Cole Horton Discusses Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge – Traveler’s Guide to Batuu and More

July 28, 2020, 10:06 AM, BST

Mike Celestino from the LaughingPlace.com sat down with author Cole Horton to discuss his most recent two books, entitled Star Wars: Book of Lists and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge – Traveler’s Guide to Batuu.

Mike Celestino, Laughing Place: Thank you so much for joining me, Cole.

Cole Horton: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

LP: Let’s start at the beginning. What was your relationship like with Star Wars growing up? I’m assuming you were a fan.

Horton: [sarcastically] A little bit, yeah. I discovered Star Wars by accident before the special editions had come out. Those VHS tapes from 1995 are what did it for me. And it was weird– as a kid, you’re into a lot of stuff and you kind of grow out of it, but I never grew out of Star Wars. And at age 16 I had founded my small-town Indiana Star Wars fan club. By 18, I had joined the 501st and I found myself doing Star Wars celebration conventions, and one thing led to the next and before you know it I was writing for StarWars.com, and then eventually writing books. And through a weird kind of coincidence at my day job, I’ve even intercepted Star Wars. I’ve worked on games at EA for five years as well. So yeah, I’d say for the past five years, up until just recently, it was 200% Star Wars all day, all the time.

LP: That’s awesome. So those VHS tapes, those were the ones with the half faces, like Yoda’s face and then the Stormtrooper, right?

Horton: That’s right, and I didn’t know any better and I bought them out of order. So I bought the one with Darth Vader on it because that looked cool. And then I bought the one with Yoda on it, or the Stormtrooper, whichever one it was. But I saw Return of the Jedi before I saw The Empire Strikes Back. And you know what? It didn’t seem to hurt my fandom at all. There’s no right way to be a Star Wars fan.

LP: I agree, and I feel like a lot of that information was out there anyway in the cultural zeitgeist. You probably already absorbed that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. But what about Disney Parks? Did you spend a lot of time there growing up?

Horton: Growing up, we were that family that did that once-in-a-lifetime vacation when I was younger. But my wife actually would go almost annually with her family. We got married shortly after college and started making trips somewhat frequently. Star Wars Weekends, of course, were a big driver for me. Somehow coincidentally, our trips always tended to end up there so we could do Star Wars Weekends. And over time, we’ve [become] annual passholders on both coasts of the domestic parks. We’ve lived in California, we’ve lived in the Midwest, and now we’re in Florida, so we’ve always been in and around various parks. In the past few years, it became really what all of our free time was– doing Disney stuff. We’re DVC members, annual passholders, Disney visa… we do all that stuff.

LP: Let’s talk about your writing career. How did you first get into that field?

Horton: Maybe by accident. I was a history student and a historian by trade, doing a lot of research and stuff. And I had started writing a series that I thought could be a book called From World War to Star Wars. It was all the parallels and connections between Star Wars and World War II. I was in the process of making some inroads with people and pitching that when the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney occurred, and that was this interesting reset period in a lot of ways. I had all of this content– I had a 60,000 word outline for what I had hoped would be a book. That’s crazy talk– I didn’t know any better. That’s not really how it’s done, but that’s what I had. And I pitched that to StarWars.com, and thankfully Matt Martin at the time was working there and gave me a chance, and let me do monthly articles about that topic and put that content out into the world.

I did that for a few years when the flood gates opened. There had been all this secrecy and quiet as everyone was just trying to figure out what the next trilogy was going to be, and all of a sudden, they needed authors. And because I was writing on StarWars.com, I had separately met a number of people in the publishing world. My name got called and I somehow got my foot in the door. And then once I did that, they kept asking me back [for] 13 books, I think it is.

LP: Let’s go through a few of those books. If you could just tell me what each of these are about, for people who don’t own them already, if they wanted to go pick them up. Let’s start with Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know. What’s that one?

Horton: That one is really dense– more for younger audiences– reference book that’s just going to tell you everything you need to know, whether you have some familiarity or no familiarity with Star Wars. That series kicked off in the lead up to The Force Awakens as part of the “Journey to” program. And it really was there for younger readers or parents with children to learn all of the need-to-know facts, but also a lot of the more fun facts.

LP: Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia. They’ve put out a bunch of these, one for each individual film. This one, I’m assuming, covers the more broad franchise as a whole. Is that right?

Horton: Yeah. All of these books so far have been from DK Publishing, and they’re known for their visual dictionaries that come out with each film. Growing up, I was a big fan of the original Visual Dictionary. What The Visual Encyclopedia is, is a way of taking everything from that universe– still very visual, as is in the name– but recataloging it and pulling [in] some of the stuff that we might’ve missed or [might] not have been included before, and catalog it as if it was a real encyclopedia– as if all of this stuff was real and existed. So there are spreads after spreads about all the different blasters, or all the different lightsabers, across the entire storytelling that existed at that time. But there’s also a spread in there about luggage and art, and just everything. If you just looked at one movie, there might not be a ton of luggage. But funny enough, as you catalog all these films, there’s actually quite a bit– there’s more luggage than you would think. So we get to shine a little bit of a spotlight on some of the more obscure stuff as well.