April of 1983, a young Mark Hamill must have been feeling pretty good. He'd completed his role as Luke Skywalker in the third and final STAR WARS movie. Currently he was starring on Broadway as Mozart in the play AMADEUS.
So one day during the play's intermission or something, nerd-boy Mark sneaks out to the comic book shop to stock up on his superhero fix. Inside West Side Comics, he saw something on the shelf that shocked and angered him:
This book:
Marvel Comic's adaptation of RETURN OF THE JEDI. In Full Colour. The entire story in one prestigious book.
Only problem was, the book was being sold a month before the movie's release. Marvel wasn't supposed to do that.
The final instalment of the STAR WARS saga, RETURN OF THE JEDI went into production under a massive cloak of secrecy. As all fans know, the working title was BLUE HARVEST. No one was trusted with a full copy of the script.
They couldn't even advertise all the toys! On the back of the action figure card, the new ewok figures were blacked out. Lucas didn't want you to know what they looked like until the movie premiered.
So the filmmakers put all that effort into keeping things quiet, but then a month before the movie comes out, Marvel publishes the entire story in a 64 page comic any bozo can breeze through in five minutes. All the secrets are in there; clumsy Bobba Fett dying, the revelation Luke and Lea are siblings, Darth Vader turning from the dark side of the force and sacrificing himself to save Luke.
The only odd omission is Yoda's death scene. We see him yammering away at Luke, lecturing him about some shit, and in the next panel he's gone, and the caption just says, "Luke leaves Yoda to much-needed rest."
I guess they wanted the kids to read between the lines. Yoda's taking The Big Sleep.
Mark Hamill must have blabbed to LucasFilm, because the next thing you know, Marvel is going into full-fledged damage control. Two members of Marvel's PR department show up at West Side Comics and grab all the RETURN OF THE JEDI books. Store manager Dave Toplitz is quoted in the July 1983 issue of The Comic's Journal, describing the encounter as "kind of nice, but very threatening."
This was a pretty big screw-up. Marvel was probably worried about being sued by LucasFilm for breaking their contract not to release the book before the film, or even worse, losing the license to publish Star Wars comics.
So now Marvel is making phone calls, sending letters, telegrams even, insisting store owners stop selling the RETURN OF THE JEDI comic. Naturally, most of the stores told them to go pound sand.
Most comic shops are independently owned business, that operate on a razor thin margin. The RETURN OF THE JEDI comic was an expensive book, retailing for $2.50 at a time when the average comic cost 60 cents. Store owners couldn't afford to sit on expensive stock for weeks on end. They needed to sell those books to get their money back so they could pay for next week's comics. It was really unfair of Marvel to demand store owners sacrifice their business just to fix a mistake they made.
The comic stores had no agreement with LucasFilm. Marvel didn't stipulate the books couldn't be sold until May 25th. So once the comic shops had paid for the books, there really wasn't any legal or moral reason they couldn't do with them what they wanted.
An estimated tens of thousands of copies of RETURN OF THE JEDI were sold, but that didn't seem to hurt the movie. It quickly became one of the highest grossing films of all time, kids bought action figures, toothbrushes, and ewok stuffed toys by the millions. The movie was a big success, and Lucas raked in a lot of money.
Curiously, the novelization was also released before the film, but only by a week. No one seemed to care that. As time went on, LucasFilm seemed to become less and less concerned with spoilers. When The Phantom Menace soundtrack came out in '99, one of the tracks was titled: "Qui Gone's Noble End" and just in case you missed it, another called "Qui Gone's Funeral".
I looked at the track listing for the earlier STAR WARS movies, just to confirm they didn't give anything away. They're titled stuff like "Darth Vader's Theme", "Han Solo and the Princess", "The Battle in the Snow". You'll notice none of them are titled something like, "Lando Double-Crosses Han and Lea", or "Vader is Luke's Father", or even, "In the Next Movie You'll Find Out He's Kissing His Sister".
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| Return of the Jedi plays at the Famous 4 Drive-In in Windsor, Ontario |
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