I have a passion for collecting vintage Star Wars merchandise from the late 70's. Action figures, comics, trading cards etc - anything related to the first Star Wars movie. But why only until 1980? It's not that I don't love The Empire Strikes Back and beyond (I really do), but there is something about that first wave of Star Wars mania that really grips me, back when it was all fresh and exciting...

Saturday, February 25, 2012

The Star Wars Album


In November 1977, Ballentine put out this 75 page Star Wars Album featuring tons of color and black and white photos from the movie and behind the scenes shots. The contents seems to fall into three sections, this first of which is a look at the influences on the movie. Everything from early sci-fi like H. G. Wells to Flash Gordon, robots in movies (i.e. Metropolis and Forbidden Planet), comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, westerns that influenced the character of Han Solo and the whole cantina scene, monster movies and Errol Flynn swashbucklers are referenced. I like this bit as it's easy to think of Star Wars as its own entity nowadays rather than the throwback to old fashioned adventure serials it was originally intended to be.


The second section is a breakdown of the movie's plot accompanied by many pictures.


The final part of the book is devoted to behind the scenes stuff with articles, pictures and concept art.

3 comments:

Rockie Bee said...

That book was the greatest; had it when I was a kid. Why, just today -- with my new copy of 'Star Wars Album' -- I used it to get my 7 year-old son interested in 'Captain Blood' and 'Logan's Run,' two films pointed out as influences in the first part of the book.

Daily Star Wars said...

Hey I see you fixed the image problem. What was the cause?

Chris Thorndycroft said...

The images seem to be enlargable on this post but not on others. I think it has something to do with the image size, but I'm looking into it.