10 Biggest Star Wars Retcons

9. The Age Of The Republic

Star Wars A New Hope Alec Guinness
Disney

This one may not be as noticeable as the other entries on our list, but it's still a fairly big retcon that confuses the history of the Old Republic.

In A New Hope, Alec Guinness' grizzled Ben Kenobi says that the Old Republic existed "for over a thousand generations", which was interpreted by various Expanded Universe sources as meaning 25,000 years.

However, skip ahead to the release of Attack of the Clones, and here, Palpatine mentions that the Republic has stood "for over a thousand years", which, as you can tell, is pretty far removed from the 25,000 years suggested by Kenobi's line.

With the Expanded Universe no longer being canon, the question of which version of events is true has been hotly debated by Star Wars fans. 2020's The Star Wars Book did clear the air somewhat by claiming that the Old Republic was founded over 25,000 years prior to A New Hope - but that only made Palpatine's Attack of the Clones retcon even more of a headscratcher.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!