The Buffy series

But is the transition from celluloid to print a recent development? Apparently not. Scrounge around second-hand bookstores or at a garage sale and you’re bound to find some old book based on a once-popular series like the Six Million Dollar Man, The Man from Atlantis, V and Knight Rider. As long as Hollywood keeps coming up with original and interesting movies that could spawn a whole new franchise, like Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, those books will keep on coming.

Few movies have successfully spawned a long-running book franchise, but BEVERLEY HON discovers some that thrived.

BOOKS have been continuously looked to for the next print-to-silver-screen hit but very few movies have inspired the reverse. One such movie franchise to successfully churn out a whole line of books - not direct translations of the movie but actually works of fiction, or science fiction in this case - is Star Wars.

When Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope was released in 1977, little did George Lucas and the rest of the world realise a cult hit was born. Names like Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2 became household names while Darth Vader became an icon.

Cartoons like Droids and Ewoks soon followed but Star Wars’s popularity dipped in the mid to late 1980s and the Star Wars “novelisations” moved out of mind and out of sight. And then it began all over again. Thanks to Timothy Zahn and his Heir to the Empire novel, people were once again interested in Star Wars.

Over the recent years, Star Wars’s popularity has grown again and given rise to more comics (Dark Horse Comics series), graphic novels, short stories and many novels, with a bulk of them written by sci-fi regulars like Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson and Michael A. Stackpole. Some explored the events before and between the films but most opted to move forward, giving the prominent characters new lives, responsibilities and adventures.

Zahn carefully blended the old with the new, retaining the familiar characters and introducing new ones like Grand Admiral Thrawn, Talon Karrde and Mara Jade in books like Heir to the Empire, while Stackpole concentrated on pilot Wedge Antilles in the X-Wing series. A.C. Crispin, on the other hand, made Han Solo his focus by giving the scruffy-looking scoundrel his very own Han Solo Trilogy which is the never-before-told story of a young Han.

Other stand-alone books include Steve Perry’s Shadows of the Empire, which covers the events that took place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; Tales of the Empire, an anthology of stories from Star Wars Adventure Journal; Tales of the Bounty Hunters, five stories of the Star Wars bounty hunters Boba Fett, Bossk, Dengar, IG-88, Zuckuss and 4-LOM; Tales of the Mos Eisley Cantina, a collection of 16 stories regarding the many denizens in the infamous Star Wars watering hole; and Tales from Jabba’s Palace, stories involving the many characters in Jabba the Hutt’s lair.

Some writers managed to retain most characters’ identities while others floundered. The Star Wars books have also seen many interesting developments over the years, including Leia and Han Solo getting married and starting a new Force-strong family, and Luke Skywalker rebuilding the Jedi Order, starting his own Jedi Academy, training apprentices, and later falling in love and marrying the very woman who tried to kill him, Mara Jade.

One development in the Star Wars saga that didn’t sit well with many die-hard Star Wars fans was R. A. Salvatore’s ambitious (and some say foolish) decision to kill off everyone’s favourite loyal Wookie, Chewbacca, in Vector Prime four years ago. Albeit the hatchet job was done with Lucas’s blessing, Salvatore - known as the man who killed off Chewbacca - did not write any Star Wars books for a while until recently, when he was given the job of writing the Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones novel.

To capture the younger market, the Star Wars franchise later came up with the Junior Jedi Knights series, written mainly by Anderson and Rebecca Moesta and based on the adventures of Han and Leia’s children - Jacen, Jaina and Anakin - and the other Jedi children. The last two Star Wars prequels saw the franchise cashing in further with movie-related books and character diaries making their way into bookstores to target both the adults and children.

Will this seemingly endless production of Star Wars books ever end? Maybe after Episode III or the next set of sequels Lucas is rumoured to be thinking of. It’s all up to the man but for now, fans seem content with the books as new ones keep coming off the printing press to satiate their curiosity and demand.