Star Wars by “George Lucas” (actually Alan Dean Foster – but as a kid I didn’t realize that of course and was so excited that George himself must have written the book!) is the densest of the three, a quality that I didn’t necessarily appreciate as a child but appreciate very much, now.

Each one has a particular flavor, being written by three different authors, and I appreciated each one differently. (Beat you to the punch, DVD extras!) While I had novelizations for a bunch of movies, the Star Wars books were definitely my favorites. Plus they had the added bonus of getting inside the characters’ heads, and sometimes even portraying deleted scenes. As someone who already loved books, they were the perfect way to re-live my favorite movies over and over again. Novelizations were a lifeline when I was growing up. (Not that our computers would even have been capable of such a thing!) You had to be content with re-living the movie in your memory – or through comics, storybooks, and novelizations.

It wasn’t available to be in your home or on your computer a few months later. Growing up as a kid who loved Star Wars (and entertainment in general) wasn’t so easy in the 70s and 80s. And that in turn got me thinking about the novelizations. So it got me thinking about my experiences seeing those films for the first time. The nostalgia hit me hard for the anniversaries of the original trilogy films, as I am (cough, just barely) old enough to have seen them in the theater when they were first released. This past month has seen the anniversaries of the releases of all six Star Wars films so far. Gather around, kids, and I’ll tell you a story from the very dawn of time… Before DVDs, digital distribution, and TV airings, Star Wars fans looked to book adaptations to revisit a galaxy far, far away.

Return of the jedi james kahn