May the Force Be With Them

"My Old Kentucky Home" (Stephen Foster) just played, kicking off the Kentucky Derby. You expect that, with such a good song and with such a phenomenon, the singing would be mellifluous, voices raised along with mint juleps, Southern accents stirred with old-lady church-hymn mezzos. Alas, despite the Derby pedigree, the timid, off-key tune was sad to hear. Mine That Bird, thankfully, made up for it.

It's funny how, in the midst of such a magnificent enterprise, some things seem to really undermine its integrity. I wrote a paper on novelizations and movie tie-in editions of books earlier this week. Scouring the library for samples, I stumbled across an adaptation of Star Wars, from 1974, in the YA section. Authored by George Lucas, like the screenplay. As with "My Old Kentucky Home," I remembered this from my childhood. The nostalgia's faded. The movie and its (two) sequels are timeless, but all those spin-offs?

It was released in 1976, to amp up excitement for the original movie. Yes, the original, when it was just called Star Wars. Before the scroll read "Episode IV" and "A New Hope." Back in the days when Darth Vader was not Luke's father, Yoda existed only in Lucas' brain, and Greedo shot first.

It starts out well enough with our first sight of Tatooine:

It was a vast, shining globe and it cast a light of lambent topaz into space--but it was not a sun. Thus, the planet had fooled men for a long time. Not until entering close orbit around it did its discoverers realize that this was a world in a binary system and not a third sun itself.

The epigraph, from Princess Leia Organa, also hits the right note for this gun-smokin' spacechaser--the ultimate B-movie:

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes."

But after page four, there are embarrassing passages. Even when I read this when I was ten (and no, I was not a sci-fi geek), I wondered about this interlude in the Obiwan-Darth Vader showdown:

"You sense only a part of the Force, Darth," Kenobi murmured with the assurance of one to whom death is merely another sensation, like sleeping or making love or touching a candle.

Novelizations bring up the question of canon. Can we safely ignore anything we learn from the book that's not from the film, such as Kenobi's knowledge of making love when he's been a solitary Jedi all his days? Then again, there are deleted scenes when Luke actually visits the Toshi station, and not to buy power converters. The Biggs/Luke subplot informs the film, though not when we have to slog through lines like this:

"Uncle Owen was pretty upset. He grounded me for the rest of the season."

Just how old is Luke these days? And there are redundant adverbs all over the place: Luke snorts "derisively," Biggs sighs "sadly." Some other moments, like Han's encounter with Jabba, work better than the book. Even though Jabba "jumped" when Han came in the room (can you picture that?), Han at least doesn't step on his tail or call Jabba "a wonderful human being" before the Hutt and his quadruple chins slime away.

I'm going to excuse the novelization in general. It's tough freelance work: writers generally get $5000 to $10,000 with no royalties, with a two-week deadline to expand 120 pages of a screenplay into a 300-page novel. Basically, they triple the size of each script page with interior reflection or authoritative narration or an expanded setting. Or, in a poor moment, mental disintegration that all transpires within seconds (when the sand people attack Luke):

Luke tried to view his situation objectively, as he had been instructed to do in survival school. Trouble was, his mouth was dry, his hands were shaking, and he was paralyzed with fear. With the Raider in front of him and a probably fatal drop behind, something else in his mind took over and opted for the least painful response. He fainted.

His maladroit uncle sent him to survival school? See what I mean about canon. Should I believe this as background, or as a deadline-driven novelist's fabrication? For what it's worth, the Han-Greedo incident is rendered as just "light and noise," no more elucidation. Despite that low-brow, wash-your-hands-afterwards feeling (on par with the Lifetime movie and the Real World reunion special), the novelization could be worse. And let's clear up a myth: this book was ghostwritten. If only George Lucas' dialogue for Attack of the Clones had been.