Dispelling Myths About 'Star Wars': What exactly did Disney add and remove from the Star Wars universe/story? (Hint: It was not Disney...)

Dan Perri's classic logo for Star Wars. ™ Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

If there's one current trend that I hate on social media is the myth that "Disney" makes editorial decisions re Star Wars and Indiana Jones.  

What exactly did Disney add and remove from the Star Wars universe/story?

What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. - The Captain, Cool Hand Luke

One of the most persistent myths about Star Wars, the franchise, and especially the business end of how the films and other media products are made is that The Walt Disney Company “adds and removes” elements of the Star Wars story. Not a day passes in which I don’t see any mention on social media - usually derisive and hateful - about how “Disney” did this, that, or the other thing to Star Wars.

Lucasfilm, which was founded in 1971 by George Lucas, did not magically disappear in 2012 after The Walt Disney Company acquired it. The company still exists. The company still makes the Star Wars movies and TV shows. ™ Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

I am not sure if this trend - which began not long after George Lucas decided to, at age 68, to retire from making blockbusters and running Lucasfilm Ltd., the company he founded in 1971 as an independent production company in which he and like-minded young filmmakers could make the movies they wanted to see - is (a) simple lack of knowledge, (b) willful ignorance based on personal biases, or (c) a combination of both, sprinkled with a dash of self-entitlement and a heaping of unhealthy resentment on the part of some “fans.”

This subset of the fandom, which I often refer to as “toxic” or the “Never Disney Star Wars crowd,” seems to believe that:

1. The Walt Disney Company somehow compelled George Lucas to sell Lucasfilm when they heard he was retiring. False. Lucas called Bob Iger and asked him if Disney would be interested in buying the company
2. The Walt Disney Company purchased the Star Wars franchise. False. The Walt Disney Company, which had already collaborated with Lucasfilm (and George Lucas in person) extensively on various projects, bought Lucasfilm Ltd. and its intellectual properties.
3. The Walt Disney Company produces all Star Wars content and makes decisions at every level, including editorial ones.

This is the core argument behind the question What exactly did Disney add and remove from the Star Wars universe/story?

It’s also a myth.

I have written on this topic before, but apparently, some people in the peanut gallery aren’t paying attention, so let’s go over it again, shall we?

First, while it is true that Lucasfilm Ltd. under CEO and President Kathleen Kennedy is no longer an independent company as it was when George Lucas was the sole owner, CEO, and President, it is a very autonomous subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company and its film division Walt Disney Studios. It is exactly the same arrangement that Marvel Studios under Kevin Feige has with TWDC and Walt Disney Studios, as well as other subsidiary-parent company relationships that “Disney” has with ABC, ESPN, National Geographic, and 20th Century Fox.

Second, “Disney” does not add or remove anything from the Star Wars franchise. Per the parent-subsidiary relationship described above, Lucasfilm Ltd. and its Lucasfilm Story Group are the folks who decide what is Star Wars canon and, more importantly, what is not.

The main issue behind What exactly did Disney add and remove from the Star Wars universe/story? is not so much the making of five new Star Wars feature films, two animated series, the one-season revival of a canceled animated series, the creation of a new post-Return of the Jedi live-action series for Disney’s new streaming service, and the production, three years from now, of a new Star Wars non-Skywalker Saga trilogy. Sure, there are “Never Disney Star Wars fans” who wish some of the new movies had not been made, but that’s not the real issue here.

What is? The 2014 announcement that Lucasfilm, through its Lucasfilm Story Group, was going to relabel the pre-2014 Star Wars Expanded Universe legendarium as Legends and simplify the canon of Star Wars in order to:

• Allow new content creators - be it filmmakers/TV showrunners, novelists, or comic book writers at Marvel Comics - to tell canonical stories that were not locked down to another, convoluted set of stories
• End the confusing multi-level system of Star Wars canon that began in 1978 when Marvel Comics published Issue #7 of its Star Wars comics series, the first “original” story set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” that was not based on the actual Star Wars film. Before 2014, Lucasfilm Licensing and Leland Chee, “keeper of the Holocron” had a cake-like structure of letter-coded canons, with G (for George) Canon at the top of everything. This was called the Holocron, and it looked like this:
• G-Canon: The 'George' canon that was all six movies
• T-Canon: A later addition with the release of Clone Wars (the 2003–2005 micro-series) that covered the official TV shows
• C-Canon: 'Continuity' Canon, tie-in media like books and comics that connect the time periods between G and T canon properties (this is where most of the EU stood)
• S-Canon: 'Secondary' Canon, elements from tie-in media that were considered ancillary
• N-Canon: Non-canon 'what if' stories, like the popular Star Wars Tales comic anthology

Many fans, especially those whose first exposure to new Star Wars content was mostly from C and S canon (especially the novels and comics), seem to have adopted the EU as the real Star Wars story, even though the actual content is wildly inconsistent in tone, quality, or inconsistent with G-canon.

Sometime after 2005, when he still ran Lucasfilm, George Lucas had this to say about the phenomenon:

I am the father of our Star Wars movie world - the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series. And I'm going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I'm the father; that's my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son - and the son does pretty much what he wants. Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father's world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.

What made the multi-level Holocron structure problematic was this: If you wrote a story set after Return of the Jedi featuring a Boba Fett who’d escaped from the Sarlacc and fans loved it. fine. But if Lucasfilm decided to make a film that used that same setting but stated that Fett was dead, the film overruled your story, especially if George himself was involved.

Many fans - and even some authors - hated this. Karen Traviss, for one, left the Star Wars writing community long before Lucas retired, mostly because she disagreed with how Star Wars: The Clone Wars depicted the Mandalorians.

So not only could conflicts between levels of the canon be confusing to both content creators and consumers, but they also could - and did - get ugly.

Lucasfilm, taking its cues from how Paramount Pictures and CBS handle the Star Trek property and especially the Pocket Books novels and IDW comics, decided to end this insanity once and for all.

So in the summer of 2014, shortly before Star Wars Rebels was due to premiere on The Disney Channel, the Lucasfilm Story Group was formed, mostly from people who had worked for years in Licensing. It was the LSG at LFL that decided that the old EU was being rebranded as Legends and that, starting with the novels Star Wars: A New Dawn and Star Wars: Tarkin, every new story published under the Star Wars brand, be it a Lucasfilm movie or TV show, a Marvel Comics series, DK Books reference work, story-only elements of new Star Wars games, or Del Rey/Disney Books novels, would be officially canon.

Lucasfilm was the entity which made the decision, not The Walt Disney Company.