If you follow my various Bluesky accounts, you may find me posting about digital encyclopedias, trivia games, the Star Wars podcast I cohost, and DVD menus. Lucasart’s 1998 release Star Wars: Behind the Magic combines all of these in a way that only a product of the multimedia era can.
The searchable glossary is probably the least interesting part of the package, but incredibly robust. The characters / technology / locations sections are also fairly conventional, but made more interesting by optional trivia questions.
Behind the Magic keeps track of your points, but that’s about the only “game-y” element of the package. Outside of the encyclopedia-esque entries lie DVD-style features, a few years before the medium was widely adopted.
This was also pre-wide distribution of videos on the internet, so Behind the Magic bringing deleted scenes home was quite the selling point.
However, the biggest selling point in 1998 was likely the preview of the upcoming Episode I. This section is fairly limited, but there is enough content here for obsessive fans to pour over for those long months until May 1999.
The two-CD-ROM set also shows the expanded universe some love with its timeline and entries on a variety of releases.
Behind the Magic is a product of its time, and something that simply could not exist as a retail product today, for a multitude of reasons. We now have an infinite amount of Star Wars images, trivia, and videos at our fingertips, but at what cost? Wookieepedia, like all Fandom pages, is nightmare to navigate as you dodge intrusive screen-covering ads and completely unrelated auto-playing videos. It’s great to find cool behind the scenes videos on YouTube, until the algorithm starts serving up right-wing culture war grifter videos about how Loth-cats are a woke Disney conspiracy or whatever.
In the ashes of a fallen republic Star Wars: Behind the Magic remains, an elegant product for a more civilized age.
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