Imaginary Worlds - The Expanded Universe

Episode Date: December 31, 2015

Warning: Spoilers ahead! When The Force Awakens came out, millions of fans flocked to the theaters to find out what happened to the characters in the 30 years since Return of the Jedi. But hardcore Star Wars fans knew what happened to them -- or they thought they did. LucasFilm had approved a series of books, comics and video games that filled in the gaps between the six Star Wars movies and beyond. Then Disney bought LucasFilm, and declared that canon of material (a.k.a. The Expanded Universe) to be invalid. But echoes of those stories found their way into the new movie anyway. With Sonia Soraya of Salon.com, Rabbi Ben Newman, Serena and Eric Fong. This is part V of my V part series on the legacy of Star Wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. Previously on Imaginary Worlds. Do you remember the names of these guys? Well, I know some of them. R2-D2. I-Yoder, of course. Do you remember how old you were when you opened up that Boba Fett?

Well, I mean, only by backdating it. I'm sure I was probably nine. Well, why don't the Breen watch them to be loyal to the Jedi? Like, why not in the seventh movie? Rubinic Midrash is kind of like fan fiction. Right, and they become part of canon, right? If they feel true enough, if they're good enough, they become, they stick. You know, they become part of the story.

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. A show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I'm in line right now to see The Force Awakens. It is Sunday, December 20th, 2015. We got here about two hours early. And the place is packed, but it is playing on so many screens right now it's incredible now i talked about the first time that i saw star wars back in 1977 and at that point it

had already been out for you know four or five months when i went to see the empire strikes back in 1980 it wasn't actually playing on that many screens in fact i don't even think there were that many multiplexes back in 1980 we had to drive into the city to see it opening weekend, and I remember the line was so long, it stretched down a fire escape, swinging around onto the street, and people were so, by the time we got closer and closer to get in, people were so impatient that I remember them banging on the doors yelling let us in let us in and the usher came out it was just like be quiet people could hear you inside the theaters and then everybody got all freaked out like oh my god like oh we feel terrible

and everybody got quiet and then when the return of the jedi came out in 1983 at that point there really were multiplexes everywhere and i remember my dad and I got there super early way too early we just sort of wandered around the movie theater for hours it was slightly anticlimactic I talked to Sonia Soraya who's a tv critic for salon.com who had a totally different experience from me the first time she saw Star Wars, she was in junior high in the late 90s. So of course, she saw it on VHS. You know, I would have a friend watching with me who would say, oh, well, you know, Boba Fett has this huge backstory. You know, you notice Boba Fett, of course, when you're watching it. But I had no idea that there was so much to him. And I only knew that because someone else had read like the comic books or something like that.

What she means is that there are all these books and comics and video games that told the story of what happened to all the Star Wars characters between the movies and after Return of the Jedi. Now, I never bothered with that stuff because I knew George Lucas wasn't really involved. His company just approved the writers and made sure they didn't contradict each other. But as a kid in the 90s, Sonya didn't care whether Lucas was involved or not. Something else mattered to her. I started getting into it on my own and quickly discovered how varied in quality all of that stuff was. And that was like a big part of me becoming a Star Wars fan was sort of learning how to discern between things that were good and things that were not good, even though they all shared the same world.

That became even more important after The Phantom Menace came out in 1999. Finally, here was a new Star Wars movie written and directed by George Lucas himself. Sorry. And, well, you know how that turned out. And, well, you know how that turned out. Starting pity oaky day with the brisky morning munching, then boom, getting very scared and grabbing that Jedi and pow, Mesa here. For a lot of Star Wars fans, George Lucas ceased to be reliable. And that's very destabilizing because he really did create the world of Star Wars almost entirely from his brain.

Or so we thought. People started debating whether the real voice of Star Wars had been Lawrence Kasdan, who worked as a screenwriter on the original trilogy. Or maybe it was George Lucas' ex-wife, Marsha, who was an editor on the trilogy and gave him really important script notes. Or maybe Star Wars just wasn't Star Wars,

unless it was a collaboration of all of them and John Williams and the original cast. Otherwise, it kind of feels like fan fiction. What's wrong with fan fiction? Nothing. It's just that whether, but I don't read a ton of fan fiction. It's like, you know, again, it's that question of whether it's authentic, you know, whether I consider it quote unquote real. Right. You know, or not.

Somebody could be writing, you know, great dialogue for Han Solo. But it's like until I see Harrison Ford deliver it, it's like I don't believe it. Well, I don't know. Did you read the Harry Potter books at all? Yeah. Yeah. And did you watch the movies? Yeah.

Presumably. Did you feel that the movies were fan fiction in that sense that's an interesting question you know to some extent i think i did think of them as extraordinarily expensive fan fiction and that's for totally reasonable well at least you're logically consistent no it's true it's true it kind of not yeah i mean as much as I like the movies, I certainly never treated them with the same sense of authenticity. Right. As the books. Right. Well, and then so to complicate this, and this is again, I think this is endlessly interesting.

So, you know, the first the first Harry Potter book is called Harry Potter in particular illustrates so well in our particular world right now in terms of pop culture and pop culture franchises is that things are made in numerous iterations from so close to their beginning point. So like with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone becomes Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. So you already have this weird split. And then right after the fourth book, the first movie comes out. And already there is this alternate narrative built on that same framework that before the first narratives even finished.

I think that so much of the Star Wars experience is about that too. Especially if you weren't, you know, around or you weren't watching them when they first were coming out in theaters. Because like, now the original trilogy is just three bullet points in a really big universe. This expanded universe, or the EU for short, really began in 1991. Timothy Zahn published a novel called Heir to the Empire, which was an officially licensed sequel to Return of the Jedi. And the fans totally embraced and accepted it. One of the things that's great about the Timothy Zahn books is that he conceived of

them very much as another trilogy. Like there are three of them they have very similar cover like cover art and titles to the star wars movies they're honestly they're like a better version of george lucas's films like it's it's it's better than the original because he's so acutely aware of what makes them good and then he finds a way to embellish them so before talking to sonia i did kind of like a crash course on the expanded universe, which means I'm going to reveal a lot of major spoilers now if you plan on reading the books. And so some of this stuff, I was just like, are you kidding me? Like the bad guys find Luke's hand, which Darth Vader, of course, cut off in The Empire Strikes Back.

And they use the hand to make an evil clone of Luke called Luke with two U's. But Sonia loves the fact that Timothy Zahn let his imagination go crazy because he could have really played it safe and been very deferential. Or like, here's another example. They find these animals. They're sort of like sloth-like animals and they're on a planet and they make a bubble where the force isn't active. So all of the, a lot of the main villains are wearing these frames that have these sloth-like animals on them. It's great.

It's amazing. I mean, it's great. Like they found a mechanism for, you mechanism for making the biggest variable invalid, which is, I mean, again, it's just fun. Timothy Zahn invented two characters that the fans really love and consider to be really authentically Star Wars characters. First, there's the main villain of his trilogy, General Thrawn, who was flying a Star Destroyer on a deep space mission while the original trilogy was happening. And when he comes back, he's totally shocked to learn that the Empire has been defeated. And the General is kind of like this Machiavellian mastermind,

in a way that none of the admirals were in the films. But he never rose to be an admiral because he's a humanoid with blue skin and red eyes. And in these novels, Timothy Zahn really kind of spells out this idea that the empire wasn't evil just because they wanted to create order. One of the threads that comes out in the expanded universe is that they are xenophobic. Like, they don't like other species. They think that humans are like the superior species. They think that humans are like the superior species. And so like a big tenet of the empire was that they would exterminate or marginalize alien life. And that's why the empire is all humans. The other big fan favorite is Mara Jade, a redheaded warrior who starts out as a

Sith. And eventually she becomes Luke's wife and the father of their son. And he moves towards the idea of creating a Jedi Academy, which ends up being this whole huge arc in this thing, and ultimately fails. That's one of the things that you find out many years later. And one of the reasons, as is addressed in the second Zahn books, is that, you know, he was trained as a Jedi for a really short amount of time. And it doesn't it doesn't work super well, but he totally could get married to Mara Jade. And like, that would be great. So that's kind of what ends up happening with Luke. And he has to fight Luke.

He has to fight Luke. Yes. Yeah, that's a great it's a great moment in history. Han and Leia start a family. You know, Leia's like this career politician. She didn't know she fucking had the Force. And now, like, all of a sudden, she has this brother that she didn't know about and this, like, super evil heritage that she didn't know about.

The movies really short shrift Leia in terms of, like, character development because although she does cool things up to right up to the end they never really deal with the fact that her the guy who tortured her and blew up her home planet ends up was her father the entire time and there's presumably a lot of emotional fallout from that that never really gets addressed it sounds like in a way a novel novels were a really good medium to deal with all this stuff yeah because there's there's like an internalness to them right interiority to them and then of course she's pregnant with twins who have the force and so it's this whole thing about like perpetuating lineage and like what she wants to put into the world and it's really interesting i think it's really interesting they definitely

cemented for me the value of doing this the value of telling more stories on top of the first story, if that makes sense. In fact, the one that I always heard, which is the one that everyone, when people told me and tried to sell me on it, it was always that one of the solo twins turns to the dark side. Yes. That they felt that that was super compelling. Oh, yeah.

And it was kind of controversial, I think. Really? Not so much because one of them goes to the dark side but just because i think in an effort to make the expanded universe interesting things got very splashy i i believe a planet falls on chewbacca's head like i think that is actually a thing that happens when i understand it was a moon a moon well you know I think that is actually a thing that happens. From what I understand, it was a moon.

A moon. Well, you know, that's... I mean, a full planet. Yeah. I mean, there's still... That seems to be the moment that everybody points to is like the worst moment in the entire expanded universe is when a moon or planet falls on Chewbacca's head. I mean, it's the jumping the shark

of the Star Wars universe, I think, where it's just like, what's even happening anymore? So I kind of had written off the expanded universe at that point. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they declared the entire expanded universe to be invalid. Or, well, technically they put it like into a parallel universe called Legends, which won't be developed anymore. A lot of fans were really upset, but Sonya had mixed feelings. A lot of fans were really upset, but Sonya had mixed feelings. It's strange to know that it could just be turned off. I think that's the thing that's so weird, is it's not so much that they're throwing it out.

They're just kind of like, oh, well, now none of it's real anymore. And it's weird that they can do that. It's weird that they can just throw a switch and do that. I miss some of it. i miss some of the characters i miss knowing that there was that this completely unique fan experience existed well that's the weird thing is that they're now going to release new books that will take place exactly when the timothy zahn books were supposed to take place but yeah that's hard that's gonna be hard it's um it's like if you're um it's you're diluting it you how much can you dilute it it's like if you've taken the

original and you dilute it and then you take some of that and you dilute it even more like at some point it's just like slightly tinged water it's no longer longer Kool-Aid. We're all craving more in a way. It's like having the best meal you've ever had and then like searching for, you know, anything else that reminds you of that. And you want to get like just a glimpse of, you know, what that moment was again. I mean, that's such a, the way you framed it is such a like depressing and i think very accurate metaphor for the way people search for meaning in their lives to be perfectly frank i mean like you know looking for the original thing again is hard and i think it might be because creating the original thing is like maybe a once in a lifetime thing and maybe that's why you know

there aren't so many creators that we can look to and we can say, they really created something magical multiple times. So I talked with Sonia before I saw The Force Awakens, and one of the pleasant surprises to me was that the new movie felt like Star Wars. And I set a really high bar for that feeling. I was also surprised that there were so many echoes of the expanded universe, even though J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan said they didn't look at those stories. I mean, maybe there are just only so many answers you can come up with to the same question,

which is how do you expand beyond the original trilogy? And again, these are going to be major spoiler alerts if you haven't seen the movie. I mean, first of all, if you're going to tell more stories, the Empire has to come back in some capacity, and they need to create a newer, bigger, badder, scarier version of the Death Star. So, check. Obviously, Han and Leia have gotten together by the end of Return of the Jedi, so do they have children? Yes. And to make it interesting, one of them goes to the dark side. In the books, their son kills Luke's wife. He actually may still have killed Luke's wife, we don't know, but in this movie, of course, he kills his father. Now, we don't know if Rey is the daughter of Luke or Han and Leia,

but either way, she fills the same role in the story as the good Skywalker daughter in the books who has to fight the bad one. And personally, I have no problem with him being first cousin instead of brother and sister. I think that's just as powerful. And just like in the expanded universe, I think we're going to find out that there were terrible consequences when Luke cut short his training with Yoda, who warned him this is a really bad idea. Although at the time, it didn't really seem quite that terrible

because he managed to learn the truth about his father and to beat Darth Vader and the Emperor and the Empire was no longer. But in the long run, he wasn't qualified to train his nephew and prevent him from being seduced by the dark side. So the Empire rises from the ashes because of this rash decision he made as a young man. And I think that's why he looks so anguished in the final scene. But going into this movie, there's one thing I was certain of, and it played out not exactly as I expected, but it played out as I expected. Han Solo was going to die. Because Harrison Ford had been really vocal for years. He didn't like Han Solo as a character. He kind of wanted him to die in the original trilogy,

but George Lucas had to convince him to stick through it to the end. And I was like, there is no way he's going to sign up for three new movies. And I've been telling this theory to my wife, Serena, for years. And so she was pretty much expecting it. But I saw the movie with my brother-in-law, who's also named Eric, and my niece, and they were totally stunned. It was obvious what was going to happen on the walkway. Yeah. But even so, when he turned the lightsaber on him,

I just, I sat up and said, no! Oh my God. I'm really sad. I'm all watering. My eyes are all wet, watering. It's funny because I mean because I also saw, too, the way it was going to parallel what happened when Luke saw Ben. That was his motivation. It's obviously going to be hers.

I want to like the movie, but I really hate what they did to Han. Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to fully cry, but... I mean, I'm not going to fully cry, but... I can't stand this. But there is that kind of sadness and that darkness and loss in every Star Wars movie to some extent. There's a feeling of that. But Han was Han.

Right. Kylo Ren wasn't that strong. He didn't seem that strong of a character. I think they needed to do it, though, in order to make him strong. I think that's the idea, is that he knew that he was a weakling little dark side guy, and if anything, Han let himself be so vulnerable in front of him.

He thought that was a way of getting him to come over to light. But yeah, because Han was Han he wasn't part of this epic force set Jedi thing this is just more disturbing to me just because as a parent yeah to have your own kid turn on you like that that was so sad. Yeah. I'm really upset. Oh. Are you going to want to see it again and again? Yes, definitely.

And buy the DVD and just go frame by frame. Yeah. It's heavier than I expected. Yeah. Too much mom and dad family stuff. Oh, I thought that... No, it affected me more, though. I didn't... I thought it would be...

would have that, and I thought it needed it just because they needed to have some kind of mythology. Yeah, if you look at the whole storyline over nine movies, it's really about the darkness and this dysfunctional Skywalker family

and how it comes out in different generations, which is something a lot of people can relate to. Ben Newman feels that way. You might remember he's the rabbi that I interviewed in my third episode, where we talked about how sci-fi canons are similar to religious canons. It's a powerful story, you know, to say that you as a parent were not successful. I think that's every parent's fear, that your child's going to turn out bad. You know, that's, look at all the,

look at all the parenting books that are out there. But what I always say to Shoshana. That's his wife and my childhood friend, Shoshana, who is also a rabbi. If anybody had it, had the key to like raising perfect children and to being a perfect parent, they would be a billionaire because that's what everybody wants. But it's not clear how to get there.

And there's always going to be struggles with parents and children. I mean, that's kind of what the Old Testament is about. Right. Look at the Torah, right? You have Jacob and Esau, which is this huge drama. And then you go one generation back, and you have Isaac and Ishmael. As you move through the Torah and the Hebrew Bible, you have these family dramas happening over and over and over again. King David had a family drama. Solomon had a family drama. And I think that's just part of being a human being.

And I think that's also the power of these series, is that they're picking up on all of those themes. Now, another thing I really liked about The Force Awakens was how little was explained. Luke Skywalker didn't have one line of dialogue in the entire movie. But, like, everybody who I saw coming out of the movie was like, I'm happy with that. You know, that's totally fine. I like the mystery. And all the mysteries in this movie have sparked like hundreds of tweets and posts and think pieces where the fans are all trying to answer these questions. Although some of them seem annoyed, there are so many dangling threads, but

they're all dying to see the next movie. J.J. Abrams, who directed The Force Awakens, did a TED Talk years ago where he brought out this white box which had question marks on the side. It was called a mystery box. And he bought it at a magic store when he was a kid. Still hasn't opened it. It just sits in his office today. What I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, and what I realized I sort of do in whatever it is that I do is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility

and that sense of potential. And I realized that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now, it's not the most groundbreaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge. It's the vagueness that is so intriguing, and so it makes us love it. I think that the prequels were too explicit.

They spelled everything out too much. Whereas this kind of J.J. Abrams mystery box sort of way of approaching things, where you have this question of what everything is, and everything's very vague. You don't know, you don't even know the main character's last name, you know, that makes it like, so that we can have these kinds of conversations and we have fun with it, you know? And this to me is like, that's the gold, that's the gold, you know, any, any literature that lasts

and that's good, that canonical material has to be as vague as you can make it. And it makes us be part of the story, which I think that's the ultimate power of it all. You claim the story as your own. It's amazing that this epic story about the force, which started out in the 1970s trying to emulate religion, has evolved to become kind of a modern day scripture in its own right. There's this great quote from the Talmud which says that when Moses was on Mount Sinai, what he received was everything that every wise scholar would ever say about the Torah through all of history. And so in a sense, like every conversation is part of the evolving story of the Jewish people. So even, you know, conversation that

I have about Star Wars and Judaism, it becomes part of the larger story. It's funny because I was thinking back to the mystery box as well. Would you want to be in that position to know the future of all canon? Now that you're giving me that option, I don't know. I probably would not want to know the future of all the canon. Maybe if I was about to die, you know, I had this thought, you know, that the next movie is not coming out until, what is it, May of 2017 or something like that. And I thought, well, what if I die before the next movie comes out? I really want to know what happens, you know? So if I knew

I was about to die, I would say, yes, let me know it all. But if I knew I was going to live to see it, then I would love to experience what I'm experiencing right now, which is theorizing, filling in the holes, trying to make the story my own. But if I knew that I wasn't ever going to hear the answer, I would probably take you up on that offer. I would too. Well, that is it for my Star Wars series. Special thanks to Ben Newman, Sonia Saraya,

Serena, and Eric Fong. And for new listeners, I used to post on Wednesdays. I switched to Tuesdays this fall, but I'm going to go back to Wednesdays permanently. And I have gotten a lot of new listeners the last few months, which is awesome. And if you really love the show, please leave a comment in iTunes.

It helps other people discover it. You can also like the show on Facebook. I tweeted Emalinski. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.