One of the problems facing the Lucasfilm team was the fact that SW licensee Kenner Toys had run out of characters to render as highly profitable plastic action figures. "I mean, they had done figures of everyone from Darth Vader to CQ-1135 [a small gardening droid whose arm is briefly visible in a scene inside the Jawa sandcrawler]," explains Kenner's director of profiteering, Roger Nurnburger.

So, rather than going with the "Star Wars production crew members" line of action figures originally scheduled for release in 1999, Kenner convinced Lucasfilm to insert several new characters into the Very Special Edition. In addition to adding new bounty hunters -- such as Bozoid and Pigg Biggboy -- to SW2: Electric Boogaloo, numerous new aliens have been introduced into A New Hope and Jedi, many of which bear a suspicious resemblance to the surplus figures left over from Kenner's unpopular Batman Forever line of toys.

John Williams's sweeping orchestral score having already been milked for all it's worth, the VSE team was looking for a new soundtrack tie-in. Their search coincided with George Lucas's desire to flesh out the character of the Emperor: "I really wanted to put the 'pal' into 'Palpatine.' The Emperor was just so dark and joyless in the first releases. I mean, why would a galactic empire want to follow him?"

The answer to both dilemmas was a series of six snappy new musical numbers. Backed by "the Empire Brass," the evil despot croaks his way through five original tunes by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, and a show-stopping rendition of Ike and Tina Turner's "Proud Mary." For the soundtrack album, those songs from the film will be interspersed with previously released cuts by Gordon Lightfoot, Vanilla Ice, A Flock of Seagulls, and other artists whose back-catalogs could be had for a pittance.

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