A New Hope

My geekitude goes back a long way. You knew that already, at least if you have spent any time here in the past. I mean, I saw the original Star Wars in the theater (I even saw the Christmas special on TV). And this isn’t going to be me blabbering on about how much I refuse to see the current trilogy movies and my dislike of them and all they entail. Actually, we are going to go back in time a little bit. Back, back, waaaayyyyy back to the start of it all.

I had an opportunity to read the collected edition (Star Wars: A New Hope; Marvel, digital edition 2015) of the original story comic book recently. If you didn’t know, there has always been a bit of controversy with Star Wars. Though this one wasn’t quite as big as the people fighting over stuff now. When the original came out, I want to say around 1977, it was listed at 30 cents. The reprints had gone up to 35 cents. If you were a collector and lucky enough to have the original, it was worth a bunch of cash even then. I had a copy of the other one. Yeah, that’s how life rolls sometimes…

Granted I had some comics that held some value, way back when I actually still collected them. Now I find myself more interested in the stories than worrying about all the clutter that comes from hoarding stuff like that. If you hoard it digitally, it is easier to organize and it takes up less space in your life. But this is taking us in a completely different direction.

Back to the point. So, I hadn’t actually read the stories since I was a kid and actually had the comics. To my memory, they pretty much told the stories in roughly the same fashion as the movies. Granted there will always be differences because that is the nature of the beast when changing formats. As I read through the series of about 5 comics or so, I realized a couple things.

The biggest though was something I thought that played into the controversy of the special editions of the original movies. There is a scene in the special edition Star Wars where Han Solo is talking to Jabba the Hutt outside the cantina. It had been cut from the original release. It’s been years since I read the book, so I don’t know if it was something from the book. But this scene was in the comics. And the funniest part of it is, the part of Jabba was still something that looked completely different from the revelation of Jabba in The Return of the Jedi.

In the cut scene Jabba was some large scruffy looking criminal type, but in the comic, he was a green skinned alien looking dude. And of course, when they returned the cut scene to the special edition Jabba became the lovable slug we all remember. Of course, that meant they really had to rework the scene to make it fit.

Anyway, there was a point I was digging for in all of this. Or maybe I am just reminiscing. Let’s see, it’s probably not a good idea to try and fix something that was removed from a film, especially when you find that the creature in question doesn’t fit the original image. But see, this is where things come into the problem. And it is part of the problem I see with this current generation of movies. When we have so many different sources of what should be the lore of a story, things don’t always carry over and not everyone is going to take the time to explore every bit. Mind you the geeks that spend the time to absorb every bit of lore, they tend to be the ones who suffer the most.

###

If you enjoy these stories, consider leaving some coffee money in the jar or you could buy a book or two. Either way helps keep the stories flowing.