The Han Solo And Indiana Jones Crossover Story You Never Knew About
The nerdier part of fan fiction thrives on creating weird meetings between different fictional universes, and throwing together two characters played by the same actor is pretty much the lifeblood that keeps the fanfic world alive, aside from feedbags full of Pocky—so what would happen if Han Solo and Indiana Jones happened to inhabit the same world? 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," and 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 Earth time. Some timelines citing comic tie-ins place the events of A New Hope around the year 1800, making Earth an insignificant ball of mud that isn't even important enough for the Empire to notice, while other timelines will just call you a nerd for even asking. There are five days in a week and seven weeks in a month, and instead of Monday, you have Primeday. In Star Wars Tales #19, the story "Into the Great Unknown" begins, well, a long time ago...
In a galaxy...
Han and Chewy are aboard the Millennium Falcon, escaping some Imperial Star Destroyers, as usual. Because their ship is a hunk of junk, it's not working right, and they make the jump to hyperspace blindly. Han remarks that the ship's computers have sucked since they left a moon called Hovan 99, a place rarely mentioned in any Star Wars canon. If references to weird Earth things are to be mentioned, football player Chris Hovan was player #99 on the Minnesota Vikings around the time this comic was written. Coincidence? Probably.
Not so far away...
The pair end up in an unfamiliar system with lots of dead planets and one blue one, and you can already see where this is going. The Falcon takes out a whole ton of trees in a catastrophic crash landing, and attracts 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 savage territory. Time travel isn't really a Star Wars kind of thing, so if this non-canon comic is to be believed, all of this is actually happening in the early 1800s. Han is immediately attacked with spears and arrows, as we see Chewy go on the kind of head-crushing, rage-filled rampage that we wished we saw in The Force Awakens. Han gets an arrow to the shoulder, gut, leg, and one apparently pierces his chest as well.
Chewsquatcha
Chewy's cries of agony at Han's death are recognized as that of a sasquatch by nearby natives. This means that there are already legends, if not sightings, of some pretty similar creatures 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...
We jump 126 years forward and 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 Doctor Indiana Jones, and along with Short Round, circa 1935, they discover the Millennium Falcon and Han Solo's skeletonized corpse. Even though Jones is essentially an 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. Chewbacca is seen in the background.
The great unknown
And that's it. No one else ever notices the spaceship, and Chewbacca has wandered the California forests for 126 years and continues to do so. Chewy was about 200 years old during the events of the Original Trilogy, so at the age of 326 and outside of his native habitat, he's nearing the 400-year life expectancy of Wookiees pretty fast, meaning that he's going to die alone on Earth, probably from pollution or hunters, which is a pretty dark story by Star Wars standards. But at least they kinda tied him into sasquatch mythology.
Not the first time
Of course, there's also an in-canon Indiana Jones crossover with Star Wars. If you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark carefully, you'll spot a hieroglyph of R2-D2 and C-3PO carved into a pillar, as well as another one of Leia and R2. This reference is so well-loved that a similar hieroglyph also made its way into an Indiana Jones LEGO playset. The list doesn't end there: Dr. Jones can be seen during The Phantom Menace's podracing sequence, and you can even find the box that housed the Ark of the Covenant in Bespin's trash rooms. Try tying those crazy threads into canon, nerds!