Why Disney Blew Up More Than 30 Years of Star Wars Canon

While the arrival of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a new beginning for the storied franchise, it’s a painful reminder of something else: More than 30 years of novel, toy, game, and comic book-tie-ins collectively known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. In April 2014, Disney—which had purchased the series in 2012, when it bought Lucasfilm—announced that all such previous efforts would have no bearing on future Star Wars projects. It was, as Obi-Wan Kenobi might have put it, “as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” In its place would be a new Expanded Universe, one crafted to complement Disney’s multiyear plan for the world’s most beloved space opera.

The casual viewer of a Star Wars movie may think that the only stories extant are the ones in the (now) seven films, but the Expanded Universe used George Lucas’s films as a launching pad for new narratives. As early as 1978, Kenner toy company’s action figures gave names to characters otherwise unmentioned in the movies. Who can forget Walrus Man at the Mos Eisley cantina, or Lando’s co-pilot Nien Numb—to say nothing of Sy Snoodles and the Rebo Band—in Return of the Jedi.