Does anyone care about the 'extended universe'?

OK, I'm new here and despite my best efforts, I haven't seen a thread on this topic (feel free to delete if there is).

Personally, I have no interest in this stuff. I bought the 'Heir To the Empire' novels when they came out and the 'Dark Empire' comics but I never liked them much. Same with the prequels. I hated the fact that 'The Force' was reduced to some stupid physiological phenomenon. I didn't want to see Darth Vader as a kid. Sometimes less is more. Thoughts?

Well, balls... : )

I haven't really got the time to explore it much.

I've become more engaged with the Doctor Who 'stuff that isn't on screen' (largely because of getting hooked during the television wilderness years) and I prefer it's 'anything goes' attitude to canonicity (it's very difficult to get into an internet discussion about Star Wars without someone bringing up an implausible Z Canon reference to prove how foolish and ill informed I am).

I got and devoured the Zahn trilogy, rather liked Dark Empire and the Jedi Academy Trilogy (even though they weren't as good) and I got some of the Dark Horse comics.

Other than that it's just my memories of the Radio Adaptations, the Marvel and Goodwin/Williams strips and Splinter Of The Minds Eye until both incarnations of The Clone Wars series started.

I really like much of the current Clone Wars stuff, it reminds me of the Marvel strips between 1977 and 1980 and it often feels more like Star Wars than the PT films but I don't foam at my mouth when it drops in quality because there is so much of it.

A Star Wars film episode should be a special occasion which is why I find the PT and ROTJ currently such a let down. 

The Radio adaptations were brilliant. I bought the CDs of those. and the Alan Dean Foster Splinter Of the Mind's Eye novel (which we all thought was Star Wars II at the time)

Anything written by Timothy Zahn gets a vote from me, but that's about all.

-Josh

SilverWook said:

The Brian Daley Han Solo trilogy, the Lando trilogy, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and the old Marvel comics are all the EU I require. ;)

This is me as well.  The best part about the Solo and the Calrissian trilogies is they barely deal with the Empire, the Jedi or the Skywalker family.  I find it refreshing while not introducing extra complications to the force.  Like midichlorians or them lizards that make bubbles in the force.  Dumb.

Who can keep up with the EU? It's an industry unto itself.

Like most people I have read the cornerstones--Splinter, Zahn trilogy, Dark Empire, and the radio dramas and movie novelizations--but other than odd things here and there I have stayed clear. The cartoons and some of the video games are maybe the exception, but even then I'm two seasons behind the current show and haven't played a Star Wars video game since the Lego ones.

When I was a young teenager I was more into it, I suppose, I know a lot of the 1990s EU but not much after the prequels started coming out. I don't know if there is an age demographic for EU, but I feel like there is much less adults who are into EU compared to the amount of adults who simply watch the films. Am I wrong in getting that impression? Maybe it's partly because most of the EU books/comics aren't particularly well written, but even the idea of EU doesn't interest me anymore, and most of the EU I've been exposed to has been fortunately pretty decent.

I rather enjoy a lot of the EU

Recently the TOR novels, Death Troopers, and Judgement were all good reads.

The EMPIRE and CLONE WARS comics were a lot of fun.

Ive found big chunkcs of the Clone Wars TV show to be enjoyable.

Zahn's genius was also just good timing. He created the EU/continuity that now has locked in all authors and creatively stifled them. Creativity needs freedom and for me that's one reason why most of the written EU is poor (very heavy on continuity) and one reason why the Clone War show is so good (continuity with EU is basically ignored). The freedom Zahn had let him tell a story simply because it was a good story, instead of the now backwards way in which things have to be fit together.

Even though Star Wars is a really rich universe of possibilities, it really isn't big enough to support the amount of material created around it if we are going to at least pretend it's all consistent and continuous. No storyline or franchise is that big. After 200 books, 200 games and 200 different comic lines each with dozens of issues, it's so congested that it all implodes. That's the way it seems to me at least.

theprequelsrule said:

It cannot be said enough: Zahn's genius was in creating great villains that were not Sithlords, 

 Zahn wrote before the idea of Sith Lords was really even designed. He did have an evil lightning shooting Jedi though.

At that point "Sith" was just an undefined term in publicity material. Darth Vader was a knight of the Sith. Whatever that was. The idea of the Jedi having an enemy order was something Lucas integrated some time later, it was in early drafts of Star Wars but didn't seem to survive into the finished film.

georgec said:

 

I haven't played The Force Unleashed but know that the main character in the game challenges Vader for his seat with the Emperor or something like that. You have all these super powerful, important characters that seem to come along every week in the EU timeline but it's all inconsequential because what you have in the OT is all that matters (at least to me).

 

 Isn't that a little circular? You dislike the stories that aren't the OT because they don't matter because it doesn't matter because it's not the OT.

I think he is saying that the EU is inherantly irrelevant because the OT is the OT and whatever drama, characters and plots the EU devises doesn't matter because it won't change the OT.

I can understand this perspective, but I don't really agree with it. Information contained in EU changes how you view the OT. This is the whole theory behind the existence of the PT. If the OT is already made then why make the PT, you know how it ends and the characters and plots of the OT already exist so it could never affect them...right? But actually no. Darth Vader changes his entire character, you realize half the people in the films have a pre-existing relationship, and you get a lot of other background information that goes against what you assumed.

Obviously, this sort of change can be for the better or for the worse (and we all know which category most of the prequel information falls into). But it happens, so material that fits around and within the OT can have pretty profound effect on how the OT plays out.