It might be hard to imagine but there was a time before the internet, before the prequels, even before Revenge of the Jedi was renamed Return of the Jedi. It was a time when Star Wars was something of a new phenomenon. And back then, one of the franchise’s biggest fans was an 11-year-old boy named Rusty Miller who decided he was going to author the first Star Wars quiz book and made it happen.
In a 2020 interview with Skywalking Through Neverland, Matt (née Rusty) explained, “The inspiration came when I saw a trivia book about the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, of which I was also a big fan. And since a trivia book hadn’t been done for Star Wars, I spent the Summer of 1981 coming up with over 600 questions. After finishing the book, my parents sent a manuscript to Del Rey who in turn sent it to Lucasfilm.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book almost didn’t happen in the more innocent wilds of 1982 (at least in terms of pop culture band-building). Lucasfilm saw little reason to publish the work of tweenage fan—that is until none other than George Lucas himself heard about the project and saved it from cancellation. Shortly thereafter The Jedi Master’s Quizbook debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, and according to its author sold over a million copies.
In 2025 the only copy of the Jedi Master’s Quizbook that you’re likely to find will be in the thrift store, your fave second hand online book store, or the local Friends of the Library store, which is exactly how I got my own copy. The dog-eared paperback is very well loved and once belonged to someone whose name is scrawled in pencil multiple times throughout the pages.
As I scoured through it for the first time in many years, I was blown away not just by Rusty’s extensive Star Wars knowledge but also by what the book said about how fandom, franchises, the concept of canon, and Star Wars itself has changed over the years.
Questions like “Who did Bend fend off at the Cantina?” and its answer “Snaggletooth,” the name of the character that was packaged with the Kenner toy of the character, are a great example of how some things never change. Toys have always played a massive part in determining and revealing canon. That’s something that readers, fans, and filmmakers all still deal with today. But while the struggles of creating art under capitalism are the same, the answer to Rusty’s question is different. Now Snaggletooth is nothing but the nickname of the Snivvian male named Zutton.
This was decades before the internet, so Rusty diligently explored what existed at the time: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and any info he could find about the upcoming third film, as well as the burgeoning Star Wars publishing initiatives. In another delightful time capsule, as many Star Wars lovers know, Return of the Jedi was then going to be called Revenge of the Jedi. That’s what Rusty put for his answer because the title hadn’t yet been changed due to the decision by Lucas that Jedi cannot feel or seek revenge. Hence that word was saved for decades until we got Revenge of the Sith.
That notion of the ever-shifting nature of canon and even titling is present throughout the book. But it also reminds us that despite all of that, some things never change, or at least they change enough to return back to where they started.
When Miller was collating the Jedi Master’s Quiz Book, Marvel Comics was behind the popular Star Wars comics, something Miller included and that which is a factoid that proves true in 2025. However, as someone who has lived through almost four decades of Star Wars fandom, I can tell you that hasn’t always been the case. Many of the most famous and well-known Star Wars comics for instance were published by Dark Horse. But as the tides go in and out, so do publishing trends. After the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney, Marvel—itself a new Disney subsidiary at the time—took the Star Wars comic book license back from Dark Horse, only for it to currently be shared by both publishers in the present.
It’s an unwritten rule, but in 2025 to make a Star Wars project is to make a story by committee, with decades of canon and continuity to contend with. Conversely, in The Jedi Master’s Quiz Book Miller seemed almost to be the sole holder of the canon of Star Wars, something most fans could never dream of. His dedication and commitment to a galaxy far, far away meant that for many kids growing up, they too got to open up this tome and become keepers of all the facts and canon within it. In an era before Wikipedia and the internet in general, Rusty Miller became one of the earliest in a grand tradition of fans to take canon, sort it, and define it with his own hands.
One of the most fun things about Miller’s work is that you can discover new facts or history that begin to slide into your own personal Star Wars canon. For example in Rusty’s quiz book the answer to “What is Artoo’s robot classification?” is “Thermocapsulary dehousing assister,” as that’s what he was named in the novelization of the movie. That long winded classification would soon be completely replaced with Astromech—at least until the “full” title was referenced in the 2015 Star Wars comics. There are also intriguing things to learn about what was considered canon and what would later be relegated to the non-canon world of Legends.
Although you will rarely, if ever, see Jedi Master’s Quiz Book cited as a key addition to canon now, at the time the world of Star Wars was expanding rapidly and the lore was beginning to grow. Thanks to the early interaction between the films and the novelizations, including the would-be-sequel story Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster, and the Marvel Comics, the Expanded Universe of Star Wars had truly begun. Which would hilariously instantly cause canonical confusions, including that in the novelization of the film, X-Wing pilot Porkins was given the callsign Blue 4 when in the film he was Red 6. He wasn’t the only one either as Wedge Antilles was named Blue 2!
In a world where we couldn’t be further from the conditions in which the Jedi Masters Quiz Book came to exist, the one thing that stays the same is that fans have always been the keepers of these franchises and their facts. It’s that passion and energy that still fuels fan wiki pages and fills convention centers all year round. Thank you for being our fandom forbearer, Rusty Miller!
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