Which Came First?

John Guillen8 Comments

This question may leave you with your jaw completely dropped. But I’m asking anyway. There are also Star Wars books along with all the movies, right? See, I don’t know anything about the series. I can probably name a handful of characters. Maybe. But I couldn’t tell you anything about the plots of the movies or the books. I’ve just never been interested. I’m still not.

So I haven’t seen any of the movies, and I have no desire to. But I just saw the Monday box office numbers and I started wondering where the movies originated? Were they a book series before they hit the big screen a million years ago? Or were the movies so successful that they spawned a book series? I suppose I could just Google and find the answer, but I’d rather make good use of you all. Hehe.

So tell me which came first. Heck, you can even tell me what you thought of the new movie. But I won’t have any idea who or what you’re talking about.

8 thoughts on “Which Came First?”

  1. Star Wars was a movie first. The novelization of the first movie came out a few months before it, but it was based on the screenplay by George Lucas. He has always been a filmmaker, not a novelist, and Star Wars is entirely his creation.

    All of the books you’ve seen in stores are what we call “the expanded universe” and started coming out after the original trilogy ended in 1983. Fans hungered for more adventures with these characters, so authors like Timothy Zahn, Aaron Allston (rest in peace), and Kevin J. Anderson took up the mantle. Sometimes they wrote stories about the main characters from the original trilogy, sometimes you had books that were basically biographies of side characters (like “Tarkin”, which was based on a side character named Grand Moff Tarkin.)

    But when Disney bought the rights to the movies, they declared that all those books were “non-canon” – meaning what happens in them is basically fan fiction and not actually true to the Star Wars universe. A few people are pissed about this. I personally think it’s fine, as the EU had a lot of weird and terrible storylines that ruined – and sometimes even killed – characters. And to make matters more confusing, Disney has launched a few books that they DO consider “canon” since then, like “A New Dawn” by John Jackson Miller. Heh. It’s all upside down at this point. I guess that’s what you get with a $4 billion franchise.

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    • You know, no one had said anything yesterday by the time I went to work, so I asked one of the guys there about this. He said nearly the exact same thing as you. He even said something about the books being non-canon. Well at least I learned a little bit about a series I know nothing about yesterday.

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  2. AetherHouse already summed it up nicely, so I’ll just add this totally useless piece of information: My husband looks just like George Lucas. I’m wondering where he stashed our $4 Billion.

    Seriously… people take stealth pictures of him at ComiCon. He just goes with it. It’s hilarious.

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  3. AetherHouse did sum it up quite nicely. However, I will add this piece of information… although there were a handful of books written during and directly after the original trilogy, it wasn’t until 1991, when Timothy Zahn’s first book, Heir to the Empire, came out did the novelization series pick up steam, leading to a slew of books, that I believe ultimately led to Lucas realizing Star Wars was now ready and primed to make a comeback to the silver screen.

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