Expanded Universe: A Question of Canon

A Question of Canon

            Canon in Latin means “standard” and refers to people measuring something up to a standard. The easiest way to describe “Canon” is imagining a bunch of popes and bishops reading holy texts and deciding what is real? What text gets into the bible? What rules do we follow? What happens when texts disagree with each other?

So how does this apply to Star Wars? Well, most people who have seen Star Wars have only seen the movies so they don’t have to worry about Canon. But hardcore fans have gone a step further and have explored the thousands of comics, cartoons, video games, card games, & books that make up the “Expanded” Star Wars universe.

Leia & Luke fight
Vader together

When Lucas started recruiting writers to make some more money for “Star Wars”, they had to be careful. They couldn’t disagree with the films or potential films that were going to be made, so they had to craft their stories without killing off any of Lucas’ characters or looking into the secret past lives of the Star Wars universe.

The first example of a book entering the Star Wars Expanded Universe was “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” in 1978, which includes Luke & Leia searching for a crystal that makes force-users invincible. After a few hundred pages they meet Vader. Luke chops off Vader’s arm and then escapes with the crystal.

The book was a treat for fans that still had a two-years wait for “Empire Strikes Back”. It was also nice for Lucas, who made some money. Yet no one had to read this book to understand the future films. They don’t refer to the crystal in the movies. Vader never says, “You’re going to pay for chopping off my arm”. The book does not interfere with the main “Star Wars” story. The movies need to be enjoyed without people having to do extra homework.

Leia with her twins

The EU would work perfectly if no more Star Wars movies were ever going to be made. The problem is sometimes new movies are made that end up disagreeing with the novels. For example, what author Timothy Zahn envisioned the Clone Wars to be like is totally different than what they look like when Lucas made the prequel films.  There are actually dozens of times that the prequels disagree with previously established “Canon” from books and comics. This is because Lucas never read the books and has admitted to have no knowledge of what happened in the EU.

There are also a lot of places that the books that are inconsistent with each other. For example there are two books that focus on Han & Leia getting married and two different stories of their wedding. No one is quite sure which one to believe.

Some would even say that the prequels are inconsistent with the original films. Why would Leia remember her mother if she was taken from her at birth? Why would Han not believe in The Force even though there were millions of Jedi when he was a child?
 

Luke with wife & son

Canon works best when the movies can tell the story they need to tell and the books can fill in some interesting gaps. Authors of the books should try not to disagree with the films, but authors of the films shouldn’t have to cater to the books.

 I think that these sequel films could conceivably negate much of the Star Wars Expanded Universe as we know it (Mara Jade, Chewbacca’s death, Ben Skywalker, Jaina & Jacen). Perhaps the new writers of the films will want to keep these aspects or perhaps they will throw them out entirely. But if Lucas were writing the stories he wouldn’t give a crap about agreeing with the Expanded Universe.

Next Time: We explore the writing of the Empire Strikes Back. 

We explore what could have been and why things turned out the way they did.