Lit A Chronological Journey Through the EU: Currently Disc. Interference

It's especially good in the audio drama.

 

Oh, yeah, the audio drama review is going to be awesome.

 

Could someone tell me what's so dumb about the Beast Wars and their origins?

Also, I was totally taken by surprise when the kidnapping was revealed to have been arranged so that the apparent victim could marry who she loved. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that prior to its revelation.

Love. It feels like Star Wars without having movie-level technology.

 

yeah no one gets the joke now

and we've had Soon Baytes since

 

Veitch couldn't write dialogue to save his arm. He's just incapable of writing dialogue that doesn't read exactly like his narration boxes. Mostly because it's just narrating whatever's happening in the panel. It's like comics for people who don't understand pictures. Sort of defeats the point of the form, really. Dark Empire is the exact same way; if you ever actually pay any attention to the dialogue, you realize it all reads exactly like the SWEEPING EPIC voice of the narration and is almost entirely extraneous either due to the art or the actual narration boxes. All the dialogue could be eliminated and replaced with narration boxes, like a silent comic or something, and it would frankly improve the comics. Veitch's dialogue is so stilted, he makes Mike Stackpole look like Ernest Hemingway.

 

Dark Empire would work just with the pictures (it helps that they're @#%$ing gorgeous). Tales of the Jedi, hm... not so much.

 

Tales of the Jedi (Part One)



4,000 BBY

*Okay, so I’m splitting this one up into three parts, because it is an adaptation of Ulic Qel-Droma & the Beast Wars of Onderon, The Saga of Nomi Sunrider and The Freedon Nadd Uprising. The Wookieepedia timeline doesn’t have it on there, but DinoJim does, and he splits it up, so we’ll do it that way.

*So, this time we’ll be talking about the bit that dramatizes Ulic Qel-Droma & the Beast Wars of Onderon.

*There is nothing quite like bad audio drama.

*Okay, you can stop referring to him as “Tott Doneeta.” One name is plenty.

*And if you’ve ever wondered how Twi’leks curse, they say, “By the great Twi’lek Goddess!”

*And if you thought Anakin Skywalker’s “Yippee!” was bad, you’ve got to hear Ulic Qel-Droma’s “Hooray!”

*A woman is required to scream, totally seriously, “My baby! It’s got my baby!” Suffice it to say, Meryl Streep’s got nothing to worry about.

*You know, you’d think it would be hard to say “No,” and sound totally fake and stupid, wouldn’t you? But it can be done. Oh, yes, it can be done. One word can sound stilted and awful, just as much as a whole monologue can.

*That Twi’lek cursing thing? They say that a lot. Just . . . a . . . whole . . . lot . . .

*The Twi’leks are intellectuals who despise violence? Since when? I guess this explains how so many of them end up in organized crime.

*Oh my God . . . the guy playing Ulic Qel-Droma is simply the worst actor I’ve come across in a long, long time.

*Okay, I’ve heard some stuffy British accents in my time, but that air traffic controller just sounds like he needs an enema.

*Okay, that villain could not be more laughable unless he actually said, “ARRRRR, it’s the life of a pirate for me, arrrrr.”

*Funny moment: Queen Amanoa bawls, “I call down the spirit of Freedon Nadd, Dark Jedi, upon your heads.” Kidnapper says, “O . . . kay . . .”

*Okay, if a missile was really going six times the speed of sound, you’d be shot down before you had time to talk about it for five minutes like you idiots do.

*Okay, even by the standards of audio drama, that cheer was just incredibly desultory.

*That’s not how you pronounce “chaotic,” smart one.

*Also, you should all probably reach some kind of consensus on how to pronounce “Onderon” cause this little ‘all saying it different’ method ain’t really working for me.

*Right, this was horrendous. What an awful idea. It’s actually making me think that I underrated the comic because this takes the comic and makes it so much worse. But I suppose even something that’s better than something else can still be worthless.

*CANONICAL STATUS: This retelling of an already fabricated story should obviously be viewed as even more fabricated and corrupted than the original. This work is NOT RECOMMENDED as a historical resource.

0 out of **** stars.

John Whitman

*Okay, next time, it’s back to the Tales of the Jedi Companion to check out another chapter: Sith Reborn! Join me then!

Star Wars Reviews!

 

Veitch had his own style, that's for sure, but his grasp of mythology and memorable characters overcome the sometimes bombastic style of his writing. Arca, Thon, Nomi and Ulic are all strong characters who embody the themes of SW perfectly. If you can find scans of the original DE and TotJ comics they contain essays that expound on the story he's telling. Most of what he created was retconned out because he was the first writer to get started on what became "Legends" which was all based on the West End Games manuals. But it shows how thoroughly he thought everything out. He had an entire "EU" in his mind and to my mind it was more exciting, robust and fun than what came later, and more in line with GL's vision of SW. It's easy to make fun of some of the writing now but for the time Veitch was a really creative choice for the new SW comics line and he really put an enormous amount of thought into what he created. The SW movies aren't exactly known for their sparkling dialogue either, it's all very "on the nose", so I can see where he's coming from. And if you read classical epics like The Iliad etc., while they contain astonishing poetry, the heroes themselves swagger around like high school jocks, boasting and declaiming, it's all very "cartoony". I think that's what Veitch was going for. At least it had balls, unlike the sleepy-time snoozefest that was the Bantam EU era. And compared to Kevin J. Anderson, who took over the 90's KOTOR comics, Veitch was frickin' Shakespeare. But I feel like I'm interrupting a thread designed to make fun of TotJ so I'll leave it there.

 

Dissenting opinions are always welcome! My reviews lean toward making fun of the stuff I don't like, but the best outcome is lively discussion.

 

did the original publication of Tales of the Jedi contain end notes like Dark Empire did?

I have to admit I didn't pick up TOTJ back when it was published because I've always been a Big 3 centric kind of person.

 

I agree that Veitch's dialogue can be inexcusable (I understand what he was going for, I love his stories deeply despite their shortcomings, and I still can find no excuse for some of the stuff he put to paper), but I also agree with EternalHero that he has Star Wars down. Maybe it's a primitive form of Star Wars, but it just feels like the old school pulp adventure-mysticism mix that originally inspired George Lucas.

Looking back at SW as a whole now after the prequels, I can safely say that Veitch out-Star Wars-ed Lucas.

 

I'm kind of on the fence here. I appreciate the prequels for what they are, but I recognize a certain shift of tone. There's things they brought to the franchise that really improved it in my eyes. I think for the most part, my problem with the prequels is how they became a model for the EU. The Jedi order in them kind of sucks, but it's supposed to suck. But the EU didn't get the memo. I can't really say that Veitch is better than them in a tonal or thematic sense, I'd say they're on the same wavelength. But I'm talking deeply about abstract concepts here, the themes and meaning of Star Wars.

 

That's the all important layer where I think Veitch got it "right" for my personal tastes. But I ingest copious amounts of traditional folklore, classical and religious mythology and all that sort of thing, psychological and anthropological analysis of myths and all that, so that's what I like. In SW, for me, that translates into the more "colorful", "weirder" side of GL's imagination (midi-chloriens, Mortis, his take on the Dathomir Witches, the "Yoda Arc" etc).

 

I agree with this 100%. I love how Nomi doesn't turn to the dark side when her husband dies and I love how there's no Jedi organization, but rather a bunch of independent Jedi.

 

I like all those things.

I think the important thing to remember is that the Force is the core concept of Star Wars, and the most important thing about the Force is that it binds all living things. It's not about giving the heroes superpowers. It's a deeply spiritual and numinous aspect of the universe, and too often stories overlook its importance, and/or reduce it to a manichean duality, which is completely missing the fundamental point.

It's important that the duality is ultimately illusory, and the good side isn't defined by its opposition to evil, but its recognition of this fact, this fundamental truth of the Force that dark siders blind themselves to: that the barriers between self and other are as illusory as this "crude matter," that the truth is spiritually all are one. Lucas is pretty hamfisted about this in Episode I; people focus on the midi-chlorians and react as though Episode I is this great betrayal of Episode V, but it's not. Symbiosis sees repetition throughout, and that is precisely what Yoda is talking about spiritually in V.

I'm sure I'll get deep into this in my commentary on The Unifying Force.

 

Oh, I love the prequels, and all the unpopular political themes. That was an important part of the story, and it was done well. It's the end of the Old Republic, and it was done as it should have been done. But for ancient "mythological" stuff, Tom Veitch was the man for the job. And the fact that they didn't let him set the tone for the EU, relying instead on K.J. Anderson and then the prequels, indeed doomed the post-RotJ timeline.

 

I don't know about it dooming the post-ROTJ. The NJO recovered quite nicely... then it was doomed.

 

Yeah, but that was only because the NJO was such a strong idea, and the writers let themselves be carried by it. I think the "prequelification" of the EU was inevitable.

 

Veitch's Sith history makes me extremely nostalgic. One thing that I won't miss about the legends universe is the conflicting Sith histories of Veitch, KJA, GL, Karpyshan, and Avallone. The differences between Veitch's history and KJA's history resulted in Sadow-era TOTJ being disconnected from Kun-era TOTJ.

 

I'm YouTubing the audio drama now. I hope I find even a little bit of it...it sounds hilarious.

 

It's not hard to appear to "get" Star Wars when all you're doing is recycling the movies.