By Eldon G
I’m sure if you grew up in the 90s you’re well aware of the lush and verdant landscape of youth horror fiction.
Every year when the Scholastic book fair rolled up to our tiny school, my brother and I would push past our Catholic school teachers as they weakly pleaded “Look! This one’s about a talking dog that meets Davy Crocket…” and head straight for the Goosebumps, the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and the Bunniculas.
Today we’re going to talk about another series of kinder trauma novellas you may not be as familiar with. But they were still every bit as delightful as the better known series from around the same period.
Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear is a true relic of a bygone era. Something that we’ll certainly never see in modern times, both because Mickey Mouse will break your fucking fingers for writing a Star Wars story in 2020 without his say so, and because childrens’ and young adult horror was an unfortunate and often overlooked casualty of the war on “unsavory” games and media of the 90s and early 2000s.
As you may be aware, the same local and federal leaders that are now cheerfully pushing Americans out the door during a plague just to keep that sacrosanct stock ticker in the green were once ardent defenders of our young children’s minds.
Senator Joe Lieberman, who took the floor of Congress several times in 1993 to excoriate the makers of Mortal Kombat for creating what he called “Video games that glorify violence and teach children to enjoy inflicting the most gruesome forms of cruelty imaginable” would go on to vote against restricting the military from utilizing “Advanced Interrogation Techniques” like waterboarding in 2008.
“Advanced Interrogation Techniques” is a euphemism governments use for gruesome cruelty when it isn’t performed by a Goro.
Of course Joe isn’t the only example of this specific type of hypocrisy I could present here. We could be at this all day if I hadn’t promised you all some Star Wars at some point in this article.
I hesitate to even call censoring popular fiction while endorsing capital violence hypocrisy given that it often seems to serve a common interest for those who are eager to pitch a fiction of their own to society.
After all the more you can limit someone’s exposure to beautiful, intricate well-crafted lies, the better your broad, dumb, guileless lies will perform in their absence.
Now that I’ve established my moral high ground vis-a-vis media censorship it’s important that I tell you that Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear is a multi-volume fever dream about nightmare monsters devouring beloved characters from the original Star Wars trilogy.
It is in no way fit for children’s consumption.
Darth Vader is a 7-foot tall cyborg who can strangle people with his mind and is less than one bad dream away from carving up a room full of kids with a laser sword at all times.
It has got to be pretty rare for him to be only the second most terrifying thing on the cover of a book.
Like every great Star Wars adventure, the first book kicks off with a mad scientist talking to Vader while torturing a creature strapped to an examination table (this scene is Joe Lieberman approved because the Empire is technically a government and therefore free to stab anything they please).
I would mention that the protagonists Tash and Zak’s parents are revealed to be dead, blown up on Alderaan to be specific, on the second page. But I imagine that is assumed given that dead parents are the most common element of any children’s story pre-2010.
I learned exactly two things in my adolescence: If you move around in quicksand you’re only going to sink deeper, and the second you start wistfully looking to the horizon in hopes of adventure you’re as good as orphaned.
I think it worked out precisely as my teachers intended because now I have a job in finance, and I avoid mud as much as possible.
These twelve books feature pretty much every canonical pre-Jar Jar Star Wars character at one point or another. And for every one of them it’s easily the raddest they’ve ever been.
In fairness, that’s a relatively low bar to clear for some of these characters.
Boba Fett got roughly 10 minutes of screen time in the original films before he tripped, flew headlong into a Georgia O’Keefe painting come to life and vanished forever. So pretty much anything he did in these books was going to be cooler than that. But still, this is pretty off the chain:
That is the greatest passage in the history of children’s literature.
It is unbesmirched even by the fact that Boba Fett clearly never learned that you have to remove the head or destroy the brain to kill a zombie, which seems like it should be day one stuff in bounty hunter school.
In 2014, the executives at Disney declared that all of the books written prior to that point would no longer be considered canonical.
I would estimate about 13,000 full novelizations of the lives of Max Rebo-the jazz playing elephant, Zuckuss-the bug man who built a robot copy of himself to help him bounty hunt, and so many other extras and puppets went right in the metaphorical toilet that day. But this was the only series I truly mourned.
I really feel that I would have enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker a lot more if I could have imagined that somewhere out there, a million miles away from one of Rey and Kylo Ren’s incredibly dull lightsaber fights, there was an amusement park that brought children’s greatest fears to life.
Splorchtown 