Star World, Nothing But Star World: Snowflake the Magic Clown and Bob Perry’s Wheelstanding Dragsters

Jonathan writes:

In the years following the release of the original Star Wars, there was a frenzy to ride the wave of popularity generated by the film. Many opportunists chose to use "Star World" to brand their unlicensed products or promotions.

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Introduction to Star World

My first action figure case was an unlicensed Star World Figure Case produced by the Tara Toy Corporation. I vividly remember getting that thing and being somewhat ungrateful because it wasn’t an authentic case made by Kenner. Now, many years later, I have a different appreciation for the weirdness of it. While I saved most of my childhood toys, sadly that case is long gone. I don’t recall if it was a victim of its flimsy nature, or if it was sold at a yard sale.

This case is from the collection of Erik Janniche.

If you want to know more about the Star World Figure Case and early unlicensed action figure cases, I recommend this blog post authored by Jason Thomas.

At the bottom left corner of the case image, the text reads "STAR WORLD IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF M.A.C. MFG. CORP.  used by permission."

Not surprisingly, I can’t find any evidence of such a trademark in a search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office database. If your sleuthing skills are better than mine, please share what you find.

M.A.C. did produce at least two toys that utilized the same Star World name and logo as the figure case. One is a paper yo-yo called the Space Sword. This one is also from the collection of Erik Janniche.

The other toy produced by M.A.C. under the Star World brand is the Space Ship, which is a triangular foam flyer. The round backer card features nice renderings of a TIE Fighter and a couple Y-Wing Fighters. This one is from the collection of Pete Vilmur.

As I alluded to in the intro, M.A.C. was certainly not alone in their use of “Star World” as a way to avoid infringing on the Star Wars trademark. I’m going to devote the remainder of this post to covering a few other early, and unrelated, uses of the Star World name.

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Snowflake’s Star World Show

A few years ago, I picked up this advertising poster for Snowflake’s Star World Show.

It was one of those auction listings that I stumbled upon, and kept passing on as it continued to go unsold. But, I eventually pulled the trigger and haven’t regretted that decision. I mean, look at this thing. It features an old-school (non-killer) clown and touts an exciting new family show featuring “Snowflake the Magic Clown,” and Chubbacca Jr. in an out-of-this-world magic and fun show.

Who wouldn’t want to see the floating U.F.O., the crazy outer space washing machine, Chubbacca’s escape, or Elmer the amazing blue droid?

The poster is approximately 15 x 20". It doesn’t translate all that well in the scan, but the image is silver on black, which makes it pretty sharp looking in person.

Snowflake the Clown was the character of Richard Snowberg, who was employed by the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Snowberg was apparently a clown of some renown. He was involved in teaching the art of clowning and authored several books on the topic.

In the summer of 1978, public libraries in the State of Wisconsin adopted Star Worlds at the Library as the theme for their summer reading program. This article from the June 18, 1978 edition of The La Crosse Tribune features photos of costumed youth at the Onalaska Branch of the La Crosse County Library.

This photo, from the July 9, 1978 edition of Baraboo News Republic shows three happy recipients of "I'm a Star Person" pinback buttons from the reading program.

This article, from the July 15, 1978 edition of The La Crosse Tribune describes a pair of appearances by Snowflake the Magic Clown at the La Crosse Public Library that were part of the Star Worlds reading program.

It's not clear if the Snowflake shows that were part of the library program were Star World themed or not, but Snowflake would go on to use Star World Show as the name of a series of recurring performances that continued at least into the summer of 1980. It seems that this was a family affair. This article from the July 2, 1979 edition of The Oshkosh Northwestern notes that Chubbacca Jr. was portrayed by Snowberg’s son Eric (then 8), with Star Patrol member portrayed by Snowberg’s other son David (then 6).

This photo from the July 5, 1979 edition of The Oshkosh Northwester features Snowflake, Chubbacca Jr., and (I suspect) Star Patrol member David, who would later be billed as David the Astronaut.

This advertisement from the June 22, 1980 edition of The La Cross Tribune, nearly a year later, features the Star World Magic Show with an appearance by all three characters at the Home Savings & Loan Association.

In the years since acquiring the poster, I’ve been hoping to add other items related to Snowflake’s Star World Show to my collection, but haven’t had any luck in that pursuit. But, as they say, a lot of the fun of collecting is in the search.

As if a Star Wars themed magic clown show wasn’t weird enough, meanwhile, an entirely different (and unrelated) Star World show was transpiring at race tracks, shopping malls, and car dealers across North America.

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Bob Perry’s Star World Wheelstanding Dragsters

In my pursuit of Snowflake’s Star World Show material, I came across this cool oval-shaped belt buckle. It features the Star World logo and a strangle-looking vehicle surrounded by stars and planets.

If you look closely at the vehicle, you will see that it is called "Death Ship."

The back side of the buckle is pretty goofy looking.

The buckle is dated 1978 and is noted as a "reality by Bob Perry." It is a relief to know that this is a genuine bona fide "Collectors Item."

The Death Ship is a wheelstanding dragster. A wheelstander races in the wheelie position, with its front wheels lifted high in the air. Based on this article from the June 9, 1978 Tucson Citizen, Death Ship was designed by Bob Perry and debuted at the American Hot Rod Association (AHRA) Tucson National Open on June 10, 1978.

As referenced in the article, at the time, Bob Perry was well known for his earlier wheelstander named "Hell on Wheels" which looked like a tank. The article notes that Perry was still working on a "good guy" dragster named Galaxy, when the Death Ship made its debut.

This advertisement from the August 13, 1978 Chicago Tribune promotes upcoming appearances by Chewbacca, Darth Vader and the Bob Perry Star World Space Ships.

These clippings with rather crude renderings of Vader and Chewie are from the September 28, 1978 and September 29, 1978 editions of The Arizona Republic.

The characters are the same as those from the Chicago area appearance about six weeks prior, however Darth Vader is now billed as "Death Raider," while Chewbacca is billed as "Tobokka." For the most part, these are the character names that will remain in use moving forward.

This clipping from the November 17, 1978 Wisconsin State Journal advertises upcoming appearances in Madison, Wisconsin. By that point in time, the Star World cast of characters had grown. Joining Death Raider and Tobokka were Lance Sky, QO 1000 Robot, Star Trooper and Princess Scherleis. The appearance also featured the Death Ship dragster and the Galaxy II dragster with R3D3 1000.

This appearance at O'Rielly Chevrolet was advertised in the December 24, 1978 edition of the Arizona Daily Star. Here, the Vader character is billed as "Death Rader," but I think that's simply a typo.

The character and vehicle appearances continued into 1979. This advertisement from the March 29, 1979 Kingsport Times is for an appearance at the Kingsport Mall where Star World is described as "A Space Odessey [sic] For All Earthlings."

Fortunately, this advert gives us an albeit fuzzy image of what the characters looked like. I don't know about you, but I think these characters look kind of terrifying. Tobakka looks sort of like a cross between the Yeti and Dr. Zaius.

The advert mentions the availability of Star Worlds "souvenirs," which presumably would have included the belt buckles. It would be interesting to know what else was available.

This article from the April 6, 1979 Florence Morning News previews an appearance as the pre-race entertainment for the upcoming CRC-Chemical Rebel 500 NASCAR race.

This is the Program from the Rebel 500. 

As you can see, the race is not celebrating the fictional Rebellion against the Empire, but rather the rebellion of the Confederacy against the United States of America.

Inside the program, there is a nice feature article about the "Star Wars Invasion."

Notably, the Vader vehicle is listed as "Death Ship II." I'm not clear whether or not that dragster is actually a second version of the vehicle, or if this is an error. I suspect the latter.

I was able to track down these period photos of the Death Ship and Galaxy II vehicles at the Rebel 500 with annotations on the reverse side, presumably by the photographer.

As you can see in the Death Ship photo, the Vader dragster is labeled simply Death Ship (not Death Ship II). The Galaxy II photo includes copilot R3D3 1000.

The Star World wheelstanders crossed the border into Canada. This pair of clippings is from an appearance about a month later at the Napierville International Speedway in Québec. The clippings are from the May 5, 1979 editions of The Gazette [Montreal] and the Montreal Star.

I pieced this article together over a long period of time as I gathered the few things that I’ve been able to track down. All of the newspaper clippings and advertisements came from digital archive research.

I took the Death Ship belt buckle to a recent collector gathering and showed it off to some friends. One collector that I showed it to was Vinny Tricomi. After we chatted about it, he was able to find a second belt buckle for the Galaxy II car and add it to his collection.

Needless to say, I'd love to find another one of the Galaxy II belt buckles to pair up with my Death Ship buckle. I'm sure there are also other related items waiting to be discovered.

These Star World items are pretty far outside my normal areas of interest in collecting, but it's nonetheless proven to be a really fun area to pursue.

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Special thanks to Erik Janniche, Pete Vilmur and Vinny Tricomi for sharing images of items from their collections.

The Name of the Game is Residuals: George Lucas and his Father

Ron writes:

 A while back, while searching a digital archive for newspaper articles related to Kenner's Star Wars toy line, I came across an interesting article about George Lucas.

Its source was the Modesto Bee, Lucas' hometown newspaper; and since it was published on October 16, 1977, it understandably dealt with the filmmaker's extraordinary success with Star Wars, released the previous summer.

The hometown aspect of it made it somewhat unique. It had a personal quality that most articles about Lucas don't approach. 

I mean, it was even illustrated with a photo of Bonnie Jameyson, Lucas' cousin, whom the image shows inhabiting a venue stacked high with the commercial relics of her famous family member's recent triumph -- a sure sign I'd found an interesting article.

Cousin aside, the most arresting aspect of the piece (authored by Fred Herman) was its focus on Lucas' father, George, Sr.

According to various sources, including Dale Pollock's authoritative Skywalking, George, Sr. was a formative influence on Lucas and his career. It was he who inspired Lucas to make of his filmmaking a business, and thereby fully control the fruits of his labor. But the elder Lucas served as a negative influence, too; for Little Georgie -- that's what they called him in those days -- wanted nothing more than to escape a life chained to the office-goods store founded by his namesake. 

Ever the conventional businessman, George, Sr. had a low opinion of Hollywood.

"I didn't want [Lucas] to go into that damn movie business," he was quoted as saying in Skywalking. "I fought him." 

"My father thought I was going to turn into a beatnik," opined Lucas. "He was still hoping I'd take over the [family] business. It was one of the few times I can remember really yelling at my father, screaming at him, telling him no matter what he said, I wasn't going into the business." 

George, Sr. interpreted his son's desire to go his own way as the upshot of resentment. "The damn kid won't even work for me," he explained to a friend, "after I've built this business up for him."

I don't think Old Man Lucas was trying to be a jerk. He just didn't understand his son. He couldn't get on his wavelength. 

As it turned out, George Lucas' efforts at movie making were pretty successful. Indeed, perhaps no one has more skillfully interwoven the art of filmmaking and the business particulars that undergird it. 

Yessir, Lucas did it his own way -- with his own money, via his own purpose-built studio, and with technology developed by firms that he controlled. 

Really, Lucas' story is one of the great American can-do narratives. Even as a child I recognized the famously bearded filmmaker as the last exemplar of a classic American type: the iconoclastic Yankee tinkerer who builds an empire on his own terms, and gets rich doing it -- a kind of movie-industry version of Henry Ford.

Our article captures Lucas on the cusp of achieving that empire. 

But though he was fast becoming an emperor, George Lucas still had a dad, and he had something to say about his son's achievements. Lucas may have succeeded in segregating himself from the annoyances of Hollywood, but not from his father's opinions. Or, I suspect, his influence.

And that's probably why the article tickles me: It reveals the very human ways in which our relatives' expectations overlap with personal realities. It also shows how personalities can diverge in ways uncomfortably (and somewhat touchingly) human, even among people whose genetics are similar.

As stated above, George, Sr. didn't think much of movies -- or of the arts in general. And yet he appreciated his son's success in his own peculiar way, and with an uncommon astuteness.

The above excerpt demonstrates that George, Sr., ever the numbers-minded business owner, cannily predicted that Star Wars would bring in billions of dollars. 

He probably wasn't thinking of sequels here, but rather of the combined return of ticket and merchandise sales generated by the first film in the franchise.

Sure enough, elsewhere in the piece, George, Sr. expounded on the finer points of merchandising, proudly explaining how the corporation controlled by his son would benefit from the novel licensing deal negotiated with Fox.

One can visualize the family vignette preceding the elder Lucas' grasping of his son's famous licensing coup: Lucas quietly explaining to his father, perhaps at the dinner table, that, as the owner of Star Wars Corp., he stood to earn untold millions on the back of merchandise related to his weird little space film. 

Vivid, too, is the effect this realization must have had on George, Sr. Finally, here was an aspect of his son's involvement in movies to which he could relate -- its business potential. 

Perhaps George, Sr. didn't grasp the appeal of THX 1138, American Graffiti, or Star Wars. But residuals, those he understood; and as the implications of the deal became clear to him, his son's business savvy was something he took pride in.

Yet, ever the dad, he couldn't help but criticize. 

His son had been smart enough to obtain the right to merchandise his film. Yet somehow, in the mind of father Lucas, Little Georgie didn't quite grasp the implications.

Look, I gotta call BS on this criticism, and the elder Lucas' claim that his son was clueless as to his take related to Star Wars. 

I suspect Lucas knew exactly what percentage he was getting. 

But it's the way of parents -- fathers in particular -- to find fault. Often, this is nothing more than their means of bridging an interpersonal gap. They criticize so they can give advice, and be involved in our lives.

Criticism aside, the popularity of Star Wars was tangible to George, Sr. It was a thing from which he could extrapolate financial value.

OK, so the above quotes hit a bit differently now that The Mandalorian and Grogu made all of three dollars at the international box office. [1]

Regardless, they constitute another canny prediction from George, Sr. 

For nearly 50 years his son's creation was a cultural staple, as familiar in its time as were Disney's animated films in theirs. And George, Sr. recognized it immediately.

As the below excerpt demonstrates, he also recognized the drag on earnings created by the percentages on the gross of Star Wars promised by Lucas to the film's key constituents.

But, for me, the most notable bit of the passage is the characterization of George, Sr. as the voluble antithesis to his notoriously reticent son.

"Father Lucas . . . enjoys talking as much as his son enjoys hiding from the press" is one of those passages whose pithiness belies its eloquence.

It may be the article's most human bit; for we've all known guys whose personalities differ radically from those of their fathers -- and yet they're noticeably their fathers' sons.

George Lucas, the filmmaker-businessman par excellence, inherited (or perhaps just learned) his father's business acumen. But he fought against it, too. And maybe in that conflict lies the source of the sensibilities that brought distinction to his life.

At the end of Return of the Jedi, when Luke saves his father (or does his father save him?), the power of the moment lies not in its sturm und drang, but in the recognition of what in each man depended on the other.

It's a recognition worth considering on Father's Day.

If you'd like to read the rest of the article, see below for its concluding page.

Notes:

[1] I'm being generous; reportedly, it lost money.

50 for '76: An Interview With James Van Hise

James Van Hise and Mark Hamill at MidAmeriCon in the Star Wars Display Room 1976 (Photo by James Van Hise)

 Danny writes:

 Some might not recognize the name James Van Hise, but comic book and sci-fi fans who were around in the '70s and '80s will remember his publications. Jim published several different fanzines covering everything from Tarzaan to Star Wars. During the Original Trilogy era, Jim was the editor and publisher for the Rocket Blast Comics Collector. RBCC’s articles on Golden Age books and their creators did for comic collectors what the SWCA does for Star Wars collectors today. In 1983, he published The Art of Al Williamson, which won an Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con. Van Hise also created and edited the Star Trek fan magazine Enterprise Incidents and wrote reference guides for Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

Star Wars fans most likely have heard of James Van Hise because when he attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City in 1976, MidAmeriCon, he interviewed a little known actor named Mark Hamill about his upcoming science fiction movie. That interview would eventually be published in a special Star Wars issue of RBCC in 1977.

In my last article, I covered Charley Lippincott’s Star Wars presentations at three science fiction conventions in the summer of 1976. For this article, I interview James Van Hise and hear his recollections about what it was like to see those presentations. Jim was gracious enough to let me speak with him for over thirty minutes to talk about comics, fanzines and MidAmeriCon. 

Danny Katzel: Tell me about yourself growing up and how you got involved in the world of comics and fanzines in the early '70s.

James Van Hise: I started buying comics in the early 1960s. My father brought home a comic book when I was sick, which I still have. It was an old Showcase Comic with characters called The Sea Devils. And I started slowly buying comics after that and then bought them regularly.

DK: I'm sure you went through them many, many times till they fell apart. Were there any particular comic books that you really focused on? Were you more of a Marvel guy or a DC guy?

JVH: I liked books from both companies. For Marvel, I liked books from Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange.  DC – I liked The Flash, and Adams Strange in Mystery In Space.

DK: How did you get involved with the fanzine Rocket Blast Comic Collector? Eventually working your way up to editor/publisher?

JVH: Well first, I started out as a subscriber, it must have been in ‘64 or ‘65. Then I moved to Florida and got to meet the publisher, G.B. Love. Then, I moved to Miami and I got a job working for him. I worked for him for four years and then I took over as editor in 1974.

DK: In the summer of 1976 before you attended MidAmeriCon in Kansas City, you and Don Rosa, who was also working on RBCC at the time, put on your own comic convention, OmniCon, in Louisville, Kentucky.  

JVH: It was just something we talked about and decided to do.  

DK: Were you still living in Florida at the time? Why did you choose Louisville for the location of your convention?

JVH: I was still in Florida. I had to fly to Louisville to work on the convention with him. That was where [Don Rosa] lived at the time. In fact he still lives in Louisville. You can find interviews with him on YouTube where he talks about collecting comics. He still has comics from many years ago. Of course, then he started drawing comics.

DK: Right.

JVH: Mostly Uncle Scrooge comics.

DK: Exactly. I met Don several times at various conventions and I have some sketches that he did where he made homages to famous comic book covers, but with the Duck Tales characters.

JVH: Well, that's great that you got those, because I know he doesn't draw like he used to, because he developed eye problems. 

DK: Yeah, this was probably in the '90s. 

Looking at the guest list for OmniCon, there were some great artists there like Frank Brunner and Michael Kaluta, and actor DeForest Kelley who played Dr. McCoy on Star Trek. How were you able to wrangle those guests?

JVH: Well, as I recall, we paid the artists like traveling expenses. And DeForest Kelley had a flat fee that he charged, because that's mostly what he was doing in the early '70s, was going to conventions.  They didn't start up Star Trek again until 1979. He only had minimal acting work over those years.

DK: After OmniCon, you attended MidAmeriCon in Kansas City. Did you attend as a fan or was it strictly business for RBCC? 

JVH: I attended as a fan. Well, first I went to San Diego Comic-Con. I attended that first in '75 and then again in '76, which is when Charley Lippincott gave his first presentation. And then I went to the World Science Fiction Convention.

DK: So you went to both! You saw the Star Wars presentation twice!?

JVH: And it was interesting, I remember at MidAmeriCon, he told the whole plot of the movie, because they were trying to get the word out to fans to tell people what it was. So they didn't want to hold anything back. Of course, five months before the movie came out, they released the novelization, so people knew what the story was going to be anyway.

DK: I remember listening to your interview with Mark Hamill, and you were talking about Owen and Beru being killed, and rescuing the princess from the Death Star - just spoiling the entire movie. It's a completely different world these days.

JVH: They were just trying to get as much information out as they could. Nobody had any idea; there had never been a hit science fiction movie before. I mean, there had been science fiction movies like Planet of the Apes and 2001 [A Space Odyssey]; 2001 took seven years to break even, so studios were still leery. It was only after Star Wars was a big hit that suddenly it was important to make science fiction movies.

DK: So you didn't know anything about Star Wars until, I guess, the San Diego Comic-Con.

JVH: Right.

DK: What did you think about it at that point?

JVH: Oh, well, it sounded interesting. I was looking forward to it. At San Diego Comic-Con, it was still almost a year away. That's when they gave out those posters that Howard Chaykin did.

DK: I know that you had Mark sign your poster at MidAmeriCon. Did you buy a second poster, or did you take your San Diego poster to Kansas City?

JVH: I must have taken it to Kansas City, because that was where I first met Mark, was in Kansas City. 

DK: He wasn't at San Diego, because they were still filming principal photography.

JVH: Yeah. Charley Lippincott was in San Diego, but the WorldCon is where Mark Hamill was, and they had the Star Wars room that people could go to.

DK: Was that open during the whole convention? So attendees could go and look at the displays?

JVH: It was basically open all day long. Once in a while, it would be closed, because the people running would need to go to lunch and stuff like that. But other than that, it was open every day during convention hours.

DK: Do you remember what other people, or you yourself, felt when you were seeing the displays or watching the presentation?

JVH: Well, I mean, they had all the posters of Ralph McQuarrie artwork, and thought, wow, this looks terrific. I hope the movie's as good as all this artwork.  And, of course, they had the mannequins of Darth Vader,  C-3PO and R2-D2, so when Charley described the film, we would understand who these characters were.

[Editor's note - According to Craig Miller's book Star Wars Memories, these were actually production-made, and likely screen-used costumes and props on display. "There were signs posted indicating the costumes and props were replicas but all of these items were actually used in the film...Gary Kurtz was concerned someone might try to steal something if they thought it was screen used at the time" (p. 18) - DK]

DK: Did they give the presentation in the same room as the display?

JVH: No, the presentation was in one the auditoriums where the convention would have panels. Charley and the other people with him were basically panelists.

DK: For that panel, it was Charley, Mark Hamill and Gary Kurtz.

JVH: Yeah.

Screen used Darth Vader costume and Ralph McQuarrie concept art prints on display in the Star Wars Room. The sign says "Test mock-up" but it was the real costume. (Photo by James Van Hise)

Screen used R2-D2 and C-3PO on display in the Star Wars Room.The sign says "Test mock-up" but they were real. (Photo by James Van Hise)

DK: Do you remember how well attended the Star Wars presentation was?

JVH: Well, I mean, this was in '76. This was before conventions became gigantic, so, there were probably a couple hundred people in there.

DK: Did you think, wow, this is a packed room? 

JVH: I think it was a standard panel attendance where people come to the convention to go to panels and see pros. And, oh, here, they're promoting this movie that we started hearing about. The whole reason they were doing these convention appearances was to get the word out to fandom so they would tell people who weren't at the convention what they saw.

Of course, it was in early '77 when they had the first trailer for Star Wars that they started showing at conventions.

DK: At no point in time were you watching this presentation thinking, "This is going to be the next Forbidden Planet and 2001 put together," right?

JVH: No, no, it was just like, "This looks good. I hope it's good." I was living in Miami then. And in Miami, the movie opened about three weeks after it opened in other parts of the country. And by then, they were doing reports on the evening news about Star Wars. And they showed that famous first scene in the movie. That would show that this was something new.

DK: You interviewed Mark Hamill for Rocket Blast. Was that planned ahead of time? How did you work that out?

JVH: No, I don't think I knew he was going to be at the convention. When I saw that he was, you know, he knew who I was. So I just set up an interview with him, which we did in the Star Wars Room.

Mark Hamill in front of Star Wars Banner in the Star Wars Room at MidAmeriCon 1976.  This banner is now on display at Rancho Obi-Wan. (Photo by James Van Hise)

DK: How did he know who you were?

JVH: Oh, because he's a fan. He collected comics. He was collecting comics before then. Even now, people talk about, "Oh yeah, I sold this Golden Age comic to Mark Hamill in San Diego."

DK: Wow! I remember going through your interview with Mark and you're asking lots of questions about the special effects. Was it clear from the presentation that Star Wars was going to have these revolutionary special effects?

JVH: No. They had stills and, of course, the Ralph McQuarrie artwork. But, I mean, if you've seen, like, behind the scenes retrospectives about Star Wars, most of the special effects were done in late '76 and early '77.

DK: Yeah, I think at that point, ILM only had two shots finished out of 365 or so. But [the panelists] didn't mention that a new camera system was being invented in order to do all these never-before-seen special effects?

JVH: No, I mean, George Lucas was making the movie overseas in Tunisia and in England. Finally, he got back to the United States and discovered they had almost nothing done on special effects. And he said, "This movie's coming out in six months. We have to get all of this done." I mean, he was close to a nervous breakdown. I think he had to be hospitalized once for exhaustion.

DK: You interviewed Mark in September of '76, but your special Star Wars issue of RBCC with that interview didn't come out until a year later in the fall of '77. Why did you withhold publication of that interview for so long?

JVH: Well, I was waiting to see the movie. Artists had to see the movie before they could draw anything for the issue. 

Luke Skywalker portrait in RBCC #137 (Art by Monica Miller)

DK: So, you knew when you were at MidAmeriCon that you would make a special Star Wars issue?

JVH: I wasn't sure yet. I interviewed him, and I probably decided, well, let's wait until the movie opens so they know who this Mark Hamill guy is. You know, that kind of thing.

DK: How did you rope all the other contributors into that special Star Wars issue, and were they all regular contributors?

JVH: Well, a lot of them were people I had already been doing work with, and once the movie came out, we were able to plan things like, you know, doing the parody of Star Wars.

First page of "Star Woes" parody comic in RBCC #137 (Art and story by Ronald Wilber)

DK: As the editor and publisher, how much say did you have to direct each person on what to write or were they pretty much free to do whatever they wanted?

JVH: Well, they pretty much would do the drawings they wanted to. Ralph Fowler did that center spread of the X-Wing, and in order to do that, he saw the movie several times, and he would do sketches when he was in the theater. Because there were no photos of the X-Wing in the trench at that time, that was months later before they started releasing important scenes from the film as photos.

[There was a] nostalgia film magazine they were doing in the '70s, when Star Wars came out, the editor … who was also an artist, swiped Ralph's drawing and kind of tilted it to try to make it look different. And when Ralph saw it, he said, “That's my artwork! He stole my artwork! He just tried to change it a little.” He says, “Nobody has reference like that. Only I did, because I saw the movie ten times and made drawings.”

Trench climax center spread in RBCC #137 (Art by Ralph Fowler)

DK: I love Ralph's drawing of the X-Wing in the trench. It was definitely the most detailed at the time.

JVH: Right.

DK: I have a poster with art by Robin Wood and some of the things in it, like the Death Star, just don't look right at all because they just drew by memory. Whereas other characters in the poster look great because there were reference photos available from the press kits.

Star Wars No. 1 poster. Note that the Death Star does not match the movie exactly because the artist was drawing from memory without a reference. (Art by Robin Wood) 

DK: I have several copies of your special Star Wars issue and it looks like there are two versions. There's the first print, and then there's a second print with extra pages including a Roy Thomas rebuttal.

JVH: Yeah, there's just stuff in there where [we critiqued] the Star Wars comic. The people who did the comic hadn't seen the movie. I think Star Wars #6 came out about the time the movie opened. So, they were all going by a script and things like that, so they had to do their own interpretation of a lot of things.

Roy Thomas rebuttal inserted into second print of RBCC #137

DK: How did you decide to do a second print of the Star Wars issue instead of just putting that rebuttal in the next issue?

JVH: Well, the first print sold out because I just did a standard printing, which was probably, I don't know, 1,500 copies or something. And when I decided to reprint it, I said, “I'll add some new pages.” And I left the price off the cover so that it was just the artwork.

Both prints of RBCC #137: Special Star Wars issue. The first print is easily identifiable because it has the $3 price printed on the cover and the second print does not. (Cover art by Ralph Fowler)

DK: Do you have anything else that you want say about Star Wars?

JVH: Star Wars, I think, contributed to the rise of science fiction overall, because science fiction and conventions were not very big yet in the '70s. San Diego Comic-Con wasn't very big in the '70s. I mean, the science fiction conventions are bigger now, but I don't think any of them are as big as, say, the San Diego Comic-Con, which draws 100,000 people.

DK: You don't think Star Trek had any effect on that?

JVH: Yes, Star Trek conventions kind of were the only thing like that that did draw a lot of people. I think an early Star Trek convention in New York City drew 3,000 people. And that was the biggest convention, science fiction or comic up to that time. Because in the early '70s, San Diego Comic-Con was drawing, like, maybe 1,000 people. But the Star Trek conventions drew many times that. That's why there were so many back then. Star Trek conventions then were popping up all across the country.

DK: I guess now they had that template when Star Wars came out to do similar kinds of conventions.

JVH: Yeah, Star Trek was the only thing like that going on, then when Star Wars came out, the fandom got bigger. There were Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans and the conventions just kept growing.

DK: And you were there at the beginning. Did you imagine that 50 years later, people would be interviewing you to ask about what it was like to be at the dawn of Star Wars?

JVH: No, I just saw online today that for the 50th anniversary of Star Wars they [will release] in IMAX next February.

DK: And that's supposedly the original version, not a special edition version.

JVH: Yeah, it's supposed to be the original edition seen for the first time, I guess, since '77. Because they were already making changes in like, '78 in re-releases.

DK: Well, as Darth Vader would say, "the circle is now complete." Thank you very much for this interview, Jim.