The 'Game Of Thrones' Dudes Nearly Did A Jedi Origin Story
In past articles in which I tried to read the tea leaves to decipher what David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (ruiners of endings, abandoners of good things) had in store for their now-dead Star Wars trilogy, I theorized that it would take place in the Old Republic, the setting made famous by the early 2000s RPG series. I was wrong, mostly. Their idea took place even longer ago in that galaxy farther away, going all the way back to the origins of the Jedi.
Earlier this year, the head of all things Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy, was asked by Entertainment Weekly if the series might tell stories in different time periods. She said they were "looking at whether we can move massively in one direction or the other," and good lord did she mean it. For the sake of comparison, let's say the nine core Star Wars movies took place between the 1970s and 2020. Telling a Jedi origin story would take the story as far back as our Stone Age -- but with interstellar travel instead of rudimentary cave drawings of buffalo.
We would've had a completely different visual style, unlike anything we've seen in a non-Legends Star Wars story so far. And that's one of the reasons the trilogy died, according to Variety. Disney wanted to stick with things audiences would be familiar with, rather than change their entire frame of reference of what Star Wars is and can be.
The new official Star Wars canon hasn't gone into too much detail about what things were like back when Jedi were rubbing two laser swords together to make fire. But we do have our own ancient texts to consult, in the form of the Legends, which consist of all the convoluted pre-Disney backstory established in hundreds of novels, comic books, video games, and more. The Legends version of the Jedi's formation began with a philosophical study group on the planet Tython. In other words, all of those cool space knights who battle evil by harnessing the powers of meditation and being totally chill came from the same premise as Community. Some of them probably saw the group advertised on a flyer on campus (and a few only showed up to the meetings for the free pizza and donuts).
Anyway, there's a good chance Benioff and Weiss wouldn't have used any of that rich backstory in their trilogy. But think about it; thousands of years later, that lowly little group would be responsible for the overthrow of an evil empire.
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