Despite overflowing with odd creatures and bizarre planets, the Star Wars galaxy does feel strangely predictable these days.
There’s greater room for diversity in casting and storytelling. But with so much money at stake, everyone is colouring inside the lines. The work must conform to the style guide and the production slate.
Star Wars isn’t alone in this. But it is unique for having morphed from a hokey fairytale to something approaching a self-serious lifestyle choice.
A loose, gonzo sensibility was ironed out, as the enterprise expanded into a multi-billion dollar shared universe in thrall to internal continuity.
Wolfmen are digitally removed, discrepancies are rationalised – everything is taken very, very seriously by fans and creators alike.
Remnants of that lost strangeness now seem refreshing and compelling. There are few examples more striking than Bob Carrau’s book Monsters and Aliens from George Lucas, published in 1993.
This anomalous volume is a reminder of how different things were, a long time ago in ‘the various universes of Lucasfilm’.
A collection of rare antiquities
Carrau’s tome is one of the strangest examples of Star Wars esoterica around. (Although, as its awkward title attests, it draws on a variety of Lucasfilm properties, with stills and concept art from Willow and the Ewoks movies.)
As George Lucas himself notes in the foreword, this represents a ‘a collection of archeological data’ collected from monsters and aliens. ‘Like us, creatures on other worlds unwittingly leave behind remnants of their own lives – address books, diaries, and grocery receipts,’ Lucas explains.
Roughly 30 creatures are profiled via resumes, weight-training routines, newspaper ads, horoscopes and even weather forecasts.
These mercenaries, dignitaries and exotic beasts are given their own interior lives. There are codependent lovers, henchmen applying for jobs, interstellar celebrities in public romances.
What are the chances that a collection this glib and idiosyncratic would be published today?
The Force left fallow
When the book was published in 1993, the Star Wars franchise was slowly emerging from a fallow period stretching back to 1988 – the first year without a new movie, animated show or theme park attraction.
Fresh comics and novels were being published, most notably Timothy Zahn’s trilogy-capper, The Last Command. But there was nothing like the full-court press you’d see from 1997 onwards.
In fact, George Lucas still wouldn’t begin writing the Prequel trilogy for another year.
In the early 1990s, with the Special Editions as yet unannounced and the prequels still a long way off, Lucas himself was the main draw. ‘Star Wars’ was a sizeable corner of the Lucasfilm empire, but not the whole ballgame.
If you want proof of this you can check the foreword to Monsters and Aliens, where Lucas himself makes reference to ‘the various universes of Lucasfilm’.
Or note that 1993 also saw a live theatrical show tour Japan, in celebration of Lucas’s entire oeuvre. Improbably, the show’s main character encountered not only Darth Vader and Indiana Jones but also Cherlindrea, Preston Tucker and John Milner.
Lucasfilm’s outer rim territories
Nowadays, reading Monsters and Aliens offers an enjoyable game of spot-the-reference. But canon wasn’t a primary driver of pop culture in 1993.
It was the pre-internet age. While warmly remembered, Star Wars wasn’t universally viewed as a foundational modern myth. It was VHS fodder to keep the kids quiet. Many people assumed that The Thrawn Trilogy was the official sequel trilogy, in book form.
For a very brief window, there was unmapped territory ahead and carte blanche to mess around in the wilder frontiers of Lucasfilm’s menagerie.
And the greatest strength of Carrau’s book is that it doesn’t take the whole enterprise so bloody seriously. At its best, the book has a sense of freedom and unique weirdness. It isn’t hemmed in by know-it-all continuity.
Today it feels like even a Star Wars pencil case has to receive deuterocanonical status in the Lucasfilm holocron.
Letting someone play with the toys in the way that Carrau does still feels like a rare treat.
The Helmet of Fourteen Confusions
Monsters and Aliens is a compelling curio. The images are frequently gorgeous and Carrau is a skilled writer who nails every format he pastiches:
A recipe card notes that ‘Wild smapp retains its celestial taste and bogg consistency and curls naturally under any form of radiant manipulation”
A society reporter tells us that ‘Eban has let his marsupial roots flourish, chewing bananas in public and proudly wearing the ceremonial HELMET OF FOURTEEN CONFUSIONS’
A player profile explains that Manac-Nebut was ‘Ipsisestec’s second leading receiver, tearing the receptacle out of 47.5 opponents claws for 345 contusions and three more scores’
But the book falls short in one key respect: it’s just not as fun as it could be.
Scary Nihilists (and Super Creeps)
Carrau often defines ‘monsters’ in a pejorative rather than an exotic sense. Many of the creatures are either profoundly unhappy or constitutionally homicidal. Or both.
Sometimes this is undeniably amusing, as in this excerpt from an Eborsisk’s diary: Tuesday. Crawl out of cave. Find Gragg. Eat him.
But the accumulated nihilism becomes a bit much. There are sad torch songs (‘If Only I Could Let Go And Cry’), private depressive musings (‘I am a sad and lonely creature’), barbarous pledges (‘I will hurt other creatures at all times’) and plaintive conversations: ‘You don’t love me. You think I’m ugly. You think I’m boring. You think I’m fat.’
There’s a just-so story in which a species is cursed to ensure chronically painful cranial growths, in perpetuity. There’s a series of genuinely horrifying threats attributed to a flying nightmare creature. The balance just feels off.
Best of the Bestiary
It also makes this reader wonder about the audience for the book, which is blurbed as ‘engaging for adults’ but ‘scary enough for any child’. The dark tone is closer to a Far Side collection, which puts it squarely in the former demographic readership.
But bestiaries are a popular format for childrens’ books. It’s easy to imagine that a slightly more approachable compendium could have been wrung out of the material, for a younger audience.
Although it feels like a missed opportunity, Carrau’s effort nevertheless represents another fascinating artefact in the Star Wars canon.
Lucas neatly sums up the impulse to create a strange document such as this: ‘Once something is created, no matter what the context, it takes on a life of its own’.
It’s nice to see that idea embroidered without the constraints of canon.
You just couldn’t publish Monsters and Aliens today without someone taking to social media to complain that a ‘Gamorrean Guard would never say that’, or explain why they have a more plausible recipe for cooking a smapp.
Monsters and Aliens from George Lucas by Bob Carrau 1993. Published by Harry N Abrams. Copyright Lucasfilm. Artwork depicted under Fair Use allowance. No copyright infringement intended.
