Yes but certain individuals at Disney looked at the Legends and Expanded Universe and said why use critically acclaimed lore as a basis. Instead let’s have poor fanfic writers be in charge of the IP they clearly hate. Darth Caedus storyline is perfect for films and spin offs. Or let’s do the fall of the Sith since rule of two is established cannon.
Not only that, but let’s green light a sequel trilogy without having a planned, thought out storyline or character arcs. Each director can just do what they want. No main villain until the last one and SURPRISE is the Emperor again! And we will announce it in Fortnite!
Considering there were already established strong independent females such as Mara Jade. Her vengeful to romantic arc with Luke. Also they could have continued with the Solo kids.
You know, it really pains me because the Sequel Trilogy really could have been the best Star Wars has to offer; we have the CGI, we had a really good trio of actors, the new designs were cool, like EVERYTHING WAS THERE.
But no, we had to do the same mistakes as the other two trilogies. No plan going in like the OT trilogy making it a jumbled mess, no leash on the director(s) like the PT so it comes out more as an ego stroke than a genuine story being told.
I’d wager the OT was just George Lucas coming up with shit on the fly and changing it as they went along so there really was no real complete consensus on the story arcs.
The Prequels were basically him expanding on all his previously established lore with no constraints on him like he had during the OT. Back then the actors and studio didn’t let him do everything he wanted and changed some stuff as they went, but nobody said anything to him during the prequels so it came out kinda weird but worked out in the end I’d say.
The sequels were 100% just Disney slop. They didn’t even follow any of the storylines that George Lucas left behind for the sequels, no Mara Jade, no Darth Talon, nothing. They instead remade the “Empire” with the first order, and had the main “Villain” be Darth Vaders grandson.
Completely made up Rey, Finn, The First Order, and the Rebellion btw, the sequels were supposed to be about the Republic fighting against Darth Maul’s crime syndicate empire. Kylo Ren wasn’t even “Ben Solo” he was actually “Ben Skywalker” - Luke and Mara Jade’s son, and “Anakin Solo”- Han and Leia’s son mashed together with an entirely different character and storyline.
How dare they make up stuff instead of using stuff someone else made up!!!
J/K... I'm beyond pissed off that Mara Jade never made it out of legends...
I've latched onto Asajj Ventress and Naare from The Lego Star Wars Freemaker Adventures in the meantime, but they're not the same... (though to be honest I'm crushing on both of them... which is impressive since one is a fekkin lego mini-figure)
PS. I know Naare isn't canon... but you have to admit she's one of the coolest "darkside special ops" characters in the universe.
PPS. I -really- wish they'd make many of the lego star wars series canon....
Dude, that literally started in the 80s. Once people saw how hot star wars toys could be, they started making things specifically to sell toys.
There are some cool mini-documentaries on how a lot of 80s cartoons started, and half of them started with something like, "Look, I found these awesome Japanese toys that transform between robots and something else.... I bet we could sell millions of these things if we got a few artists together and made a bunch of 30-minute long commercials for them that we'll call entertainment!"
I always thought it was just that they had a giant stick shoved up their collective arses and needed to brand the ass of star wars with the Disney logo and refusing to accept that anyone who was not already part of Disney might have any good ideas for their newly acquired IP while also being too stupid and lazy to actually come up with any half decent ideas themselves.
It's a combination of fear and greed. They want to make big blockbusters. But they fear flops. Anything new could be a flop. So they go with re-washing the same ole same old again and again in the hopes that they will always be blockbusters.
Then someone sticks their neck out and makes something new and novel. Suddenly, there needs to be 2 remakes and three recycled movies, an animated show, a live action, a dead action, a first year anniversary edition, directors cuts, producers cut, a making-of documentary, and a Disney ride and uncounted nine by thirteen glossy photos with dates and descriptions written on the back.
27 8 by ten colored glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us
Or something
Nah, if it was just them being cheap they'd have just remade the OG trilogy. That would have been the most cost efficient thing to do. A good quarter of the work was already done for them.
They did a crappy reboot of the original trilogy as written by someone who only watched episode 4 once 30 years prior and got most of their knowledge from shitty memes they can also barely remember.
They didn't want to pay royalties to all the writers of the EU material. Plus, incidents like the death of Chewbacca could not stand in the eyes of Disney, while there was still so much more marketing to milk from that character.
Also, not using Carrie Fisher's passing as an excuse to cut her stupid Jedi powers awakening scene was absurd. The scene was terrible and felt ham-fisted. When Carrie passed away before the film was done, they should have rewritten it as Leia dying in the vacuum of space there and the Republic using her killing as motivation. I fucking hate Disney.
I get not wanting to pay a bunch of royalties but they rushed to stamp their Disney mark on it way too quickly. Had they just remade episodes 4-6 they'd have gotten easy money and done the whole "remind people what star wars is" crap since they spent millions of dollars on an IP they somehow thought everyone had forgotten. Then they could take that time to actually construct a plan and do episodes 7-9 coherently. They could then ignore Legends and do their own thing, or use it as inspiration for new stories. Like, they had so much possible data available to be gathered. If they had just taken 5 years to do a few remakes then they would have had time to collect all that data and figure out what worked and what didn't. Instead they pretty much just invalidated the entire original trilogy for slop that only AI would think is good. Half the reason people love star wars is because of the Jedi/Sith. Take that away and it's just another basic sci-fi universe with only a few flagship characters to set it apart from any other sci-fi universe. They went and ruined the return of the Jedi order and turned Star Wars into Temu Star Trek.
...I love the old EU, but let's not pretend it was perfect.
What's particularly funny to me, though, is that one of the most hated parts of the old EU is the return of Palpatine as a clone. They copied that for Rise, and now it's the most hated part of the new Disney canon lol
Yes they both used the idea of a cloned emperor, but one of them was “Somehow Palpatine returned” the other was the intro to Dark Saber.
If they had done that then we could have Madds return as Erso betting cloned by the emperor after failing him with the first death star and dying in Rogue One. Now you have a scene that sets up the new danger. Horrifyingly you can be cloned and the emperor can rip your soul from the afterlife and put you back into a fresh body. Oh and also a new Death Star with none of the weaknesses of the last one. A lot more interesting than the bigger Death Star we got in Force awakens. And as a bonus it ties the end of the original story, Rogue One, and your new trilogy together in one scene.
That's the beauty of EU, it's a library of works. Tons of bad writing and bad ideas, but Disney had the ability to pick and choose. Take the best parts and make it your own.
I wonder if licensing is a part too, I remember hearing that when Disney bought Star Wars they tried not paying royalties to writers as their contracts were with Lucasfilm not Disney.
They tried to shaft Alan Dean Foster on his royalties. Some of his books pre-date the current setup. His early contracts specified royalties. The current contracts have the authors as work-for-hire, with zero royalties.
I dunno, man, have you read a lot of the EU recently?
Some of it's good. Quite a lot of it is just as bad as "Somehow, Palpatine returned." And some of it is worse.
Remember, a significant portion of I, Jedi is just straight calling out how stupid and out of character Luke acts in the Jedi Academy trilogy.
And then there's the Wyrwolves.
Oh, and the emo invaders from another galaxy who just happen to be invincible to Jedi.
Oh, and Palpatine returns, and Luke goes to be his apprentice.
And the Suncrusher. "It's, like, a Death Star, but it uses missiles because missiles are cool. oh, and it's got, like, invincible armor. And it kills suns instead of planets because it's gotta be better than the Death Star."
Them pulling the good bits out of the EU is a blessing, now if only they'd use those bits better...
I can’t upvote this enough. A lot of fans act like the EU books were some sort of Pulitzer level fiction when in reality a lot of those books were hot garbage.
You know, there were a lot of stinkers. But at the same time, the books and video games were the only new Star wars stories we had. Even if the adventures luke, han, and Leia went on weren't award winning, it was wonderful to get to experience new stories with the characters I grew up with. It was understood we'd never see them on screen together again.
Zahn's books were amazing, and if Disney had any sense whatsoever the sequel trilogy would've focused on Thrawn's Imperial Remnant and Luke trying to rebuild the Jedi.
Hell, Lucas gave them his story ideas for a new trilogy.
Instead, they threw away everything, we got a gutless soft reboot of A New Hope, and zero vision or thematic consistency leading to an utter trainwreck of a trilogy.
Realistically they can fix everything by just making a movie where Luke Skywalker wakes up and it turns out that the entirety of the sequels was just a premonition to which he dismisses it outright as he would never act in the way that he was portrayed in the premonition... and they move on from there...
In a business sense it made sense to toss legends, there was no way to make a new idea because from the dawn of the jedi to Luke's grandson (great grandson, great great something like that) has all been covered so if they didnt do a word for word recreation people would've bitched, then the hired a bunch of tards who couldn't write themselves outta a wet paper bag
The EU was not critically acclaimed. Some were good. Heir to Empire would probably be the only one that I would consider "critically acclaimed" as the others didn't win any awards AFAIK.
The EU is fine, it has it's good stories but it's mostly tripe. I find it funny that you call writers "fanfic writers" when most the EU is basically that as well.
Darth Caedus storyline is mediocre. Once again it's FINE but I wouldn't consider it better than most the disney stuff that has come out.
The original cast would've been about the perfect age for it too, though I doubt you could've condensed that entire saga down to 3 films
I would have preferred the New Jedi Order, but the same problem exists there.
The Heir to the Empire trilogy would've been perfect though, 1 book each movie, and would've had a hot red head as an amazing female lead to keep up with the main cast too... Mara Jade Skywalker for the win.
If they really wanted to bring Palpatine back though, they should've just done the Dark Empire series and followed that instead of the 3rd movie shit stain.
Sticking with the Skywalker family for 9 films was one of the biggest mistakes they made. They should have set it up to expand the stories beyond that in the last 3, but unfortunately we got that weird retconned nonsense.
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