Poll: StarWars Expanded Universe Getting Axed and If People other than me and a select few "SW Nerds" Care

[Bart XB]

The SW Expanded Universe has a few pretty great moments, but it's also a big, bloated mess that really does need an axe to cut it down to size. Things like Dun Moch and the Yuuzhan Vong were just terrible. Sure, this means that Kyle Katarn, the biggest badass there ever was, got the axe as well, but I'm sure that Disney will bring him, and other great ideas, back.

I'm sure they won't

 

[Saltyk]

I don't really care. I wouldn't be surprised if Disney does bring some characters and such from the EU for cameos or actual roles within the upcoming movies, though. Seems that it would be smart on their part.

Beyond that, I guess you can just do what Dragon Ball fans do. There is "Anime Canon" and "Manga Canon". Basically, there are things within the anime that completely contradict the manga. Some are blatant and horrible, such as Goku being killed(?) by Frieza and Gohan returning to fight. Completely ignoring the series lore and undermining the story and theme. And others are a bit more subtle, like Frieza and Cell being 'alive' and having bodies in Other World. Something which contradicts the established lore that only the truly good keep their bodies in the afterlife.

In order to sort of rectify this, it's largely looked at as though they are different universes telling the same story. After all, King Kai never tells Goku how the Saiyan Home World was destroyed in the manga, thus eliminating the issue of it later being revealed to be Frieza which he knew. It's only a plot hole in the anime. Or an example of King Kai lying.

There ya go. I just gave you a model. You can now have a "Movie Canon" and a "EU Canon". And neither necessarily contradicts the other. Seriously, expect that the EU Canon would have plenty of that already, though.

 

[Qwurty2.0]

The SW Expanded Universe has a few pretty great moments, but it's also a big, bloated mess that really does need an axe to cut it down to size. Things like Dun Moch and the Yuuzhan Vong were just terrible. Sure, this means that Kyle Katarn, the biggest badass there ever was, got the axe as well, but I'm sure that Disney will bring him, and other great ideas, back.

What was wrong with the Yuuzhan Vong war? I thought it was unique and different for the SW's universe, though I was a bit younger when I read it (and was never super critical of stuff like that (I try to see the bright side of things)).

 

[Ieyke]

It was shitty fanfiction, I predicted this would happen like 10 years ago, and they're smart to do it.

 

[Lhianon]

-snip-
I've read the books, comics, watched the TV shows and spin off movies and everything but now it's all just basically fan fiction. I've never been one into fan fiction because I always though it was desperate to make up for something that's gone.
-snip-

You may want to check your sources, in the official statements they rather clearly stated that, in addition to Ep I-VI, the clone wars movie and booth TV-series are canon.
They also stated that they will continue to publish allready existing EU-material under a new sub-brand, so nothing is really lost.
I suggest you take the D&D approach and pick and choose what you like, in the same way not everybody likes to have Drizzt in their campaign not everybody likes Darth Krayt or Celeste Morne.

 

[jademunky]

The 90's Animated Universe. Earth-92131

I could be wrong, because googling turns up nothing. But what I recall reading was that there was some space crystal, it cracked and the resulting energy destroyed everything.

It was long time ago. Like a decade or so. I've been believing this for so long.

A google search mentions that that version of earth was threatened by spider-carnage but says nothing about it actually being destroyed.

http://marvel.wikia.com/Earth-92131

 

[jademunky]

It was shitty fanfiction, I predicted this would happen like 10 years ago, and they're smart to do it.

Still less shitty than the prequel films or clone wars TV show.

Much of it was better than "Return of the Jedi" too. Granted I was like 12 when I read the Thrawn trilogy but still.

 

[beastro]

Where's the option for "Some of it like KOTOR was good, but I don't care either way - People shouldn't have built their houses of beloved fiction on sand made of Star Wars."

EU was a way for Lucas to make money and to make more he threw it away. People shouldn't be surprised.

For people to attach themselves to a work of popular fiction like Star Wars, Star Trek or comic books is begging to be hurt and disappointed.

 

[mrdude2010]

I think anything that axes that incredibly stupid Bobba Fett storyline where he survives is a credit to the series.

It's a shame some of the better parts of the expanded universe are going to be gone; some of them were very impressive, but the garbage vastly outweighs the good, and it makes it a lot easier to preserve continuity.

The storyline where Boba Fett survived was actually really well executed and it's more than plausible for him to survive. The sarlacc takes a thousand years to digest anything (stated directly in the movies) and this combined with Fett being covered head to toe in body armor (and said armor being very high quality and having a small built in oxygen supply) means he would definitely be alive for at least a little while inside the stomach.
In the book the stomach acids did corrode a lot of his armor but he survived by basically blasting his way out of the stomach (temporarily killing the sarlacc). Remember, Fett is armed to the teeth with blasters, thermal detonators, flamethrowers, blades, grappling hooks, and an explosive rocket. Then there's the fact that he has a jetpack (while it malfunctioned when Han hit it, that doesn't necessarily mean it was completely non-functional). So him basically blowing up his way out of the sarlacc, lying in the sun near death, and then being rescued by a scavenger isn't impossible. Not as impossible as dino-legs Maul anyways (which frankly is beyond any form of credibility IMO).

The only kind of person who could in theory survive being eaten by a sarlacc is pretty much a jedi/sith with a lightsaber, or a person like Boba Fett.

That's fair enough, you've convinced me he could plausibly escape, but it just feels like pandering to bring back everyone's favorite bounty hunter. I don't know, something about it rubs me the wrong way. Then again, I'm probably the only person who liked the Jedi Apprentice books.

 

[Darknacht]

SW:EU started dieing in 1999, when Lucas started Retconning large parts of it out of existence, so Disney's declaration that it is in fact dead is rather meaningless.

 

[Tono Makt]

Part of me really hopes they cut back everything that wasn't in the first three movies. Get back to the utter basics and start over. Anything Star Wars that isn't "A New Hope", "Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi", jettison.

I would hate to lose the Old Republic games, and the Clone Wars cartoons. Yes, even the CGI series which became extremely good after the first season. I would hate to lose Admiral Thrawn. I would hate to lose the history of C-3P0 and R2-D2 prior to A New Hope. (well, the concept of it anyway - something about 3P0 being created by Darth Vader resonated with me, though the execution was horrible.)

But all in all, I think it would be a good thing to keep Star Wars as simple as possible. Regardless of the amount of stuff that would be lost.

 

[Drizzitdude]

So all of your poll options involve the expanded universe sucking or it being a smart move for disney. Good poll.

 

[Kyrian007]

I really love parts of the EU, but really this doesn't surprise or bother me all that much. Frankly the whole thing had gone "hokey religions and ancient weapons" pretty whole hog and that was always the LEAST interesting stuff in Star Wars. To me anyway. My favorite of the movies was always the 1st one because the penultimate fight scene was a bombastic wicked cool space battle that is still one of my favorite movie moments ever. The others ending on some dumb lazersword duel was lame (points to Jedi for combining the 2 and at least being half interesting.)

So yeah, its bothersome that now my Wraiths and Rogues are mostly non-canon (except Wedge, Janson, and Hobbie.) But I don't really care, I still have the novels and comics that I like that focus on the non-jedi stuff, and the new "disney canon" will go off on the fantasy religions and space magic bus... and I bid them a fond goodbye. Or more like a "don't let the door hit ya" goodbye.

 

[NateA42]

I really love parts of the EU, but really this doesn't surprise or bother me all that much. Frankly the whole thing had gone "hokey religions and ancient weapons" pretty whole hog and that was always the LEAST interesting stuff in Star Wars. To me anyway. My favorite of the movies was always the 1st one because the penultimate fight scene was a bombastic wicked cool space battle that is still one of my favorite movie moments ever. The others ending on some dumb lazersword duel was lame (points to Jedi for combining the 2 and at least being half interesting.)

So yeah, its bothersome that now my Wraiths and Rogues are mostly non-canon (except Wedge, Janson, and Hobbie.) But I don't really care, I still have the novels and comics that I like that focus on the non-jedi stuff, and the new "disney canon" will go off on the fantasy religions and space magic bus... and I bid them a fond goodbye. Or more like a "don't let the door hit ya" goodbye.

Wow I found somebody who looks at Star Wars like me! I want more pre-tibanna gas stories!

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

The storyline where Boba Fett survived was actually really well executed and it's more than plausible for him to survive. The sarlacc takes a thousand years to digest anything (stated directly in the movies) and this combined with Fett being covered head to toe in body armor (and said armor being very high quality and having a small built in oxygen supply) means he would definitely be alive for at least a little while inside the stomach.

See, this is part of the reason why I stopped caring about the EU; authors often wouldn't stop and think things through for a bit.

I always interpreted the "thousand-year digestion" quote as deliberate exaggeration on Jabba's part to psyche his victims out. It's hard to believe that such a large creature would get by on such an inefficient digestion system, particularly when it's burning calories with those flailing tentacles and beak mouth. Even if it did take a thousand years, wouldn't the victim die of thirst or starvation long before that point? Are they saying the Sarlaac somehow keeps its prey alive by sustaining them with nutrients...while it's digesting them? Even if that were the case, wouldn't the victim die of old age? It just raises too many questions.[footnote]As you can probably tell, I've never read the books that describe how Boba supposedly escapes.[/footnote]

You see this happening in the prequels as well. Palpatine's single line about the Republic that has "stood for a thousand years" contradicted EU sources that stated the institution was over 25,000 years old. Rather than reaching the more logical conclusion that Palpatine simply misspoke and used the word "years" when he meant "generations," EU authors rose to the occasion to make an overly convoluted explanation to reconcile it.[footnote]http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ruusan_Reformation[/footnote]

Some EU authors took the line in Attack of the Clones about 200,000 clone trooper "units" with "a million more well on the way" to mean that the "Grand Army of the Republic" consisted of 1,200,000 troops. That number may seem impressive...until you realize that the United States military is larger. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Personnel] Given that the U.S. has difficulty maintaining bases and combat deployments on Earth alone, would you expect an army of comparable size to be capable of waging war on a galactic scale?! It makes far more sense when you consider "units" as divisions or armies, but no. Many EU sources stubbornly insisted that each "unit" meant a single clone trooper.

In short, EU often got silly, even for a setting that features space wizards and laser swords. Nerd rant over.

There was no beak in the original version of that movie, that was a Special Edition addition. The way it looked in the original movie (aside from being a giant sand vagina), it was just kind of sitting there, out in the middle of the desert, waiting for something to literally fall into its mouth. It had the tentacles, but you get the impression that it's not actively using them unless it knows there's something to grab onto and eat nearby. If anything, taking 1,000 years to fully process its food sounds like an incredibly /efficient/ metabolism for such a creature, not inefficient.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Bad new stuff does not erase great old stuff.

It's true for Spider-Man, it's true here.

Go ahead Disney, put out a craptacular new Trilogy and try telling me that it's the new canon. Nothing that you (legally) do can ever destroy my much-used copies of Shatterpoint, Heir to the Empire, Revenge of the Sith (Novelization), Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, Book 1 of the Legacy of the Force, the New Jedi Order series, or the Wraith Squadron/Rogue Squadron series. You cannot erase history.

I suppose you could pay a bunch of people to have SWTOR's servers shut down, but not for a few years yet I hope.

 

[Lilani]

I HAS A QUESTION:

Did Disney cancel the creation of all future Star Wars expanded universe novels and such, or did they simply state that the expanded universe will not be canon in the films?

If the first, then while I see the frustration with that it is perfectly within Disney's right to do so, them holding the copyright. The way I understand it was basically licensed fanfiction anyway, something which not a lot of IP holders would put up with in the first place.

If the second, and the novels can still be written as they always were, then I don't see what the problem is. I was aware of the Star Wars EU though a few friends who enjoy them, and they never gave me the impression they thought they were canon with the "official" stuff like the movies and Clone Wars animated series and such. They were just stories derived from the same universe, but written by completely different people who weren't actively collaborating. Given the nature of how the novels and "official" stuff is created, I really can't imagine why anybody would come to the conclusion that they're all canon. You can't coordinate that many people over such a span of time to create a cohesive universe. Or if there was that kind of coordination going on, people would be aware of it.

I've just always thought that's how it worked. Doctor Who has the TV series, radio plays, and graphic novels, all written over the last five decades by dozens if not hundreds of different people. But in the TV series, it's generally accepted that only the TV stuff is canon. And that's fine, I haven't heard anybody complain yet. Radio plays both old and new are finding new life on Audible and iTunes, graphic novels are adding adventures to Doctors who have long since regenerated, but they all exist within their own canonical spheres. And everybody understands that.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

Bad new stuff does not erase great old stuff.

It's true for Spider-Man, it's true here.

Are you telling me that the Raimi trilogy disappears because of Amazing Spider-Man?

Because it hasn't. I can go to the store and buy the Raimi trilogy on Blu-ray right now. I can watch them over and over again. Same as I can read my Star Wars Dark Horse Omnibuses over and over. Same as, after Empire Strikes Back was released, I could still re-read Splinter of the Mind's Eye. That stuff does not go away; it may sound sentimental, but it truly does exist for as long as we remember it. As long as we're reading the old comics, watching the unedited, original editions of the films; as long as we're passing around bootlegs of the Christmas Special, that stuff exists.

I shan't accept any answer to the contrary, and neither should you.