Last week, when I was reading up on Star Wars lore for a VF Daily item I was writing ("Is There Still Life for Han and Leia?"), I stumbled across Internet reports of a comic-book tale published a few years ago that imagined an intriguing scenario: what if the paths of Han Solo and Indiana Jones—both created by George Lucas and immortalized by Harrison Ford—intersected?
The story, which was titled "Into The Great Unknown," was originally published in 2004, in issue No. 19 of a Dark Horse comics title called Star Wars Tales, and was later collected in the trade anthology Star Wars Tales Volume 5. And, I was pleased to discover, the writer of the story was Haden Blackman, whom I had interviewed for my feature on The Force Unleashed, the cutting-edge Star Wars video game that LucasArts will release this fall. Blackman is the leader of the team that developed The Force Unleashed, but he has also written a number of Star Wars comics, including the adaptation of The Force Unleashed, which will be released as a graphic novel in conjunction with the game.
"Into The Great Unknown" is just 10 pages long, but it has a couple of inspired twists. The tale begins with Han Solo and his furry Wookie sidekick, Chewbacca, battling Imperial forces in their ship, the Millennium Falcon, and, after taking a blind leap into hyperspace, crash-landing in a dense forest right here on planet Earth. When they leave the ship to investigate their surroundings, it becomes clear that they have not landed in modern times. The duo are attacked by Native Americans, and though Chewbacca opens a can of Wookiee whoop-ass, Solo is killed by a barrage of arrows. What I really love about the story is that when the natives hear Chewbacca yeowling in grief over the body of his dead partner, one of them dubs him "Sasquatch."Indiana Jones enters the picture 126 years later, according to the comic. He and his now-grown sidekick Short Round, from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, are presumably investigating the Bigfoot myth when they come across the wreckage of the Millennium Falcon and the skeleton of Han Solo. "I've never seen anything like it. Not even in Atlantis…. But it's all somehow familiar," Jones says before deciding to let the question of whether Sasquatch exists remain "part of the great unknown." (For those who want to read the comic themselves, I won't reveal the image depicted in the last panel.)
When I called Blackman about "Into The Great Unknown," he told me that it was one of the most fun Star Wars tales he's attempted, and that the idea had actually been kicking around for a while at Dark Horse Comics, the publisher of Star Wars Tales, when he was asked to take a crack at it.
"This might be an apocryphal story," Blackman explained, but during the production of Return of the Jedi, a number of the sequences that took place on forest-covered planet of Endor (home of the Ewoks) were filmed in the Pacific Northwest. "And the story goes that Peter Mayhew, the guy who played Chewbacca, always had to be accompanied by a couple guys in brightly colored vests so that he wouldn't accidentally get shot by somebody mistaking him for Bigfoot," Blackman said. "So, I took that story and kind of just ran with that idea." He adds that, according to received Star Wars wisdom, Wookies can live hundreds of years, which makes it possible for Chewbacca to be alive when Indy happens upon the wreckage.
Blackman also included a number of references from both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Shortly before he's attacked in the forest, Han Solo says, "I have a bad feeling about this place," a signature Star Wars cue that trouble is on the horizon, and his last words to Chewbacca are "I'm going first into the great unknown," a reference to a similar line used by Indy's mortally wounded friend Wu Han in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
"To me, the biggest thing was trying to make sure that the fans of both films could find little nuggets and tie it into that," Blackman says. "It's almost like tying together four worlds. There's our world; there's Indy's world, there's Han Solo's world. But then there's that weird impossible-to-find fan world that has all that information about all those stories.
And what about the creator of Han's and Indy's worlds? Has Lucas ever acknowledged reading the Indiana Jones-Han Solo crossover?
"No, I don't know if he knows it exists," Blackman said.
Talk about your great unknown.
Image via Dark Horse.
Buy Star Wars Tales Volume 5 from the Dark Horse Web site.
Read "Is There Still Life for Han and Leia?" by Frank DiGiacomo.
