While most of us would like to think of the Star Wars prequels as little more than a bad dream from which we’ve now all woken, the fact remains that this most ridiculed of trilogies is part of the franchise canon, for better or worse. This means that any subsequent films set in the cinematic universe – including the newly released Solo: A Star Wars Story – are duty-bound to fit in with the continuity of these earlier works, even if that entails accounting for a cameo from the galaxy’s favorite smuggler in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.
This was almost the case in the third (and, shall we say, least hated) of the original Star Wars prequels, which was initially set to include a brief appearance from a 10-year-old Han Solo. The young Solo was to be living on the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk where he would assist the Wookiee army by finding part of a transmitter droid, allowing the furry forces to trace the signal back to base.
But the potentially world-altering detail of this brief cameo is that Han is being raised on Kashyyk by none other than that most famous of Wookiees, Chewbacca. Had this section remained in the finished film, we’d be looking at a completely different origin story for the duo’s relationship from the one we see in Solo, in which the title character only meets his friend and co-pilot Chewie as an adult.
Seeing how people didn’t take too kindly to the prequels’ attempts to shoehorn in other appearance from beloved Star Wars characters in their early years, it’s probably for the best that Solo’s Revenge of the Sith scenes were left out. Just as we didn’t need to know that C-3PO was built by a pre-teen Anakin Skywalker, perhaps Han’s involvement in the Clone Wars and Chewbacca’s role as surrogate father would have raised too many questions.
With Han’s omission from Episode III, our current Solo: A Star Wars Story is less beholden to the continuity of the prequel trilogy than it might’ve been. And it’s doubtful that there are too many people in the Star Wars fandom who are upset about that.
