This is a wonderful idea, and one I have had myself for a long time. But like the recent "The Magic of Myth" publication, it falls short of its potential; although not as miserably as the former.

Bouzereau’s annotations take the form of breaks in the screenplay, sometimes in the forms of quotes [printed interview style] or paragraphs of exposition. This, in itself, makes the book difficult to use. Footnotes or appendices would have been both easier to reference and more visually attractive. As it stands, the format not only makes referencing specific points impossible, it also prevents one from comfortably reading the actual screenplays, which are sometimes interrupted for pages at a time.

Bouzereau states in the Introduction that he had "direct access to all the different screen-plays, treatments, and story conference transcripts"; needless to say, annotated editions of those materials would be far more advantageous to any serious scholar. Bouzereau also had "George Lucas’s direct input". The blurb on the back of the book [not always a reliable source of information] tells us that this "direct input" manifested itself in the form of "hours of exclusive interviews" with George Lucas. I recognized some of the quotes, but since the annotator does not date them, it is impossible to ascertain which quotes are most recent, which is, of course, essential to anyone who would actually make use of this volume.

Bouzereau’s descriptions of the material culled from early drafts are, uniformly, confusing. I found it absolutely necessary to rely on my previous knowledge of those materials, which should, of course, be unnecessary. I have a hard time imagining someone with no previous knowledge of those drafts picking up this book and making sense of the summations. Actually publishing the drafts, with annotations indicating their final form, is a far more logical idea than cramming descriptions of a certain passage's antecedents into a compressed paragraph or two.

Despite these faults, I don’t doubt that this volume will be useful to fans who are not aware of the development of the story. To me, the most interesting effect of this information will be to see how much unused material is going to be transplanted into "Episode One", as some of it has already been into the "Willow" novels ["Willow", "Shadow Moon", "Shadow Dawn"].

Having both the annotations and all three screenplays in one volume will no doubt serve to entice a greater number of people into reading them. This at least is a good thing. Too few critics have noted the uniqueness and distinctly American flavor of George Lucas’s writing style.

I have always thought of the "Star Wars" saga as a wonderfully bizarre cross between "The Lord of the Rings" and the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. Reading "Star Wars", as opposed to watching it, only compounds this impression. "Star Wars" has a distinctly American flavor; in fact, if one traces his character from its inception, Obi Wan Kenobi in his later years recalls not Merlin or Gandalf so much as a character from Harold Gray’s comic strip "Lil’ Orphan Annie": Mr. Am, described by Robert Harvey in his "Art of The Funnies" as "a fatherly, bearded sort of sultan, who, Gray hinted broadly, had lived since the dawn of time and…could enter the 4^th Dimension and restore the dead to life."

To me, it is this unusual juxtaposition which gives "Star Wars" such a singular texture. The fusion of sonorous spiritual ideals and quirky, 1950’s style usage makes the presence of anachronistic colloquialisms more outstanding than similar approaches in E.E Smith’s "Lensman" saga, or even Michael Straczynskie’s "Babylon-5". The reason for this is that "Star Wars" is a self contained world, with no attachments to Earth. It is natural for a fantasist to employ an exotic or archaic pattern of expression to evoke a detached reality; Lucas’s style is to counter the fantastic with the everyday. This sets him apart from other American fantasists.

So, if Bouzereau’s book succeeds in drawing attention to this aspect of Lucas’s work, I will be pleased. But as a useful reference tool, or even a simple guide to the permutations of the "Star Wars" saga, it seems to promise far more than it delivers. What is really needed here is the equivalent of Christopher Tolkien’s "History of Middle Earth" series.