After Return of the Jedi
The Ongoing Legacy of the First Star Wars Sequel Trilogy (the One by Timothy Zahn)
I saw Return of the Jedi in Boston on May 25, 1983, the day it came out. Once the exhilaration of its dramatic conclusion had worn off, I was bereft: there was no more Star Wars to look forward to.
Sure, George Lucas had claimed some years earlier that he had other Star Wars films in mind. In an interview conducted with Alan Arnold on October 29, 1979 and included in Arnold’s book Once Upon a Galaxy: The Making of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Lucas said:
There are essentially nine films in a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy is about the young Ben Kenobi and the early life of Luke’s father when Luke was a little boy. This trilogy takes place some twenty years before the second trilogy which includes Star Wars and Empire. About a year or two passes between each story of the trilogy and about twenty years pass between the trilogies. The entire saga spans about fifty-five years. (247)
Lucas claimed that he had “story treatments on all nine,” as well as “voluminous notes, histories, and other material … Some of it will be used, some not.”
Once Star Wars was a hit, Lucas began to reveal the scope of what he had in mind. He told Arnold:
Originally, when I wrote Star Wars, it developed into an epic on the scale of War and Peace, so big I couldn’t possibly make it into a movie. So I cut it in half, but it was still too big, so I cut each half into three parts. I then had material for six movies. After the success of Star Wars I added another trilogy but stopped there, primarily because reality took over. After all, it takes three years to prepare and make a Star Wars picture. How many years are left? So I’m still left with three trilogies of nine films. At two hours each, that’s about eighteen hours of film!
These comments were made well before filming began on Return of the Jedi, when it still had the title “Revenge of the Jedi” (248).
During the summer after Return of the Jedi was released, Rolling Stone magazine published a piece called “George Lucas Wants to Play Guitar as ‘Star Wars’ Takes a Vacation,” in which he spoke a little more about his ideas for future films:
Empire and Jedi were what that first film was supposed to be. And after that, I can tell another story about what happens to Luke after this trilogy ends. All the prequel stories exist: where Darth Vader came from, the whole story about Darth and Ben Kenobi, and it all takes place before Luke was born. The other one — what happens to Luke afterward — is much more ethereal. I have a tiny notebook full of notes on that. If I’m really ambitious, I could proceed to figure out what would have happened to Luke.
In the interview, however, Lucas talked about how demanding it was to make Return of the Jedi, both in terms of money and effort. Money would factor into whether further Star Wars films could be made:
The way things are going, I couldn’t afford to make another one like Jedi. I wouldn’t take the risk. Inflation in films is astronomical. There’s gotta be a cheaper way. I think if we started the next series, we would probably try to do all three of them at once.
Even more discouraging for the Star Wars fan who wanted more stories set in that galaxy far, far away was Lucas’s determination to take some time off:
I have to decide one way or the other about doing another trilogy. It depends on how well this one does, what the economics of the situation are and what my personal life is. Can I rearrange my life in such a way that my priorities are correct? My family should be first and the movies second. If I can’t make that work, then there won’t be any movies. I’ve put up with Star Wars taking over and pushing itself into the first position for too long. I’ve been trying to shove it back. Every time I kick it down, it comes rearing its ugly head back up again. This time I’ve kicked it down for good, I think.
In short, by the summer of 1983, it was pretty clear that we wouldn’t be getting a new Star Wars film any time soon.
In those days, before DVDs, let alone on-demand streaming, it was a challenge even to rewatch the Star Wars films if you were a fan.
The first Star Wars film was not released on VHS tape until 1982, and even then, at $79.99 it was priced for purchase by video stores rather than home viewers.
In The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Phil Szostak, director Rian Johnson remembers what it was like to be a Star Wars fan in the 1980s:
I remember when we got the VHS for Star Wars from the video store. We had our friends over, and we would watch it for twelve hours straight, over and over, until we had to give it back. There’d be like a three-month waiting list to get it. … I had the records. I had the storybooks. I had the holiday album. I had anything I could get that had to do with Star Wars. But one thing we didn’t have was the movie. Largely, it was talking with your friends about the movie, pooling information and memories of it. And so it was a very strange and mythological experience of Star Wars. It mythologized the films in a very powerful way because, like God’s absence, the actual object of your worship was not there. So you and your friends end up studying the sacred texts and philosophizing about it.
Johnson muses that for fans like him “Star Wars feels like such a powerful myth of our childhoods,” at least in part “because we couldn’t see the actual movies.”
And then, suddenly, there were new Star Wars stories. Official Star Wars stories sanctioned by Lucasfilm.
They just weren’t movies. They were novels.
In 1991, Timothy Zahn published Heir to the Empire, which is set approximately five years after the events of Return of the Jedi. I bought it right away and remember reading the copy on the jacket flap of the hardcover with great anticipation:
It’s five years after Return of the Jedi: the Rebel Alliance has destroyed the Death Star, defeated Darth Vader and the Emperor, and driven out the remnants of the old Imperial Starfleet to a distant corner of the galaxy. Princess Leia and Han Solo are married and expecting Jedi Twins. And Luke Skywalker has become the first in a long-awaited line of Jedi Knights. But thousands of light-years away, the last of the emperor’s warlords has taken command of the shattered Imperial Fleet, readied it for war, and pointed it at the fragile heart of the new Republic. For this dark warrior has made two vital discoveries that could destroy everything the courageous men and women of the Rebel Alliance fought so hard to build. The explosive confrontation that results is a towering epic of action, invention, mystery, and spectacle on a galactic scale — in short, a story worthy of the name Star Wars.
I wasn’t alone in my excitement. The novel debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for fiction, beating out John Grisham’s novel The Firm.
The Imperial warlord described in the blurb would prove to be the blue-skinned Chiss Grand Admiral Thrawn, and he would become an enduring part of Star Wars storytelling in the decades to come. Together, Heir to the Empire and the two novels that followed it—Dark Force Rising (1992) and The Last Command (1993)—would become known as The Thrawn Trilogy.
What was marvelous about the Thrawn Trilogy was Zahn’s ability to translate the Star Wars experience to the pages of a novel. He took great care to make the characters’ dialogue sound like the dialogue we remembered from the films. Early in Heir to the Empire, for example, Han is confronted by an old acquaintance who ridicules him for having “gone respectable”:
Dravis cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, well, then let’s be specific,” he said sardonically. “I hear you joined the Rebel Alliance, got made a general, married a former Alderaanian princess, and got yourself a set of twins on the way.”
Han waved a self-deprecating hand. “Actually, I resigned the general part a few months back.”
Zahn also take care to pay homage to the films’ visual style. In an annotation included in the twentieth-anniversary edition of the novel, Zahn notes that “each of the three classic Star Wars movies includes a Star Destroyer in its opening scene. All of my Rebellion-era books do the same.”
The structure of Zahn’s trilogy echoes the structure of the original trilogy: there is an upbeat ending for our our Rebel heroes at the end of Heir to the Empire, which proves to be provisional; Dark Force Rising depicts the Imperial striking back; and The Last Command brings the trilogy to a satisfying close.
One of the joys of the trilogy, however, is its creation of new pairings of favorite characters. Leia and Chewbacca had teamed up briefly (and most by implication) at the start of Return of the Jedi, but in Heir to the Empire, the duo have a full-fledged adventure together on the Wookiee home planet, Kashyyk. Meanwhile, Han and Lando work together to prevent Thrawn from stealing ships from the planet of Sluis Van.
In addition, Zahn picks up on one of the famous but enigmatic historical references in the first film—“General Kenobi, years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars”—and makes cloning a central part of his trilogy, while creating memorable characters like the Force-sensitive assassin Mara Jade, the Jedi Jorus C’baoth, and the smuggler Talon Karrde.
I won’t say more about the plot of the trilogy, because although it is no longer canonical—downgraded to “Legends” status by Lucasfilm after the company’s acquisition by Disney—it’s still tremendous fun to read if you’re a Star Wars fan.
The Thrawn Trilogy initiated what became known as the Star Wars “Expanded Universe” (EU), and by the time Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2014, the EU had grown to what Disney CEO Bob Iger described as “17,000 characters, inhabiting several thousand planets, and spanning 20,000 years.” Iger suggested that the EU would give “Disney infinite inspiration and opportunities to continue the epic Star Wars saga.” The announcement on the official Star Wars website about the change in the canonical status of the EU reassured fans that “creators of new Star Wars entertainment have full access to the rich content of the Expanded Universe. For example, elements of the EU are included in Star Wars Rebels.” In fact, Rebels would later make prominent use of Thrawn, and Zahn would write not one but two Thrawn trilogies as part of the rebooted canon.
Thrawn will make his live-action debut later this summer in Dave Filoni’s Ahsoka series, played by Lars Mikkelson, who voiced the character in Rebels. Moreover, Thrawn will likely be the primary antagonist in the recently announced live-action film that Filoni will direct and that promises to tie together the storylines in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Disney+ series.
Thrawn’s re-canonization tells us something about how Star Wars storytelling has evolved since Lucas first conceived his galaxy far, far away in the mid-1970s.
Lucas famously drew on the archetypes and stories that Joseph Campbell explored in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). For next-generation Star Wars storytellers like Filoni, “Legends” is an appropriate way to think about the status of the stories told in the EU: they serve as a source of archetypal characters and stories in much the same way that Campbell’s “monomyth” served as a source for Lucas.
In fact, it’s rumored that Filoni’s film will be called “Heir to the Empire,” a phrase that Ahsoka uses to describe Thrawn in the trailer for the upcoming series. If so, it won’t be an adaptation of Zahn’s 1991 novel, but rather a new story that is a part of its ongoing legacy.
Cyrus R. K. Patell is Professor of English at New York University. His most recent book is Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Bloomsbury). www.patell.net.
