Monday, April 21, 2014

Star Wars Movies Ignoring Expanded Universe

Just in case you doubted my previous posts on the subject, Star Wars: Rebels writer Simon Kinberg has put another nail in the Star Wars Expanded Universe coffin. While at Wondercon he said, "You know, [the Expanded Universe is] not off-limits, and it’s certainly inspiring — I’m working on an animated show for [Lucasfilm] as well, Star Wars: Rebels, that will take inspiration from everywhere, but — I know for the movies, the canon is the canon, and the canon is the six films that exist." If you are wondering about his bonafides, he is writing the movie script for one of the three planned standalone films that will focus on a single Star Wars character. As such he would be at least aware of the broad strokes of the trilogy storyline so his movie can at least avoid contradicting the main trilogy.

So basically the canon is the movies and nothing else. I assume that includes the cartoons too. If Abrams grabs anything from EU its probably going to be because the name, design or what have you is already owned by Lucasfilm so free and clear to use but not because he actually saw any EU content that he deemed worth using. So for hypothetical example, let us say there is an Admiral Thrawn in the movie (this is my made up example, not real). But the character might be in the Alliance army and only has a five second appearance before assassinated. The name wasn't used as a wink to EU fans but because Abrams said "I need a name I can legally use for this minor character" and legal returned with a list of names of which Abrams happened to like Thrawn the most. So for EU lovers, its dead and done. There might be a few more books that come out to finish any story lines out there but by 2015 they will gear up to tell stories set in the post-Abrams Star Wars verse simply because that is how Disney operates. I find it tragic waste but that is how it is.

1 comment:

  1. GEORGE LUCAS was at many meetings and plotted these books. I know he will keep to them. Except bring Jacen Solo back as a cyborg. Oh well. Stay Positive I know the BIG MAN won't let DISNEY hurt us.

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