Johnboy3434 said:Vaderisnothayden said:No way. The films shouldn't have to kow tow to the EU. The EU is by very nature non-canonical, no matter what certain Lucasfilm employees think, and Lucas is thoroughly justified in ignoring it or going counter to it. The only question is whether he should be allowing his employees to officially call it canon if he's not going to treat it as that in his work. I think he shouldn't. I think it's a con to call the stuff canon when it's clearly not treated as canon. I think it's called canon just to to aid sales and wouldn't be called canon if not for that. The EU needs to be soundly put in its place. They should do the honest and appropriate thing and declare it all non-canon.
That's not your call to make. Whatever their reasons for saying it's canon, the point is that they say it, and so it is. The company that owns the right to a franchise can define its canon however it wants, so the EU is not "by very nature" non-canonical. If GL disagreed so vehemently with the presence of EU in Star Wars canon, he would fire the entire team of individuals whose sole job is to maintain a massive database on what constitutes canon, and who keep threads in the official message boards open for questions from readers. High-visibility jobs like that wouldn't last long if they were as unnecessary as you think.
I've noticed from your previous posts that you seem to think you have much more authority in these matters than you actually do. First, you insist that the OOT is the canon version simply because you think GL has lost sight of some nebulous concept of what SW "is" (which smacks of the same self-styled elitist definition as the phrase "true fan"), despite having no involvement in the production of the films of even an affiliation with the companies that made them. Now, you use the fact that Lucas Licensing is a business to off-handedly dismiss any official statements on the definition of canon. There's no logical follow-through to these statements at all. Simply put, you know less about what Star Wars "is" than Lucas and company ever will, because they DECIDE what it "is".
OOT purists, if you ever wondered why people have a tendency to look down on you, you need only look at people like Vaderisnothayden.
Another insulting post from Johnboy. At least you didn't call me "ignorant" this time.
You seem to adhere to the slavish view that canon is just what the company says it is, but that is failing to recognize what the idea of canon is about. It's all about the question of what's the real thing. And the company does not always know best what is the real thing. As such, something is not made canon just because they say it is. If canon were a value that consisted solely of what a company SAID was the real thing, then it would be a worthless value. But canon is about the very real question of what's the real thing, and that exists quite independent of any company's word. As such, there is a canon that exists independent of a company's decisions. And anybody with a brain can take a stab at judging what this real canon is.
GL is not going to fire his EU pseudo-canon employees, because they help to bring him money. But he has made it very clear that he does not consider the EU to be canon. He has talked of it beng a separate universe from his Star Wars and compared the situation to the Star Trek situation, in which there are two universes, the live action and the books etc EU which is not canon. I'm amazed you take Lucas employing these guys as some sort of evidence that he believes in the EU as canon. All it is is evidence of marketing strategy. Indeed, you YOURSELF have previously acknowledged that Lucas does not consider the EU to be canon. You passed off his view then by saying that one day he'll die and then the Lucasfilm EU-is-canon idea will be the one left standing.
GL has certainly lost sight of what Star Wars is. A lot of people will agree with me on that. It's not elitist to say he has, merely accurate. He has clearly lost touch with the original Star Wars. No, Lucas and Lucasfilm do not decide what Star Wars is. The OOT films that made the legend of Star Wars decide that. They're the measure of Star Wars. And Lucas has broken away from those films and their mentality. The "Star Wars" that's being pushed these days, far from deciding what Star Wars is, just isn't really real Star Wars itself at all. And you don't need to be involved in the making of Star Wars to judge this. You don't need to be involved in the making of a piece of art to be able to judge it. All you need is a brain.