“I thought you knew that, Ken:” A disturbing look back at the Jedi Prince series

Dark greetings, my little mookas! Feast your third eye on this: Topless Robot has mined one of the early Expanded Universe’s proudest moments for a list of the ten crappiest aspects of the Jedi Prince series. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll boggle that some of us actually spent money on this crap.

Personal aside: To this day I can’t see the title Mission from Mount Yoda as anything but Mission to Mount Yoda, thanks to a certain founding member of Club Jade.

19 Replies to ““I thought you knew that, Ken:” A disturbing look back at the Jedi Prince series”

  1. I know I read these, but I honestly have no memory of the plot, whatsoever.

    I blame PTJPD – Post-Traumatic Jedi Prince Disorder.

  2. back when these were collected into 3-book omnibus hardcovers, i bought them, but i don’t think i got very far in reading them. mostly i remember their content from the related entries in Slaviscek’s 3rd Guide.

  3. I saw these in my library when I was about ten. I was like “Ooh, Star Wars!” but then I thought it didn’t look that much like Star Wars. There was a book about Darth Vader’s glove and a mountain named after Yoda, and I passed.

    Somehow the above illustration made me think of The Wizard of Oz.

  4. Didn’t Luke trade in his X-Wing for a Y-Wing in these books? And then install a mattress or something in the back for long distance trips? And occasionally brought the whole gang along somehow in a single-man fighter?

    I want to say I dreamed that all up, but thinking back to other plot points from the Jedi Prince series, it could have happened.

  5. I eagerly await the lost work of Paul and Hollace Davids: Luke Skywalker’s Bitchin’ Space Van.

  6. Ha!

    I can’t help feeling the plot would be a mix between Dude, Where’s My Car & Scooby Doo –with a healthy helping of ABC Afterschool Special: Don’t pollute! Throw out the wrappers from your munchies! Don’t pilot your Y-Wing under the influence!

  7. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t mesh well with the first two. But I’m sure Paul & Hollace could have pulled it off in their patented way.

  8. I was amazed while reading Shadows of Mindor when Stover used the prophets of the dark side…and made it work.

    I really want to read the story of Luke’s bitchin’ space van.

  9. What’s amazing is that these books are still out there and not that hard to find! My eight-year-old son was really excited when he got his hands on a copy of The Glove of Darth Vader at school just a few weeks ago.

    He was a little disappointed once he finally got around to reading it . . . .

  10. I still own all six, though I refuse to reread them because there are far better things to devote my brain space to. :) I seem to remember that the first three or four featured eco-friendly themes – save the whales, save the rainforests, air pollution, etc. And there was Han’s floating mansion on Bespin?

    Mostly I just thought the covers were pretty. Drew Struzan FTW!

  11. You can get copies of this off of Amazon.com for like, 30 cents (plus shipping.)

    Hollace’s other claim to faime is “The Fires of Pele: Mark Twain’s Legendary Lost Journal”

    0_0

  12. Man, I think that the first one was probably the first Star Wars book that I read as a young’un. Before I was really familiar with the movies, really. I couldn’t get enough of the time, finding them endlessly creative and strange.

    Actually, I came across my copies a few weeks ago while packing up my books to move (twenty boxes, for crying out loud) and thumbed through them during a lunch break. And honestly? I can’t say that they’re THAT bad. They’re not Star Wars, certainly, but as a young reader series they’re a fair mix of silly and dark and lightly complex, and they don’t do a bad job of getting their environmental themes across. Most of the characters are fairly well drawn as well, and have something like actual arcs.

    They’re absolutely terrible Star Wars stories though. Let’s not have an illusions about that…

  13. I think these were the books that turned me completley off from the EU until KOTOR came around.

    Even then, whenever someone tells me that the EU is better than the movies/Clone Wars, all I have to do is mention “Jedi Prince” and they concede. Bwaha!

  14. I think all EU fans should be willing to admit that huge chunks of it are utter crap. (It helps, folks! Really!) And Jedi Prince is true bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.

  15. Well, of course huge swathes of the EU are complete crapola. It’s what makes the reading so delightful…am I going to get something good that I can look back on fondly? Or something rubbish that I can snark at, and then probably also look back on fondly but for different reasons?

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