Star Wars/Trivia


 * The Star Wars Expanded Universe can be very weird, but the Jedi Prince cycle really takes the biscuit. The Glove Of Darth Vader has Luke Skywalker on a quest to save the whales. The Empire is hunting whales and during the course of this one of them discovers the titular glove. The "save the whales" message is handled with all the subtlety you'd expect. The sequel features a location called Mount Yoda, which sounds like an instruction that might be given in a particularly bad Slash Fic. Other gems include the Tatooine Retirement Home for Aged Aliens and Han and Leia's wedding at which she turns out to be a fembot a la Austin Powers planted by the rebellion to assassinate the Big Bad.
 * The books also feature Triclops, the emperor's crazy three-eyed son, versus Trioculus, the evil three-eyed impostor. And that's not even touching the mofference, or the line "I bid you Dark Greetings!" Or the unintentionally hilarious comic-book sound effects used in lieu of description. Even the dullest read could be sent into laugh-out-loud territory with this. When a scene is set up to prove how cruel and ruthless the BBEG is by shooting one of his lieutenants, "ZAP!" kind of detracts.
 * They've done some industrial-strength Retcon to fit it in. Notably the events don't take place over the five years the authors originally proposed, but over a single year, and are described as being of little importance. The Empire of Jedi Prince, the Moffs having their Mofference on the Moffship and all, were just another faction of many trying to overthrow Isard.
 * Wookieepedia really adopted the name "Mofferences" for its periodic IRC meetings, exactly because it was found to be So Bad It's Good. It's even customary to begin the meeting with "I bid you all Dark Greetings!", which is itself spoofed, like here or here.
 * There are two major fan organizations of cosplayers - the 501st Legion, aka "Vader's Fist", is composed of people who make and wear the various "villain" costumes. They take letter-number designations, the letters reflecting their costumes - someone who wore a stormtrooper costume would take the prefix "TK", for example. In reaction to the 501st, the Rebel Legion was formed. There is significant overlap between the two, and they're the next thing to professional in keeping standards.
 * The Star Wars Expanded Universe has reverse-Defictionalized the 501st. Timothy Zahn, whose Imperials are basically a Badass Army, has used them in Survivor's Quest and Allegiance, where they are Vader's personal legion, the best of the best, possibly the only suboordinates he values. The clones who invaded the Jedi Temple with pre-Mustafar Darth Vader were in the 501st. Perhaps most flattering of all, Star Wars Battlefront II reveals that almost every Clone Trooper and Stormtrooper in the Star Wars movies, from Geonosis to Hoth, is a member of the 501st.
 * The Star Wars Clone Wars series actually covers the formation of the unit, even if only by mention.
 * They are also mentioned in The Force Unleashed.
 * The infamous "Hello Kitty Vader" is actually a photoshop of a 501st member's white Vader.
 * In Outbound Flight, there is a female Chiss admiral in white whose name is Ar'alani. A few years before the book was written, Zahn met and eventually became friends with a fangirl named Ari Roselani. When they met, Roselani was cosplaying as Mitth'raw'nuruodo (better known as Thrawn), a male Chiss admiral in white.
 * Noriyoshi Ohrai's poster designs for the promotion of the movies in Japan are so popular that other countries have adopted the same design.
 * Hey It's That Voice: Also overlaps with The Other Darrin: Many countries has dubbed the whole original trilogy in the respective languages more than once: The worst offender are the Japanese versions, since only just the first movie was dubbed about six times, and excluding the upcoming Blu-Ray version (and with different voice actors) since the original trilogy was broadcasted by many Japanese networks in the past. This is adverted with the prequels, since George Lucas wanted a consistent voice cast between all the movies, regardless the network or media format.
 * Refitted for Sequel: Considering the immensity of the Star Wars universe, a lot of ideas get recycled. A New Hope was to feature a ground battle at the Rebel base on Yavin, which was later adapted to the Battle of Endor (a similar forested planetoid) in Return of the Jedi.
 * What Could Have Been:
 * Word of God stated that Obi Wan Kenobi was originally written for Toshiro Mifune, veteran of Akira Kurosawa classics like Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai; this was a reverent way to directly pay tribute to the Samurai films that Star Wars was adapted from.
 * Many things were considered over the years, considering the vastness of the franchise. A major thing to consider is that George Lucas originally wanted to serve as a mere supervisor as nine films were made under different directors, and looking forward to seeing how the franchise evolved with different people Running the Asylum. As things continued on (Possibly due to a disasterous incident of "leaving it in someone elses hand") he took more direct control of The Verse. The more recent Star Wars television productions seem to be him trying to salvage what was left of that original intent.
 * In the Leigh Brackett first draft script of Empire, Vader and Anakin were two separate people; Anakin showed up to Luke as a kindly Force Ghost. Also, Luke's twin sister was not Leia but someone else, a girl called Nellith who was mentioned but never seen, in an obvious Sequel Hook.
 * The basic story of the original trilogy was intended as a single movie, beginning with the hero's journey to become a Jedi and ending with the defeat of the Empire with the destruction of the Death Star. Realizing how immense that project would be, Lucas opted to not tell the defeat of the Empire in a single movie but keep the destruction of the Death Star (which is why the Death Star II came into play as well as another forest planet being involved). Lucas also coalesced the backstory notes into what became the foundation for the prequel trilogy, deciding that an entire trilogy happened before the original films. In each trilogy, the story grew far beyond the original intention.
 * Much of this is covered in Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, which painstakingly goes over documentation from the very earliest days of the project to show how Lucas developed and transformed his original vision, especially the idea that Luke's father and Darth Vader were two different people.
 * Animator Nelson Shin (Who would later become the executive producer of the original Transformers cartoon and found AKOM) was the creator of the famous Lightsaber effect for the first film. Later films have it done in-house at ILM.