Star Wars Magazines

One of the unfortunate side effects of the internet has been the decline of physical magazines. They’re still out there on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and maybe at your local supermarket, but they’re nowhere near as omnipresent or numerous as they once were. There was a time in my 20s when I was simultaneously subscribed to Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Playboy (for the articles!), Film & Video, Stuff, Maxim, and Wired. It was always so great to come home, see a new magazine crammed into my apartment mailbox, and just sit down and flip through it. I often had a stack of issues on the back of the toilet, sitting beside my bed, sitting on the coffee table, and I’d even bring them to work for those days when things were a little slow around the office. They were a great source of information and entertainment, but they simply could not keep up with the fast-paced, easy-editing environment of the internet.

As a young Gen Xer, collecting magazine was kind of a given. I had stacks of MAD Magazine, Cracked, Ranger Rick, Highlights, Dynamite, Cricket, 3-2-1 Contact Magazine, National Geographic World, The Electric Company Magazine, and the occasional Starlog (though never Fangoria, because my parents would never let me buy it). And I also feel like collecting magazines was part of our heritage, passed down by parents and grandparents who still had old LIFE Magazines and National Geographics sitting in a box in the spare bedroom closet.

Between my generational penchant for collecting magazines and my love of Star Wars, it should come as no surprise that I have a decent collection of magazines that feature Star Wars on the cover. For years, my parents would set them aside for me when they rolled in via subscription (namely the TIME Magazine issues, because my father was a subscriber throughout my youth), but I also began to hold onto issues of Entertainment Weekly, the first magazine subscription I paid for back in the 90s, when The Phantom Menace was looming. I would also pick up random issues of random magazines from the newsstand, usually because of the Star Wars story inside.

And, like my parents and grandparents before me, they’ve been sitting in a box ever since. In my ongoing effort to document my collection of pop culture ephemera, I recently decided to break out that box of magazines and scan them in. Here they are presented in roughly chronological order:

One interesting note: That Entertainment Weekly from 2022 with Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, was also the last physical copy of the magazine printed. It seems kind of fitting that a magazine that covered so much of the era of entertainment spawned by the phenomenon that was Star Wars would end with an issue with Star Wars on the cover.

It’s kind of a shame that magazines – and therefore magazine collections – are going away. It’s nice to be able to sit down with something tangible and flip through it. But it’s also kind of a fascinating look at not only the world of publishing in the pre-internet days, but of the world itself. Writers would have to submit stories and interviews well in advance of publication. By the time an issue was published, that news was weeks old to the person who wrote it. But to the reader, this was brand new information. Newspapers and TV were for breaking news; magazines were a form of time travel that forced us to absorb information more slowly. Not that it was necessarily better than what we have now, but it’s just different, and a sign of how the world has changed over the last 25+ years of the internet being a dominate force in communication.

As a Gen Xer raised on magazines, I don’t think I’m going to throw these relics away anytime soon. I’m content with keeping them in a box, flipping through them from time to time when I remember they’re there, and maybe my kids will see the value in the way things used to be someday (but, let’s face it, probably not).

Do you still have a box of magazines or newspapers tucked away in your basement?