Star Walt: A New Hope (Three Different Ones)

Because I love tormenting myself I've decided to engage in a long-term, exhaustive project that, knowing me, will likely last two or three months before I abandon it: watch/read/play as much Star Wars media as I can possibly stand in publication order and write a bit about at least some of it as I go. I have a horrible sickness, I know, but it gives me stuff to read and write in bits and pieces between baby naps and other new father obligations. Let's get right to it and start where it all began with A New Hope (I will only tolerate calling it simply Star Wars if you actually saw it in theaters) -- the movie itself a bit, but also its two adaptations.

Despite being a Star Wars fan of varying degrees for most of my life and having absorbed some opinions about the changes made in the special editions, I am fairly certain I'd never seen the unedited cut of A New Hope until I watched it last weekend. Thankfully it turns out that when I bought DVDs of the original trilogy from a closing Hollywood Video back in college they were versions that included the original theatrical cuts on the second disc (well, "original" -- some minor changes such as the updating of the title crawl and other such tweaks made for home media were kept). The transfers of these are pretty lousy, being made from the 90s laserdiscs, with poorly compressed audio and video and an odd aspect ratio. While it would be nice to have a higher quality version widely available, I would guess it's probably the easiest way for others to find a copy to watch (legally, of course).

Enough has been said about the film version of A New Hope, and I'm not going to claim to have a unique perspective on it. But man: it still looks so damn good. Even in the shoddy transfer of the 2006 DVD, the costumes, puppets, models, and sets are so fully realized that every frame captures the imagination. Even if Empire is the better movie of the original trilogy, A New Hope is bursting with such sights and sounds that even now, after decades of Star Wars dominating popular culture, it still feels wonderful and captivating.

The novelization of A New Hope, initially titled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, was published under Lucas's name but ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster. Interestingly, the novel was actually published about half a year prior to the movie, so there were probably a decent amount of scifi fans who read it before the movie hit theaters. Of course, that number would be a vanishingly small percentage of all Star Wars fans now, but they do exist! The novel is based on an earlier draft of the script, and includes some scenes that were shot but cut from the movie. Some were added back in later in the Special Edition (pretty much uniformly for the worst) while others can easily be found online and in various home media.

As an actual piece of writing, I was pleasantly surprised with the novel. It's still more middling than good (my expectations weren't very high, to be honest), and Foster relies too much on adverbs and similes, but it's solid mass market scifi fare. I was most impressed with the final chapter, consisting almost entirely of the Death Star trench run. The scene is the highlight of the movie, an audiovisual spectacle that many other movies have tried, and failed, to match. While I assumed that translating it to prose would lose most of what makes it impressive, Foster managed to deliver a tight, intense rendition, avoiding the excessive wordiness he was prone to for the majority of the novel. Of course, what the trench run is to film far exceeds what this adaptation of the scene is to prose, but the fact that it isn't a pure disappointment when compared to its more famous counterpart speaks well of Foster's ability to adapt a highly kinetic scene.

Aside from some discrepancies in visual descriptions -- the visual language that is now crucial to making Star Wars feel like Star Wars wasn't quite defined yet -- the novel hews close to Lucas's vision for the movie, with nearly all of the "added" scenes having been filmed but left on the cutting room floor. Here we can already see the beginning of an "extended universe," albeit one still entirely beholden to Lucas rather than a purely corporate product. A New Hope is a stronger movie for not including these scenes, keeping it lean, but they fit into the novel without disrupting its pacing while simultaneously giving the then-burgeoning Star Wars fandom more details on this new galaxy.

One interesting difference between the novel and the Star Wars we know now is the description, however brief, of Palpatine. He is named in the prologue of the novel, well before his screen debut in The Empire Strikes Back, but we are painted a picture of a once-ambituous despot who now is controlled by Imperial bureaucrats -- a far cry from the cackling, over-the-top mastermind he'd later be known as.

The first couple of issues of the Marvel Star Wars ongoing comic series also hit shelves shortly before A New Hope debuted in theaters, and the six issues that serve as another version of A New Hope feels like a midway point between the novel and the movie (which sounds obvious now that I've written it out). Artist Howard Chaykin had concept art and similar materials to work from, and so the comic largely looks like the Star Wars we know (despite maybe a few instances of characters appearing off model). Furthermore, some of the more iconic lines that weren't present in the earlier version of the movie's script that the novel was adapted from now appear. However, nearly all the cut scenes that appear in the novel appear here, as well, and it appears that writer Roy Thomas lifted much of the text for the narrative captions directly from the novel.

As a comics fan, I was hoping to get more out of these six issues -- both Thomas and Chaykin are legends, after all. Perhaps it's just that I've had a bit of a New Hope overload in the past few days, but for the most part I found it unremarkable. Chaykin is, of course, excellent, and gives Star Wars tech a bit of a Kirby flair at points, but I think Thomas keeping so close to the novel didn't quite fit the pacing inherent in the monthly serialized format. Perhaps I'll be more impressed with their original stories, but considering Thomas gave us Jaxxon, one of the most mocked characters in EU history (which is saying something), I'm not getting my hopes up.

Speaking of, next up on my list is the remainder of Thomas and Chaykin's brief run on the Star Wars ongoing comic series (only 4 more issues) and the first original novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye. I don't intend to read the other novelizations of the original trilogy, as both their quality and their historical relevance appear to be limited -- though in the unlikely event that I continue with this project long enough to get to the prequels I'll give those a shot. May the Force be with me (ugh, I know).