Star Wars Books from the Groovy Seventies

Back in the Seventies there was merely a trickle of Star Wars merchandise compared to the cornucopia of content fans have to enjoy nowadays. So instead of video games and animated fare and comics you have today we fans subsisted on bubble gum cards, a few action figures, and whatever else we could find. But ask anyone from my generation and they have fond memories of those rare treats. Ones that stand out in my mind to this day were the books from Random House.

Published in 1979 by Black Falcon Ltd. Under the Random House label, they were soft cover books for younglings that featured either stories or activities. The three I still own to this day are Darth Vader’s Activity Book, Chewbacca’s Activity Book, and story book The Mystery of the Rebellious Robot.

The Mystery of the Rebellious Robot featured a story set in the time immediately following the Battle of Yavin in A New Hope. In fact, it actually took place at a Rebel base on Tattooine and had all our favorite heroes involved like we’d just popped in right after Luke blew up the Death Star. Illustrated in groovy Seventies flair by Mark Corcoran, the pictures had an acid wash feel to them with swirling blends of colors. The characters were funky and unkempt-looking, with wavy hair and wild-eyed expressions. My favorite has to be Chewie, who looks like something from a Dr. Seuss book.

Hey Chewie did get a medal after all!

What I love most about the book is the time capsule quality of the story elements. We get a glimpse at the fledgling Star Wars universe before it exploded into a thousand expansion ideas. Sit back and enjoy thinking about moisture vaporators (and super-vaporators!). Watch in awe as Chewie and R2-D2 square off playing Planetary Poker on the very chess table where R2 bested the Wookiee in the movie. Read about Luke using the “mysterious” Force like it hadn’t been ingrained into popular culture yet and needed explaining.

But most of all I just love the never-ending struggle between the Jawas and the droids. We only got a brief chance to see Jawas in A New Hope. But if the movie was a high-speed freeway, a book like this was a rest-stop where we could pull over and take our time to learn more about them. And boy are they jerks in this story! Don’t expect an Agatha Christy caper, it’s pretty straightforward for kids to understand. But I always enjoyed reading it, knowing the Jawas were more formidable than the movie let on.

Chewie at his grumpy best

On to the puzzle books, which were even more entertaining. Illustrated by Patricia Wayne, they featured black-and-white illustrations which were no less rich for their format. Cross-hatching in the illustrations gave them an old-world feel like they were wood cuts.

Vader is out to get you!

Vader’s activity book was focused, of course, on what would be on Vader’s mind. There were brain teaser puzzles alluding to the Force, the idea being the reader gets a feel for how something so mystical would feel. If you wanted to know how the Empire works, there were secret codes to use and decipher. And of course there were cross-word puzzles, connect-the-dots, and card games. Crafts included building a Vader bank from a salt container, optical illusions you created with pictures twirling on a string, and a recipe for a huge Death Star cookie (and yes, I made my mom make one and it was HUGE). But my favorite activity was the Destroy Death Star game near the back, where you closed your eyes and traced your pencil along the trench of the Death Star, hoping to evade obstacles to hit the target. That was so ingenious a way to simulate the Force I used it for years with my own kids on custom drawn obstacle courses. You’ll be surprised how eager kids get into that game while you’re sitting at a restaurant and all you have is a place mat and crayons to bide your time.

That’s no moon (pie)

Lastly there was Chewbacca’s Activity Book and I guess this was the ‘good guy’ alternative to the Vader book. In it you found the same beautiful illustrations by Patricia Wayne, only with more good guys in it. You can play Chewie’s Chess on a grid using math to help navigate a maze, learn the Rebellion card game, and decode some Rebellion messages as well as the regular cross-word puzzle and maze fare. But what I find advanced for kids’ books at the time was the use of spatial reasoning in the Crazy Cube game, brain teasers using line drawings that feature on IQ tests even today, and the traveling salesman style of puzzles but used to navigate planets. Pretty cool stuff to learn when I was a kid, and I never forgot them. And who can forget Chewbacca’s Chewies? Caramel never tasted so good.

What else would you call them?

Okay, so I know what I’m describing puts me squarely in the quaint old-timer’s corner of Star Wars fans. I don’t know how many people remember those books or if it’s only me. But the Seventies were a time where fans were so jazzed at the new revolution in story-telling that we ate up anything with Star Wars on it. I just feel lucky that, as a kid growing up loving puzzles and learning, these books weren’t dumbed-down fare and they easily could have been. Instead I found them thought-provoking and captured a sense of the Star Wars universe that kept you coming back for more.

Maybe one day they’ll reprint the puzzles in the books. I’d be interested in how kids today can handle them (probably a lot better than I did!). In the meantime, I’ll keep stumping my kids with hand-made Tests-of-the-Force diagrams on the back of restaurant place mats. There’s nothing like the excitement they feel that first time they close their eyes and score a direct hit on the Death Star. Thanks, Random House!

Now I know what ‘scruffy-looking’ looks like