I think the primary issue was not using the expanded universe material the way the MCU has used comic books for movie plots. You don’t have to stick to the original material, but at least use it as a basis and inspiration. Disney just dumped the EU and then claimed it was hard to write new material when they never needed to.
1 Like
Two problems with that: 1) most of the EU was based around the adventures of our heroic trio in the prime of their lives, and real-world issues would have required recasting, and 2) most of the EU was absolutely terrible adolescent power-fantasy incompatible with Star Wars, starting with the Thrawn trilogy.
3 Likes
They officially deemed all the old EU stuff as “Legends” in 2014, but they definitely didn’t throw it all out. Plenty of characters, planets and events that used to only exist in the old EU are now canon in the new films, books, and TV shows. Clearly the current story group still looks to the EU for inspiration. They just aren’t chained to it.
1 Like
The strands that hold this “universe” together are so torturously forced to have become a big joke. The super die hard fans exist in some kind of cross between Stockholm Syndrome and Cognitive Dissonance.
The movies, mostly, are pretty fun. But I think the “one offs” (Rogue One, Solo) are way more enjoyable than the recent trilogy because they’re not premised on a “reality” that crumbles under any scrutiny and causes me to surrender my film fan self-respect to enjoy.
5 Likes
One of the current Story Group wrote the definitive guide to the EU.
1 Like
This is what we needed:
3 Likes
Or, y’know, we don’t need our escapist pulp space fantasy stories to be perfectly rigorous.
1 Like
“A wizard did it…”
1 Like
Not at all, that’s my point. SW is so far beyond the pale of even see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil escapism, it’s a joke. Defending/Justifying it is just evidence of Stockholm Syndrome.
now i understand why the death star was so large.
5 Likes
It’s not a joke, it’s a genre that plays fast and loose for purposes of swashbuckling. The Millennium Falcon flew from Hoth to Anoat to Bespin without a working hyperdrive in 1980, but nobody got bent out of shape because it’s just a fun space adventure. If you don’t dig it that’s fine, but it’s okay for other people to enjoy things.
3 Likes
I was only refuting the assertion that the arc reactor’s transformation to life saving measure to iPhone charging doohickey actually had some explanation in one of the films. Beyond that, it’s superhero movie logic.
I’d be fine with recasting. I thought Solo was a fine movie and the casting decisions were close enough. I would have been fine with the Mandalorian if they had recast Luke rather than used the CGI. That said, there were plenty of EU characters that weren’t Luke, Han, and Leia that I’d love to see explored, including some of the video game characters like Kyle Katarn or Maarek Stele.
I really enjoyed the early to mid EU. There were plenty of good stories that didn’t feel OP to me. Only the earliest stuff like Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and the first Han Solo trilogy felt out of place.
More importantly, the New Republic vs the Remnants of the Empire and the in-fighting between the remnants didn’t make the OT struggles and sacrifices seem irrelevant. Trying to recapture the desperation of the Rebellion in the Resistance just felt lazy and like bad fan fiction.
3 Likes
Zahn turned the pulp fantasy Star Wars universe into military SF that actively worked to suppress and gamify the mystical elements, and from that point onward the EU became less interested in the goofy and the wondrous and more interested in the edgy and the cool. It struck me as an attempt to appeal to Star Wars fans that had aged out of liking Ewoks and Ben Quadrinaros and to lean hard into the Boba Fett aesthetic, when George’s Star Wars was always carefully balanced between the two (and got rid of Boba Fett with a burp joke). The Daley Han Solo trilogy and the original Marvel comics run were about the only parts of the EU that felt like Star Wars to me.
1 Like
The problem is that with each novel or series there was a temptation to add something that made sense at time, like a difficulty to overcome (Imperial encoded ship transponders), or one more weird force trick for Luke to save the day (moving a black hole was just stupid). And then they piled up in later novels.
Thrawn is the happy exception to all of that, of course: a non-force user who couldn’t just be power-stomped.
1 Like
I’ve been whining for decades that they need to let the main storyline and characters go and explore the potential of the rest of the galaxies and cultures. We don’t always need the force and Jedi and etc etc. I stolidly support a Sopranos/Godfather type series based on Nal Hutta.
7 Likes
So am I to understand that he kept refining his clones, all of which came out as elderly monstermen, making them gradually less deformed and zombie-like, until suddenly one somehow came out as a physically healthy baby girl? And then he decided that tracking that one down over a couple decades was easier than trying to replicate that result a second time?
Yeah, I can kind of see why they left it at “THE DEAD SPEAK!”
1 Like
This is exactly why I really enjoyed the old Lucasarts games that didn’t revolve entirely around the events in the movies, and why The Mandalorian is a thousand times better than the prequels and new trilogy combined.
2 Likes
No, Rey is the daughter of one of his failed clones.
I definitely aged out of liking the Ewoks. They were awesome when I was a kid in the 80s. I was in my almost to early teens when the Zahn trilogy came out, as well as when I was deep in LucasArts games. I was watching the OT between once a week and once a month for a few years around that time. I was into the comic books, the novels, the games. They’re all just facets of Star Wars to me. There was a lot of military SF in the OT to be further explored. I roleplayed Star Wars characters with my friends on Compuserve and we made custom missions for the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games and wrote our own fan fiction.
Quadrinaros wasn’t until Phantom Menace when I was graduating high school and the kids stuff hadn’t been interesting to me for a decade already. The Dark Empire I and II comics had already been out for a while and Boba Fett was alive and well and cool in the early to mid 90s.
