Sometimes I feel the Star Wars universe is unnecessarily big and confused, and that it contains a disproportionate amount of material, although there’s no need to. If I were George Lucas, this is the way I would have organized the Star Wars universe from the beginning:
- A “Down of the Jedi” style long comic series to explore the birth of the Jedi and the Republic.
- A “Tales of the Jedi” style comic series to explore the birth of the Sith and the Great War between the Jedi and the Sith, which leed to the Sith “extinction” at Russan.
- A trilogy of comics to explore Darth Bane’s story.
- A “Star Wars: Republic” style long comic series to explore the whole Prequel Era, the Clone Wars and Anakin’s fall. No Prequel films, everything Is made in comics.
- A “Star Wars: Dark Times” style comic series to explore the Dark Times.
- The Original Trilogy.
- A “Tales of the Jedi” style long comic series to explore the post-ROTJ period, at least until the definitive defeat of the Empire.
That’s it. This way, there wouldn’t be too much material, the universe outside of the movies wouldn’t be so big, and perhaps people would be less confused.
The issue you run into with a really tight, concrete canon is that the duds are harder to ignore. If a book, show, or movie is hard canon and ends up being really bad, all future material still has adhere to it.
IMO, Disney should consider the movies something like a “Main Saga” and everything else sort of like an Expanded Universe, which are on different tiers of canon.
In fact, it would probably be a good idea to split it into more than two tiers of canon. Like, George Lucas’s 6 movies are obviously on the top tier of canon as the core story the rest is based on, but then on the next tier you could have stuff like The Clone Wars which is clearly core canon but still lower than 1-6. Then you’d have stuff like novels and comics, the main bulk of what I’m thinking I’d call the “Expanded Star Wars Universe”, and then at the bottom you’d have stuff which conforms to canon but doesn’t define it. This would really work out, especially with such an anal fanbase. I’m not sure why Disney doesn’t do this.