7 Reasons To Give Up Star Wars

When Disney acquired the rights to Star Wars, they declared all of the Expanded Universe stories no longer happened. A lot of longtime fans were upset, but considering that the EU wasn’t really official canon and could be overturned at any time by Lucas, it’s not that tough of a pill to swallow. Many suggested the move was made in order to repackage successful plot elements from the novels and those people were absolutely correct.

Kylo Ren, Han and Leia’s son who succumbed to evil is clearly based on Jacen Solo. Jacen and his twin sister (“it’s like poetry - they rhyme”) Jaina debuted in the novel The Last Command in 1993. They were trained as Jedi, but Jacen was seduced by the dark side and became Darth Caedus, who wanted to create a new Galactic Alliance called the New Order.

Starkiller base takes its name from Starkiller, Darth Vader’s apprentice from the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed video game, as well as “Annikin Starkiller,” George Lucas’ original name for Luke in early drafts of the Star Wars script. Finn’s abandonment of his stormtrooper post is a lot less moving when you hear about Baron Soontir Fel, who also left the Empire but didn’t have a wild ride with cute girls and war heroes; instead, he was treated as a pariah by the rebels he joined.

Superweapons like the Galaxy Gun, Star Forge, Centerpoint Station, and Sun Crusher have all been featured in the EU and if you throw them all in a blender, you’ll get the one used in The Force Awakens. A short story in the Star Wars Tales comic depicted people living in the wreckage of an AT-AT walker and showed an image of an abandoned Star Destroyer just like the one Rey plunders. Even Kylo Ren’s mask is from KOTOR.

This isn’t some isolated incident; it’s clearly a trend. Disney does not need originality to be successful. If anything, it’s been proven time and time again that originality is actually detrimental to making blockbusters. People want exactly what they’ve seen before, but they want it to feel different enough that things aren’t stagnant.

Timid hardcore Star Wars fans will gleefully flock to the theaters to see “the movie version” of their favorite elements from the EU while those who never even knew there were Star Wars books won’t know the difference. It’s a safe bet that large portions of the Han Solo prequel movies will come from The Paradise Snare, The Hutt Gambit, and Rebel Dawn, the three books that make up the Han Solo Trilogy, a prequel story.

When Disney tires of making the original trilogy over again, they can move on to the rest of the EU and recycle that. There is such an immense back catalog of non-canonical works to be stripped that they’ll never, ever have to come up with an original idea. Sounds fun.