Is Disney/LFL incapable of making anything new?

Now I have stated openly that I know nothing of the EU, heck, I didnt even know they killed off Chewie until I saw this video but this video is a great example of Disneys complete inability to produce anything new while at the same time push their product as new stories with new heros, I just threw up in my mouth a little at that one.

What do the people who dont have a vested interest think?

Initially, they claimed they had to scrap the EU to allow them to tell new and original stories rather than be beholden to what many fans accepted as the continuing 'adventures '.
Now, they say it was all based on not depriving the fans of a much loved character............ Yet we now have a retread of ANH and a mash up of TESB and ROTJ. The preservation of beloved characters seems to be the last thing they care about
They have a story group that have failed to come up with a story and are just winging it. Leland Chee and Pablo Hidalgo make it up as they go, giving arbitrary answers to questions brought about by poor storytelling and plot holes.
I've said this before, in the galaxy far far away, there are many thousands of planets and many thousands of years. So much open ground and potential but they seem to be milking all that is familiar and then watering it down for the widest possible audience.

First they kill off Chewie...WHAT....then, as the video points out, they bring him back just to sell toys and bring a sense of nostalgia to their new stories. That says it all for mine.

Chewie didnt die in the EU until quite a ways in... the 1999 novel Vector Prime... thats a BS excuse.

The EU had so many weird off-shoots and contradictions that I think that every Star Wars EU reader had to at some point pick and choose what to count as their personal EU and what to discard.
The New Jedi Order in which Chewbacca would have died, was for instance never part of my EU. I think Lucasfilm could just as well have made that same decision.

For the rest, I think the best course of action would have been just not to decide. Just do like with Villeneuve did with Deckard in Blade Runner -- leave questions open.
Don't tell what happened between movies until the story requires you to. The sequel trilogy is supposed to be about new characters anyway, not to explain the past. Let the fan-theories flourish and keep the fan-community alive instead of divided.

Greenie said:

Initially, they claimed they had to scrap the EU to allow them to tell new and original stories rather than be beholden to what many fans accepted as the continuing 'adventures '.
Now, they say it was all based on not depriving the fans of a much loved character............ Yet we now have a retread of ANH and a mash up of TESB and ROTJ. The preservation of beloved characters seems to be the last thing they care about
They have a story group that have failed to come up with a story and are just winging it. Leland Chee and Pablo Hidalgo make it up as they go, giving arbitrary answers to questions brought about by poor storytelling and plot holes.
I've said this before, in the galaxy far far away, there are many thousands of planets and many thousands of years. So much open ground and potential but they seem to be milking all that is familiar and then watering it down for the widest possible audience.

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The ultimate irony in that being killing the EU to bring back Chewy, but having no problem offing the two most popular characters in the entire SW universe. But, you know, Chewy's still around....whatever.

The EU was never official. They stated when Heir to Empire hit shelves (actually, before) that should any sequel ever be made, they (LFL) were not beholden to anything written.

I do agree that the story team is just making it up as they go along. Only a fool does a trilogy without a set plan in place of what major elements are to occur in each part. You don't make it up as you go. Look at Marvel. The framework to the upcoming Avengers 3 this year and 4 next year was put in place when iron man was made. You have to lay out a long term plan and adhere to it. Making it up as you go screws things up and leaves dangling plot points.

cboath said:

The ultimate irony in that being killing the EU to bring back Chewy, but having no problem offing the two most popular characters in the entire SW universe. But, you know, Chewy's still around....whatever.

The EU was never official. They stated when Heir to Empire hit shelves (actually, before) that should any sequel ever be made, they (LFL) were not beholden to anything written.

I do agree that the story team is just making it up as they go along. Only a fool does a trilogy without a set plan in place of what major elements are to occur in each part. You don't make it up as you go. Look at Marvel. The framework to the upcoming Avengers 3 this year and 4 next year was put in place when iron man was made. You have to lay out a long term plan and adhere to it. Making it up as you go screws things up and leaves dangling plot points.

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Couldnt agree more. Once you let the Toy Division be your major plot developer,all is lost.

Chewbacca WHAT?!?

Mr Webber said:

Couldnt agree more. Once you let the Toy Division be your major plot developer,all is lost.

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Game designers/writers, are now becoming the champions of story telling.

The Wook said:

Chewbacca WHAT?!?

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I know, I got a mousehead when I saw that in the video as well:lol They dropped a moon on his head.

cboath said:

The EU was never official. They stated when Heir to Empire hit shelves (actually, before) that should any sequel ever be made, they (LFL) were not beholden to anything written.

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That was under George Lucas.
Under Kennedy, they first said that they were going to work out the kinks of the EU and bring selected parts into canon. Months later, they changed their minds.

It's hard for me to fathom how Disney could have allowed this current trilogy into gear without having at least a rough story outline for all three movies in place first.

batguy said:

It's hard for me to fathom how Disney could have allowed this current trilogy into gear without having at least a rough story outline for all three movies in place first.

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This. Exactly.
They're not doing it to tell stories. They're just selling any old crap labelled as Star Wars. As Bryancd points out, if it makes a shed load of money then it must be good. Right?

Extended universes are lame. I don't want to have to read every novel, comic, and short story...and watch every animated series and web-series to know what's going on in an overall story.

If if you want to extend a universe by telling other stories about other people in the universe, by all means...but when things happen to major characters in novels and comics, that's dumb.

That Chewbacca-argument is a load of bull, it's really the stupidest reason.
That being said, I read only a handful of EU novels and they were almost exclusively all cheap badly written pulp fiction. Chewbacca dying in that novel was nothing more than a gimmick to sell more books and it's hardly a thing that takes the franchise in a new direction. Most of the EU was either extremely derivative of the original films or completely unrelated generic stories with the Star Wars gloss on it (which you can argue that it would be a better direction than clingin on to the old ones).
To me it makes sense to throw it in the dump and start "fresh" mostly because if the original three are brought back and due to their age you can't just pick it up from ROTJ and you can't just start with 40 years later and say, well read the EU books so you'll know how Han and Leia got here, who these kids are, how Luke was doing, etc.
I personally don't care much about the anthology movies and after TLJ don't care much about the main storyline either. The measure of how much I don't care about the Solo movie is beyond the scale. There's probably gonna be a handful of decent anthology movies, but that's all I'm expecting from SW now.
I don't fully blame Disney, I'd like to quote Rich Evans who said that Star Wars is basically creatively bankrupt, all you can do is shove in X-wings, TIE fighters, lightsabers, stretch the old conflict as long as you can, or copy the old formulas because the entire universe is a really limited sandbox.

Gimpdiggity said:

Extended universes are lame. I don't want to have to read every novel, comic, and short story...and watch every animated series and web-series to know what's going on in an overall story.

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That is not the fault of the novels and comics - but a flaw in the movies, because the movies failed to tell the story.
By filling in the gaps, novels and stories seize being merely of an "extended" universe and become something else.

This happened several times in the prequel era: the movies raised lots of questions that it didn't answer. That was purely George Lucas' fault.
The novelists had to cover the blanks in the story, if only to have something to work with.

This happens in the new sequel trilogy again. What in the universe is the First Order? How was it able to become this big? Why does Leia lead a new Rebellion? Why did Han go back to smuggling? Etc. etc. Now, the blame can only lie with Lucasfilm's "Story group".

And BTW, the EU was much more than just about the overall story and the principal characters. It contained quite a few characters on the fringe and characters and events thousands of years before the "prequel era". They deepened the Jedi and Sith story.
Stories that did not affect the sequels at all - but Lucasfilm chose to relegate those into "Legends" anyway.

I disagree 100%. It's a poor filmmaker who relies on extended media to tell his story. Of the Star Wars filmmakers, the only person who did that was George Lucas. You'll get no argument from me that the PT left out a lot of needed details and were not great movies.

That said-- that wasn't the intent of the EU, to fix holes. It just happened to fall to them to scramble and recontextualize things to make sense out of Lucas' screw ups.

As for Disney making "original" content, fandom literally can't make up its mind. It's mad when sacred chestnuts are messed with, but then it's mad when they don't get them at all. There is literally NO WAY to please everyone. Trying to please fanboys is a lost cause.

And they are doing original material-- Rian Johnson's trilogy is in the SW but disconnected from anything we've seen in the saga. I'm sure people will bitch about that too.

As for Disney ditching the EU-- they had to. There is no way to continue the story of the OT cast onscreen and keep what was written. The story was taken to such extremes you'd need an entire movie full of boring exposition just to explain everything. And like I say-- had they been 100% original and not included the OT 3, people would have flipped out over that too.

The truth is, to make a fan happy, you have to give them Luke Skywalker, but only that fan's preferred version of Luke Skywalker. And if you think that one fan's vision is shared any all fans, I have a bridge in New York to sell you.

People complaining about "legends" need to realize Star Wars was a movie franchise first and foremost, and it is meant for a very wide audience. You don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie for the, at most, tens of thousands of people reading Star Wars books. You make a movie for the hundreds of thousands who will go to a theater.

As for whether the old EU or the movies are better-- that's an individual choice, but I do take issue with Legends fans out to ruin the experience for everyone else by spoiling things or making idiotic online petitions.

Darth Lars said:

That was under George Lucas.
Under Kennedy, they first said that they were going to work out the kinks of the EU and bring selected parts into canon. Months later, they changed their minds.

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And most likely the tried and couldn't make it happen. Possibly wanting to bring in post Chewy death aspects that wanting to keep him alive messed up and the just said dump it all.


Or, maybe we misread that statement, and things like they're doing with rebels (adding thrawn, etc) is what they meant. Bring it back in some shape or form where they can.

Gimpdiggity said:

Extended universes are lame. I don't want to have to read every novel, comic, and short story...and watch every animated series and web-series to know what's going on in an overall story.

If if you want to extend a universe by telling other stories about other people in the universe, by all means...but when things happen to major characters in novels and comics, that's dumb.

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I agree about not wanting to have to use ancilliary product to fill in the gaps. If you can do an EU without it impacting the movies at all, fine.

Thing is, I think this tact is driven by the home office or marketing. Why sell someone a movie ticket when you can leave gaps in the movie and pull in more money by selling extra products to fill in the gaps.

It's not all that different from EA with games. We'll sell you the game for $50, but if you want to be good, cough up another 50-100 more and hammer everyone right off the bat.

cboath said:

It's not all that different from EA with games. We'll sell you the game for $50, but if you want to be good, cough up another 50-100 more and hammer everyone right off the bat.

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Remember BF2, Didnt go so well.