We all know of the dark times for Star Wars back in the late 80s and early 90s when there wasn’t much happening and George hadn’t formally announced nor begun work on the prequel trilogy.
The toy line died in 1986 and wasn’t to be seen again for just under a decade until The Power of the Force 2 line reached shelves before the Special Editions.
There’s a somewhat forgotten piece of colleting lore, however, that was actively pursued by Kenner to continue the toys and action figures with an original story and new and existing characters. The line was called Star Wars: The Epic Continues and was a planned continuation of the original Power of the Force line.
Kenner was eager to continue to the hot property and didn’t want their biggest money maker to date to go anywhere. So, Kenner designer Tim Effler created a new storyline and original characters that would have been set after the events of Return of the Jedi.
The story was this …
A new villain called Atha Prime was a legendary and wicked ruler of dark worlds and had been freed from his exile following the demise of Emperor Palpatine. He would strike the Rebel Alliance and would engage in battle with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and the Mongo Beefhead tribesman – more of these later. The real twist to the story though was who the main villain was set to be. Grand Moff Tarkin himself was to take over the Galactic Empire now that Palpatine was dead. So yes, somehow Tarkin returned.
Here, word for word, is the original Kenner brief for Lucasfilm:
“A powerful force long kept in exile in a remote fringe of the galaxy has been released by the death of the Emperor. It moves now, like a plague, securing control over the shattered remnants of the empire and re-enslaving newly freed worlds. Atha Prime, genetics master, ruler of the dark worlds and architect of the Clone Wars, is free again. His advanced army of combat clones has already decimated rebel outposts along the galactic frontier. His goal is to crush forever the Rebel Alliance and control the Galaxy.”
All these story concepts were, of course, created by Kenner to try and sustain the toy line without any new films being released. The idea that this was at all possible had party come from the Mini-Rigs of the vintage era. The idea for these toys is that though they weren’t seen in the film, they had an almost ‘just off-screen’ feel to them and had been successful.
The team put together concepts for new vehicles by kit-bashing pieces from whatever was lying around in the hopes of persuading Lucasfilm to greenlight the project.
It’s quite overwhelming to see the amount of time, thought and effort that went into producing the pitch. Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were to make triumphant returns, though the one oddity in the whole project is that there is no mention of Leia. Han Solo was drawn to look more heroic while Luke was imagined having new Jedi armour and, most interestingly, in concept sketches his lightsaber is a pink/red colour.
The Mongo Beefhead Tribesman figure was actually produced into a prototype and was kit-bashed from several figures including Hammerhead, 4-LOM and the torse of a Quarren.
Kenner was hot on the idea that new stories needed to be developed to keep things exciting and interesting and so it was plotted out that Atha Prime was the mastermind villain behind the, at this point in time, only briefly mentioned Clone Wars.
As for Tarkin returning, this was nothing more than a solution to try and rectify the fact that no figure had been of him at all in the original run.
A lot of care went into designing playsets and vehicles in the pitch to Lucasfilm and as we shall see next week, elements of this project actually made it into canon.
