Few fanbases are more fastidious about the content of the canon than that of the Star Wars franchise, which is why Disney’s announcement back in 2014 that all stories outside of the six core movies and The Clone Wars TV show would be struck from the continuity was met with some backlash.
But what’s a little ironic about this literal-minded fixation on what did and didn’t “really happen” is that the Expanded Universe mythology didn’t always add up to a particularly coherent world. A new piece from Screen Rant, for instance, observes how the character of Ki-Adi-Mundi was riddled with contradictions before Lucasfilm wiped the slate relatively clean.
To elaborate, material accompanying The Phantom Menace described this long-headed member of the Jedi Council as a Jedi Knight. However, a few years later in Revenge of the Sith, the idea of a Knight on the Council is shown to be pretty much unheard of, hence Anakin Skywalker’s outrage at not being made a Master when he’s appointed. Similarly, the 2000 comic Star Wars: Republic: Prelude to Rebellion depicts the character as married and with children, but as Attack of the Clones would later indicate, Jedi are forbidden from forming such attachments.
In both cases, George Lucas pretty much ignored the content of all the tie-in fiction to follow through with his own vision, and in response, the Expanded Universe had to bend over backwards to retcon itself. Specifically, the new canon became that Ki-Adi-Mundi’s Master status hadn’t yet come into effect yet during the events of The Phantom Menace, and that due to a population crisis among the Cerean species, the character was made exempt from the celibacy rules.
These are just a couple of examples of how the Expanded Universe was constantly required to monitor and ‘fix’ itself as its body of work grew increasingly large and elaborate, but with Lucasfilm striking all this material from the record, the franchise was suddenly freed up to take alternative paths. Of course, as the post-2014 Star Wars canon continues to grow, it may well find itself entangled in a similarly messy web of continuity, but if the continuity can be purged once, then what’s to stop them from doing it again?
