**SPOILERS AHEAD**
When Disney paid $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012, fans were elated with the additional announcement that a new “Star Wars” trilogy was in the works. However, the fine print revealed a monumental change — everything outside the original six movies and “The Clone Wars” TV series was going to be scrapped from the canon. That’s right, anything that happened in the countless books, comics, and more would not impact where the story would go next. While some fans were dismayed, it was an understandable move in terms of streamlining the mythology as the franchise was rebooted for a whole new generation. From a business perspective, it opened up a whole new world of licensed product potential. And curiously, it’s Chewbacca who spurred some of that change.
Lucasfilm’s Leland Chee might have the most enviable job in the galaxy. He’s responsible for the Holocron, the extensive database of the “Star Wars” canon, that continues every morsel of information about every character, vehicle, object and weapon you can think of. With over 80,000 entries, you want to have Chee on your side during any “Star Wars” trivia night. Speaking on Syfy’s “Fandom Files” podcast, he reveals how Han Solo’s bestie spurred overhauling the “Star Wars” canon.
“For me it came down to simply that we had killed Chewbacca in the ‘Legends’ [series] — a big moon had fallen on him. Part of that [original decision] was Chewbacca, because he can’t speak and just speaks in growls, he was a challenging character to write for in novels. Publishing had decided they needed to kill somebody, and it was Chewbacca,” Chee explained.
“But if you have the opportunity to bring back Chewbacca into a live action film, you’re not gonna deprive fans that,” he continued. “There’s no way that I’d want to do an ‘Episode VII’ that didn’t have Chewbacca in it and have to explain that Chewbacca had a moon fall on his head. And if we were going to overturn a monumental decision like that, everything else was really just minor in comparison.”
In case you’re wondering, Chee is referring to the 1999 book “Star Wars: The New Jedi Order – Vector Prime” by R. A. Salvatore, which generated plenty of controversy at the time for being the first occasion a major character from the original trilogy was killed off in the “Star Wars” expanded universe. It’s somewhat ironic that the old canon was tossed out, only for Lucasfilm to go on and kill off Han Solo and Luke Skywalker in the new trilogy.
At any rate, it’s a fascinating insight into machinery of Lucasfilm, and you can listen to the entire conversation with Chee below.
