The sacred texts

A new era of Star Wars is on the way.

Now that the sequel trilogy has mercifully wrapped up, Lucasfilm is moving forward with a new project to direct their attention, and advertising dollars, towards. "Star Wars: The High Republic" isn't any one thing, but a series of interconnected stories set roughly 200 years before "The Phantom Menace" to be told in a series of novels and comics.

Not movies.

No theatrical releases. No live action Disney+ show. Not even an animated series. For the immediate future, the next stage in Star Wars is restricted to print media.

I'm okay with this.

In fact, this is, as far as I'm concerned, business as usual.

I've always found the perception that the Star Wars extended universe "doesn't matter" to be strange. Especially considering that for, most of the franchise's history, the extended universe was the only thing that actually did matter.

For sixteen years between "Return of the Jedi" and "The Phantom Menace" Star Wars did not exist in movie theaters. With the exception of a couple of children's cartoons between '85-'86 it didn't even exist on television. If you wanted more adventures in a galaxy far, far away you had to read the novels and comics or play the video games.

For most of the 80s and 90s, Star Wars wasn't a movie franchise. It was, for all intents and purposes, a book franchise based on movies. In a time when even the idea of getting a prequel trilogy seemed like a wild fantasy, exploring the lore of the Star Wars universe was almost exclusively the domain of printed work.

In 1991, long before Disney came around, Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy established what happened to our favorite rebel heroes after the credits rolled on Episode VI. A new generation of Jedi lived, died, turned to the dark side, and back again within the pages of paperbacks because that was the only place the stories were being told until the prequel trilogy brought the franchise back to the big screen.

Even then, this extended universe didn't stop when the prequel trilogy came out. If anything, it kept expanding.

Say what you will about Lucas' ability to write dialogue or direct romance scenes, the man is a top-notch world builder. The prequel movies are not the best Star Wars movies ever crafted, but they did inspire some of the best Star Wars stories ever written.

Dark Horse comics thrived during this time, thoroughly exploring the events before, after, and during the Clone Wars that were only ever alluded to on the big screen. One of my favorite characters in the franchise, Quinlan Vos, was derived from a random guy in the background of "The Phantom Menace." Imagine noticing a particularly interesting looking extra in a background shot of Tatooine and writing dozens of issues of comic book stories about them.

And again, like after the original trilogy, for years nobody ever dreamed we'd ever get another set of movies. So for another decade between 2005 and 2015 Star Wars was still primarily a franchise that existed outside of theaters. In this case, either on television in the form of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" or the continuing line of Dark Horse comic books and Del Ray novels.

Then of course there's The Old Republic. Set thousands of years before the era of Skywalker, what started as a simple video game spin-off has branched out into a significant corner of Star Wars continuity taking place across two games, a comic book series, and a still running MMORPG. In fact, with fan-favorite Darth Revan getting a mention in "The Rise of Skywalker," it's possible that Disney considers the entire Old Republic area of the timeline to be just as relevant to the canon as it was before the buyout. (Which is to say, not really relevant at all, but still occasionally acknowledged.)

The High Republic shares many parallels with The Old Republic. Both are set long before the events of any of the movies and are, so far, exclusively restrained to secondary media. Rumors are abound that Disney may be eyeing The Old Republic as their next live action project. That would be cool, but I'm fine either way.

I spent the first 15 years of my life enjoying Star Wars thinking that we'd never get any more movies and spent the next decade after the prequel trilogy also thinking that we'd never get any more Star Wars movies. If any form of media has proven to be expendable to the Star Wars franchise, it is the movies.

Right now it appears that Lucasfilm is giving the big screen a break. For the first time since the Disney buyout, there are no announced films in production. This lull will undoubtedly not last, but even if we go another five or ten years between films there will still be plenty of Star Wars to enjoy.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and doesn't really care what medium he gets his stories about space wizards wielding laser swords.