Talking Culture: Does Disney-owned Lucasfilm ignore the old Star Wars 'Expanded Universe' when determining canon?

This will always be the "core canon" of Star Wars, even under the House of the Mouse. (C) 2015 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

Does Disney-owned Lucasfilm ignore the old Star Wars 'Expanded Universe' when determining canon?

Pretty much, yes.

I understand that a vocal group of Star Wars fans (which don’t represent the vast majority of Star Wars  fandom but nevertheless make lots of noise, especially online) feels that the old Expanded Universe, aka Star Wars Legends, is not the primary source for the Sequel Trilogy and languishes, according to them, in The Walt Disney Company’s equivalent of purgatory.

Apparently, for many fans, especially those who were teens and/or young adults in the Dark Times between the Classic Trilogy and the Prequels, the Expanded Universe was the Star Wars universe, only instead of movies, its main fare was a series of novels, comic books, graphic novels, and a plethora of video games, space-flight simulators, and role playing games. Lucasfilm licensed the creators of this vast media empire, and an entire contingent of the company’s tie-in division devoted its energies to coordinate all these books, games, and short story anthologies so they would be consistent with each other. That way, a sense of internal consistency existed, even if the quality of the actual writing was hit-or-miss.

The trilogy that kicked off the 1990s Star Wars Renaissance. (C) 1991, 1992, 1993 Bantam Spectra and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

The EU, by the way, began way before 1991’s Star Wars: Heir to the Empire debuted and ushered in the Star Wars renaissance. The first stories set after the end of Lucas’s first Star Wars film were told by Marvel Comics, starting with Star Wars #7.

(C) 1978 Del Rey Books and The Star Wars Corporation (later Lucasfilm Ltd.)

The first EU novel was Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, a strange planet-bound story based on a concept by George Lucas for a cheap, quick-and-dirty sequel film that would be filmed if 1977’s Star Wars flopped.

In fact, Lucas thought the budget for The Sequel That Never Was would be so meager that he asked Foster to delete a scene depicting a space battle from an early draft of the novel. Why? The special effects would cost a ton of money - money that was not yet in The Star Wars Corporation’s coffers. Also, since Harrison Ford had not signed the three-film deal that his co-stars Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher had, Foster was told to only mention Han Solo in passing.

Now, Foster is one of America’s finest science fiction and fantasy writer. He adapted Star Trek: The Animated Series in the mid-1970s as the Star Trek Logs series. He also wrote the story In Thy Image for the canceled TV pilot for Paramount’s Star Trek: Phase II TV series; Harold Livingston would adapt that treatment as the basis for the Star Trek: The Motion Picture screenplay he’d later write for Gene Roddenberry’s 1979 feature film.

He was also, in 1977, no stranger to Star Wars. In 1976. Charles Lippincot, Lucasfilm’s media and public relations guru, hired Foster to novelize Lucas’s fourth draft of the Star Wars screenplay as a ghostwriter. He would do the writing, Lucas would get his name on the title page (and book cover). Foster agreed, and in late 1976, Del Rey Books, then an imprint of Ballantine Books, published the first edition of Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker.

As a result, the first EU novel has the same narrative sensibilities of the first canonical adaptation, even though reading it today makes readers familiar with the Star Wars saga feel like they’re reading very good fan fiction.

Other authors, including Brian Daley and L. Neil Smith, would join Foster as the creators of the first wave of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

Then, between 1986 and 1991, the Great Star Wars Drought occurred. Lucasfilm moved on - seemingly - away from Star Wars movies while their creator struggled to raise a family after a nasty divorce. Marvel closed its comic book series in ‘85, and Kenner Toys stopped making new Star Wars toys in 1986.

And then…Bantam Spectra won the licensing rights to publish new Star Wars fiction in 1991, and after Tim Zahn’s Heir to the Empire and its two sequels became New York Times bestsellers, a flood of new stories bearing the Star Wars brand came into being. New novels, new games, new comics, and even new action figures hit store shelves and were bought eagerly by anxious fans who wanted to see what Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, R2-D2 and C-3PO had been up to since the Battle of Endor.

All well and good, and this writer bought a lot of the novels, graphic novels, and even a few of the EU-set Star Wars games. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot.

Trouble is, just as in that other franchise with a two-word title that begins with Star, the quality of the novels ranged from the “so good you want Lucasfilm to make the movie versions” to the “Ugh, I can’t believe I bought this shit!”

I expected this. I even accepted this as a part of the fan experience. I have experienced it even with canonical material: some Star Trek movies and TV episodes are awesome, while some make you wince or look away in embarrassment. Same thing happens in Star Wars: who in their right mind defends The Star Wars Holiday Special as canon today? Or Caravans of Courage? Or The Ewoks/Droids Adventure Hour?

To be sure, Lucasfilm never envisioned the Expanded Universe as “the official story” of that galaxy far, far away. George Lucas often said in interviews that he never read the novels, but every so often he’d scan through EU material to see if there were names he could use (as he did with Coruscant) when he finally got around to doing the Prequels.

Dark Empire is an example of the worst excesses of the old Expanded Universe. (C) 1994 Dark Horse Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd.

But….even though by the late 1990s Lucasfilm’s official position on the EU’s canon status was easily found online if one bothered to look it up, many fans had invested lots of money, time, and emotional commitment to the stories told by Zahn, Tom Veitch, Kevin J. Anderson, Barbara Hambly, Vonda N. McIntyre, Steve Perry, Michael Reaves, and James Luceno, just to name a few. They loved the stories that included the growing pains of the New Republic, the struggles of our favorite heroes against Grand Admiral Thrawn, Admiral Daala, a resurrected Emperor, a lucky-to-be-alive Boba Fett, creepy ex-Imperials who want to create an Empire Reborn, and eventually, a seemingly unstoppable alien race that nearly defeats our heroes and forces the former Rebels to ally themselves with the remnants of the Empire.

Again, although some of the novels that were published between 1991 and 2014 are pure literary gold, many of them are not. And eventually the EU became too convoluted. too silly, for Lucasfilm and Disney to even consider mining it “as is” for movie or TV show ideas. (So far, only one major EU character has become a major canonical player to be reckoned with in the official Star Wars saga: Grand Admiral Thrawn.)

To its credit, Disney-owned Lucasfilm has not collected every existing EU novel or story ever published and tossed the whole lot into the garbage compactor to feed the Dianoga. It just relabeled the EU material as Legends and is content to let booksellers offer them to consumers.

And Lucasfilm’s Story Group will, no doubt, sift through the Legends stuff and use what it can if writers and directors see concepts they like. Lucasfilm , after all, licensed the Legends stories and owns the copyrights. It’s up to the company, and not the consumers, to decide what Star Wars canon is…and what isn’t.