Tan Skywalker.

It's a rather apt name for a man from the suns-baked world of Tatooine, wouldn't you say? But the "tan" here doesn't refer to the golden glow of Anakin or Luke's skin. Instead, the name comes down to us from Star Wars writer and illustrator Russ Manning.

Tan Skywalker has his origin in 1978, when Manning was drawing and writing the Star Wars comic strip appearing in newspapers. Due to the particular challenges of telling a continuous story in just a couple of panels daily, in the series' initial storyline Gambler's World (viewable by Hyperspace members), Manning introduced a character called Mistress Mnemos. Mnemos was a supercomputer to whom the Star Wars heroes would relate their most recent adventures. Utilized largely on Sundays, when the funnies were expanded with more panels allowing for more exposition, the storytelling convention summed up events that had occurred in previous installments of the strip throughout the week, bringing a reader who had missed those past days up to speed. (Unfortunately, because StarWars.com isn't reprinting the Sunday sections of the old newspaper funnies, the strip in question is not available online).

So it was that in one such Sunday story, Mistress Mnemos raises Luke Skywalker's file, and states some startling facts:

"Luke Skywalker... File: ZC-1905-FT, Section: OC-6492, Human: 10th Degree, Born: Sidereal Era, AS-5670... of Master and Mistress Tan Skywalker."

It comes as little surprise that this scene was excised when Dark Horse reprinted the majority of the Manning newspaper strips in its Classic Star Wars: The Early Adventures series. What's this business about Luke being a 10th degree human? Is that the state of all humans in the galaxy far, far away? Oh, the humanity! And what's this about a "Sidereal Era"? Sounds like something out of a Salvador Dali painting.

But these questions are, essentially, easily navigable. As Dan Wallace demonstrates in his Star Wars Calendars blog, its easy to imagine that the Sidereal Era is just a name given to a certain timeframe by someone who thought doing so was useful. And Human¹º? Again, that's probably some classification useful to some group of galactic taxonomists somewhere.

But, that last bit of info at the end of the Mistress Mnemos spiel is a bit more problematic: "Luke Skywalker: Born... of Master and Mistress Tan Skywalker."

Don't be too hard on Manning. Everyone now knows Luke's dad's name ain't "Tan." But up until his name was revealed as Anakin in Return of the Jedi, released in 1983 well beyond the publication date of Gambler's World, no one, perhaps not even George Lucas, knew what Anakin's name was going to be, save that he and Luke probably shared the surname Skywalker. (This first occurrence of Anakin's name in the Original Trilogy has since been rewound to The Empire Strikes Back, with the altered dialogue added to the exchange between Palpatine and Vader aboard his Super Star Destroyer). Folks, of course, have every right to question the choice of the name by Manning. Why Tan? A bad pun? Maybe... writers are known to do that. Why not one of the many unused names from the many rough drafts of Star Wars available at the time, including "Annikin"?

Well, it's really impossible to know, especially since the author has since passed on. In the meantime, this Master and Mistress Tan Skywalker business still stands.

So, by now you're wondering, what's the answer, what's the solution to this mess? Well, the first few problems with the name are easily resolvable. First, and almost not worth addressing, is the fact that the name Tan Skywalker seems to apply to both Anakin and Padmé in this sentence. But this is simply an old, albeit perhaps chauvinistic, manner of addressing married couples from our own world, as in "Mr. And Mrs. John Smith, I presume." Next is the question of how the supercomputer Mistress Mnemos got this name into its files. But it's easy enough to imagine that Luke gave it to her. "Okay," you say, "so how did Luke get his own father's name wrong?" Now our real work begins.

The option of establishing Tan as a middle name or nickname for Anakin is obvious. Maybe a little too obvious. In fact, that sort of retcon has been used frequently in Star Wars to address double-naming snafus just like this one, as in the case of many of the X-Wing pilots in A New Hope, including Garven "Dave" Dreis, Jon "Dutch" Vander, and Jek Tono Porkins. Is there instead another convenient option?

There is, if you know your Star Wars literature. Years ago, I was reading the continuation of the Stele Chronicles included the Official TIE Fighter Strategy Guide, companion to the PC game of the same name. The story stars Maarek Stele, an Imperial pilot who becomes a TIE fighter ace. The story, published in 1994 and written by Rusel DeMaria, is highly enjoyable and I recommend tracking down a copy. However, the point I'm driving at is not an endorsement but a peculiar coincidence this book yields. In one uncanny instance, on the back cover of this TIE Fighter guide, our Imperial hero is oddly referred to as not Maarek Stele but as Tan Stele. Nowhere else and never again is this character referred to by that name, and no explanation for the substitution is given.

Interestingly, there's a short history of this sort of thing in Star Wars. Check out the inside flap of the hardcover version of the book Planet of Twilight by Barbara Hambly. There you'll find that the name of the chief setting of the book, the planet Nam Chorios, has been called instead Renat Chorios. Likewise, in the audio book version of the Corellian Trilogy, a character who is named Pter Thanas in print is given the utterly improbable appellation Reth Klar Hospia--my purely phonetic spelling. (Put those in your back pockets, fanboys and girls. )

In any case, I brought my Tan findings to the Star Wars Fanboy Association. Wouldn't it be neat, I said, if this Tan Stele oddity was or could be somehow linked to Manning's old error of referring to Luke's father as Tan Skywalker? They were, after all, both champs behind the stick of a starfighter. This triggered a suggestion by Pablo Hidalgo, who said, Hey, maybe Tan is some kind of title given to exceptional starfighter aces? I dig it.

Flash-forward about a year. I get my first professional gig as a Star Wars writer. The piece for Star Wars Gamer is about the Emperor's Hands, the shadowy Force-sensitive warriors who work as the Palpatine's assassins, spies, and bodyguards. The game TIE Fighter suggested that Maarek Stele was among this elite group, and the recently published first edition of the Essential Chronology had just confirmed it. Pulling out all the stops, I naturally stuck in a bit about Maarek earning the title Tan, and described it as a title or rank given to starfighter aces.

Now flash-forward another five years. I'm contracted to contribute a few pieces to Vader: The Ultimate Guide, among them, a rundown of all of the vehicles and ships Anakin uses throughout the Star Wars saga. And you know what's in the back of my mind. The opportunity comes when describing Anakin's Episode III Jedi starfighter. I explain how he used it in several battles during the Clone Wars, and because of his exceptional skill, earned the title Tan, just like Maarek did many years later.

Voila. Tan Skywalker. The circle is now complete.

Still, why the word "Tan" though? I'll tell you in another five years. ~ Abel G. Peña

BLOG INDEX

MYSPACE PROFILE