The following links are excellent resources for obscure Star Wars trivia and references. Please email me with further recommendations and they shall be added at our discretion. Thanks!
STAR WARS RARITIES
This is the coolest Star Wars website on the internet IF you love speculating about what could have been. Not only do the excerpts of script and photos exist for missing and cut scenes, but some video is available too. It’s a delight.
Run by the same guy who does the Star Wars Cutscenes site, this is the ultimate online resource for all things “Holiday Special”. The webmaster’s enthusiasm for the special is infectious. Long live the Holiday Special!
STAR WARS COMMUNITIES
This is a growing online community populated almost entirely by die-hard fans of the Original unaltered Star Wars Trilogy. At last there is a place to go where you are in good company if you’re not a fan of the Prequels or even the Special Editions. Also, the site is a hub for Star Wars fan edits. This is a growing movement among video savvy fans to edit their own alternative versions of the films, “by the insertion, deletion or re-ordering of scenes within the movie.” The most ambitious of these include new soundtrack and/or cleaned up special effects. These alternate interpretations of the films are just an interesting aside for me at OriginalTrilogy.com as its greatest offering is the realization that I’m not the only outcast from mainstream Prequel worshipping fandom. In fact, it turns out that there’s quite a lot of people dissatisfied with the Prequels and the treatment of the Original Trilogy.
Adywan’s Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope Revisited
In 2004, Adywan, a Star Wars fan from the UK, took it upon himself to save Star Wars ANH by releasing an edition that fixes every error in the original movie while updating every major effect in the film. This legendary edition is called Revisited…
Adywan’s – Star wars: The Empire Strikes Back: Revisited
ESB Revisited tentatively to be release towards the end of 2010.
STAR WARS FAN-FICTION & HUMOR
The Diary of Grand Moff Tarkin by Richard Whettestone
One of the funniest Star Wars fan fictions I’ve read, Richard Whettestone gives us the personal letters written by Grand Moff Willhuff Tarkin to his wife the Lady (named Lauren in this pre-Thalassa period text) Tarkin. His letters concern his familiarization with the Death Star, the hijinks amongst the officer elite and the events surrounding and leading up to the ultimate destruction of the station.
Villa Galaxia: Home of the Tarkins (An Imperial Family)
The webmaster/mistress of this old school web 1.0 website (thank goodness some still exist!) is more in love with Tarkin than me! There’s fan fiction that has its origins right back to the time the Original Trilogy was still in theaters! There’s photo manipulations of the Tarkin family making extensive use of Peter Cushing’s iconic aquiline features stuck on various bodies to both interesting and amusing effect. Best of all, this is where I found my first reference material for Lady Tarkin.
STAR WARS REFERENCE
This website not only shows the various interpretations of the cantina floor plan but points out the flaws in more commonly accepted maps that have been published and gained some acceptance despite conflicting with what is seen in the movie. There are also some great models of the cantina exterior and interior made by some very talented craftsfans.
StarWars.com: Cantina Roll-Call: Shedding Light on Some Alien Aliases
By no means thorough, but if you click on the mug shots you see some rarer photos… if small. Plus, this has the distinction of being hosted and compiled by the official StarWars.com. Whatever that may mean. 
A visual guide to many of the obscure Imperial characters
Great page of thumbnails from a foreign language Star Wars wiki (I think Dutch).
The easiest place to turn when you need a quick reference. Despite being an invaluable resource Wookieepedia has two main draw backs. First and most obviously, it can be updated by anyone, leading to quality issues. Second, the articles rarely acknowledge multiple sources. Sure they provide a bibliography, but some of the information in the article itself is drawn from sources as varied from the movies as video games, books and comics. Distinguishing which facts are drawn from which medium is almost impossible without owning all the references yourself and doing a lot of reading. Even if you wholeheartedly embrace a multi-medium Expanded Universe, there are still going to be times you’ll want to know what fact came from where.
STAR WARS LITERARY EXAMINATIONS
Star Wars Technical Commentaries
This is an excellent website with some well researched articles on the minutiae of the SW universe. All those practicalities of the SW universe that only the most obsessive SW fans could possibly be concerned about. Facts about Star ships, the Imperial and Rebel organization, etc.
SW Technical Commentaries: Imperial Insignia
This is a good starting point for research into the seemingly byzantine Imperial rank insignia system. As an obsessive fan the urge to make the pieces fit neatly together can rarely be as great as when trying to make sense of the seemingly straight forward Imperial ranking system. While I partially support the rationalizations of the article, I don’t agree with some of the assumptions which rely too much instinct than fact to find the missing elements that make the color and number patterns work. The truth is that the costume designers working on TESB decided to throw out the rule book (who are we kidding, there never was one) for the Imperial ranking system and start anew.
The need to rationalize two clearly very different rank insignia systems is like George Lucas’ need to neatly tie C3PO’s origin to a pre-teen Anakin. Sometimes things can be too neat. Isn’t it equally possible that two very different ranking systems exist for army and navy, or staff officers and regular military? I’d like things to fit too, but sometimes its better they don’t. It’s more real that way. Just like the rusty old spaceships and machinery on Tatooine. I thought it was part of SW’s genius. But then the Prequels happened and CGI just made the shiny clean paint job ships look even more fake. Crap, this is turning into a soap box and it’s just supposed to be a link page!
SW Technical Commentaries: Rebel Alliance Insignia
Here’s the rebel rank insignia article. See above!
SW Fanboy Association: Rejects of the SW Universe 1.0
What makes this essay so interesting is that it explores Raymond L. Velasco’s A Guide to the Star Wars Universe, published in 1984 as the first attempt to collect together and rationalize the various SW trivia into a cohesive universe. As SW 1.0 this is a world much close to the Original Trilogy, whereas what we have today is either SW 2.0 (1990s Expanded Universe) or perhaps 3.0 (post Prequel). Personally, I love me some 1.0 with occasional dashing of 2.
SW Fanboy Association: Fighter Squadrons of the Alliance
Ever wonder about how many fighters were in each squadron that attacked the Death Star? Ever wonder how many squadrons? The names of the pilots? Who survived? This article is postulating for the most part, but does a great job of giving a well researched basis to build your own theories without breaking a sweat to do the groundwork.
A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
IndieAstronaut sent me a link to this interesting paper: Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III. I am not a big fan of the executions (and many of the events) of the Prequels, but this paper does an excellent job of applying a Prequel perspective on the Original Trilogy. If your not a Prequel fan then this might at first discourage you from reading it, but I highly recommend it as a good read.
“If we accept all the Star Wars films as the same canon, then a lot that happens in the original films has to be reinterpreted in the light of the prequels. As we now know, the rebel Alliance was founded by Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa. What can readily be deduced is that their first recruit, who soon became their top field agent, was R2-D2.”
