, was still more than a decade away from happening, and so much material was coming out. So let's get into it.
After four years of no Star Wars merchandise coming out at all, fans were treated to Heir to the Empire, written by Timothy Zahn and published by Bantam Spectra Books on May 1st, 1991. This was the first book to take place after Return of the Jedi as the books that had been published in the 70's and 80's all took place either during the movies or before them. It also introduced us to an entire cast of brand new characters such as Grand Admiral Thrawn, his bodyguard, Rukh, Captain Pellaeon, Mara Jade, Joruus C'baoth, Talon Karrde, Borsk Fey'lya, the pilots of Rogue Squadron, and Garm Bel Iblis. All of these characters, minus the clone of C'baoth, would play key roles in the novels and comics that would follow the success of Heir to the Empire, and a few would show up in modern Star Wars TV shows like Rebels, The Mandalorian, andAhsoka. This book, along with its sequels, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command launched a book publishing program that not only lasted throughout the 90's, but continues to this day. The bulk of what became the Expanded Universe was born in these novels, with characters like Corran Horn, Iella Wessiri, Kyp Durron, Jacen Solo, Jaina Solo, and Anakin Solo all being introduced to us over the next five years.
At the same time Bantam Spectra was publishing the new novels, Del Rey re-published the books they'd originally published in the 70's and 80's when the movies were coming out. Besides the novelizations of all three films, The Han Solo Adventures, The Lando Calrissian Adventures and Splinter of the Mind's Eye were all given new editions, with the novelizations, the Han Solo novels, and the Lando books were all collected into single paperback volumes, all of which continue to be published to this day.
At the same time the book publishers were putting out their material, Dark Horse Comics published a six issue miniseries called Dark Empire, where Luke turns to the dark side following the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine through the use of clones, similar to the clones we saw in Zahn's novels. This miniseries also introduced us to Salla Zend, Mako Spince and Shug Ninx, three characters who were part of Han Solo's backstory, which we'd only scratched the surface of in The Han Solo Adventures. It also showed us that Boba Fett had escaped from the Sarlacc pit after Han had inadvertently knocked him into it in Return of the Jedi. While there were many great comics coming out in the 90's, very few of them had as much impact on the larger Expanded Universe as Dark Empire and its sequels, Dark Empire II and Empire's End, had. Tales of the Jedi, which was set thousands of years before the movies, gave us many amazing characters, including Nomi Sunrider and Ulic Qel-Droma.
While Star Wars had had video games in the 80's, including arcade games, It didn't have any games for the Nintendo Entertainment System until 1991, the same year as Heir to the Empire and Dark Empire came out. However, the first game to not be movie related was Star Wars: X-Wing for the PC. This was a combat simulator game, where you got to fly X-Wings, Y-Wings, and A-Wings as a character known as Keyan Farlander. Other games PC games would follow, such as TIE Fighter, Rebel Assault and Dark Forces, but it wouldn't be until Shadows of the Empire was produced for the Nintendo 64 in 1996 that the franchise would return to gaming consoles outside of the Super Star Wars Trilogy games that came out for the Super Nintendo.
While Kenner had produced multiple lines of toys for the movies, ending with the The Power of the Force toyline in 1985, it wouldn't be until 1995 when Hasbro, under the Kenner name, began producing a new The Power of the Force toyline that Star Wars would return to toy stores. Not only did this line release updated versions of the classic Kenner figures from the 70's and 80's, but updated versions of the ships and vehicles that had originally come out with the original Kenner toylines were made as well. With toylines for the Expanded Universe, like Heir to the Empire (with Thrawn and Mara Jade), Dark Empire (with the resurrected Emperor, dark side Luke, and Leia), and Dark Forces (with a Kyle Katarn figure) getting produced. Unlike the original 1985 toyline, these new toys were flying off the shelves, despite the fact that they had competition from their own toyline for Batman: The Animated Series, Playmates's toylines for Star Trek and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Bandai's toyline for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Eventually Hasbro would stop using the Kenner name but continues to make Star Wars toys to this day.
While other novels, comics, video games, and toys were being made, in 1996 Hasbro, Bantam, Dark Horse, LucasArts, Galoob, and Topps came together to create Shadows of the Empire. This was a massive multimedia project that included a novel by Steve Perry, a six issue comic book miniseries written by John Wagner with art by Kilian Plunkett (who would eventually become a design artist for Star Wars Rebels in 2014), a junior novel by Christopher Golden, two toylines, one from Hasbro, the other from Galoob, a video game, a soundtrack by Joel McNeely, and a set of trading cards with illustrations by Tim and Greg Hildebrandt. Basically a movie without the movie. Lucasfilm would do this sort of thing again in the early 2000's with the Clone Wars Multimedia Project and in the 2020s with the High Republic, but Shadows of the Empire was the first.
Outside of the stories themselves, we got a new series of reference books called the Essential Guides. These were trade paperback sized softcover coffee table books that gave details on every aspect of the ever growing Star Wars Universe, including the movies, books, comics, and video games. The first book in the series, The Essential Guide to Characters, was published in 1996.
In 1994 the second edition of A Guide to the Star Wars Universe by Bill Slavicsek was published. This was more of dictionary type book that had each entry in alphabetical order with several entries in a list format on each page. I never owned this version of the book, but I did have the third edition which came out in 2000.
In 1998 the Star Wars Encyclopedia by Steve Sansweet, who was the head of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm, and would be until 2011, was published. This book was an amalgamation of information on the Star Wars Universe that had been presented in the Essential Guides and A Guide to the Star Wars Universe. It stayed in print until 2008 when it was replaced by The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia which was written by Steve Sansweet, and Pablo Hidalgo, who is currently a member of the Lucasfilm Story Group for the franchise, as well as the Senior Creative Executive, Franchise & Story (Dave Filoni's right hand man basically) and Star Wars Lore Advisor (he's the guy who can tell the producers of a show what has happened in previous shows so they don't repeat themselves).
In addition to all of the books and comics that we got in the 90's, we also got three magazines. The first was Star Wars Insider. Originally started as Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine, the successor to the original Bantha Tracks newsletter, in 1987, after George Lucas announced he was going to be making the Prequel Trilogy in 1993, and with alot more Star Wars stuff coming out, the magazine changed its name to Star Wars Insider after 22 issues. The magazine is still around today with a total of 226 issues and no signs of it going away.
The second magazine to be published, was published by Topps, starting in 1994. Star Wars Galaxy Magazine focused more on the in universe stuff, as well as the merchandise that was coming out from various companies at the time. Which is where it differentiated from Star Wars Insider, which focused more on the fans and everything going on at Lucasfilm, including updates on the movies. Star Wars Galaxy Magazine also contained exclusive comic stories and RPG stories, neither of which Star Wars Insider had. The magazine was cancelled in 1997.
The third and final Star Wars magazine we had in the 90's was Star Wars Galaxy Collector, which was actually a replacement for Star Wars Galaxy Magazine. It began in 1998 and ran for 8 issues until 1999. The difference between this magazine and its predecessor is that this magazine focused solely on the collecting aspect of 90's Star Wars fandom. I said this when I did my overview of Star Wars magazines a few years ago, but one of the reasons I suspect this magazine was cancelled was because Star Wars Insider had started to include columns that focused on books by 1999, and with Steve Sansweet's column, "Scouting the Galaxy" being a regular column, Galaxy Collector became redundant. Especially because Star Wars Insider was the official magazine of Lucasfilm and Star Wars and it didn't make sense for Topps to continue publishing their magazine.
Speaking of Topps, they've been releasing Star Wars trading cards since A New Hope came out in 1977, and they're still doing it today. However, like with other Star Wars licensees, there was a period from 1983, when their Return of the Jedi trading cards were released, to 1993 when they began releasing their Star Wars Galaxy sets, where Topps didn't release any Star Wars trading cards. Even though the Ewoks TV movies, and the Droids and Ewoks cartoons came out in 1984, 1985, and 1986.
Things were happening on the movie side of things too in the 90's. Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi had had several VHS releases since 1984, but the most notable was the 1995 "One Last Time..." releases. You could buy these individually or in a Star Wars Trilogy box set. On each tape was a part of an interview with George Lucas, conducted by film historian, Leonard Maltin. This was how I saw the Original Trilogy for the first time and it was my first time seeing George Lucas, as well as my first time seeing Leonard Maltin. Because I didn't see the Star Wars movies until I was nine years old, I had no idea who George was, but I found out between these VHS tapes, the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition VHS tapes, and the DVD for Episode I. Not to mention interviews with him in Star Wars Insider. The other reason these tapes are significant is because they were the last time the theatrical versions of all three movies would be released on VHS. They'd be released on DVD in 2006.
In 1997, all three movies were re-released in theatres with The Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition, which included CGI effects, and new, or expanded scenes. I did an entire blog post on these versions of the movies, so I won't delve too deeply into them here. Especially because if you're a Star Wars fan, you already know what these releases are and what 1997 was like when these came out, making even more money at the box office on top of the money they'd made during their original releases in 1977, 1980, and 1983 respectively.
Then, on May 19th, 1999, the first movie in the Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was released theatrically. It was hugely successful and introduced an entirely new generation to the world of Star Wars. And introduced us to a whole new era of storytelling inside the Star Wars Universe. I also did an entire blog post on this movie and the impact it had on me, and the world at large, but it felt like everything Lucasfilm did with the franchise with the books, the comics, the video games, the magazines, and everything else I talked about in this blog post, was leading up to the release of this movie. Especially Shadows of the Empire, and the Special Editions, since Shadows was the movie without a movie, and the Special Editions showed that Star Wars could still be financially successful at the box office. But, believe it or not, Star Wars wasn't finished with the 90's just yet. One more thing came out on October 5th, 1999.
Even though the books had started strong with Heir to the Empire in 1991, by 1997, sales had begun to drop and the books, whether they were published in hardcover first, or published in paperback only, weren't hitting the Bestsellers lists anymore. So Lucasfilm got together with Dark Horse and Del Rey, who had gotten the book license back in 1997 in preparation for the prequel publishing program which would launch in 1999 with the novelization of The Phantom Menace, and they created a nineteen book series called The New Jedi Order. This ambitious series was created by the Story Group, which consisted of Lucy Autry Wilson, the Director of Publishing at Lucasfilm, Sue Rostoni, who was the Executive Editor at Lucas Licensing, Shelly Shapiro, who was the editor in charge of Star Wars publishing at Del Rey, James Luceno, who would write three books in the series, Michael A. Stackpole, who'd written the X-Wing comics and novels, and would write two books in this series, and Randy Stradley from Dark Horse. The first book in the series, Vector Prime, was written by R.A. Salvatore, and the book had all of our favourite characters, from the EU and the movies, team up to take on the Yuuzhan Vong, a warrior race from outside the galaxy who invade the galaxy and take on the Jedi Knights, now a much larger group led by Luke Skywalker. It also involves the death of Chewbacca, an idea that George approved of so that we, as the readers, would know that if Chewie can be killed, then nobody is safe, as the Bantam books had no stakes to them for the characters from the movies. The series would end with The Unifying Force in 2003.
Being a Star Wars fan in the 90's was insane. The franchise had been dormant for four years when Heir to the Empire came out, and had slowly been dying out once Return of the Jedi had come out in 1983. Yet the fanbase was still there, even if we were a marginalized group because Star Wars wasn't cool anymore as it had been when A New Hope had come out in 1977. I say we because I'm a Star Wars fan, even if I was born in 1986 and didn't see the movies until early 1996, and I identify myself as a Star Wars fan, which is why I'm doing this blog series, to show my fandom, and talk about all aspects of Star Wars. And I'm glad that I became a fan when I was growing up in the 90's.
That's gonna be it for me for today. I'll be back on Friday for my next My Star Trek Experience post. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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