Anna Daniels
It’s crazy to think about now, but there was a time when Star Wars wasn’t everywhere. In the early ’90s, Return of the Jedi was almost a decade old. The two animated spinoffs, Droids and Ewoks, had flopped. Other than a few video games and West End Games’ tabletop RPG, new Star Wars material was impossible to find.
Enter publisher Random House, which bought the rights to Star Wars and began publishing prose sequels to the original trilogy, starting with Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire. Despite low expectations, the new books were massive hits, and the so-called “Expanded Universe” was reborn. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, hundreds of novels and comic books pushed the Star Wars universe in new, intriguing, and sometimes very silly directions.
Those fans are grown up now and the EU is gone, declared non-canon by Disney in 2014. And yet The Rise of Skywalker has many, many similarities to those old stories. The Emperor’s resurrection is right out of the Dark Horse comic series Dark Empire. A fleet of old, super-powerful battleships falling under the control of former Imperial forces is a key plot point in Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy. In the EU, Han and Leia’s son falls to the dark side and redeems himself with his death.
That’s just the beginning. A whole generation grew up on these books, and they’ll find plenty of parallels in the new film, even if their kids won’t.
Written by: Looper
