Q & As About 'Star Wars': What is the reason Disney got rid of so much good 'Star Wars' content by making the Expanded Universe legends?

What is the reason Disney got rid of so much good Star Wars content by making the Expanded Universe legends?

There are several reasons why Lucasfilm (not Disney) decided to “get rid of” much of the Expanded Universe.

First, if Lucasfilm was going to make new films, it needed to have full creative license to do so without being beholden to stories that other writers had written between 1978 and 2014. This includes the Marvel Comics issues that were not adaptations of the Original Trilogy movies, Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, the Brian Daley Han Solo trilogy, and the various novels and comics published by Bantam Spectra, Dark Horse Comics, Bantam Skylark, Del Rey Books, and other licensees. No self-respecting screenwriter or film director, much less the Lucasfilm Story Group, would have wanted to wade through a thicket of superficially connected but wildly uneven stories.

Second, I hate to break it to you, but not everything in the old EU was “good.” Sure, some of the Star Wars novels published between 1991 and 2014 are excellent and I highly recommend them. All of Timothy Zahn’s novels are well-written and still stand up as great Star Wars stories, which is why Lucasfilm and Dave Filoni decided to reach into the recesses of Legends and added Grand Admiral Thrawn and other elements from the Thrawn Trilogy to the official canon in Star Wars Rebels.

But, seriously, the EU was seriously a mess by the time Disney agreed to buy Lucasfilm from George Lucas, and he never considered most of it to be canonical, either. There was a lot of unevenness in the tone and characterizations that veered from one extreme to another: in some novels, Luke Skywalker was depicted as a realistic young man trying to wrest with his new responsibilities as the galaxy’s only active Jedi, while in others he was just a cartoon character version of the naive farm boy from Tatooine endowed with superpowers unlike anything seen in the films. To this 1977-Generation Star Wars fan, at least, this was a major turn-off, to say the least.

Third, Lucasfilm had never considered the Expanded Universe to be the canon of Star Wars. Yes, there was a time before Lucas retired when Leeland Chee, the Lucasfilm exec in charge of overseeing the EU, had separated all of Star Wars’ content into levels of canonicity, in which the existing films were “G” (for George) Canon and Star Wars: The Clone Wars was T (for Television), with everything else going into lower levels of “canon” depending on whether a product was a novel, a comic book, a role-playing game supplement, or even a toy package blurb describing a character.

Clearly, this was an unsustainable model for canonicity, especially since we are talking about a fictional universe and not a real-world with actual history.

Don’t believe me? Then go to your nearby library and take a look at the 2008 three-volume set of The Star Wars Encyclopedia, which weighs over 10 pounds in its slipcover. Most of its entries are devoted to EU material, including data from crappy young reader books such as the Young Jedi Knights series and the horrible Jedi Prince stories.

If Stephen Sansweet and his co-authors, including Pablo Hidalgo, had limited their coverage to just G and T canon, the Star Wars Encyclopedia would not have needed three volumes, nor would it have been so darned expensive.

So, yeah. If you’re going to make more new content for TV, streaming services, and movie theaters, you need to have creative freedom. And being tied down to the EU does not provide that freedom.

Finally, “Disney” did not “get rid of” the Expanded Universe material. Del Rey Books is still publishing books that were originally released by other licensees. Marvel Comics is re-issuing the Dark Horse Comics Star Wars graphic novels, including (ugh) The Dark Empire trilogy.