Star Wars fans have paid for a billboard ad pleading for a continuation of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
Summarizing such a situation is likely tempting fate, but the quick and dirty version is that the Expanded Universe refers to most of the licensed content created before 2014 other than the first six movies and the Clone Wars movie and animated series. This other content includes everything from books to video games and theoretically the horrific events of November 17, 1978.
Keeping track of what is and isn’t canon in the Star Wars universe is such a complex and controversial issue that Lucasfilm and Disney set up a committee to make official rulings. On April 25 last year it ruled that the Expanded Universe was no longer canon and that the content would be retrobranded as “Star Wars Legends.” That policy appears to be designed to deal with possible contradictions between the new movies and events in the Expanded Universe set after Return Of The Jedi.
A group called GiveUsLegends has now raised the $4,784 needed to hire the billboard space for the poster shown above, which is now up in San Francisco around six blocks from Lucasfilms’ headquarters. They say that although they welcome the new Disney movies and storylines, they don’t want to see an end to a storyline that has effectively been unveiled over almost forty years:
The success of this project was dependent on one guiding principle which those of us at the heart of the effort believe to be true. That guiding principle is that there is still a large demand for the Star Wars Legends timeline to be continued as an alternate universe to Disney’s new timeline… We are confident that if there was any company on the face of this planet that has the capacity and the ability to make two Star Wars timelines at the same time, it is Disney through Lucasfilm. They already have the playing field set, having re-branded the stories we love as Legends to make the clear distinction between the two timelines.