Like any devoted fanbase, Star Wars fans passionately debate the respective merits or drawbacks of everything associated with the brand, from the criticisms of the prequels to the online outrage over The Last Jedi. When Lucasfilm’s new owners at Disney rebranded the old Expanded Universe tales as Star Wars Legends, many saw this as a painful erasure of canon, the dismissal of stories they’d explored and cherished for years. But what did George Lucas think about those EU stories? Here, we’ll take a look at what George Lucas Considered Star Wars Canon.
Nobody is perfect, not even the beloved creator of that galaxy far, far away. So before we dive in here, let’s make sure we keep in mind that George Lucas, like anybody, has contradicted himself. The Star Wars saga is now more than 40 years old. Of course he should be forgiven for changing his mind, or sharpening an answer.
Back in 1976, when the chances that his ambitious space opera would be a commercial success seemed slim, Lucas gave some rough footage, paintings, and drafts to writer Alan Dean Foster, commissioning him to ghostwrite a novelization, which was first released as From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, credited to George. As part of a two-book deal, Lucas also asked Dean to create a story that could be adapted into a low-budget sequel, in the event that Star Wars was a flop.
The resulting 1978 book, in which Luke is the one who chops a limb from Vader, was called Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Foster left Han Solo out of his sequel story, as Harrison Ford wasn’t under contract. He was also careful to stick to locations that would be cheap to create and scenes that could utilize preexisting sets and props from the first movie. (It was adapted into a graphic novel in the mid-90s.) Of course, once Star Wars became a phenomenon, that story was jettisoned in favor of a much bigger budgeted affair, which of course became Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.
Even with its blue-lightsaber wielding Vader and uncomfortable romantic subplot between the Skywalker twins, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye has its fans. More importantly, it’s considered the jump-off for what came to be called the Expanded Universe. 1987’s Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was another touchstone moment, followed by the Dark Empire comics from Dark Horse, which followed a post-Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker who had fallen to the Dark Side. And of course, there’s Heir to the Empire and the rest of the Thrawn trilogy, still a big favorite to this day.
Throughout the seemingly endless amount of novels, comics, video games, and the like, there were great characters, cool concepts, and exciting story arcs. There were also more than a fair share of missteps and downright embarrassments. Luke’s clone, the Ewoks cartoon and tie-in comic, Skippy the Droid, Vader’s magical glove, space werewolves… (Ok, perhaps space werewolves could have been cool.)
Eventually, the folks at Lucasfilm categorized the EU into different levels of canon, with different levels of priority. But the films always reigned supreme, by everyone’s account, and Lucas reserved the right to pull from or overwrite anything he chose. A big turning point, according to one of the keepers of the Lucasfilm holocron, which sought to keep track of everything out there and keep it more or less straight, was the death of Chewbacca. A character who primarily grunts or growls isn’t easy to write, so when the decision was made to kill off a major original trilogy player, poor Chewbacca was chosen.
But how could Lucasfilm deny sequel moviemakers the chance to use Chewbacca, let alone the fans the chance to see him again onscreen? They couldn’t. Which made the decision to firmly categorize everything outside of the first six theatrical films made prior to Disney, and the Clone Wars series, as Star Wars Legends, and not canon.
In 1994, Lucas provided the introduction to an edition of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, seizing the opportunity to share some of his thoughts on the EU in general: “After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story - however many films it took to tell - was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories I was destined to tell. Instead they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided. Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.”
The same year, two Lucas Licensing staffers stated the following about the EU, in an issue of Star Wars Insider: “Gospel, or canon as we refer to it, includes the screenplays, the films, the radio dramas and the novelizations. These works spin out of George Lucas' original stories, the rest are written by other writers.” They noted that they do take care to make sure the EU material was consistent and faithful.
In a 2001 interview, between the releases of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, Lucas told Cinescape, “There are two worlds here. There’s my world, which is the movies, and there’s this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe-the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don’t intrude on my world, which is a select period of time, [but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don’t get too involved in the parallel universe.”
A statement from the Director of Fan Relations posted on Star Wars dot com the same year clarified, “When it comes to absolute canon, the real story of Star Wars, you must turn to the films themselves-and only the films. Even novelizations are interpretations of the film, and while they are largely true to George Lucas' vision (he works quite closely with the novel authors), the method in which they are written does allow for some minor differences… The further one branches away from the movies, the more interpretation and speculation come into play.”
In 2005, the year Revenge of the Sith was released Lucas was even more direct, responding to a Starlog question about “the subsidiary material that’s in the novels, comics, and other offshoots.” He said, “I don’t read that stuff. I haven’t read any of the novels. I don’t know anything about that world. That’s a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.”
During a ShoWest interview published on the official Star Wars website and conducted in 2008, the year the Clone Wars series started airing on Cartoon Network, Lucas was asked again about the Expanded Universe material and specifically, whether any of it would ever be turned into movies set after Episode VI.
“But there’s no story past Episode VI, there’s just no story,” he protested.
“It’s a certain story about Anakin Skywalker and once Anakin Skywalker dies, that’s kind of the end of the story. There is no story about Luke Skywalker, I mean apart from the books. But there’s three worlds: There’s my world that I made up, there’s the licensing world that’s the books, the comics, all that kind of stuff, the games, which is their world, and then there’s the fans' world, which is also very rich in imagination, but they don’t always mesh. All I’m in charge of is my world. I can’t be in charge of those other people’s world, because I can’t keep up with it.”
The same year, he likened it to the Christian trinity, describing himself to Total Film as the Father, the President of Licensing as the Son, and the fans as the Holy Ghost. “Now these three different pillars don’t always match,” he noted. “But the movies and TV shows are all under my control and they are consistent within themselves.”
He added that “in the early days” he forbid them from telling any stories about how Darth Vader was born. He also threw a little shade at some of the EU ideas. “I’ve left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more [movies],” he said. “There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX. That’s because there isn’t any story. I mean, I never thought of anything. And now there have been novels about the events after Episode VI, which isn’t at all what I would have done with it. The Star Wars story is really the tragedy of Darth Vader. That is the story. Once Vader dies, he doesn’t come back to life, the Emperor doesn’t get cloned and Luke doesn’t get married…”
Emmy Award winner Dave Filoni, whose fingerprints are all over the animated series, told Comic Book dot com in 2017, “For me and my training here at Lucasfilm, working with George, he and I always thought the Expanded Universe was just that. It was an expanded universe. Basically it’s stories that are really fun and really exciting, but they’re a view on Star Wars, not necessarily canon to him. That was the way it was from the day I walked into Lucasfilm with him all through Clone Wars, everything we worked on, he felt the Clone Wars series and his movies were what was actually the reality of it all, the canon, then there was everything else.”
“It wasn’t a big dynamic shift for me mentally when there was this big announcement saying the EU is now Legends. I’m like, ‘Okay, well, it’s kind of the same thing to me because that’s the way I work,'” he added. He noted that both he and George used characters and ideas that had been popular in the EU, but were always careful to translate them in a way that made sense with the movies.
Perhaps we can all take a page (pun intended?) from prolific EU writer Timothy Zahn, who created Grand Admiral Thrawn and so many other great characters. He pointed out that nobody is coming to our houses to take away our books. We still have them. “We jus don’t have it as official [canon] - except it never really was official, in the sense that it was in stone,” he said to The Daily Dot in 2016. “It was always something that Lucas could override at any time. And in fact, everybody who had written stuff about Boba Fett watched that backstory get demolished in the prequel trilogy… I try to calm people down. ‘It’s not the end. Some of your favorite characters, some of your favorite scenes, could come back at any time. We don’t know… I appreciate your loyalty and your passion. But really, relax.” He himself has since published books in the new canon, including Thrawn and Thrawn: Alliances.
What do you think about the Expanded Universe, the reorganization into Star Wars Legends, and the things Lucas himself has said about all of it over the years? Who are some of the EU characters you’d like to see make a Thrawn style jump to canon? Let us know in the comments. Because if there’s one thing we Star Wars fan love, it’s commenting about Star Wars on the Interwebz, often very “Force"fully. (Ugh sorry!)
