The Glove of Darth Vader was a children's Star Wars novel written in 1992 and set after the movie Return of the Jedi. It focused on Luke Skywalker stopping the remnants of the Empire from hunting Whaladons--huge, intelligent, whale-like creatures from the planet Mon Calamari. The real-world parallel here is obvious. The Whaladons are whales, and the Empire's hunting of them is meant to represent the whaling industry that still exists in Japan, Norway, and Iceland.
As an environmental parable, there is nothing remarkable or exciting about The Glove of Darth Vader. In typical children's book fashion, the heroes and villains are distinct and unambiguous. The villains even go out of their way to refer to themselves as evil, by means of such phrases as "I bid you Dark Greetings" and "Dark Blessings". While not as bad as Captain Planet or FernGully, this is still a very crude depiction of environmental issues.
This entry is less interesting for what it is than for the circumstances surrounding it. Like Captain Planet and FernGully, The Glove of Darth Vader was released in the early 1990s, at a time when enthusiasm for environmentalism seemed to be at an all-time high. During this time, environmental lessons were considered "cool" and shoehorned into popular fiction because they were thought to be what sold. Film studios, book writers and publishers, and TV executives all lunged at the marketing opportunity. Needless to say, this approach does not seem to have produced tangible results 20 years later.
The Glove of Darth Vader may just be an odd little footnote in the Star Wars story, but it shows how even the most unlikely franchises were cashing in on the environmentalism trend in the early 1990s.
Its story itself wasn't remarkable, but The Glove of Darth Vader is a perfect time capsule from a period when environmentalism was seen as a selling point--sometimes at the expense of common sense.
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