Originally published January 16, 2018. Updated December 2, 2022.
Lucasfilm may have been helped along in their decision to delete the Expanded Universe from Star Wars canon by the death of Chewbacca.
When Disney purchased Lucasfilm, along with Star Wars, it was revealed that they had cleared up the series’ canon considerably, announcing that the Expanded Universe would now become the non-canon entity known as Legends.
This was a decision that upset many fans at the time, who had loved reading about the further adventures of Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca in various different mediums.
Leland Chee, who works for Lucasfilm as the head of the Star Wars database of knowledge and a part of the Lucasfilm Story Group, has explained in a recent interview with Syfy’s Fandom Files podcast the influence behind this decision.
“For me it came down to simply that we had killed Chewbacca in the Legends — 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. … But if you have the opportunity to bring back Chewbacca into a live-action film, you’re not gonna deprive fans that. 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.”
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Chee has since gone onto clarify that this is just his personal justification and it wasn’t his decision to end the EU.
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