Other Star Wars Products

The Star Wars Expanded Universe (also known as the EU) encompasses all of the officially licensed, fictional background of the Star Wars universe, outside of the six feature films produced by George Lucas. more...

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It includes books, comic books, video games, spin-off films, television series, toys, and other media. This material expands and continues the stories told in the films.

History

Development

The early development of the Expanded Universe was sporadic and unrefined, particularly because there was so little official material for the creators to build on. For example, the "Expanded Universe" is generally considered to have begun with Alan Dean Foster's February 1978 Star Wars spin-off novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye (although technically it began with Marvel Comics' "Star Wars #7" in January 1978). This novel drew inspiration primarily from an early draft of the Star Wars script. Furthermore, while George Lucas was given sole writing credit for the original Star Wars novelization, Alan Dean Foster contributed heavily to it. He was given a copy of the working script and a tour of the production. Most of the actual description was from the mind of Foster.

Much of the early EU material from the early '80s contained analogies to the real world, rather than embracing the holistic fiction of the Star Wars films. Much of this material now seems rather detached from the rest of the EU.

A turning point was reached when West End Games began publishing the Star Wars Roleplaying Game in 1987. In order for players of the roleplaying game to create new adventures, West End Games needed to provide supplemental material describing the Star Wars universe in previously unknown detail. For example, the Aurebesh alphabet was originally a random piece of set dressing in Return of the Jedi. Stephen Crane copied those symbols and turned them into a complete and coherent alphabet (which would later be used in the feature films). Developing details like this in a consistent fashion turned West End Games' Star Wars products into a de facto reference library for other EU developers.

Shortly thereafter, in the early '90s, Bantam published Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy. Widely publicized as the "sequels which were never made", Zahn's novels reignited Star Wars fandom and sparked a revolution in Star Wars literature.

Around this same time, Dark Horse Comics acquired the Star Wars license and used it to launch a number of ambitious sequels to the original trilogy, including the very popular Dark Empire stories.

All this development began to feedback on itself: West End Games was producing roleplaying supplements detailing the material from Dark Horse's comics and Zahn's novels. Novelists and comic creators were using West End Games' supplements as reference material. Sequels to the novels were being published as comics and vice versa. And the scope of the Expanded Universe grew at a prodigious rate.

Read more at Wikipedia.org