Fandoms thrive on creating weird meetings between different fictional universes.
Aside from Pocky, pizza rolls, and Mountain Dew: Code Red, throwing together characters
from different worlds is the fuel that keeps the fan-fiction world alive.
And if those characters are played by the same actor, so much the better.
So what would happen if Han Solo and Indiana Jones happened to inhabit the same reality?
Now that Disney owns both properties, anything is possible, but what if we told you it already
happened?
A long time ago...
Star Wars takes place "a long time ago," but what does that really mean for us Earth viewers?
Star Wars fiction always throws around terms like BBY or "Before the Battle of Yavin."
But none of that means anything to us humans and our local time.
Some timelines, citing Expanded Universe comic tie-ins, place the events of A New Hope around
the Earth-year 1800, and an important part of that theory comes from one bonkers Han
Solo-Indiana Jones crossover in 2004's Star Wars Tales #19.
The short story "Into the Great Unknown", written by W. Haden Blackman, begins, well,
a long time ago.
It starts off fairly normal, but things get pretty weird, pretty fast.
In a galaxy...
The story starts with Han and Chewy on board the Millennium Falcon, escaping some Imperial
Star Destroyers, as usual.
Because their ship is a piece of junk, it's not working right, and they make the jump
to hyperspace blindly.
Han remarks that the ship's computers have been on the fritz since they left a moon called
Hovan 99, a place rarely mentioned in any Star Wars canon.
Already, it appears we're getting references to weird Earth things, because football player
Chris Hovan was player #99 on the Minnesota Vikings around the time this comic was written.
Coincidence?
Eh, probably.
Not so far away...
The pair end up in an unfamiliar system with lots of dead planets, and one blue one, so
you can already see where this is going.
The Falcon takes out a whole ton of trees in a catastrophic crash landing, attracting
the attention of some local Native Americans.
Han remarks that their landing spot looks a lot like Endor, so it's likely that the
ship landed in the redwood forests of California, where Endor was actually filmed.
Star Wars has officially, in an Elseworlds sort of way, reached Earth.
Under attack
There's really no indication about whether or not Han and Chewy hopped through time in
their journey, but they're now deep within dangerous territory.
Han is immediately attacked with spears and arrows, as we see Chewy go on the kind of
head-crushing, rage-filled rampage that we all wish we saw in The Force Awakens.
Han gets an arrow to the shoulder, gut, leg, and one apparently pierces his chest as well.
For a goofy, lighthearted comic book story, it's pretty horrific and brutal.
Chewsquatcha
Chewy's cries of agony at Han's unfortunate end are taken to be the calls of a sasquatch
by the nearby human attackers.
This means that there are already legends, if not sightings, of some creatures pretty
similar to Chewy already on Earth.
This raises the question of Wookiees and sasquatches being products of convergent evolution, or
if our familiar 'squatches are just Wookiees that were dropped off here on our dirty Outer
Rim planet a long time ago.
A little while ago...
The story then jumps 126 years forward, and we see a Native American guide leading an
unseen figure towards the home of some unknown creature, tracking footprints.
It's quickly revealed that this figure is a circa-1935 Doctor Henry "Indiana" Jones.
Along with Temple of Doom's Short Round, they discover the Millennium Falcon, as well as
Han Solo's skeletonized corpse.
Even though Jones is essentially a professional artifact thief, he gets a weird feeling about
the whole thing and just decides to abandon his whole adventure right there, spaceship,
sasquatch, and all.
"You could've kept it."
"Ah, what for, they'd just put in a museum..."
The great unknown
The story ends with Indy giving up on his hunt for Bigfoot, getting creeped out about
the whole thing.
The Earth portrayed in the comic is apparently not a curious place — no one else ever notices
the Millennium Falcon, and Chewbacca continues to wander the California forests.
According to the old Expanded Universe, Chewy was roughly 200 years old during the events
of the Original Trilogy, a fact that the new movies confirm.
"You're 190 years old?"
"You look great!"
At the age of 326 and outside of his native habitat, comic book Chewbacca is nearing the
400-year life expectancy of Wookiees.
The awful implication is that he's going to live the rest of his life alone on Earth,
which is a pretty dark story by Star Wars standards.
But at least they made him into a pretty cool myth.
Not the first time
This comic isn't the only time that Star Wars lore crossed over with Indiana Jones.
If you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark carefully, you'll spot a hieroglyph of R2-D2 and C-3PO
carved into a pillar, a reference that's so well-loved it even made its way into an Indiana
Jones LEGO playset.
But that's not all.
Temple of Doom has a nightclub evidently founded by Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.
And you can even find the Ark of the Covenant in an episode of the animated Clone Wars..
Now, we're just wondering where Blade Runner fits in.
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