ABSTRACT
In April 2014, two years after Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm and its constellation of intellectual properties (IP) in October 2012, Lucasfilm/Disney announced plans to create the Lucasfilm Story Group that would establish a single canon for the franchise and coordinate world-building efforts across all forthcoming narrative media. Establishing a “true canon—a single, cohesive Star Wars storyline” meant jettisoning the EU of comics, video games, television shows, made-for-TV movies, and novels created since 1977. As the report of the Story Group’s new canon project attested, the EU was largely conceived of as those adventures in the Star Wars storyworld taking place “beyond what is seen on the screen.” 1 To save those off-screen stories, the EU was recycled in the new Legends publishing line to encourage continued revenue from no-longer-canonical sources. The header image of the announcement tellingly displayed the new Legends cover for Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire (1991), the first of the Thrawn Trilogy that formed the cornerstone of the EU’s popularity with hardcore fans at a time when Star Wars was thought to be a franchise beyond licensing revivification.
