Into A Large World: Star Wars Woodstock
The December zine is a special edition issue all about the legendary first Star Wars Celebration!
✨ This zine is an old school, black & white, 90s inspired issue covering the timeline of Celebration I. From the idea’s first appearances to that rainy Denver weekend and the legacy that followed, read about how the tradition we love so much first began.
Author: Kara DJ
Page Count: 18
Publication Date: January, 2024
It may be 2024, when everything can be learned, looked up or grabbed from a screen, but there’s an inherrent charm and innocence to the fanzine. It’s tactile, you can hold it and within its pages there’s all the love and affection that fanzines of the past delivered to fans in pre-internet days. A post from former Star Wars Insider editor Dan Madsen alerted me to this fanzine, an issue of Into A Large World called Star Wars Woodstock that looked back a quarter of a century to 1999 and the very first Star Wars Celebration that took place in Denver, Colorado (which Madsen had a large hand in taking from dream to reality). As we hurtle towards the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace on 19th May, what better way to celebrate than a browse through a fanzine that reeks of nostalgia for those halcyon days?
Writer Kara DJ has managed to craft something very special here, taking us from 1997 and the Special Editions when Star Wars was on the up and up and up to the initial idea of a fan celebration which saw Lucasfilm Marketing Director Jim Ward approach Head of Fan Relations Steve Sansweet, who in turn took the idea to Insider publisher Madsen. All three were on the same page, and by early 1998 the green light was given and Denver was chosen. In November 1998, the month the first teaser arrived for Episode I, Star Wars Insider #41 ran a full page ad and the world learned the name of this new event – Star Wars Celebration.
Throughout this issue we’re treated to some fascinating Celebration facts. There’s a timeline of how information came to the fans, and a look at how in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre, Lucasfilm decided to cancel the event and it was only the intervention of the Mayor of Denver (at the behest of Madsen who reached out to him) that saved the day. We run through the events of the three-day event, look at the sponsors of the time, the guests at the show and the first-time happenings that took place (the debut of the Duel of the Fates video, the Jar Jar Jam, Warwick Davis doing a panel on a flatbed lorry) and through it all there’s a nostalgic thrill that – even if you weren’t there – takes you back to the final days before our world changed with the arrival of The Phantom Menace.
It’s very difficult to get across what the pre-Prequel world was like, and as we get further and further away from that era of Star Wars as we continue to journey through the modern ‘Disney’ era, publications like this are more and more important. I confess to being hardwired to appreciate this fanzine; I launched my first dedicated Star Wars site Lightsabre.co.uk on 28th June 1999, just a few weeks after the first Celebration and before the film arrived in the UK on 16th July. The era and the early work myself, Louis and the team did on that site will always be inextricably linked to this exciting new era, so anything that evokes the turn of the century will – to steal a phrase – be of great interest. Hats off to Kara and the Into A Large World Project for such a charming release that will sit proudly in my collection.
- Hardcover Book
- Baver, Kristin (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 344 Pages - 04/25/2023 (Publication Date) - DK (Publisher)
