Star Wars in other media

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars in other media began not with a film, but with a novel published in 1976 -- a full year before audiences ever saw a lightsaber on screen. That novelization of the original film was ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster, and it set in motion one of the most sprawling fictional universes ever assembled outside of its source material. Thousands of novels, comics, video games, and audio dramas would follow, built around a saga that George Lucas never entirely relinquished. The key question hanging over all of it: when the books and games contradicted the films, which story was actually true? And when Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 and swept most of that history away, what was lost -- and what survived?

• 2. The First Wave

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  Alan Dean Foster ghostwrote the original film novelization, but his name would surface again when Lucas personally commissioned him to write a follow-up novel. The result was Splinter of the Mind's Eye, published in 1978, which Lucas originally conceived as a potential low-budget film sequel. When the first Star Wars movie became one of the most successful films of all time, that plan was abandoned in favor of The Empire Strikes Back.

  Marvel Comics launched a Star Wars comic series running from April 1977 to May 1986 that proved unexpectedly powerful in the marketplace. Former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter credited those early sales with saving the company financially during 1977 and 1978. By 1979 and 1980, the series had become one of the industry's top-selling titles. Brian Daley contributed both a trilogy of Han Solo novels between 1979 and 1980 and radio dramatizations of the original trilogy films, which aired in 1981, 1983, and 1996.

  The Ewoks -- the furry creatures first introduced in Return of the Jedi -- generated their own spin-off orbit in the mid-1980s. Two television films focused on them aired in 1984 and 1985, and they anchored an American-Canadian animated series produced by Nelvana that ran for two seasons between 1985 and 1986. A companion animated series, Droids, followed the further adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO. In 1985, Marvel's Star Comics imprint published a bi-monthly Ewoks tie-in comic, and in 1986 followed it with an eight-issue Droids series; the two series crossed over into a shared storyline. The decade closed with the opening of the Star Tours ride at Disney Parks in 1987 to mark the saga's 10th anniversary.

• 3. The Dark Times

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  After the 10th anniversary celebrations, almost everything stopped. The fan newsletter Bantha Tracks was absorbed into the official Lucasfilm magazine, which shifted its focus away from Star Wars toward the company's other projects. Some fans concluded the franchise was finished. The years between 1987 and 1991 acquired a name borrowed from the films themselves: the Dark Times.

  One institution kept the universe alive during this gap. In 1987, West End Games began publishing Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, along with sourcebooks, gamebooks, and adventure modules. Writers who later produced major franchise novels would draw on that material as a reference resource. Those publications have been described as the first to expand significantly beyond what the vintage era of the movies had established.

• 4. Heir to the Empire

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  Timothy Zahn's novel Heir to the Empire arrived in 1991 and reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list. StarWars.com wrote in 2014 that the book jumpstarted a publishing program that endures to this day and formalized the Expanded Universe. It introduced Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade, two characters who became central to decades of subsequent storytelling, and it led directly to the sequels Dark Force Rising in 1992 and The Last Command in 1993. In The Secret History of Star Wars, Michael Kaminski argued that the renewed public interest generated by the Thrawn trilogy was a factor in Lucas's decision to develop the prequel films.

  Around the same time, the comics license moved from Marvel to Dark Horse Comics. Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy launched the Dark Empire sequence between 1991 and 1995, a sequel to the Thrawn novels that notably brought back Emperor Palpatine and Boba Fett through the device of cloned bodies. Zahn himself objected to that choice, arguing it undermined the meaning of Return of the Jedi's ending.

  Dark Horse's Tales of the Jedi series in 1993 pushed the fictional timeline back approximately 4,000 years before the films into the era of the Old Republic. That series eventually gave rise to the Knights of the Old Republic computer role-playing games and a broader ecosystem of novels and comics set in that ancient period, including the Bane Trilogy and the Knights of the Old Republic comic line.

• 5. The Holocron and Canon Tiers

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  In 2000, a LucasArts lead tester named Leland Chee was hired as Continuity Database Administrator for Lucas Licensing. His job was to build a comprehensive tracking system for franchise continuity, drawing in part from the encyclopedic Star Wars: Behind the Magic CD-ROM released in 1998. The resulting database borrowed a name from within the Star Wars universe itself -- the Holocron, a term for ancient repositories of knowledge and wisdom. By the time of its fullest development, the Holocron contained over 55,000 entries covering characters, locations, species, and vehicles.

  To manage the competing authority of so many different works, Lucasfilm developed a tiered canon system with six levels. G-canon sat at the top: the films themselves, with Episodes I-VI overriding everything below. Chee summarized the principle plainly: George's view of the universe is his view. He's not beholden to what's gone before. T-canon recognized The Clone Wars television series, which Lucas co-created. C-canon covered the bulk of the Expanded Universe material. S-canon applied to elements that had been contradicted by other material; the Holiday Special fell into this category, except where higher canon referenced its elements. D-canon covered the planned-but-unreleased Detours parody series. N-canon captured outright non-canonical material such as alternate-universe stories, crossover appearances in other game franchises, and anything directly contradicted by higher levels.

  Lucas himself described his approach in August 2005: he said he had not read any of the novels and did not know that world, but that he tried to keep things consistent by checking whether names he invented had already been used. He framed the result as two universes: his own, and the Expanded Universe that others built alongside it.

• 6. Disney, Legends, and the Reset

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  On the 30th of October 2012, the Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm. A new body called the Lucasfilm Story Group was formed to unify and define the canon across films, comics, and other media. Among its members were Leland Chee, Kiri Hart, and Pablo Hidalgo. With a sequel trilogy planned, the decision was made to free those films from the accumulated plotlines of the Expanded Universe.

  On the 25th of April 2014, Lucasfilm renamed the Expanded Universe Star Wars Legends and declared it non-canonical to the franchise. The Clone Wars television series was exempted and retained its canonical status. Chee stated in a 2014 Twitter post that a primary goal of the story group was to replace the old hierarchical Holocron system with a single cohesive canon.

  The boundary between Legends and the new canon proved difficult to maintain cleanly in practice. The final season of The Clone Wars, released in 2020, contradicted aspects of the 2016 canonical novel Ahsoka. The following year, The Clone Wars spin-off series The Bad Batch contradicted canon elements established in the 2015 Kanan comic book series. Executive producer Jennifer Corbett acknowledged the tension, explaining that the production wanted to honor what existed while also offering a different take in the new story.

  The Legends material itself found a partial afterlife. In 2019, Marvel published a one-issue continuation of its original 1977 Star Wars comic series, marking it as the first new story published within the Legends continuity. In 2021, Del Rey Books announced an Essential Legends Collection to reissue popular Legends novels for the franchise's 50th anniversary, beginning with Heir to the Empire, Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, and Shatterpoint.

• 7. Scale and the Shadows of the Empire

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  The 1996 Steve Perry novel Shadows of the Empire occupied a gap that had never previously been explored in print: the time between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It was not a standalone release but the centerpiece of a multimedia campaign that also included a comic book series and a video game. The project was explicitly designed to reinvigorate the franchise ahead of the prequel trilogy and Lucas's 1997 Special Editions of the original three films.

  Lucas incorporated Expanded Universe ideas directly into those Special Editions. Coruscant -- the New Republic capital planet that Timothy Zahn had invented for the Thrawn trilogy -- made its first appearance in a film in the Special Edition of Return of the Jedi before being developed more fully in the prequels.

  By 2004, more than 1,100 Star Wars titles had been published across novels, comics, non-fiction, and magazines. Howard Roffman, then president of Lucas Licensing, estimated that more than 65 million Star Wars books were in print at that point. He described the books as a way of extending the fantasy of Star Wars, saying that the films had a profound effect on a couple of generations and that Star Wars had become a cultural touchpoint. The Jedi Prince young-reader novel series in 1992-1993 had depicted Luke, Leia, and Han about a year after Return of the Jedi, while R. A. Salvatore's Vector Prime -- the opening novel of The New Jedi Order series launched in 1999 -- killed off the popular character Chewbacca, signaling that the post-Return of the Jedi universe would not be a safe one.

• 8. The High Republic and Beyond

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  The Mandalorian premiered on Disney+ in late 2019, a live-action post-Return of the Jedi series written by Jon Favreau that opened a new chapter in the expanded universe. In February 2020, a new line of books and comics called The High Republic was announced, set 200 years before the events of The Phantom Menace and deliberately placed outside any currently planned films or series.

  In December 2020, Lucasfilm announced multiple new live-action Disney+ series: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Lando, three Mandalorian spin-offs, and The Acolyte, the last of which is set during the High Republic era. The Bad Batch debuted on the 4th of May 2021. Multiple comic series relaunched in 2020, shifting their settings to the era between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

  Dave Filoni, who co-created The Clone Wars with Lucas, has continued Lucas's own practice of pulling Expanded Universe elements into canonical productions. His 2016 reintroduction of the Thrawn character into the canonical third season of Rebels led directly to Timothy Zahn being hired to write new canonical novels about a character Zahn himself had created in 1991. The Legends fictional timeline, as defined by the publishing eras first introduced in October 2000, spans from before the founding of the Republic at 25,053 BBY all the way through a Legacy era ending at 140 ABY -- a fictional history stretching across more than 25,000 years that remains available in print, even if it no longer counts as the official story.