Star Wars has been a part of American pop culture since 1977 after the release of Star Wars: A New Hope. And ever since, it has spawned animated TV shows, graphic novels, a TV Christmas special, five sequel movies, three prequel movies and more than its fair share of fan created content. In fact, Star Wars is unique to most franchises in that for a time between 1977 and 2012, it had had several incarnations of books and comic books created by both fan and professional writers officially added to the canon universe. Of course, with these many changes came a need for organization so the stories would not outgrow the limits set by the original trilogy of movies.

In an attempt to reorganize the thoughts and ideas of fans and creators, George Lucas decided to create a new trilogy of prequel movies to explain the origins of characters and the main story of his original works. These prequels divided some fans and angered more with their use of cliche movie tactics. But nothing would come close to the anger caused by Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012.

This singular event caused the rift between fans and studio to grow larger as Disney claimed that all extended universe media including video games, comic books and books would be considered non-canon. Some fans found this action to be ludicrous because hundreds of examples of media which were the hard work of dedicated and passionate individuals would be considered worthless.

“I think Disney should reconsider making the EU [expanded universe] non-canon. They’ve torn the Star Wars fans apart by destroying Star Wars history that’s been canon for years and forcing their own story line down people’s throats. Which a lot of it is basically the original trilogy with a different look,” Tyler Cullen, 2017 PAHS graduate, said.

But other fans found the new decision to be a good one because it changed the universe into a much narrower and easier to follow story path.

“I enjoy the new addition to the Star Wars movies, and I feel like they should continue the series for a long time. I like the simplification of the series. It makes it a lot more uniform,” sophomore Brad Duncan said.

 But whichever category you fall into, I think most can agree. Jar-Jar is pretty dumb