A little game: Lucas /= Disney
Posted: Fri Mar 13, 2015 5:18 am
I'm not prepared to make this jump yet, but I wanted to play with it out loud.
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Let's ponder a few things . . .
1. The Lucas-helmed The Clone Wars was scuttled immediately upon the sale. Ostensibly this was merely a business decision, and indeed Filoni was kept aboard for Rebels, but he was also given two extra overseers (or side-seers, depending on who was in charge of the little triumvirate).
2. The treatment Lucas provided for Episode VII has been explicitly discarded. (At the CanonWars blog, I called this "The Clean Break".)
3. Based on trash like the novel Tarkin, character and tech data from the canon novelizations of the past (ostensibly still canon) are being ignored in favor of old EU drivel. (Heir to the Jedi was actually fairly decent, along with some of the other fiction I've seen, but generally speaking it seems like the Story Group doesn't have a tech consistency guy of the caliber of . . . well . . . anyone here.)
4. Disney has been explicit that old EU is usable in new material . . . it's just that the old EU sources don't count. That is to say, anything from the EU is free for reintroduction. Or, quoting Disney: "While the universe that readers knew is changing, it is not being discarded. Creators of new Star Wars entertainment have full access to the rich content of the Expanded Universe."
With such thoughts in mind, one could make the case that this should be treated as a new universe altogether.
The old Lucas universe was very distinct from the parallel EU universe . . . even Disney has basically said this, as did Lucas and Filoni and ad infinitum beforehand. Let's quote: "While Lucasfilm always strived to keep the stories created for the EU consistent with our film and television content as well as internally consistent, Lucas always made it clear that he was not beholden to the EU. He set the films he created as the canon. This includes the six Star Wars episodes, and the many hours of content he developed and produced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. These stories are the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align."
To explicitly create a new canon into which EU data reintroduction is welcome is to defy any such alignment. The EU was a self-referential animal, as I noted before . . . that, by necessity, required it to be separate and different.
Disney should've gone tabula rasa in regards to the EU, but didn't. This implies the desire to create a new universe, even if (like Lucas Licensing before them) they wanted to explicitly kowtow to the Lucas works.
An alternate but no less controversial view would be to staunchly refuse to accept anything but the Lucas canon and any Disney 'facts' which fit it. That is to say, one could argue that while "characters and events" does not, in and of itself, refer to "facts", the simple fact that characters and events occurred in the way in which they did requires that, generally speaking, the facts be part and parcel. Ergo, if Disney states that the Lucas canon is "immovable", inviolable events to which new tales must align, then it seems we are invited to be the arbiters.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's ponder a few things . . .
1. The Lucas-helmed The Clone Wars was scuttled immediately upon the sale. Ostensibly this was merely a business decision, and indeed Filoni was kept aboard for Rebels, but he was also given two extra overseers (or side-seers, depending on who was in charge of the little triumvirate).
2. The treatment Lucas provided for Episode VII has been explicitly discarded. (At the CanonWars blog, I called this "The Clean Break".)
3. Based on trash like the novel Tarkin, character and tech data from the canon novelizations of the past (ostensibly still canon) are being ignored in favor of old EU drivel. (Heir to the Jedi was actually fairly decent, along with some of the other fiction I've seen, but generally speaking it seems like the Story Group doesn't have a tech consistency guy of the caliber of . . . well . . . anyone here.)
4. Disney has been explicit that old EU is usable in new material . . . it's just that the old EU sources don't count. That is to say, anything from the EU is free for reintroduction. Or, quoting Disney: "While the universe that readers knew is changing, it is not being discarded. Creators of new Star Wars entertainment have full access to the rich content of the Expanded Universe."
With such thoughts in mind, one could make the case that this should be treated as a new universe altogether.
The old Lucas universe was very distinct from the parallel EU universe . . . even Disney has basically said this, as did Lucas and Filoni and ad infinitum beforehand. Let's quote: "While Lucasfilm always strived to keep the stories created for the EU consistent with our film and television content as well as internally consistent, Lucas always made it clear that he was not beholden to the EU. He set the films he created as the canon. This includes the six Star Wars episodes, and the many hours of content he developed and produced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. These stories are the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align."
To explicitly create a new canon into which EU data reintroduction is welcome is to defy any such alignment. The EU was a self-referential animal, as I noted before . . . that, by necessity, required it to be separate and different.
Disney should've gone tabula rasa in regards to the EU, but didn't. This implies the desire to create a new universe, even if (like Lucas Licensing before them) they wanted to explicitly kowtow to the Lucas works.
An alternate but no less controversial view would be to staunchly refuse to accept anything but the Lucas canon and any Disney 'facts' which fit it. That is to say, one could argue that while "characters and events" does not, in and of itself, refer to "facts", the simple fact that characters and events occurred in the way in which they did requires that, generally speaking, the facts be part and parcel. Ergo, if Disney states that the Lucas canon is "immovable", inviolable events to which new tales must align, then it seems we are invited to be the arbiters.