Lit What did fans think of the SW contiuinity back in the day?

I'm talking back in the 70's and 80's before Lucasfilm made any official statement about tiers of canon and all that. When we only had the marvel comics, splinter of the minds eye, the holiday special, the OT novelizations, toy descriptions, droids and ewok shows/movies, all the newspaper strips, Han Solo trilogy novels and Lando trilogy novels and the movies themselves. Even before 1987 and the WEG roleplaying game material. Was anyone here around at the time or perhaps have any insight into what the SW fandom thought of the SW universe?

Did they go see ANH and then follow the marvel comics through to ESB fully thinking the comics were actually what happens in-between the movies? Did the "bounty hunter from ord mantell" comment jar and confuse them since it wasn't featured in any of the pre may 1980 marvel comics? Did everything fit well? Did they just accept that everything was canon?

 

This is going to sound crazy, but I bought an early 80s SW Marvel comic way back when... I think it might have ironically been the one where Wedge dies... where the letters column at the end has an editor's statement that says something like "We work hard to maintain continuity with the Brian Daley novels and the newspaper strips, at Lucasfilm's directive..." I don't remember the exact quote but I'm going home for Christmas in two weeks and will be happy to dig through my old comics and find it. It's also worth noting that the planet Fondor was first mentioned in Han Solo at Star's End and then went on to appear in both the newspaper strips and the Marvel comics. Chewie's family, who first appeared in 1978's Holiday Special, were also in a Marvel comic a few years later.

Spoiler

Until 2002, I thought that Vader having a robotic arm at the end of ROTJ was a nod to him having his arm cut off in Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

 

Ah, I was there. I got this.

In the '70s and '80s, nobody thought that spinoff material was anything other than spinoff material. We wanted more Star Wars so we consumed it all, but we totally knew that the movies were probably going to ignore all the ancillary stuff. ESB all but confirmed that SOTME didn't happen; ROTJ made it clear that Jabba wasn't a yellow walrus biped; two different comics (scripted by the same guy) did two different version of the Ord Mantell bounty hunter while a vinyl LP drama (!!!) did a third, and, um, the Holiday Special was allowed to exist. So, the "EU" back then was understood to be a bit of fun and not to be taken too seriously.

As a veteran of those days, I've always had a hard time understanding why anyone would ever assume otherwise, and the more the later EU changed the galaxy in ways no future movie could be expected to roll with (while paradoxically maintaining plot armor for the OT3 "just in case"), the less plausible it became as the "real story".

As an odd side note, since many of those early stories were stand-alones, that's made their elements easier to re-canonize cleanly. Elements of SOTME, the Han and Lando novels, and even Jaxxon have made it in while everyone's still waiting for Mara Jade...

 

FiveFireRings nailed it. After Splinter, you knew not to worry about stuff matching and aligning too much. And I'm not sure we were any worse off for the lack of worrying.

There are some great stories from that early era: the Daley trilogy, "Dark Encounter," "Doom Mission" and "Whatever Happened to Jabba the Hut?" all come to mind from the Marvel run. And I always liked Splinter, steel kittens and who-can-swim arguments and all.

 

Not if they'd read SW #37 from about a month beforehand. There were indeed other versions of Ord Mantell in short order but that one did manage to squeak in pre-release.

Which one is this again?

 

I imagine hardly any of the fans cared about continuity until the Thrawn Trilogy came out.

 

I think that could be part of it, but I'd still see what happened after it as the key part.

LFL had an unexpected success on their hands so they said they were doing a shared continuity and, because it was a less cynical and more trusting, innocent age, fans believed it at face value. Over time, of course, that got harder and harder to maintain yet couldn't really be wiped out either and the more stuff there was, the harder it became to contemplate that option until... Well, 2014.

Were it not for that declaration setting SW apart from its competitors, I suspect LFL might have simply done a Trek and declared the books and comics a continuation rather than the continuation. It would have saved them a whole lot of aggro in the long run but might have also have hit the profits. So they went for the Brexit, have-cake-and-eat messy solution and somehow kept it going until 2014.

 

Lol...Probably one of the best analogies ever, or at least funniest. 2008-2014 is that weird "Were still making a deal" period then ;p

 

Wonder if that Brexit analog'll still have any relevance in about 3 days time?

 

Yeah I recall thinking everything outside the films was just some kind of alternate not to be taken seriously as part of the story. I do remember when I found Splinter at a flea market however, as I thought this was some book version of a film I did not see advertised. I started wondering where all the extra material was.

 

Oh my....

But yeah...The Old EU was one of those things that ...I don't wanna say was untenable... but let's face it, it wasn't built on the firmest of grounds. Now if you wanna argue NuCanon isn't either that's your prerogative. But it was definitely under George's whims in the long run.

In a strange way I feel like the Star Wars universe had 3 reboots....1990 with the Thrawn Trilogy...TCW 08...and then 014

 

You missed one - 1999.

 

Right! The Prequels were a soft reboot too.


So in a weird way, it's kinda odd (yet make sense) to look at Legends as this singular entity and more like 4 different Era's of Star Wars storytelling meshed to one.

 

People were different back then. People were just happy to see a movie. Now we are media gluttons (myself included) needing constant stimulation

 

I've mentioned before that as I moved in and out of fandom, I certainly looked at it that way, and at a certain point I was a little bit shocked to realize that elements of the '70s/'80s spinoffs were still considered part of the post-TTT continuity when so many of those elements were overwritten by the films themselves.

One of the magic things about the first Zahn novels was that they were just "big" enough to be interesting, but the events they portrayed weren't so galaxy-shaking as to lock anything in that a future movie series couldn't ignore or absorb. I really think the trouble starts with the NJO. It was a conundrum for sure: keep telling stories with low stakes, to diminishing returns, or go for an epic move. And once you kill a major character, you're in AU territory -- you've gone where Trek went with The Entropy Effect. The uneasy aftermath of that was that LFL maintained plot armor for the rest of the OT characters as a hedge against using that continuity in future films, which was an odd choice since Lucas himself didn't consider them part of his story, but he changed his mind a lot... maybe he toyed with the idea, who knows.

Oh... the Rebel Mission to Ord Mantell LP! It's this:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rebel_Mission_to_Ord_Mantell

Written by Brian Daley and with a sweet painting of the preproduction art that turned into the DP20 on the back! However, my '80s "headcanon" dismissed the story -- my choice was always that the Goodwin-Williamson newspaper strips were the "real" story between ANH and ESB, written as they were with the benefit of coming out after Empire (and even Jedi toward the end). That plus I just loved the art.

Edited: Corey Burton as Luke, decades before he would be Dooku! Learn something new every day.

 

I wish we were more like that now, not worrying about everything being a perfect continuity. I really feel like it hampers creative story-telling at times. But then I know there are probably even more people who would whinge if something doesn't match up perfectly . . .

 

There was an awkward period for a few years in the early nineties where the pre-Heir stuff wasn't really being acknowledged --- Chewie goes to Kashyyyk in Heir but his family are conspicuously absent; 1994's A Guide to the Star Wars Universe: Second Edition doesn't mention anything from Daley's books or the Holiday Special --- but then 1995 brought The Essential Guide to Characters with its entries on Cindel Towani and Bollux & Blue Max, discussion of the Holiday Special stuff in Chewie's entry, discussion of Shira Brie in Luke's, etc. I've always wondered if there was an LFL mandate regarding that or if Andy Mangels, author of TEGTC, just kinda asked if he could do it and got a "sure why not."

Ehhhh I doubt if that was the reason. I think it would have gone without saying that any future films would have decanonized the EU. The plot armor on the Big Three always seemed like it was due to creative bankruptcy, the horrid start-stop booking of the new generation ("build them up then kill them all!"), and the unwillingness to financially risk doing a series without familiar faces on most of the covers.

Lucas was always adamant that a sequel trilogy was never happening. Pablo described how flabbergasted he was when he found out. Now that there's a sequel trilogy it's easy enough to speculate that it was always kind of in the cards, but really... it wasn't.

 

As a young kid i was just happy that i was getting new star wars adventure's and at the time i knew the films were the main story and the comics/book and ewok droids tv shows were fun extras ! the more they connected to the films the better ! but i love them just for what they were now that i'm older i do want it all to connect.

 

Funny to think that of the... six?... versions of the "bounty hunter at Ord Mantell" story we ended up with, three of them were actually written by the same person - Archie Goodwin.

 

WEG broke the pre-1991 barrier a couple years before that with their Han Solo and the Corporate Sector Sourcebook (a fantastic book, btw). From there it seemed WEG gradually abandoned their reluctance to reference earlier continuity - culminating in 1996's revised Galaxy Guide 3, which included prominent references to the Marvel comic. Perhaps with WEG featuring so prominently as source material in the 90s, as they led other publishers followed.

 

Honestly, I always thought there was a difference in how pre-WEG material was treated between the HST and newspaper strip versus most other stuff. The former was much more integrated.

 

First, before commercials started appearing for the Empire Strikes Back, I had no idea (at the wise old age of 8 years old) that movies could even have sequels. I didn't know there could be an ongoing saga beyond how I played with my action figures. I do remember loving the comics but those early ones were so strange compared to the Star Wars I knew. Chewie was more an angry and dangerous beast, there were green talking rabbits, and long ago, Obi-wan was a Jedi detective solving a mystery on a grand space liner.

As stated above, I never saw anything outside the movies as more than fluff. Entertaining fluff often enough, but nothing that affected my heroes. Not even when the best of the EU came out.

 

I didn't read the old Marvel comics when they came out - just the EU books. I caught up to Marvel when they were issued in tpb format (Star Wars..A Long Time Ago). Some of the stories were pretty good, some were meh, and some were just weird.

 

Actually, it has many entries from the Daley books.

 

I always took that stuff as commercial fan fiction. That's not a criticism. I willingly paid the clams for it and it was fun to see what stories other folks to come up with in that universe. After all, we were doing the same in our heads. Never did get hung up on "continuity" in a fictional universe, especially when different authors were involved.