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book_nerd_1's review
1.0
These are kids stories but they're pretty terrible compared to something like the Young Jedi Knights books. They're from before the EU really got going and they don't fit with the rest of it.
rhubarb1608's review
0.25
The series was for children and published in 1992-1993. Each book contains a dubious cast of characters, illustrated fully but not well, and concludes with a strange little "glossary," which in the real world would be "an alphabetical list of technical terms in some specialized field of knowledge," but for Mr. and Mrs. Davids, it is a place to cover the cast of characters for a third time.
The titles of the complete series are The Glove of Darth Vader, The Lost City of the Jedi, and Zorba the Hutt’s Revenge. They make absolutely no attempt to be canonical, logical, or even coherent, and remain simply an excuse for people to spend their money on things with the Star Wars tattoo on them.
They tell the story of Palpatine's insane, mutant, three-eyed son Triclops (because Palpatine would totally name any three-eyed offspring "Triclops")–and the three-eyed mutant Trioculus (because nothing could have three eyes without being a mutant), whom the Empire is trying to put into power as a dummy for the insane son. The "Glove" of Vader, supposedly indestructible for no reason the authors care to mention, is the key to his power, because some Dark Side Prophets (who only speak in verse) have declared that the next ruler will wear the Glove of Darth Vader. Because said glove is indestructible, they conclude that it was not destroyed in the explosion of Death Star II, merely flung somewhere.
While Luke and the gang are helping out a Captain Ahab rip-off on Mon Calamari (he hunts "whalevin"), they discover wreckage from the Death Star deep in Mon Calamari's oceans. They've also happened on it at the same time as Trioculus and his pals. One of the characters graciously expresses surprise that Vader's glove should be found there, but the explosion of the Death Star, it is explained, had an explosion so powerful it was able to knock bits of wreckage and the glove "many millions of miles." I'll say. Mon Calamari is literally on the other end of the galaxy from Endor.
You say maybe the authors couldn't have known they were that far apart? I say, you're really going to defend that "many millions of miles" thing? Look, one lightyear equals 5.879 trillion miles. Even if you subtracted "many millions" from 5.8 trillion, you'd still have over 5 trillion. One lightyear, by the way, besides equaling more miles than the authors could even begin to compute, is only a quarter of the distance between us and Alpha Centauri -– it won't even get you one star system away, in other words. I don't mean to harp but this was one of the lowest points of the entire book. It was beyond ridiculous. To think a glove could get blown even one planet away -- and that bits of wreckage could be surviving the explosion, trip, and entry into atmosphere -- it's obvious trash.
But I have more delightful points. Yavin IV, the isolated jungle moon the rebels chose for a base because of its obscurity, turns out to be home of the galaxy's absolute best top-notch physicians, because Luke can't get his artificial hand repaired on Mon Calamari but has to go back to Yavin IV. There, in the Lost City of the Jedi, a young boy (apparently a rejected Robert A. Heinlein protagonist) is growing up raised by droids and playing with Star Wars action figures, I kid you not. His name is Ken and he lives in the underground lost city of the Jedi that just so happens to be on Yavin IV. He decides to run away on the very day his idol, Luke Skywalker, is strolling around. Also, Trioculus is there because the glove is making him go blind (his mama warned him!), and there's some super-duper secret healer who lives on Yavin IV. This clown also only speaks in rhymed couplets that could make a cat sick. Insert hints that maybe Ken is Obi-Wan Kenobi's lost son, which the authors really expect us to believe even though Ken's only 12 and Obi-Wan was like 65 when he died.
Many ludicrous things happen in the course of the book, including the fact that Lando remains chief administrator of Cloud City -- because Empire Strikes Back apparently had no consequences whatsoever -- and Han buys a big house there. Literally. He throws a housewarming party for his sky house on Cloud City, because he doesn't have any reason to have bad memories of that place.
Reading the entire thing took me about half an hour. They are liberally illustrated, but the pictures are generally horrible and do little to make the action make sense. There is pretty much nothing that 1) is not contradicted in a real book, and 2) makes any sense whatsoever, no matter what planet you are from. Although a lot of reivews here express amusement at the "campy read," I found it a little too campy for me. Like camping in the creepy woods where some toothless rednecks are going to put a serious hurt on you and you’ll get poison ivy.
The titles of the complete series are The Glove of Darth Vader, The Lost City of the Jedi, and Zorba the Hutt’s Revenge. They make absolutely no attempt to be canonical, logical, or even coherent, and remain simply an excuse for people to spend their money on things with the Star Wars tattoo on them.
They tell the story of Palpatine's insane, mutant, three-eyed son Triclops (because Palpatine would totally name any three-eyed offspring "Triclops")–and the three-eyed mutant Trioculus (because nothing could have three eyes without being a mutant), whom the Empire is trying to put into power as a dummy for the insane son. The "Glove" of Vader, supposedly indestructible for no reason the authors care to mention, is the key to his power, because some Dark Side Prophets (who only speak in verse) have declared that the next ruler will wear the Glove of Darth Vader. Because said glove is indestructible, they conclude that it was not destroyed in the explosion of Death Star II, merely flung somewhere.
While Luke and the gang are helping out a Captain Ahab rip-off on Mon Calamari (he hunts "whalevin"), they discover wreckage from the Death Star deep in Mon Calamari's oceans. They've also happened on it at the same time as Trioculus and his pals. One of the characters graciously expresses surprise that Vader's glove should be found there, but the explosion of the Death Star, it is explained, had an explosion so powerful it was able to knock bits of wreckage and the glove "many millions of miles." I'll say. Mon Calamari is literally on the other end of the galaxy from Endor.
You say maybe the authors couldn't have known they were that far apart? I say, you're really going to defend that "many millions of miles" thing? Look, one lightyear equals 5.879 trillion miles. Even if you subtracted "many millions" from 5.8 trillion, you'd still have over 5 trillion. One lightyear, by the way, besides equaling more miles than the authors could even begin to compute, is only a quarter of the distance between us and Alpha Centauri -– it won't even get you one star system away, in other words. I don't mean to harp but this was one of the lowest points of the entire book. It was beyond ridiculous. To think a glove could get blown even one planet away -- and that bits of wreckage could be surviving the explosion, trip, and entry into atmosphere -- it's obvious trash.
But I have more delightful points. Yavin IV, the isolated jungle moon the rebels chose for a base because of its obscurity, turns out to be home of the galaxy's absolute best top-notch physicians, because Luke can't get his artificial hand repaired on Mon Calamari but has to go back to Yavin IV. There, in the Lost City of the Jedi, a young boy (apparently a rejected Robert A. Heinlein protagonist) is growing up raised by droids and playing with Star Wars action figures, I kid you not. His name is Ken and he lives in the underground lost city of the Jedi that just so happens to be on Yavin IV. He decides to run away on the very day his idol, Luke Skywalker, is strolling around. Also, Trioculus is there because the glove is making him go blind (his mama warned him!), and there's some super-duper secret healer who lives on Yavin IV. This clown also only speaks in rhymed couplets that could make a cat sick. Insert hints that maybe Ken is Obi-Wan Kenobi's lost son, which the authors really expect us to believe even though Ken's only 12 and Obi-Wan was like 65 when he died.
Many ludicrous things happen in the course of the book, including the fact that Lando remains chief administrator of Cloud City -- because Empire Strikes Back apparently had no consequences whatsoever -- and Han buys a big house there. Literally. He throws a housewarming party for his sky house on Cloud City, because he doesn't have any reason to have bad memories of that place.
Reading the entire thing took me about half an hour. They are liberally illustrated, but the pictures are generally horrible and do little to make the action make sense. There is pretty much nothing that 1) is not contradicted in a real book, and 2) makes any sense whatsoever, no matter what planet you are from. Although a lot of reivews here express amusement at the "campy read," I found it a little too campy for me. Like camping in the creepy woods where some toothless rednecks are going to put a serious hurt on you and you’ll get poison ivy.
octavia_cade's review
1.0
God help me, I read and reviewed each of the three books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. Each volume earned a single star, and that was frankly generous. They are dire. Remember that scene in Return of the Jedi where Salacious Crumb was ripping out C-3PO's eye? The droid got off lucky. He could have been reading this instead.
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