Lit GENERAL QUESTION THREAD (What to read? Where to start? What's canon? What's not? Duros, etc.)

From time to time I read about Jango and Boba having a honour code but I have never seen it explained what it involves. Do anybody know how the Fetts honour works?

 

There are supposedly living quarters in the Emperor's tower on the Death Star below the throne room level. How is this even possible if the top level is the only one that has rooms protruding off the central shaft, and the central shaft is an open pit that leads directly to the reactor?

 

There's four protrusions from the tower - the throne room is in one, the living quarters are in another:

 

is there a thread about Tony Daniels' autobiography?

 

The little sitting area and weird techno-bed are something separate from the living quarters, though. This is what it says in the Haynes manual: “The royal living quarters and quarters for the Emperor’s personal body guards were located below the throne room.”


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Then they're probably at the foot of the tower, rather than in the tower proper.

 

I haven't seen one here. I did a quick scan of the 'Books'-tagged threads going back to a last post date of Feb 2019. I think you're good to start one if you want.

 

There is much more than just the Radio Dramas, Dooku - Jedi Lost, and Rebel Mission To Ord Mantell.

Here is a complete list of all of the other full-cast audio dramas... (many of these are out of print but easily obtainable on eBay or Amazon Marketplace.)

Tales of the Jedi (1994)
Tales of the Jedi - Dark Lords of the Sith (1996)
Dark Empire (1994) (w/ Billy Dee Williams as Lando)
Dark Empire II (1995)
Empire's End (1996) (only available in the Dark Empire Collector's Set)
We Don't Do Weddings: The Band's Tale (1995)
Nightlily: The Lover's Tale (1995)
Dark Forces - Soldier For The Empire (1997)
Dark Forces - Rebel Agent (1998)
Dark Forces - Jedi Knight (1998)
Crimson Empire (1999)

 

With IG-88 enjoying a moment in the limelight thanks to IG-11's star turn in The Mandalorian, here's a quick question for the old-timers in the audience: anyone remember when and where the term "phlutdroid" was first used? I seem to remember that word being tossed around way, way back in the day - possibly back before WEG, even, and definitely long before the whole "Project Phlut" backstory was established to explain it. Did it appear in the Glut novelization, perhaps, or one of the poster magazines? And what in the world did "phlutdroid" even mean? (I feel like something that weird, with no particular explanation offered for it at the time, somehow had to be a Lucas thing.) Anyone have any insights?

 

Which is really nice.

 

I've been wondering this same thing for over two decades myself, TPF. I think I first noticed it The Movie Trilogy Sourcebook. According to the Wook, the reference first appearanced in Galaxy Guide 3: The Empire Strikes Back by Michael Stern. If that is indeed a correct citation. There's been more than a handful of errors in obscure entries.

 

I think it goes back before that -- I remember it as a thing back in contemporaneous-to-the-OT material. I never did WEG and didn't track the EU super closely after ROTJ, I was just an old-school since-'77 nerd who got back into it way later, and I definitely remember it as one of those really cool "well what the hell is that other than something that sounds great for no reason" SW things. Unless my mind is scrambled, it dates to the early '80s.

 

FWIW, the second edition(1994) of the A Guide to the Star Wars Universe also puts the word Phlutdroid in parentheses in its IG-88 entry, but the only source cited for the entry is ESB.

 

The term does not appear in the first edition of Galaxy Guide 3, unless my eyes are deceiving me. Thanks to Nom von Anor I can confirm that "phlutdroid" dates back to at least 1984...

This comment prompted me to break out my fragile, well-loved copy of Raymond Velasco's first edition Guide to the Star Wars Universe (the one that ten year old me clumsily added my own entries to from my Droid World and Planet of the Hoojibs book and record sets), circa 1984, and "phlutdroid" is there. It cites ESB and the ESB "Official Collector's Edition" as sources, but obviously it's not in ESB and after some research I can now confirm it does not appear in the Official Collector's Edition, the Glut novelization, The Art of Empire Strikes Back, The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook, or The Empire Strikes Back Notebook, all from 1980. So unless it showed up in the poster magazine or a Lucas interview or some other supremely obscure source, Velasco's 1984 Guide seems to be the earliest usage of "phlutdroid." Where he got it from remains a mystery.

Interestingly, Velasco's first edition Guide also states that IG-88 was "leased by its master to anyone who could pay for its services" - the first and only reference I could find in any of that old material to IG-88 having a master (and a reference the later EU clearly ignored). The identity of the master is left unstated. It makes me wonder if Velasco didn't invent little bits of lore here and there to pad out entries that would have been too short otherwise...?

 

Super-interesting. I've always wanted to obtain the 1st edition of the Guide. I see copies of it on eBay for relatively cheap. I never knew it had such a trove of original content until a year or two ago when I saw a blog post on the various diagrams and uber-detailed droid entries. There was definite padding going on. Which I think is cool.

Interestingly enough, I am currently wading through my reading of every entry in the 3rd Edition by Bill Slavicsek, which I've owned for years. I intend to do the same for the 1998 Star Wars Encyclopedia.

 

Very interesting. The second edition of the Guide completely omits that part.

This suddenly brought to my mind a few Dark Empire characters I had seen mentioned in the second edition of the Guide that are nowhere to be seen in Dark Empire itself - not the comic, not the Dark Empire Sourcebook, and not the DE Endnotes. It's as if Slavicsek invented them himself. I've been meaning to ask about them. This might be as good a time as any - if I can remember who those characters were!

EDIT: I found two of them. As far as I can see, there's no mention of either in any of the sources I mentioned above. Could they have originated in the second edition of A Guide to the Star Wars Universe itself?

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Chubb_Scutt

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cycy_Loctob

 

You guys are totally giving me mid-90s flashbacks. The 2nd Edition was my absolute resource after picking it up at the Star Trader at Disneyland one summer. And even then, I remember noticing all of those ancillary Dark Empire characters, and "Phlutdroid."

 

A little more research on the "phlutdroid" thing steered me to Wikipedia (not Wookieepedia), where it is claimed that "phlutdroid" was what IG-88 was called during production. Some online poking around along those lines brought me to The Empire Strikes Back Official Poster Monthly #2, dated June 1980, where we get the following description: "A battered and tarnished war machine, also called the Phlutdroid, IG-88 is amongst the most fearsome of the bounty hunters." And with that, I think we have our winner! And I should have known. I am constantly amazed at how much of the fundamental lore we all take for granted nowadays first emerged out of the pages of those poster magazines. At some point if I get an opportunity I might hit up Rinzler's The Making of the Empire Strikes Back to see if I can confirm that bit about "phlutdroid" used as a production nickname.

 

Whenever I have seen phlutdroid written down I have just read it as pronounced flut. But now knowing ig-88 was called that in TESB production it is obvious that it is pronounced flute droid.
Here is a flageolet flute.

 

Fantastic. I definitely had (probably technically *have*) that poster magazine. And even more oddly, I definitely have the Velasco book, because I just ran across it and my daughter and I had a browse through it, with her amusing herself greatly by stuff like the species names before the species had any names other than those based on Kenner toys. The illustration of a Quarren to go with the absolutely earnest entry "Squid Head" was her favorite. Some hazy Clone Wars history that still managed to be wildly inaccurate was a hit as well.

 

Velasco probably thought, “IG-88 is a droid, so he must have a master.”

 

Absolutely fascinating. I'm glad we were able to track this information down.

I remember another one of those old ESB souvenir magazines having an early script piece, mentioning Sate Pestage, who connects Vader to the Emperor's hologram before their conversation about Luke. I think Sate might have made it as far as the shooting script before the final revision. After that, I think it was either the Dark Empire endnotes or the Dark Empire Sourcebook that revived him.

 

That's great!! From now on I'm calling the IG series Flute Droids.

 

Apparently the scene with Pestage may have even been filmed.


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I wouldn't be that surprised if it was. It's just a shame that we didn't see it as part of the cut footage and alternate takes on the 2011 Blu-rays. There was a surprising amount of stuff in ESB that even I -- with my vaunted Star Wars knowledge -- didn't know about. Like the extended takes and extra dialogue of Han and Leia arguing in Echo Base. All of that stuff blew my mind. And it was incredible to finally see the scene of Luke sending off the droids to Jabba's Palace, cut from the beginning of RotJ.