George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise is a staple of modern science fiction. Initially just an incredibly ambitious space opera project, it went on to become one of the most popular and prosperous franchises in history. After several decades of being a cult franchise, Star Wars has garnered the respect of numerous fans across multiple generations and remains one of the most magnificent fictional universes ever created.

And while a lot has changed since Disney took over Lucasfilm, one of the biggest differences was made to the original Star Wars canon, which was significantly altered by Disney. Namely, the Expanded Universe was by most considered to be canon before Disney’s takeover, alongside the main series, but it seems that Lucas himself did not share that opinion.

We know Disney significantly reduced the Star Wars canon when they took over, but as things stand, not even Lucas considered the Expanded Univers to be part of the canon, which means that the recent additions from The Acolyte canonized some elements that even Lucas himself did not consider canon.

A lot of fans were angry when Disney took over and said that the Expanded Universe was not canon, creating the Legends universe, but it seems that this was misdirected, as not even George Lucas himself considered the original Expanded Universe as part of the Star Wars canon, although he did acknowledge it and respected it:

“I don’t read that stuff. I haven’t read any of the novels. I don’t know anything about that world. That’s a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. When I said [other people] could make their own ‘Star Wars’ stories, we decided that, like ‘Star Trek’, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.”

Source: MeriStation

This was later confirmed by Dave Filoni, who worked with Lucas on the Clone Wars animated series, as the current creative director of Star Wars said that “having  worked with George I can tell you that it was always very clear — and he made it very clear — that the films and the TV shows were the only things that he considered Canon. That was it. So everything else  was a world of fun ideas, exciting characters, great possibilities, the  EU was created to explore all those things.” The video confirms it:

In light of that, it has to be said that a lot of things changed with Disney and that a lot of Expanded Universe moments and details were subsequently canonized in later works, especially The Acolyte, which also made significant changes to what was once considered to be canon. The overall conclusion is that the Star Wars universe is evolving and that anything that expands our horizons – for better or worse – is always welcome!

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