10 Biggest Star Wars Retcons
"Luke, I am your father... but not until the second draft."
With a franchise as expansive and long-running as Star Wars, it was inevitable that its lore would become increasingly muddled as time went on.
And though not every bit of Star Wars content that's been released since 1977 is considered canon, there's just so much stuff out there - movies, TV shows, comics, video games, novels, reference books, card games, you name it - that contradictory information is a common sight in pop-culture's favourite galaxy.
Even if we just look at the main Star Wars features, the Skywalker Saga and its spinoffs have been littered with retcons from the very beginning, with George Lucas' sprawling space opera consistently changing its own history on the fly, retroactively adjusting certain aspects of the story to better fit whichever movie was being worked on at the time.
On the plus side, not all of these retcons are bad (a couple actually improved the franchise, making the overall story that little bit more satisfying), but some of them definitely are, either being awkwardly executed, not making any sense, or, in some cases, just making the movies worse.
10. Anakin's Younger Force Ghost
The numerous changes George Lucas has made to his original trilogy over the years have been met with a controversial reception by Star Wars fans, and though a bunch of them are fairly minor and inconsequential - like Darth Vader getting his eyebrows shaved off - others are a lot more questionable.
Speaking of Vader's eyebrows, Return of the Jedi's original ending saw the owner of those bushy eye decorations, Sebastian Shaw, appear before Luke as a Force ghost, a great moment that really solidified Vader's redemption.
However, in the 2004 DVD release of the original trilogy, Lucas decided to swap out old Anakin for his younger counterpart, replacing Shaw's sweet smile with Hayden Christensen's creepy stare in a change that is not only a huge visual retcon, but seemingly contradicts everything we've learned about Force ghosts throughout the franchise.
Force ghosts in other movies (Luke in The Rise of Skywalker, Yoda in The Last Jedi, Obi-Wan in The Empire Strikes Back) look like the characters at the time of their deaths, so for Anakin to de-age a couple of decades felt like nothing more than a cheap way to hype Revenge of the Sith, which was due in cinemas less than a year after the DVD's release.