Star Wars Infinities: What Might Have Been

On Amazon Prime Reading they added a bunch of Star Wars comics a few months ago.  A lot of them are the more recent Marvel ones after Disney acquired the franchise but there were also some collected reprints of the pre-Disney era under the banner "Legends."  One volume called "Infinities" was from the pre-Disney era but even then it wasn't considered canon because it's a collection of four What If or Elseworld stories.

The first three are basically like the old "What If..." issues Marvel used to do that would speculate on stuff like, "What If Captain America was never found frozen?"  Or if he had never been frozen in the first place.

There's one What If scenario for each movie.  The first one presents a possible story on if Luke's torpedoes had gone down the vent but exploded prematurely so the Death Star isn't destroyed.  They cheat a little in that while the Death Star isn't destroyed, it's damaged enough that it can't just blow up Yavin and kill everyone there.  Instead, Leia, the droids, and everyone on Yavin is captured.

Meanwhile Luke and Han escape the Empire and Ben Kenobi's ghost tells them to go to Dagobah.  It's funny that when Yoda goes into his shtick annoying Luke and saying he'll take him to Yoda soon it's Han who recognizes the con for what it is.  Luke begins training while Han and Chewie lay low for a while before taking off to start smuggling again.

While Luke is training to be a Jedi, the Emperor and Vader are training Leia to be a Sith.  Five years later she's about to become the head of a new Senate based on the "Justice Star," formerly the Death Star.

When Luke is finished training, he, Yoda, Han, and Chewie take the Falcon to Coruscant.  Yoda goes aboard the Justice Star and uses his Jedi mind trick to control Tarkin.  Meanwhile Luke confronts Leia, Vader, and the Emperor.  Leia turns and she and Luke fight the Emperor until Vader turns as well.  He tells Luke and Leia to go while he keeps the Emperor busy.  The Emperor is destroyed when Yoda crashes the Justice Star into the planet, destroying the Imperial seat of power.  By then Luke, Leia, and the droids have escaped with Han and Chewie.  Hooray.

This was probably the best of the three.  It really would have been interesting if Leia had gotten to confront the Emperor because that's something we never saw in the series.  And really besides torturing her on the Death Star and capturing her in Bespin, Vader and Leia didn't have much interaction either.  And Yoda crashing a Death Star, how epic is that?

The second scenario is if Luke had been killed by the Wampa.  Again it cheats a little as Luke has time to tell Han to go to Dagobah to become a Jedi.  At least Han thinks the message is for him.  As the Imperials invade Hoth, Han, Leia, Chewie, and the droids get on the Falcon to escape.  Han does the trick of latching onto the back of a Star Destroyer and then drifting away with the garbage.  And like the movie, Boba Fett follows him to Bespin.

At Bespin they meet Lando only this time they've managed to arrive ahead of the Empire--though not Boba Fett.  It's Fett waiting for him but with Lando's help they take him down and freeze him in carbonite.  Han and the others leave for Dagobah just ahead of the Empire.  In retribution, Vader destroys Cloud City, killing Lando.

When they get to Dagobah, Leia finds out she's the one meant to train as a Jedi.  She stays to train with a purple lightsaber while Han and Chewie leave to raise money to pay Jabba off.  Except Jabba doesn't want money, so he takes them captive in his palace and feeds them to animals in his pit, though not a Rancor like Luke fought.  Han and Chewie are able to escape, but Threepio is left behind.

Vader goes to Jabba and takes Threepio with him.  Taking Threepio apart he's able to find out that they went to Dagobah and so goes there thinking he'll find his son.

Han and Chewie are also going to Dagobah, where Leia is finishing her training in the cave when Vader shows up.  Yoda confronts him and sort of mind melds with him to fight him on the astral plane or something.  But Vader escapes to kill Yoda.  Leia confronts him and they fight briefly with Vader getting the upper hand before Han shoots him and he dies, repenting his life of evil.

Kind of lame that Leia needs Han to save her.  And too bad about Lando and Threepio in addition to Luke.

The third one was an even weaker scenario.  What if...the negotiations with Leia in bounty hunter disguise had gone awry when Jabba hit the captured Threepio too hard, killing him?  And while trying to rescue Han from Boba Fett, Leia hit his carbonite slab with a blast so that when he's revived he's blinded permanently.

While Luke goes to Dagobah after he feels Yoda dying, Leia, Lando, and Chewie track Boba Fett to Endor, where they rescue Han and Fett is killed.  They take Han's carbonite slab back to the Rebel fleet where they find out he's blind.

Meanwhile Luke's X-Wing is captured and he's taken to Vader and the Emperor, but not before he gets a message off to Leia telling her the truth of their parentage.  She steals Boba Fett's ship and flies to the Death Star where she's captured and taken to Luke, Vader, and the Emperor.

Lando leads an attack on the Death Star, which like before is a trap and so they have to fight for their lives.  On Endor the Ewoks attack both Imperials and Rebels and in the chaos the Falcon is able to go down and blow up the shield generator so Wedge can blow up the Death Star's reactor.

Luke and Vader fight until the Death Star starts to blow up.  The Emperor flees while Vader can't kill his kids so they take him to the hangar, where the Falcon picks them up and they rejoin the Rebel fleet.  The Emperor has escaped but Vader joins the Rebellion in a suit of white armor.  I mean sure he killed like millions of people but now he's a good guy!  Um, yeah.  Hooray?

This wasn't really that good.  Just meh.

I guess the point of all of these is that in the end the Rebellion would always defeat the Empire.  Suck it, Empire!

That was only about 55% of the book.  The rest of it was an adaptation of The Star Wars, the early rough draft of the original Star Wars script.  There were a lot of differences between this and the finished product we all know and love.

First the Luke Skywalker character is named Anikin Starkiller.  Luke Skywalker is an old general who's more like Ben Kenobi.  Leia is still a princess, though not of Alderaan because Alderaan is the seat of the Empire.  Darth Vader is a general of the Empire who has a scar on his face and a red robot eye but otherwise is normal looking.  The Emperor is a normal-looking guy.  And Han Solo is a green alien sort of like Greedo in the final product.

The basic story is that the Empire wants to take over this planet Aquilae.  That planet is ruled by a king and defended by General Luke Skywalker.  Meanwhile on a distant planet Anikin, his father, and younger brother Deak are attacked by a Sith, who kills Deak.  The father takes Anikin to Luke to train him to become a Jedi.  Luke uses Anikin sort of as an intern, assigning him to go pick up Leia from a private school.

The Empire launches its attack, which isn't going all that well until they kill the king and force the queen to surrender.  Luke, Anikin, and Leia go on the run to a port where they meet Han Solo to get off the planet.  They crash on a planet and meet the Wookies and Luke saves their prince--Chewbacca, who looks pretty much the same.  Luke trains the Wookies to pilot Y-Wing-looking fighters while Anikin and Leia fall madly in love.

Leia is captured by a Sith, Prince something-or-other who wears sort of the bottom half of a Vader mask on his face for...reasons.  Anikin, Luke, and Han go to the enemy space fortress (the Death Star-ish thing) to rescue her.  Anikin winds up teaming with the Sith against the Empire to save Leia while the Wookies launch an attack on the fortress.

In the end the Empire is defeated and Aquilae becomes the seat of the Rebellion.  And there's a big medal ceremony and celebration.  So the overall story has a lot of similarities but there are a lot more locations and characters that really made it impossible to film in 1976 when George Lucas was a relative unknown and they didn't have $300 million to spend on these things.

Really the way this looks makes it more like the Star Wars ripoffs that came after the first movie was such a hit like Battle Beyond the Stars and Star Crash.  There were some of the weaknesses we came to see more in the prequels like the "love story" between Leia and Anikin where they didn't like each other and then just spontaneously decide they love each other.  Still, it's an interesting read just to see sort of what Lucas was thinking at the beginning and how it all turned out.

If you have Amazon Prime it's free to read so definitely worth an hour or two to read what might have been.