8 People More Important Than George Lucas In Making Star Wars Great

7. Timothy Zahn Made People Care About Star Wars Again In The Nineties

It's now nigh-on impossible to comprehend in a world where the next Star Wars film will never be more than a year away, but in the late eighties the franchise looked pretty much done. The movies had finished in 1983 and since then there'd only been a couple of Ewok movies and a pair of kid-baiting cartoons, leaving the whole thing look set to become a well-remembered, but hardly current, legacy property. Enter Timothy Zahn. There'd been Expanded Universe books written before the Hugo Award winning writer took on Star Wars, but he was the one who really used them to tell an advancing story. The Thrawn Trilogy put Luke, Han and Leia on a new adventure that developed them as characters (as well as introducing some great new ones) and did the seemingly impossible; it made people care about Star Wars again (many even held them as an unofficial sequel trilogy). It's so often stated that it was seeing the CGI in Jurassic Park that convinced Lucas to make the prequels - technology had finally caught up with his vision - but I'd suggest it's (at least partially) something else; the success of the Thrawn novels showed just how popular Star Wars remained in the cultural psyche and revealed that there was a hunger for more, laying the groundwork for the major resurgence in the nineties with the Special Editions and, eventually, the prequels. Had Zahn not come along with his sublime books, then there's every possibility Star Wars would have never gone beyond the original trilogy.