The Sad Fate of the Star Wars Characters Disney Will Never Let Die
Remember when Chewbacca died?
In the 1999 book The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime by R. A. Salvatore, Han Solo’s faithful Wookiee partner, Rebel Alliance fixture, and big walking carpet Chewie bought the moisture farm. Not surprisingly, he died a hero, saving thousands of lives.
It was a pretty big deal, even for those Star Wars fans (like me) who didn’t read the Expanded Universe books and comics at the time. Vector Prime got a big promotional push, including a commercial featuring Mark Hamill doing voiceover as Luke Skywalker, and the book even made it to the New York Times Best Sellers list for four weeks.
But that was then and this is now, where the EU is known as Star Wars Legends and “doesn’t count” anymore, and a character like Chewie seems unlikely to ever die in the modern Star Wars canon. No, a popular figure such as Chewbacca, who can be endlessly recast on the cheap – and who can continue to juice merchandising sales for untold generations to come – is probably doomed to live forever like some kind of outer space Renfield, beholden to do his master’s pop-culture bloodsucking forever.
A popular figure like Chewbacca, who can be endlessly recast – and who can continue to juice merchandising sales – is probably doomed to live forever.
It’s not just our favorite Wookiee who is consigned to this dire fate, of course. C-3PO and R2-D2 are, and will continue to be, similarly afflicted, but even characters that have died in the canon like Yoda and Jabba will continue to rise from the grave time and again to satisfy the Sarlacc-like Easter egg maw of the latest show or game (most recently for Yoda on The Acolyte and for Jabba in Star Wars Outlaws). And those are just the most obvious examples. Everyone from Nien Nunb to Baby Yoda to the guy who got his arm cut off in the cantina in A New Hope is up for grabs. (Ponda Baba. His name is Ponda Baba.)
I’m thinking about this today not just because of the news that Disney is embroiled in a lawsuit over the use of the late Peter Cushing’s likeness as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One, but also because of the passing of James Earl Jones on Monday. Jones of course was the voice of Darth Vader, one of the most iconic characters not just in Star Wars but in all of cinema. The fact that the actor had signed off on AI recreations of his Vader voice reminds us that while he may be gone now, the Sith Lord can and almost certainly will continue to pop up in future Star Wars films and TV shows.
But Vader, or Anakin Skywalker if you will, actually died all the way back in 1983’s Return of the Jedi. And while, sure, prequels like Rogue One, flashbacks like in the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, and Force dream sequences (or whatever that was) in Ahsoka can bring a character back, we have to ask whether or not they should be bringing a classic figure like Vader back time and again.
Take the prequel trilogy, where Anakin’s origin story was told and he was portrayed first by Jake Lloyd and then Hayden Christensen. I would argue that whether or not you think those movies ultimately work as original stories, they at least were trying to do something new with Anakin, uncovering the events that led to his downfall over the span of three whole movies. Can the same be said for Rogue One or Obi-Wan Kenobi, where Vader was more of a “how cool is it that we brought him back” play than anything else?
Of course, the threat of living forever in an ever-diminishing series of Star Wars vehicles has now extended beyond the masked and non-human characters. The debate over the use of Cushing in Rogue One some 22 years after he died isn’t a new one; ditto Mark Hamill’s cut-scene-like returns as a younger Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Even our three main heroes from the original trilogy — Luke, Leia, and Han — are all dead now in the canon, but they’ve each come back in some form or another too. Plus, in the case of the late Carrie Fisher, digital trickery was also employed to (unconvincingly) insert old footage of her into The Rise of Skywalker.
Indeed, the notion of the dead returning to the land of the living goes back to the very first Star Wars movie when Obi-Wan’s ghost whispered, “Run, Luke, run!” But that was an unexpected and cool extension of Luke’s story, not a gimmick used to sell more tickets or Alec Guinness plushies.
Andor, which is the best of the live-action Star Wars shows, also features the return of a dead character via prequel story, but the compelling tale of how an ordinary man becomes a rebel during the age of the Empire works because of the show’s excellent writing and performances, not to mention the avoidance of cute cameos for the sake of them. Alas, that is the exception rather than the rule in the Star Wars universe now.
So pour one out not just for the EU version of Chewie, who died saving thousands rather than continuing on forever as a shambling echo of his former greatness, but also for Threepio, R2, Vader, Yoda, and all the rest who will never be allowed to truly move on. They will persist so that the Star Wars franchise can continue to, sort of, live.
Talk to Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
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