NBC’s upcoming Emerald City already had my attention: put the ripe-for-a-revamp Wizard of Oz into the hands of Tarsem Singh, director of the most beautiful movie ever (that would be The Fall), and I’m 100% there. But Bleeding Cool just reported a bit of news that kicks my enthusiasm up several levels: writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has worked on episodes of the fall series!
DeConnick, for the uninitiated, is the co-creator and writer of Bitch Planet and Pretty Deadly, and the writer who relaunched Captain Marvel in 2012. With her husband, Matt Fraction, she runs a company called Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, and has been dropping occasional hints about television work in the Milkfed newsletter. This weekend, they launched a new website, Milkfed.us, with a panel at HeroesCon. During that panel, DeConnick made the Emerald City announcement, adding that she “got to write for Vincent D’Onofrio,” who plays the Wizard.
Emerald City has a tumultuous history—it’s on its second showrunner, David Schulner, whose track record as a producer is all over the place, from Kings to Dracula. And Singh is a divisive filmmaker, if one rightly known for his stunning visuals. Little is known about the rest of the creative team (though Shaun Cassidy is listed as Schulner’s co-executive producer/writer), but DeConnick’s involvement is incredibly promising. Smart, unabashedly feminist, funny and fierce, she writes character-driven stories across a variety of genres, and her comics often feature an ensemble cast of vibrant, diverse women. If she can bring that sensibility to Emerald City, it’ll be even better than this picture of Florence Kasumba as the Wicked Witch of the East looks.
Emerald City is expected to premiere on NBC in September.
Luke also died in the altercation with the Sand People, cuz Artoo is very worried about him.
I always read the version of the Emperor that the populace learned from the history books, and the one seen in TESB and ROTJ to be a deliberate characterization, so that the people didn’t know that the Emperor was responsible.
Eh, chalk it up to Early Installment Weirdness. Though I do enjoy one of the lines you didn’t mention, the epigraph to the novel:
“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally, they became heroes.” –Princess Leia Organa
Another interesting viewpoint of the original film is the public radio performance of it. It includes the Biggs scenes, a lot more on Tatooine, and really fleshes out the story. It was written by Brian Daley, who also did the great Han Solo series set in the Corporate Sector.
Nothing new here.
The german paperback edition of the early 90s 3-part-omnibus was my first Star Wars book, a few years before the continuation novels, and was exactly the described version. I always knew these “added informations” to the original trilogy.
The reason for the squadron designation color change was that the blue flashings on the “Blue Squadron” X-Wings would have been problematic for the bluescreen model shoot (likewise all of Artoo’s blue ‘trim’ is black in the deathstar sequences shot against a bluescreen).
So Blue Squadron became Red Squadron and Red became Gold. This was obviously a change made late in shooting as most of the pilots in ‘Red’ squadron still have blue Alliance Starbirds on their helmets.
I seriously thought the Journal of the Whills was a real book when I was a child, I even wrote the Library of Congress looking for it.
Mainly because of that Leia line.
You missed the one where Jabba is clearly a humanoid of some sort in his standoff with Han and Chewie in the Mos Eisley spaceport.
#7 He was also cast that way in the film. They shot that scene and later cut it. They used it in the re-release, (Blasphemous as it is), and added the RotJ Jubba.
I suspect you either have or will cover this in another post, but the sequel to this book, Allen Dean Foster’s 1978 “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” is directly related to this book, and not – in any direct sense – the movies. As it was full of Luke/Leia stuff, Vader wackiness, the Force being treated like gravity or magnetism, and basically ties Star Wars to the Cthulhu mythos… it was sadly NOT made into the second movie.
The two books together present a sort of “alternate history” of the Star Wars universe that I really really loved as a kid. The only thing that feels similar is the Marvel Comics Star Wars series from the late 70s and early 80’s, they were totally riffing on this vibe.
Having listened to the public radio version of Star Wars 1.5 times in the last month (I have a 4-year-old), I’ve been meaning to reread the book to see how many of the differences between the radio show and the movie are also in the book. Notably the radio show has scenes of Luke drag racing through Beggar’s Canyon and Leia acquiring the Death Star plans…