Since the announcement that Disney bought Lucasfilm, there has been a wide range of reactions to it, from the very optimistic and positive, to the stunningly negative and outrageous. There are many reasons to be optimistic though, and I feel there are no valid arguments against Disney at this point. Within the few years, Disney has made some pretty smart moves with their acquisitions. Let’s take a look at that to see why Star Wars is safe in the House of Mouse.
If you’ve not seen Revenge of the Sith by now, this article will be spoiler filled, so avoid if you need to. However, if you’ve read my other articles, you already know all of the stuff here anyway, so read on.
There is one pretty big inconsistency in the Star Wars films that I don’t know the answer to.
How does Leia remember her mother?
It seems there are many theories about why, in Return of the Jedi, Leia says that her mother was “very beautiful. Kind, but…sad.”
When you look back on the Star Wars prequels, there is one thing that doesn’t stand out as very obvious at first. There weren’t many introduced mysteries that we absolutely had to get the answers to. Instead, most of the mysteries were laid bare for us to see as if we were the ones writing the screenplays. This wasn’t true all the time, of course, but in those cases, the mysteries weren’t character driven enough, or sweeping enough to cover the trilogy.
Mystery Boxes are those mysteries that occur when you’re watching a movie or TV series brings up a bunch of questions that you feel the need to know the answers to. They happen very frequently at the beginning of the original Star Wars film, A New Hope.
One of the big questions about the new Star Wars trilogy is this: what does this mean for all of the books in the Expanded Universe that take place after the original trilogy?
First, some background on the Expanded Universe
Since 1991′s release of Heir to the Empire, new Star Wars stories have been released pretty consistently. Books that cover, so far, about 44 years of adventures after the Battle of Yavin (which is the battle that takes place in A New Hope). This territory includes many adventures with the primary cast from the trilogy, as well as their children, the Empire, and changes to the known universe. A lot of great adventures that land all over the timeline. If a character dies in a particular book, any book that happens later on cannot have that character suddenly living as if nothing has happened. What people that don’t know, or understand, that haven’t looked into the Expanded Universe, is that it all happens on the same timeline. This means that a book that happens on the timeline between two previously written books can’t change things so much that the following story doesn’t make sense, so that there’s a logical progression.
Now, with new Star Wars sequels coming to film, how does that effect the Expanded Universe?
Today, there was official confirmation from the head of Disney Bob Iger, that there will be spin-off films in the Star Wars cinematic universe. What does this mean? Well, what we previously thought may not be true (that remains to be seen, with this news). We thought that Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg were going to be the screenwriters on Episodes VIII and IX, and that might still be true, as no writers have been announced at this time for those films. They will be consulting on those films, as they are on Episode VII currently. However, they will be pretty busy developing their own screenplays following individual characters in the Star Wars universe.