Video: Unboxing Star Wars: Rebels finale ‘Twilight of the Apprentice’, Character Encyclopedia

Unboxing Star Wars 4-15-16 title card

We’ve got a new episode of Unboxing Star Wars! Yowie and I hit the road for the Star Wars Rebels finale screening at Walt Disney Studios and we review ‘Twilight of the Apprentice’. I also check out Star Wars Character Encyclopedia Updated and Expanded by Pablo Hidalgo and Simon Beecroft, from DK. Plus I give a quick review of the first issue of the Poe Dameron comic, while Baby Jawa plays with a new R2-D2 toy and we check out some of the new Star Wars stuff we’ve picked up. And at the end, some Baby Jawa fun time!


Quick reviews
Star Wars Character Encyclopedia Updated and Expanded – Great for everone! Have fun learning tidbits about more than 200 characters and creatures from all the Star Wars films! (and watch for my interview with author Pablo Hidalgo on starwars.com early next week)
‘Twilight of the Apprentice’ – Big thumbs up! When Rebels has a season finale, they pull out all the stops and unload a whole boatload of awesome. (Also, if you haven’t seen it already, I have the entire Q&A from the screening available to watch.)
Poe Dameron #1 – A promising start! I think I’m more interested in who Lor San Tekka is than about Poe on his tail but we’ll see where it goes. Plus BB-8!

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Note: DK provided a copy of Star Wars Character Encyclopedia Updated and Expanded for review.

Video: Star Wars authors Bray, Horton, Kogge and Castellucci at Mysterious Galaxy


Last Thursday, Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego hosted a quartet of Star Wars authors as they counted down for the Force Friday midnight releases. Representing the first stop on DK’s Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know book release tour were three of its authors: Adam Bray, Cole Horton, and Michael Kogge. Rounding out the team was author Cecil Castellucci, who wrote one of the new young adult books, Moving Target, with Jason Fry. Moderating the panel were Richard and Sarah Woloski of the Skywalking Through Neverland podcast.

Video is of the author panel and Q&A session. Revealed at the end of the evening was the announcement that Michael Kogge is the author of the junior novelization of The Force Awakens, coming out in 2016. And if you just want to see some photos of the event, including the induction of the podcast hosts into Rebel Legion, I’ve got a gallery here.

Looking for signed copies of the books? Mysterious Galaxy has you covered! The Absolutely Everything You Need to Know tour picks up again next weekend around the US.

Video: Ultimate Star Wars book tour with Adam Bray and Tricia Barr


To promote their new book, Ultimate Star Wars, DK Publishing has dispatched the four authors across the US on a book tour. I caught up with Tricia Barr and Adam Bray at their talk and signing at the Carlsbad Library in southern California, and ended up moderating the author talk at the library.


After the signing, I was able to sit down with Adam Bray to go more in depth about Ultimate Star Wars and some other upcoming projects. Catch the book tour when it comes to your area!

What will Disney buying Lucasfilm mean for the Star Wars Expanded Universe publishers?

What will happen to the Expanded Universe? Well, it’s too soon to tell, honestly, but a sequel trilogy could certainly mean upheaval in the galaxy far, far away – and the post-Return of the Jedi continuity that’s been in the works for the past several decades. My bare bones advice? It’s time to start hardening yourself to a more fluid concept of continuity and canon. (You might also want to check out IGN’s Joey Esposito’s great post on the 007 approach to continuity.) But it is far, far too soon to speculate about what new Star Wars movies will bring to the party when we don’t know anything about them aside from their basic existence. (Yes, I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on all that later, but one thing at a time!)

One place we can speculate on is who’s going to handling that future in publishing. We’ve seen no indication that Disney is going to shake up the way Lucasfilm works, so we can assume that Lucasbooks will remain the guiding hand. But what of the licensees themselves? They all have contracts, so things will stay as they are for now. But once those contracts are up?

Continue reading “What will Disney buying Lucasfilm mean for the Star Wars Expanded Universe publishers?”

Random House, Penguin may combine publishing divisions

It’s the talk of the publishing world today: Parent companies Pearson and Bertelsmann are discussing combining the publishing houses Penguin and Random House. Together, the two publishers would control more than 20% of the U.S. market,. so antitrust issues are sure to be a concern.

Both companies have Star Wars licenses: Random House’s Del Rey handles the adult Star Wars novels (as is Bantam, which handles the backlist,) while Penguin publishes books for younger readers, mostly based on The Clone Wars. DK is also a part of Penguin.

io9’s Charlie Jane Anders looks at what the merger might mean for the genre as a whole.

EUbits: Upcoming from DK and Dark Horse

Upcoming. StarWars.com has a look at some of DK’s 2011 offerings, including Secrets of the Jedi, which sounds like a kid’s version of The Jedi Path. Also up are the December 2010 comics, including Knight Errant #3 and Legacy: War #1.

Interviews. Nathan P. Butler and Andrew Lupi talk to Shannon McRandle.

Column. EUC’s column this week, about death in the EU, is… gigantic.

Fanmade. A custom Mara Jade Mighty Mugg.

StarWars.com confirms Year by Year and Adventures in Hyperspace

Dan Wallace confirmed the book and shared some additional details on Year by Year with us yesterday, but now StarWars.com has an item on the book – including some early cover art and the addition of Gus Lopez as a writer. They also give us a short Q&A on Adventures in Hyperspace, which is being penned by Scholastic regular Ryder Windham.

We’re still waiting on word of Sean William’s The Old Republic novel – as yet, Sue Rostoni is “unable to either confirm nor deny.” (Don’t panic: That’s pretty standard.) Though audio versions have shown up on RandomHouse.com.