Talking About 'Star Wars': Should the Star Wars Expanded Universe (Legends) be continued even though Disney made it non-Canon?

© 1978 Ballantine Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (as The Star Wars Corporation)

Should the Star Wars Expanded Universe (Legends) be continued even though Disney made it non-Canon?

No.

Contrary to the belief held by many Star Wars fans who really dig the Expanded Universe (EU) novels, comic books, roleplaying game supplements, and even video game backstories, Lucasfilm Ltd. always considered them apocryphal.

In other words, as far as the company and its founder, George Lucas, were concerned, the EU that began with the publication of Marvel Comics’ Star Wars #7 in October of 1977 and Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye several months later was never canon.

Marvel Comics' Star Wars #7 was arguably the first Expanded Universe publication. © 1977 Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm Ltd.

As I wrote in my answer to What exactly did Disney add and remove from the Star Wars universe/story?

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 1977 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.

The old EU is now Legends. The books and comics are still being reissued, albeit with the “Legends” label, so it’s not like new fans can’t buy new copies to see what all the fuss is all about.

But from Lucasfilm’s point of view, it makes more sense to start anew and keep things consistent by having one unified canon that encompasses all media rather than keeps the confusing pre-2014 setup as described above.