LogFAQs > #924840773

Revelation34 posted...

I just ignore Disney on that since Lucas himself approved of the EU.

He really didn't, though. It would be more accurate to say that he completely ignored the EU, and that his stance on it was more or less "I don't care what they do or whether or not they call it "canon", just so long as I can contradict literally anything they say the next time I feel like making a movie."

Lucas never read anything in the EU. He certainly never signed off on ideas on an individual basis. He just cashed the checks from the licensing and let his underlings handle the details, because he didn't give even the remotest of shits. The few rare ideas he actually kept from the EU (like Aayla Secura) happened more or less by accident (in Aayla Secura's case, he literally only saw a picture of her hanging up by one of his underling's desks, said she looked interesting, and then got a 1-2 sentence description of who she was before slipping her into the films, and blatantly killing her off because he didn't actually care about her as a character). As far as he was concerned, the only thing that was ever really canon was what he put in the films, and nothing else.

The whole multi-tier canon system was basically just a line of bullshit they fed to fanboys to convince them that the EU was someone "official" and "true" in the context of the Star Wars universe, to encourage them to buy dozens of books, when it was essentially only slightly above the level of fanfiction.

And honestly, most of what people fondly remember from the EU (other than Zahn's books) wasn't even from the "upper" tier of pseudo-canon anyway. Stuff like KotOR was like three levels down, only just barely avoiding being declared officially non-canon entirely.

And there was a LOT of absolute feces in the EU.



Revelation34 posted...

Original creator has more precedence than who bought the rights.

In most shared universe franchises, this is the opposite of true. Especially if the original creator sells the entirety of the rights in perpetuity.

This is why comic stories are retconned constantly - the ideas and intentions of the creators are almost immaterial to the ideas and intentions of whoever currently owns the IP. And we explicitly accept this as a culture - most of what you know about any given comic character comes from stories written by other writers long after the original creators had moved on. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men, but the only reason anyone even knows who they are today is more because of Chris Claremont. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman, but if you were to make a list of the top 10 things most people know about the character, about 8-9 of those things were likely dictated or outright created by other people.

Like it or not, Lucas' right to have opinions about Star Wars that really matter ended the moment he cashed the check.

Though some people would argue that Lucas' right to have opinions about Star Wars ended sometime in the 1980s, because he bought into his own hype and went batshit insane. But that's a more subjective discussion.

(Though it's not as if Lucas' proposed ideas for the sequel trilogy were any better than what we got. Seriously, track down and read some of the ideas he was passing on to Disney when he still thought they were going to pay attention to his ideas. They're absolutely terrible - and some of them are clearly him still dipping into the well of bad ideas he'd had in the 70s but which he cut out of the original film's script because everyone around him (included multiple Oscar-winning directors told him they were incredibly bad.)


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