The Craziest Stories And Moments From The 'Star Wars' Legends Continuity

In the Legends timeline, Chewbacca perishes. In the 1999 novel The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime, set 25 years after A New Hope, an ultra-powerful extradimensional species called the Yuuzhan Vong have invaded the galaxy, and the New Republic and Imperial remnant have to join forces to stop them. When the Yuuzhan Vong set their sights on a planet called Sernpidal, Han, Chewbacca, and Han's son Anakin Solo travel there to rescue as many people as they can. But the Yuuzhan Vong have put Sernpidal's moon on a collision course with the planet, and Chewbacca is unable to escape in time. Chewie's demise then causes a rift in the Solo family, and it takes several months for Han and Anakin to reconcile. 

According to Lucasfilm Story Group member Leland Chee, this single moment is one of the main reasons why Disney decided to ditch the Legends timeline as they wanted to revive Chewie for the sequel trilogy. “For me it came down to simply that we had killed Chewbacca in the Legends—a big moon had fallen on him," Chee said. 

Chee also explained why Chewie had been axed in the first place: "Part of that [original decision] was Chewbacca because he can’t speak and just speaks in growls, he was a challenging character to write for in novels. Publishing had decided they needed to [terminate] somebody, and it was Chewbacca.”

Yes, there was an Indiana Jones/Han Solo mashup. That sounds impossible, since Star Wars takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." But according to the 19th volume of the Star Wars Tales comics, it actually is possible for Star Wars characters to visit our world. 

In the story "Into the Great Unknown," the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive malfunctions and sends Han and Chewie to a previously unknown planet: Earth. Upon landing in the Pacific Northwest, (which Han compares to Endor), a group of natives strike, and Han is slain with an arrow to the chest. Chewie flees and survives in the forests for decades. 

Then, 126 years later, Indiana Jones and his sidekick, Short Round, travel to the area to search for the legendary Sasquatch - who's actually Chewie. Chewie observes from a distance as Indy and Short Round locate the Millennium Falcon and discover Han's skeleton. Something about the skeleton strikes Indy as familiar, and he decides to abandon the Sasquatch hunt. 

How was it even possible for the book to take out Han entirely, on Earth no less? Most of the stories in Star Wars Tales weren't considered canon, even before Disney abandoned the EU timeline. 

In The Force Awakens, when Maz Kanata gives Rey Luke's old blue lightsaber, (which used to belong to Anakin) she refuses to explain how she came about it. Fans speculated that Kanata had somehow recovered the saber and Luke's severed hand from Bespin. But in the Legends timeline, Luke's severed hand plays an important role in a different story altogether. 

After cutting off Luke's hand, Darth Vader recovers it and the lightsaber and takes it to a storehouse on the planet Wayland. Years later, during Timothy Zahn's The Last Command, Grand Admiral Thrawn has recruited the dark Jedi Joruus C'baoth, himself a clone, to help him reconquer the galaxy. To do this, C'baoth has retrieved the hand and used it to clone Luke Skywalker. Confusingly, the clone's name is "Luuke," and he's nearly as proficient in the Force and lightsaber combat as Luke is. 

C'baoth lures Luke, Mara Jade, and Princess Leia to Wayland and attempts to convert them to the dark side; and when they refuse, he unleashes Luuke. Luuke nearly overpowers all three of them, but Jade manages to retrieve Leia's lightsaber and finish the clone off. 

The Courtship of Princess Leia is one of the most unusual books in the Legends timeline. Eight years after A New Hope, Han Solo and Leia Organa are all ready to get married. But on the day of their wedding, a brand-new character called Prince Isolder shows up. He's the super rich heir to the powerful Hapes Consortium, and he asks for Leia's hand in marriage. The offer would make the New Republic vastly more powerful. And despite her and Han's entire story arc up to this point, Leia actually considers it. 

When Han hears this, he gets drunk, joins a high-stakes sabacc, and wins an entire planet called Dathomir. Now with a planet of his own to offer the Princess, Han decides to shoot her with a stun bolt, drag her onto the Millenium Falcon, and fly to Dathomir to get married, all without Leia's knowledge or consent. Despite all that, Leia and Han do end up getting consensually married. 

The idea that Emperor Palpatine fathered a son came as a shock to many viewers of The Rise of Skywalker - but Legends timeline readers have seen it before. The six books in the Jedi Prince series are set immediately after Return of the Jedi, and they detail the power vacuum that resulted after Emperor Palpatine's downfall. As various Imperial warlords jockeyed for control, a three-eyed man named Trioculus stepped forward claiming to be Palpatine's son and the rightful heir to the throne. Although Trioculus attracts a following and even seems to have the ability to generate Force lightning, he's actually an impostor. 

There really is a three-eyed son of Palpatine, though, just not Trioculus. Palpatine's real son is named Triclops, and his third eye is in the back of his head, not his forehead. Triclops was a relatively gentle person and a disappointment to Palpatine, and so he was kept in a prison for years, allowing Trioculus to usurp his claim. After Trioculus threatens the New Republic, Luke Skywalker rescues Triclops from his prison and they take Trioculus down.

Twelve years after Return of the Jedi introduced Jabba the Hutt to the world, the 1995 novel Darksaber expanded on the Hutt species and their society. According to the book, 25,000 years before A New Hope, the Hutts were a powerful race led by a legendary warlord named Kossak Inijic Ar'durv. Now, however, the Hutts mostly operate as underworld bosses on the fringes of the galaxy. Twelve years after A New Hope, one of these Hutts, a crime lord named Durga, attempts to restore the Hutts' prior glory by building a superweapon called the Darksaber. (Note: not the same Darksaber that appears at the end of the first season of The Mandalorian. The name was just reused.) 

After taking the original Death Star plans from Coruscant, Durga has the Darksaber constructed at a secret base in the asteroid field near Hoth. Instead of rebuilding the entire moon-sized space station, Durga keeps things simple and just reconstructs the Death Star's laser cannon. Theoretically, this makes the Darksaber more maneuverable, more efficient, and deadlier than the Death Star, but unfortunately, its outdated computer cores render it nearly useless. Star Wars story master Pablo Hidalgo said that the Darksaber's only practical use would have been "Flash-fry[ing] entire planets' worth of meals" for the Hutts.