Escape from the Monster Ship: A Droid Adventure

Escape from the Monster Ship

Author: Bonnie Bogart

Illustrator: Amador

Medium: Picture book

Publication Date: May 1986

Timeline Placement: 15 BBY

 

R2-D2 and C-3PO have a new master: Mungo Baobab, of the Baobab merchant family of Manda! Mungo wants more than to be a simple merchant like his father, however; he yearns for the life of an adventurer! And since his family business is apparently in dire straits and the planetary economy is about to crash, now is the time to take bold action.

Mungo searches the Baobab archives for the location of the legendary Roon System, rumored to be a fabulously wealthy trading center that exports many rare gems and minerals. The Merchant Council rejects Mungo's proposal to open a trade route between Manda and Roon, so Mungo takes the droids in his ship, the Caravel, and sets off to do it anyway. Threepio is none too pleased with this course of action.

Meanwhile, Roon is under the thumb of the despotic Governor Koong and his insectoid lieutenant, Gaff. Koong is in cahoots with Admiral Screed, representing the Empire's interests in the Roon System. Despite appearing only as a villain in the animated Droids series, Screed is a somewhat significant secondary character in the broader EU, with his backstory and exploits fleshed out across several reference books and articles. That said, in this book he appears for like one page and is never mentioned again.

The Caravel arrives in the Roon System and is immediately captured by the titular Monster Ship, which is never referred to as such in the text or in the TV episode on which this book is based, "Tail of the Roon Comets." This is the only book in the Droid Adventure series where they changed the name of the episode being adapted and they don't even take advantage of it. "Look out, Threepio, the MONSTER SHIP is after us!" Never happens.

Aboard the Monster Ship, the gang meets Noop Yeldarb, which is clearly a tuckerization of Bradley Poon, and his menagerie of tribbles, I mean "mupples," who are also prisoners of Governor Koong, which is clearly a tuckerization of Gnook Ronrevog. Gaff has Threepio strapped to a table so he can perform invasive brain surgery and reset the golden droid to factory settings. But Artoo creates a smokescreen as a diversion and frees all his friends. "You've done a man's job, sir," Gaff congratulates him, "but are you sure you are a man? It's hard to be sure who's who around here."

Mungo, the droids, Poon Bradley, and the mupples all escape aboard a short-range cloudcraft as the Monster Ship explodes because the book's ending. Threepio hopes they will return to Manda, but Mungo happily informs him that with their current transportation they have no choice but to journey on to Roon. Then Threepio falls over.

The mononymous Amador returns to do the illustrations for this book, and they're quite lovely. The Monster Ship is a cool design and there are a lot of space scenes with deep and vibrant colors. As an adaptation, however, this book, the last in the A Droid Adventure series, is kind of strange. What happened to Governor Koong? Did he died on the Monster Ship? If the existence of Roon is a legend and people don't know if it really exists or how to get there, how is it also the hub of a thriving space trade economy and doing business with the Empire? And what of Admiral Screed? Why was he even mentioned in the book if he did nothing at all? Just don't even keep him in the adaptation.

Mostly, though, I'm just sorry that someone decided at some point that both the Marvel Droids comic series and the entire Droids animated series all took place within a single year. I'm not sure what the logic here was, as Artoo and Threepio are still out wandering the galaxy by themselves a good decade later in the Dark Horse Droids comics, so it's not like their adventures needed to be abbreviated for the sake of another story's timeline. There could have easily been a year between each arc of the cartoon so they weren't switching masters every other week. Spread that shit out. This whole paragraph is superfluous, I'll cut all this out.