Inside the Worlds of Star Wars, Episode I - The Phantom Menace: The Complete Guide to the Incredible Locations

Uncover the inside story of all the amazing locations from Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace in this stunning new addition to DK's best-selling Star Wars series. Peer right into the buildings, trace the routes of the characters, and learn all the facts about the planets and locales of the movie. To produce this definitive guide, the DK team was given access to the original blueprints, scale drawings, and models for Episode I stored at Skywalker Ranch, Lucasfilm headquarters in California. Absolute accuracy and authority was ensured by the close involvement of insiders at Lucasfilm. With the addition of dozens of never-seen-before stills from the movie, illustrated maps and Kristin Lund's detailed, wide-ranging text, this book is the only reference work to provide Star Wars fans with all the background to the places and locations of Episode I.

Where does a Jedi go to unwind? Why, to a Contemplation Station, of course. The Jedi Temple on Coruscant has three of them.

But you'd already know that if you had Inside the Worlds of Star Wars: Episode I, yet another lushly illustrated and obscenely detailed Star Wars reference from the folks at DK Publishing. Much like their other excellent cross-section books, most of which focus on vehicles, this title pulls apart Episode I's exotic locales, from Otoh Gunga to the N-1 hangar in Theed to poor Anakin and Shmi's pathetic excuse for a home in Mos Espa.

Each illustration includes a few paragraphs of background information (along with some well-chosen stills from the movie in some cases), but the meat is in the copious call-outs pointing to minute details that would otherwise go unnoticed. In the honeycomb of "species-friendly" offices surrounding the Senate, for example, you can see the Wookiee napping rooms (oh, the Jedis only wish that they had hammocks in their Contemplation Stations) and learn about re-orgs in the Neimoidian diplomatic corps ("To enforce competitiveness, Neimoidians assign identical work to two teams of worker drones, with the incentive that the successful team eats the other").

The book's biggest set piece is a fold-out rendering of the Mos Espa Arena, but fans will likely enjoy the diagrammed blow-by-blows of Episode I's most dramatic scenes even more: What route did the Queen and her retainers take as they scurried through occupied Theed? Exactly how and where did the Trade Federation deploy its droids? And which turn is the tightest on the Boonta Eve Classic? Thanks to DK, it's all there in meticulously drawn detail. --Paul Hughes