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Welcome to the first annual Verge Hack Week. We're totally blowing up our site: we've given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas, while members of our amazing product team have gathered in New York to help build all sorts of interesting new things. Learn more.


I'm not sure why George Lucas hates his own creations. It feels like the director has tried his best to erase goodwill, to go back and manually delete fond memories, to rifle through history and systematically undo all the good things his movies have added to cultural consciousness. Lucas added aliens to Indiana Jones. He shoehorned CGI monsters into every Star Wars scene, he made Greedo shoot first, and he invented Jar Jar Binks. But it's only recently, shortly after the sale of the company he founded to Disney, that Lucas completed his most nefarious work. For George Lucas would stop at nothing short of blowing up the universe.

Specifically the Star Wars expanded universe, the collection of books, comics, video games, and stories that blossomed into the narrative space left by the original Star Wars movie trilogy. In April, Lucasfilm announced that the post-Return of the Jedi expanded universe — a history built over 35 real-world years out of millions of words and thousands of characters — would be destroyed. Not with a bang, like Alderaan or the Death Stars, but with a whimper. The events that the books and games and comics said took place after Star Wars: Episode VI were rebadged as Star Wars Legends: an alternate reality to the new canon to be written in upcoming movies and CGI TV shows.