Expanded Universe

An obsession over Star Wars was quickly formed after the first movie in 1977, and every movie after the cult of fanboys grew larger and larger. Out of all of the movies that have had fictional non official novels or movies or such made about them, the Star Wars extended universe has 1,000,000X as much from fan made movies on youtube (myself included), to countless books, to the animated TV series, the amount and extent of the extra material made about this fictional galaxy is mind blowing. For goodness sakes, there is even an online wikipedia/encyclopedia called Wookieepedia (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page) and thats what makes Star Wars so great. The passion that people have for this franchise is incredible.

First the Books, because I can't talk about every book and I am bound to miss one, click here for a full list of nearly every Star Wars novel. The king of all Star Wars literature is the Thrawn trilogy, which includes the three books Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Commando. These stories let the imagination of a writer, put pen to paper and explain what he thinks happened five years after Luke and Co. blow up DS2 in Episode VI. That is the beauty of the Star Wars literature. Any avenue that you think the movies left unexplained has been thought of and written about with 100 different endings to each one so that if you don't like Han Solo dying immediately after ROTJ you can find a different expanded universe book where he lives. This creative freedom has lead to story telling of the post Death Star period(post Ep. 6), the Old Republic(pre Ep.1), and the Clone Wars(between Ep.2-3). Consequently this has lead to more video games and I believe the reception the fans took to extending the movies was the inspiration for George Lucas to even make the Prequel Trilogy. Another famous book, arguable just as good as the Thrawn Trilogy is the I, Jedi novel. This story is told in the first person and tells of a young X-Wing pilot who joins Luke's Jedi Academy post Episode VI.

The other man component of the Expanded Universe other than literature is the TV series "The Clone Wars." This extremely successful franchise has become increasingly popular with younger kids and has allowed the Star Wars fandom to extend to children who grew up in the late 2000's watching cartoon network. This show began in 2008 and told of the battles of Anakin and Obi-Wan and many other Jedi during the Civil War known as The Clone Wars (Between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith movies). The show is still in production is now entering its 5th season. A movie was made under Lucasfilms derived from this series also titled "The Clone Wars" which got very mixed reviews in the theater. Many critics did not take the film seriously because it is animated, but many did enjoy the film. This series is continuously introducing new characters to the Star Wars universe, and as long as this show is going there will always be more and more to talk about involving Star Wars.