Lit So if the EU was still going right now where do you think they would be?

Yeah but we still got new movies after Episode 3

 

To be honest even if Solo had done better at the box office I still think movies would have slowed down and Star Wars would still be primarily building up Disney Plus.

The amount that Lucasfilm was working on from 2014-2019 was just insane. Not even Marvel attempts to do that much. Marvel makes a good amount of movies but not all of them are 250m+ productions like Lucasfilm was doing. When you think about what they were trying to do (which likely wasn't their choice) you can see why they seemed to be running out of gas towards the end. Pretty much every single Star Wars movie that came out during that period was an Avengers level of production.

 

Wasn't Solo's failure largely down to the lack of marketing in the year prior to the film's release? Only coming out like two months before the film's release, five months after the controversial TLJ split the fandom to pieces? The loss of the two original directors who were looking to make a slapstick comedy more than a serious Star Wars film? They wanted to make the fortieth anniversary of SW but it clashed with the backlash against TLJ and as a result fell to pieces and we left waiting 19 months until TROS instead of 12 months like we were used to, allowing time to dissipate against the controversies.

Maybe they should've released the films in May from 2015 onwards instead of Christmas, then there would've been the full year between films. By the end of the film series, we were feeling the drag of just wanting something out.

As to the original EU, the post-40 ABY period was well...knowing how I feel about Denning these days, it'd have been worse. And the nasty habit to retcon everything between ANH and ESB, including the origins of Rogue Squadron (don't like the new canon one either as everything Marvel Star Wars (2015) issue 26 onwards actually bores me to pieces and I would love a retcon of those events), and now as we found out cancelled post-ROTJ books that are actually really good -- Heart of the Jedi anyone? -- plus with the way Clone Wars was going and Rebels was likely already in the works since 2012 no doubt. The reboot was coming, but it stung to me that many elements weren't kept. Mara Jade (Lucas would've come around, if he was stubborn Piett wouldn't have made into ROTJ through a fan-mail campaign), Corran Horn, the Solo children, Wedge Antilles and Iella Wessiri, Winter, Tycho Celchu, Thrawn (before Rebels brought him back), Grand Vizier Sate Pestage, Ysanne Isard, Warlord Zsinj and someone giving a damn to liberate Coruscant.

 

What hobbled Solo was more the fact that it was wedged smack dab between Avengers Infinity War and Deadpool 2 and between the two big marvel films it’s audience was largely cannibalised.

 

I think Solo got hit by a combination of:

- Standard consumer MO: Don't like the last movie? Don't see the next one. Solo paid for the sins of TLJ. Sadly, its sacrifice didn't redeem TLJ either.

- Why do I need to see a Han prequel? It didn't really have a compelling answer.

- Don't like the recasting. Looking back at the OT Ford is far more lanky too.

- Oh, so now you've killed him off you're doing a prequel? Might have played a part.

Thing is, once you've seen the film, most of these lessen greatly. But if you're asking me if I would have blown £20 on it in 2018, in the cinema, my answer is no. Got the Blu-Ray for £10 months later.

 

I think another aspect that would have broken the old EUs back was the Fellpire and Jagged Fel as a character.
Because cultural sensitivties where shifting during that time, and Jagged ultimatley just fits in the same category as mordern day alt right, this attempt at a "moderate right wing party".

I mean the old EU more or less had Han and Leia´s daughter turn into a Neo Nazi Princess... Not to mention Legacy even showing the Fellpire in parts as better than the GA... I just don´t think that would fly well today. And might be one of the reasons we don´t get any further legends material in the era from Disney anymore.

 

Heh, yeah.

Star Wars came out forty-one years before Solo. So there wasn't even an anniversary to consider --- the May release was really just nonsensical.

But we've all argued about Solo to death in other threads. Staying on target --- if Lucas had doubled down on no more films, and live-action TV shows had become the franchise's torch-bearers in lieu of a sequel trilogy, would we have welcomed those shows with open arms, or would we have greeted them with pitchforks and angry vitriol like we did TCW back in 2008?

Yeah. The whole Empire surviving and kinda becoming the good guys despite still being... well, the Empire... continues to look worse and worse in retrospect.

It's a weird artifact of A) the result of the Zahn/Stackpole-verse humanizing Imperials, in Zahn's case to the point of worshiping them and B) Legacy embracing the grim, dark, anti-hero filled dystopic style of the Nolan-inspired pop culture of the mid-to-late 2000s. In 2006 we were like "Cool, Imperial Knights! People named Fel!" But now we're just like "Yyyyeahhhh the Empire were Nazis and they should have lost a loooooong time before that."

As much as I loved Legacy at the time, it painted the EU into a corner that in a lot of ways is horrifying by today's standards.

 

I once heard it succinctly summed up that the Legendverse had a problem where about half the writers wrote the Empire as essentially the British Empire at its height - brutal and (obviously) imperialistic, but having numerous genuinely noble traits and hardly what you'd call "pure evil;" and the other half wrote them as the Nazis ...exactly what you'd call "pure evil."

For all its faults, the rebooted continuity is at least more consistent on having them be the latter.

 

I think the marketing didn't help. First they inexplicably break the pattern of "one movie per year, around Christmas" to release it only a few months after TLJ. Then they even more inexplicably do almost nothing to market it - I remember waiting more and more impatiently for a trailer until just a couple months before the movie came out, and even then there wasn't much noise about it. In the alternate universe where Solo is released in the usual Christmas pattern and gets a respectable amount of marketing around it, it at the very least does better. The way things were, you'd swear they were trying to sneak the movie past us.

 

It seemed the EU did that a lot in telling the type of stories in their books that were popular in the cinema during the same period.

For all intents and purposes the NJO is an alien invasion story and that was a popular type of movie to make back in the late 90's/ early 00's.

 

I don't know, I thought Pellaeon by the HOT duology was pretty clearly meant to be riffing off of Gorbachev, with the Felpire afterwards being an idealized version of that.

 

This is one of the things that makes the Bantam era feel so incredibly 90's to me, the "living with the enemy" attitude towards the Imperial remnants makes a lot more sense with the end of the Cold War as context. It does make me wonder if the West's deteriorating relationship with Russia would have eventually been reflected, if a "friendly" Empire still existed.

 

As opposed to what the new movies did to Han and Leia’s son?

I don’t know, I feel like this gets exaggerated to some extent. Wasn’t the Felpire just the existing infrastructure and citizenry of the Imperial Remnant repurposed by new leadership? I haven’t read the Legacy comics in a while but I don’t think the Felpire persecuted and enslaved alien species or built superweapons or committed atrocities on the regular, nor were they led and culturally shaped by a genocidal death cult of evil wizards (until they got taken over by one). I don’t really remember them doing anything notably problematic besides being an undemocratic hereditary monarchy, but Star Wars is a fantasy setting. Even Imperial design iconography like stormtroopers, Red Guards, TIE fighters, Star Destroyers, and the spoked wheel symbol predate the actual Empire and originated in the Old Republic. Germany still exists and its head of state is still called a chancellor despite a previous chancellor doing some pretty heinous things with German military and political policy.

 

Difference is that Kylo is written as a villian while Jaina is a heroine. In fact they even made her pacifist brother a Sith when it came to which Solo kid would fall...

The Fellpire is certainly closer to the Empire than modern day Germany is to the Nazis.
Its basically like the modern alt right, not explicitly calling for genocide but still shareing much of the ideals with facist movments. The Fellpire is still a military based dictatorship... it just became more pragmatic.

 

IMO, it is worth mentioning that Fellpire ultimately showed its true colors when Roan was betrayed by the Council of Moffs (consisting , like in the old times, mostly of human power-hungry scumbags) and most of the military forces, resulting with creation of Krayt's Galactic Empire - even more hideous than the original one.

 

Not that that made Roan Fel into a good guy....

It's interesting how, across the entirety of the run, Ostrander was being very clear about Fel's nature. The idea that evil is not binary, that Fel can be every bit as brutal a villain as Darth Krayt didn't seem to occur to many.

 

I feel like the "evil empire" angle was never entirely dropped. In FOTJ and Mercy Kill, you had the Lecersen Conspiracy, Admiral Daala, and pushback against Fel's democratization efforts. In Legacy, you had a whole faction aligning with the Sith.

The vibe I got was that you had a ruling house (the Fels) that was mostly benevolent, in an "enlightened despot" kind of way, but also a powerful and entrenched aristocracy (the Moffs) that was much more conservative, authoritarian, and prone to Palpatine-nostalgia. Which ads up to your basic fairytale trope of the good king with an evil court, and allows you to tell stories with both kinds of Imps. The government bureaucracy (Imperial Starfleet, Imperial Knights, Imperial Mission) mostly taking its cues from the Fels but with still a lot of sympathizers for the Moffs.

And yes, I agree that the Bantam era feels incredibly 90s: putting it next to the sequel trilogy and its supplemental material says a lot about what a different place the world (or at least the West) is in now compared to then.

 

Legacy makes it clear there is no democracy in the Felpire, so any 'efforts' that Jagged put into it are null and void.

Problem is that even the most kind and enlightened ruler can have a succesor who utterly ruins everything, wether through incompetence or outright malice. Our own history is full with examples of that.

Plus the Felpire clearly stands in the tradition of the old. They keep the 501st that is as if modern day germany still had the 'Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler' as a military unit, they keep the astetics the armor and uniforms and if Jag is any indication openly worship figures such as Thrawn as heroes. A charakter who for all the whitewashing Zahn has compiled over the years was still a loyal commander of a fascist regime who had no problem with using slave soldiers and handing over kids to a madman.

 

What examples of this do you have in mind?

 

@Jeff_Ferguson

Oh pitchforks obviously. That's how most new Star Wars things are gonna be, especially if they started 'contradicting' books and what not

 

SW' biggest problem is its lying marketing. It's never going to work well but they just keep trying it.

Thus, "buy this book, it's what really happened", then a short time later, "new SW TV shows the Empire's fall! Earlier book? Nah, there was no book. There was? And it doesn't sync up? Well, point of view and all that, keep buying suckers."

As it was memorably put: Surely, they can do better?

 

Except...Doesn't it work?

Like regardless of the morality behind it ....People keep buying the books BECAUSE of the lying market? It's paid dividends and has continued to pay dividends. Sure we'll grumble and point this out but the vast majority of the market I don't think know...Or really care....and I think it's continued to service them well.

I don't think the Star Wars EU would be the thing it is WITHOUT that lying market

 

The whole continuity aspect did indeed set SW apart from its competitors in the early 90s. It did boost it but, as time went on, it became pretty clear that, yes, it was a con job.

It's why I'm not a big Lucas fan. Putting out product lines that you intend to erase later, while selling them as the continuation of the story? That's not OK and Lucas did it twice with the PT and TCW.

If the criterion is 'will fans stop buying?' then probably not. It will take an awful lot to do that.

If it is 'how do we want fans to view us' then it's not a good look.

Marketing should be able to sell a product without engaging in deceit but also without that product being undermined by its own producer.

And across 2014-2017 they did do this. It's only recently that there's been this medium hierarchy messing things up. Even then, not totally as there's the High Republic.

 

Fair enough...Good logic there


But back to the Original point.

Since week know Lucas was kinda sorta thinking about making a Sequels (I mean we have evidence he was) i do wonder if we could have seen a scenario where it's set "In -Universe Timeline Wise" after the events of Crucible and could have been made in a way that if you Squint hard enough it could sorta fit and you could One Canon it.

Sadly i think Legacy comics are the real losers really in every scenario here regardless from what i've seen.

 

Yep.

I think it would come down to the backstory opted for.

They could have done a Picard that didn't erase 20 years of books, but would have had to go with a married, family man Picard.

They could do a ST that bolts onto Legends but it would have to have minimal references to the past. If starting with a new threat established, could be difficult without playing the card of "they were hidden out there the entire time"