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Is Disney Bad at Star Wars? An Analysis
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Yes. As far as I'm concerned, with notable exceptions of stuff like Andor (this is AMAZING), the real Star Wars story is the pre-Disney EU, which was, contrary to popular refrain, fairly consistent once they got the "keeper of the Holocron" to make sure the stories were relatively cohesive and didn't contradict one-another.
A bunch of the authors even worked to retcon-remove the Dark Empire storyline with the reborn Emperor in their various series by referring to that as "mere rumors" and whatnot.
That's not to say the entire EU was marvelous. But I read the vast majority of it - overall it entirely eclipses what Disney has been doing in terms of quality and depth. Not to mention...Disney, with their tabula rasa, still have stories contradicting one another and introducing inconsistencies...
For me, Disney's Episodes 7-9 never happened. I consume and recognize anything that doesn't materially contradict the prior EU - I'm O.K. with smoothing over, explaining away, and massaging stuff to make it work. But "Kylo Ren" is a dollar store knock-off of Darth Caedus.
Episodes 7-9 were, from a creative standpoint, made with pure contempt. Watching that shit felt like there were MBAs in the writers room reminding people that on brand strength alone these movies were guaranteed to make a profit so all their nerdy ideas were pointless. And they were right. Those movies sleepwalked into being highly profitable. The creative damage it did to the franchise is nerd shit for nerds, and MBAs are winners and they won.
It's not even worth going over their failings. They're so creatively bankrupt that they're not even worth any critical analysis (not that that hasn't been done to death).
I'm just sad that the Sword of the Jedi is never going to be finished.
Seeing Disney just repeating all EU mistakes (superweapon after superweapon, Palpatine clones, inconsistencies) is just rubbing salt in the wound.
I disagree that the entire EU was better. To me, it seems like the combined works in the EU were just so enormous that there were enough high points one would positively remember WHILE at the same point allowing for singular bad instances to be mostly ignored. With the unified canon disney has established, having one bad trilogy will forever taint all the remaining pieces because you can't handwave TRoS away and pretend it didn't or will not happen in canon. Marvel and DC comics have hundreds of timelines and hundreds of different iterations and versions of heroes and wildly different stories and you can pick and choose what you like and ignore the rest. If disney does a poop at any point in the one solidified Star Wars timeline, that poop is now there to stay and everybody now has to bend over backwards to make it appear like it's less of a poop than it really is.