ZkinandBonez

flametitan said:

On that second comparison pic, the one with Han escorting the other ships, isn’t that the prototype design for the Pirate ship? judging by what materials the comic team had access to, I’m not surprised they got that design.

Yes, it does kind of look like it. But then again, that design was re-used for the Blockade Runner in the opening of ANH, so it’s probably just supposed to be one of those. There’s another ship visible underneath it which look very similar as well.

(I’m more curious about what that red antenna thing is supposed to be.)

flametitan said:

Out of curiosity: Were there ever any country specific comics anywhere for Star Wars? For example, I know Marvel in the UK had a couple stories in some of their other licenses that didn’t appear in the US comics. Did this happen for star Wars too?

I the UK’s Star Wars Weekly magazine, there was exclusive stories; such as The Day After the Death Star that I mentioned in an earlier post, as well as Way of the Wookiee, The Weapons Master and a rather odd and out-of-place story called World of Fire .

As for Scandinavia though, no. They were not important enough to get any exclusive stories. They were in fact quite lucky if they got any at all. Star Wars in Scandinavia was quite a mess. Many stores got left out, and many plot-lines wasn’t even finished. Norway did f.ex. get Dark Empire and Dark Empire 2, but no Empire’s End. Similarly the Swedes only got two thirds of the Thrawn trilogy comic adaptation.
(In the fan letter sections of these comics, there would sometimes even be advice on how to contact UK comic distributors so that the fans could order the missing parts from abroad.)

SilverWook said:

I won’t link to it as it’s probably skirting the rules, but someone has been making Youtube videos out of the old SW Marvel comics recently. (And some not so old material.) First time I’ve seen anyone do this online. All the original ads and letter pages included, which the reprints and omnibus editions don’t have. Worth it just to see those if you don’t have the original issues, but I can’t imagine it’s going to be up long if the Mouse police get wind of it.

Interesting, I’ll have a look at it while it’s still available.

SilverWook said:

IIRC, when Dark Horse reprinted the newspaper strips in comic book form, there was similar reformatting going on.

I ever actually read the newspaper strips so don’t really know what they would have looked like originally, but I did recently find a comic from the early 90’s that contained one of the newspaper storylines by Archie Goodwin. I’m assuming that all they’ve done is put them all on the same page.
Maybe you, or someone else, could help give me some clues as to how they edited them from the originals;
I took this photo of some pages from the comic. It’s not a very good picture, but it shows how they’ve set it all up.

Oh, and compared to the images I shared above where they integrated the splash-pages into the other panels, it’s funny how in this Norwegian comic they’ve done the exact opposite and made a splash-page out of the newspaper strips/panels;

SilverWook said:

And wow, the lightsaber placement in front of Threepio’s crotch is too awkward to be random. 😉

Wow, I didn’t even notice.

At least it’s not as blatant as the old “Force Beam” ads from the 70’s.

LexX said:

Finland got the same treatment. About 10 years ago I tried to figure out what Marvel numbers were released here and found out how they did the albums. Kind of funny. ROTJ was the last album, then they started to publish the comic itself and the stories were like they were meant to be (althoug in completely random release order).

Interesting, that’s exactly what they did in Norway.

I know that Denmark and Sweden published more-or-less the same comics as we got in Norway, and from what I’ve gathered online they were all edited and distributed by the same company in Denmark.

I wonder if Finland might have done the same.

Did you actually get any of these Finish annuals/albums?
I’m curious as to what they look like.

MathUser said:

So why do you guys think Finn didn’t know Poe Dameron survived? Wouldn’t there have been footprints in the sand that he ran away in? Wasn’t that robot with him? Couldn’t it have told Finn that he survived and ran away?

Robot?
Also BB-8 wasn’t even there. They were separated several scenes earlier.

And I don’t think Finn stopped to search for footprints after he saw the TIE-fighter sink and explode.
(Both the sinking sand and the explosion may have hidden any footprints nearby.)

Here’s the scene btw

SilverWook said:

We’ve never seen a droid memory wipe on screen, but unless he’s got one of these, I would think it take a bit of time to revert to his original programming.

Some fans had the same idea;

Source

flametitan said:

I’m of the opinion that C-3PO knows there’s a Princess on the ship, as well as some level of familiarity with her exploits, but never met her personally so he wouldn’t recognize her by face.

As far as Lucas was concerned he knew quite well who she was, but was programmed to lie about her.

ZkinandBonez said:

Lucas does however state that Threepio was “programmed not to mention having knowledge of the Princess”

The radio-play of ANH from 1981 even had Leia and captain Antilles specifically go up to Threepio and give him orders/re-programming to lie about knowing her.

Darth Id said:

some confusion by fans as to why Threepio acted as if he didn’t know who Leia was in the film, despite that being nearly impossible.

What’s this bit all about? I just remember Threepy saying ‘There will be no escape for the princess this time,’ clearly indicating he’s well aware of her and her exploits. When does he ever act unfamiliar with her?

I was referring to the scene when Luke discovers Leia’s message for Ben. Luke asks Threepio who Leia is, and he answers; “I’m afraid I’m not quite sure, sir. I think she was a passenger on our last voyage, a person of some importance I believe.”

Sure, if you stop to think about it it makes sense that Threepio was lying to Luke at this point in the story, but I guess that most people found it confusing. I don’t think most people stopped to analyse these scenes. (This is also before VHS was common.)

EDIT: I have to learn to type faster.

Since we’re on the subject of the Goodwin/Infantino comics of the late 70’s, I figured I’d share this recent comic purchase of mine.
This might be a bit too niche, but hopefully some of you will find this somewhat fascinating.
I’ll post some more “normal” retro stuff later.

First off, to put things in context, I live in Norway, and I recently decided to find a copy of every pre-PT SW comic that’s ever been published here. Now that may sound crazy, but being a small country with only a few million people there was never a large enough demand to publish as many comics as in the US. As a matter of fact I already own half-or-so of every SW comic published between 1978 and 1999. So it’s not as daunting a task as it sounds like.
My priority search however revolves around these six annuals released between 1978 and 1983.

What’s so fascinating about these annuals is that what the Scandinavian publishers did was to take story lines from the US comics that were split into five or six issues, and simply released all of them in one album each year. That way they managed to cover roughly half a year of US comics in one single comic released annually.

The comic above, which I recently purchased online, is one of the rarest and hardest to find, and it’s the only non-movie-adaptation one with original cover art. The other two are Infantino covers recreated by some Scandinavian painter.
(The Norwegian title translates to “Last Warning” btw.)

However, what fascinates me the most is what’s inside this comic.

At first it seems quite simple;
Take Marvel Star Wars #25-26 & #31-34, ignore all the sub-plots explored in between, and release all six issues in one annual.
However, in order to get these six stories to fit into one 80 page comic, as well as to remove any signs that these used to be several comics, they’ve done some editing of the actual artwork by Infantino.

As you can see in the image below, they’ve take the original splash-page, cropped it and combined it with several panels from the next page. The reason for this is simply that the splash-pages become redundant when you’re doing six issues as one continuous story, but there’s none-the-less information here that they can’t cut out.
The result is this chopped up composition where two pages become one.

US comic on the left, Norwegian comic on the right.

Here they’ve taken a splash-page and incorporated it into a large two-page image. They’ve even thrown in the first panel from the next page (in US version) to save some space.

US comic top row, Norwegian comic bottom row.

And the more I looked into it, the crazier it gets. Some times there are several pages that are completely re-arranged from their original compositions. If you look closely you can even see that they’ve altered the artwork itself some times. A lot of the text is really condensed down to their bare-essentials as well, not to mention that the colours are often quite different.

An example of just how crazy this editing can get.

(As a side-note for those of you who have actually read these comics. It’s kind of funny how for Norwegian readers back in the 80’s, the entire pre-ESB EU ends with this annual, e.g. Marvel SW # 31. The whole “Red Queen Rising” story-line with Domina Tagge was never published, presumably because it was only three issues and therefore didn’t fit into the annual format. So as far as Norwegian kids was aware of back in the 80’s Baron Tagge dies here when his ship explodes, and not as he actually did two issues later in the US (and UK). What’s even weirder is that when Norway started publishing monthly SW comics like in the US, but only after 1983, where they initially focused on post-ESB stories, Domina does make an appearance. She actually references events that were never published in Norway. There’s even a little text box that refers to “a previous issue”.)

Well, it’s a bit odd considering that they wrapped up filming some time ago.

“LUPITA NYONG’O HAS YET TO FILM HER MAZ KANATA SCENES FOR EPISODE VIII.”

Any thoughts on this?

MathUser said:

I like that the claymation chess is better animated. Is it really claymation again?

Yep, it was done with stop-motion by the same guy who did it back in 1976.
(Well, it’s technically not “claymation”, but it was done with little “puppets”.)

Making of Holochess for Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I personally liked that they actually added something new (sort of). I feel like one of the many things the PT did wrong was not adding any new abilities. Freaking out about Kylo stopping a laser blast is to me like freaking out over Palpatine using Force lightning because it wasn’t in ANH.
When the Force is treated as a fixed set of super-powers it looses it’s sense of magic. You should keep wondering what else it might be capable of.

SilverWook said:

What issue is that in the American Marvel run? I’d bet the interior art is more accurate.
The extra covers needed for the weekly may also have been rush jobs.

It’s from a story called The Day After the Death Star and it was made specifically for Star Wars Weekly in the UK. It was released in the US a year later with colour as a Marvel Illustrated Books. Both the cover and the interior art was done by Carmine Infantino.

And no, he does look exactly like that in the interior art.

It’s hard to say what colours he was supposed to be though. The Star Wars Weekly comics didn’t have colours, and the coloured American release one year later gave him a different, but still pretty weird, colour scheme;

(Honestly the largest picture I could find online.)

EDIT:
Infantino drew a TIE-pilot that looked very similar in a previous issue (made for a US release);

The design is similar, but he’s wearing a black outfit which at least makes him look more like a proper TIE-pilot. However, we never see him from the front, so it’s hard to say what Infantino imagined.

However, he did also draw the cover art, in which the TIE-pilot look pretty much the same as he did in the Star Wars Weekly story. (The colourist, however made him look even crazier on the cover. Here he’s red and blue.)

DuracellEnergizer said:

ZkinandBonez said:

(That guy with the knife is actually supposed to be a TIE-Pilot. It’s hard to tell why Infantino drew him like that, considering how the TIE-Pilots were featured so prominently the movie. Then again Marvel did seem to often use the Kenner toys as reference, and the TIE-pilot figure didn’t exist at this point.)

I think Infantino just took a lot of creative liberty with his renderings. Everything from ships to stormtroopers looks off compared to their counterparts in the original film.

True.
This one just seems unusually off to me.

I mean he added his own touch to the the weapons, ships, etc. but a Stormtrooper was recognizable as a Stormtrooper. This guy, looks like a scuba-diver to me.

(Not that I’m complaining, I love Infantino’s SW work, I just find this green and purple scuba-pilot kinda funny.)

ATMachine said:

I suspect the shot of the one drunk alien being dragged away by his friend might be an outtake from the SW 1977 cantina footage. It strikes me as just the sort of amusing slice-of-life/documentary moment that GL would like.

(Plus the crew also improvised other sight gags during filming, like a gunfight between two guys of extremely different height in a Mos Eisley back alley.)

Are you referring to this shot?

Like Tyrphanax said, there’s no fighting, the little guy just runs through his legs. But, I don’t doubt that they shot other “sigh gags” like this. I’m guessing this one survived because it was used in the Holiday Special.

(It’s a weird shot, because the small guy seems to have an empty holster, and he’s clearly running away from something, and the tall alien follows him off screen. Just another day in Mos Eisley I guess?)

SilverWook said:

I mean he won a copy that came up for auction.

Ah, of course. I should’ve gotten that.
(As a non-native speaker these idioms slip your mind every now and then. I though you were implying that Puggo was restoring one of the PSAs or something like that.)

SilverWook said:

I think the mouse and a couple other creatures were more “off the shelf” things Rick Baker or someone else had lying around to fill out the scene. (Others, like the bouncer, were created just for the HS.) The HS cantina set could have been chopped up and rearranged, or else Lucasfilm still had the partial sets handy from the U.S. shoot. They also could have simply built a new set.

It would seem all the U.K. masks got shipped back to Lucasfilm, as many of them appear in this Richard Pryor show skit from late 1977.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kJkhEcQ44k

Those masks really got around didn’t they.

Tyrphanax said:

Maybe they were using leftover ANH sabers for ESB and leftover ESB sabers for Jedi?

Well, the ANH lightsaber was a feature built into the figure, whereas the ESB saber was an accessory. Also there was never a blue ESB lightsaber, they were all yellow.

I’m guessing that when they finally decided to fix the yellow lightsaber thing and give Luke a properly coloured saber they based the new lightsaber accessory on the early ROTJ footage in which it was blue. But, like I mentioned earlier, they did change it to green eventually.

SilverWook said:

Puggo and I would love to find a 16mm of that. He scored one of the PSA’s with the droids and included it on Puggo Grande. Someone uploaded a better version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxpz3Lp-PCk

Puggo scored it?
Was it missing music to begin with?

SilverWook said:

It would be interesting to know where the cantina one was shot. My guess would be in California just like the cantina inserts shot for the movie. The Holiday Special set might have been used.

You can very briefly see most of the room here and it looks different from what appeared in the Holiday Special. I’m not patient enough to look through the entire HS scene, but I think they’re different sets. In the HS, there’s a wall on the left of the bar, in the PSA it looks more like a smaller version of the cantina from the movie.

I’m assuming that they re-used the “California/insert-aliens” in the HS, so I don’t see why they would have done something different for this PSA.
(I was surprised by the giant mouse in the HS though. I don’t remember that one from the movie. I remember a giant mantis, but not seeing a giant mouse.)

SilverWook said:

The droids PSA’s were shot in the UK, with a set using leftover bits of the Death Star control room. You might shed a tear seeing Kenny Baker and Artoo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B_69vakbrc

Wow, that’s really cool.
Btw, which PSA is this from? I remember having seen quite a few Artoo and Threepio PSAs on YouTube, but I can’t remember having seen this set before.

(Also, this guy on the far right looks like a Vulcan dressed as Han Solo.)

Star Wars Weekly, The UK’s version of the Marvel Star Wars comics.

Just figured I’d share random covers that I managed to find in high res and that I feel accurately illustrates the over-dramatic quality of late 70’s Marvel SW comics (the last one in particular).

(All of these have original artwork made for the UK by Carmine Infantino. Since the Marvel UK split each American issue into several smaller parts, more cover art was needed. They even wrote some original stories just for the UK.)

(It doesn’t get more 70’s Marvel than a buff Luke Skywalker dual-wielding blasters against some Imperial Troop Transports; which BTW were actually based off a Kenner toy that were released the same year as this comic was released.)

(That guy with the knife is actually supposed to be a TIE-Pilot. It’s hard to tell why Infantino drew him like that, considering how the TIE-Pilots were featured so prominently the movie. Then again Marvel did seem to often use the Kenner toys as reference, and the TIE-pilot figure didn’t exist at this point.)

(This one I find especially amusing. “Chewbacca betrayed by Han Solo!” This ‘betrayal’ ends up actually being a relatively small moment that plays out with far less drama and confusion than the cover would imply. The composition in the cover is, when compared to the events in the cover, actually straight up misleading.)

SilverWook said:

ZkinandBonez said:

SilverWook said:

Marvel did get a couple letters accusing them of inserting scenes into the movie adaptation, specifically Biggs and Jabba, so overreacting is nothing new. 😉

Do you know how people reacted to Luke’s red and yellow lightsaber in the Marvel comics?

There’s a guy on YouTube who grew up with the Kenner toys in the early 80’s and he’s apparently been annoyed at that yellow lightsaber ever since. So this made me curious.
Do you know if this was a common complaint, or did most people just accept it like they did with the comic covers?

I don’t recall any lightsaber controversies. Too bad nobody has thought of an archive of just the letters column page to show what fans were thinking back then.

I do know the yellow lightsaber persisted well into the ESB line.

The irony is that they finally realized that the lightsaber was supposed to be blue…

…in 1983.

(They did after a short while change it to green though. But how they kept getting these colours wrong from 1977-1982 still baffles me.)

Btw. All this 70’s and 80’s SW might start to be not-so-random-thoughts anymore.
So I made a Retro Star Wars thread.

SilverWook said:

Marvel did get a couple letters accusing them of inserting scenes into the movie adaptation, specifically Biggs and Jabba, so overreacting is nothing new. 😉

Do you know how people reacted to Luke’s red and yellow lightsaber in the Marvel comics?

There’s a guy on YouTube who grew up with the Kenner toys in the early 80’s and he’s apparently been annoyed at that yellow lightsaber ever since. So this made me curious.
Do you know if this was a common complaint, or did most people just accept it like they did with the comic covers?

LexX said:

It was great when people used to have artistic license which made their stuff unique and interesting. Now every little detail is controlled and people get angry if R2’s panels don’t match. Ugh.

I know what you mean.
Current SW comics’ fixation with getting every detail screen-accurate is one of the many things that makes me uninterested in them. The old comics had hit or miss stories as well, but they spent more time trying to craft interesting stories, than they spent on making sure that every detail on Han’s DL-44 blaster was exactly as it was in the movies.

It may bug a lot of current SW fans, but I find a certain charm in these old Marvel comics where Luke’s lightsaber colour changes every other issue. They’re fun stories, and I get that it’s a lightsaber, so why would it matter if it’s blue, or yellow, or red?

And sometimes they did it blatantly on purpose. Imagine how dull Dark Empire would have been if they were forced to make everything scree-accurate.

Tyrphanax said:

The ribbing on the sleeve doesn’t go all the way down the arms, though. I’m also inclined to think Greedo’s outfit was a jumpsuit as well?

Yeah, that is true.
But they’re still very similar in design.
Also had Luke zipped his jacket all the way up I think the collar would have looked like Greedo’s as well.

So I guess they’re two different costumes all together, but the designs might still be intentionally similar.

SilverWook said:

I think we just accepted it as kids and teens. Misleading covers were par for the course for most comic books back then. Covers teasing the death of a major superhero were a staple. Superman died pretty regularly before DC conned the entire world into thinking they killed him off permanently.

I used to buy old DC and Marvel comics as a kid (they were cheaper than the new ones, and also more interesting in my opinion), and I remember buying this Flash comic (well the Norwegian version anyway), and being super enticed by the dramatic cover. In the end however, the Golden Age Flash just get’s knocked out and he wakes up as soon as Flash reaches him. There’s pretty much zero drama in the actual scene, and the cover makes it up to be this huge turn of events where a main character dies. It really bugged me as a kid, but now I find it kinda funny.

The original six issue SW adaptation have some of the most misleading covers of the entire series.

I think it’s pretty funny how this is one of the least exaggerated covers Marvel made for the movie adaptation.

Probably a really odd thing to revive this thread with,
but I just noticed that Luke’s ceremonial jacket from the end of ANH has a very similar design as the jacket that Greedo wears under his west.

I wonder if they just re-coloured (painted? dyed?) and altered the Greedo jacket somewhat and used it for the Medal ceremony scene to save time and money, and I’m also curious as to whether there is some canon-explanation for them having the same jacket design.
(It’s called the “ceremonial jacket”, but I always got the impression that it was some kind of pilot jacket, which would make some sense for both characters.)