The return of the ... expanded universe
INSIDE THE CONVOLUTED, PAINSTAKING DRAMA OF THE STAR WARS CANONICAL WORKS
You may be surprised to learn, if your familiarity with Star Wars extends merely to its eight feature films, that Luke Skywalker was once briefly threatened by an evil dopplegänger cloned from the remnants of his severed right hand. The double’s name was Luuke. Doesn’t ring a bell? Well, perhaps you were aware that Luke later succumbed to the Dark Side under the influence of Emperor Palpatine, naturally reincarnated, after his death at the end of Return of the Jedi, into a younger clone of his own body. Or that Han Solo and Princess Leia gave birth to twins, Jaina and Jacen, who would duel to the death by lightsaber in their early 30s after the latter became a malevolent Sith Lord.
And did you hear about poor Chewbacca? The hirsute fellow was fatally crushed in a freak interplanetary collision.
It’s true. All of it. Among adherents of Star Wars the lot of this has been common knowledge now for more than 20 years.
Blockbusters have always been barnacled with tie- ins and spin- offs — with those vast attendant libraries of cartoons and comic books and video games and even action figures derived from the source. But for the enterprising mega- franchise these lucrative accoutrements alone are no longer enough. The modern blockbuster, the 21st century super-property, ought to be more than simply enriched by its supplementary material: it must to cohere with the stuff.
Coherence is what Star Wars promises. Suppose a Jedi apprentice under Darth Vader’s secret tutelage is introduced as the hero of a new Playstation shooter. According to the people with the power to sanction such things, that character is to be henceforth recognized as a part of the Star Wars world — a part as real, as meaningful, as R2D2 or Obi-wan Kenobi.
In this way, for three decades, a parochial fiction has swelled and diversified. All those comic books and video games and action figures have become an official component of the franchise’s bona fide Expanded Universe.
‘ The EU,” though it sounds like a coalition of nations or an edgy TV network for teens, is a sort of company- sanctioned content umbrella. Under its coveted aegis, Lucasfilm has certified original Star Wars stories as “authentic” since the classic trilogy concluded with Return of the Jedi in 1983. A story devised without its approval is mere fanfiction. With the EU seal it’s gospel.
The most enduring contributions to the EU have been literary. You may have seen the books around, in the airport or the supermarket: Dark Force Rising, Champions of the Force, Planet of Twilight, The New Rebellion, Shield of Lies. These tell the story of what happened after the destruction of the second Death Star and the fall of the Empire — and what happened after that, and after that.
Without Hollywood budgets to strain or movie- making timelines to adhere to, the post- Jedi novels are free to move forward indefinitely. And with only the patience of the diehard fan to try, their appeal is theoretically inexhaustible.
This arrangement seemed well and good for a very long while — and no doubt EU enthusiasts would have been happy to follow the Skywalker family’s continuing adventures in print to the grave. But then Disney bought Star Wars. And Disney, naturally hoping to recoup the four billion dollar investment, swiftly ordered some Star Wars sequels: proper sequels, immortalized on the silver screen.
Now, you’d think word of several new Star Wars films would have been received by Star Wars fans rather eagerly. Not so. Scholars of the EU could sense the implicit threat. The Universe as they knew it was about to be wiped out.
Lucasfilm was quick to confess that Force Awakens and its immediate sequels wouldn’t be anything like the stories told by the novels — in fact these new films would unambiguously contradict them. “While the universe that readers knew is changing,” the studio assured alarmists in a statement the year before the film was released, “it is not being discarded.”
Should the demand remain all those obsolete old books will stay in print – only without the import once attached to them. What was canon is now the undistinguished sprawl of alternate history.
But a new era of Star Wars has not stopped Lucasfilm from authorizing Star Wars novels. The studio redoubled its commitment to the written word, rushing to market a battery of original stories that vowed to disabuse fans of false history and at last tell the real story of what happens next. And so under the shared cover strap line JOURNEY TO STAR WARS THE FORCE AWAKENS soon arrived not only several novels but various comic books, reference books, activity books, short stories and volumes of young adult fiction — all of them gloriously, irresistibly canonical.
Of course the canon is not a phenomenon unique to Star Wars. Wherever a film or novel or television series aspires to construct for itself a coherent world, the sort with languages and landscapes and lore, fans will insist upon a scrupulous cartography — every family tree and backstory chronicled, every crevice and fjord mapped out.
With the wealth of Hapes to help fund the war, Leia could overthrow the last remnants of the Empire quickly, saving billions of lives in the process. — How The Courtship of Princess Leia describes th e result s of her hypothetical marriage to Prince Is older
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is available on DVD and Blu- ray on April 4. Here are five things we learned from the bonus materials on the disc.
1. Director Gareth Edwards is a real Star Wars fan.
Interviewed by producer Kiri Hart for the job of directing Rogue One, Edwards’ first words to her were: “I’ve always wanted to join the Rebel Alliance.” We also see photos taken in 2005, when Edwards for his 30th birthday visited the Tunisia set that served as Luke Skywalker’s childhood home in the 1977 movie. And he gets a cameo in Rogue One as a rebel soldier in one of the final scenes. ( Also among the cameos: Episode VIII director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman as a Death Star weapons crew, cowering in a tunnel as a laser blast rockets past them.)
2. Alan Tudyk is a real cutup.
Despite being born and raised in Texas, the actor who performs as a reprogrammed Imperial Droid (K-2SO) in Rogue One gave his character an English accent because “a lot of Empire guys are English.” He also messed up at least a few supposed Steadicam shots because the director was shaking too much with laughter. Among his ad libs was talking to passing stormtroopers as though he knew them: “Clive, nice to see you. Darren, hello, hello. Gail, looking good; you’ve lost a little.”
3. Ralph McQuarrie is a real inspiration.
The designer of many of the iconic sets and costumes in the original Star Wars trilogy, McQuarrie died in 2012 at the age of 82. But the crew of Rogue One continued to reference his material, including unused sketches that influenced the look of K- 2SO and the elite, black- clad stormtroopers seen in some scenes. And some sets that existed only as matte paintings in the early movies were designed as practical sets in this one. Says Edwards: “We were all sort of living in the shadow of Ralph McQuarrie.”
4. The budgets are really bigger.
A New Hope was made for about $ 11 million — a fair bit of change in 1977, but dwarfed by the $20 million spent that year on Close Encounters of the Third Kind or even the $ 14 million on The Spy Who Loved Me. And the producers of Rogue One note that “nothing looks quite as good as you remember.” Stormtrooper helmets in 1977 featured a grill on the side that was in fact just a sticker, and sometimes peeled away from the uniform. The helmets in Rogue One ( estimated budget, $ 200 million) turned that into an actual three- dimensional detail. And yet the new film had to resist improving too much on the old; as co- production designer Neil Lamont notes, you should be able to watch Rogue One and its “sequel,” the original Star Wars, back to back without a jolt.
5. There are a lot of references to other Star Wars movies.
In addition to cameos from directors and producers, there are a lot of nods to the other movies in the series. The death of a character referred to as Red Five reminds us that this would become Luke’s fighter- pilot callsign. Look closely and you can see an Imperial probe droid ( from The Empire Strikes Back) in one scene, and characters playing Dejarik (hologrammatic chess) in another. And that grumpy pair of aliens that start an ill-advised bar fight with Luke and Obi-Wan in the original Star Wars movie are seen in this one, already looking for trouble. Some things never change.