Peter Cushing, Vader and more: The sad fate of the Star Wars characters that Disney will never let die

Remember when Chewbacca died?

In the 1999 book The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime by RA Salvatore, Han Solo's loyal Wookiee partner, Rebel Alliance stalwart, and great walking carpet Chewie bought the moisture farm. Unsurprisingly, he died a hero, saving thousands of lives.

This was a pretty big deal, even for Star Wars fans (like me) who hadn't read the Expanded Universe books and comics at the time. Vector Prime received a major advertising campaign, including a commercial featuring Mark Hamill voicing Luke Skywalker, and the book even spent four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

But that was then, and now the EU is known as Star Wars Legends and “doesn't count anymore,” and a character like Chewie will probably never die in the modern Star Wars canon. No, a beloved character like Chewbacca, who can be endlessly and cheaply recast – and who can continue to drive merchandising sales for countless generations – is probably doomed to live like some kind of Renfield in space, forever taking over his master's pop-cultural bloodsucking.

Of course, it's not just our favorite Wookiee who is doomed to this terrible fate. C-3PO and R2-D2 are and will continue to be similarly affected, but even characters who died in canon, like Yoda and Jabba, will rise from the grave time and time again to satisfy the Sarlacc-esque Easter egg maw of the latest show or game (most recently for Yoda in The Acolyte and for Jabba in Star Wars Outlaws). And those are just the most obvious examples. Everyone from Nien Nunb to Baby Yoda to the guy who got his arm cut off in the cantina in A New Hope is up for grabs. (Ponda Baba. His name is Ponda Baba.)

I am thinking about this today, not only because of the news that Disney is investing in a Lawsuit over use of image of late Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One, but also because of the death of James Earl Jones on Monday. Jones was of course the voice of Darth Vaderone of the most iconic characters not only in Star Wars, but in all of cinema. The fact that the actor AI replicas approved his Vader voice reminds us that although the Sith Lord is no longer around, he can and almost certainly will continue to appear in future Star Wars films and television series.

But Vader, or Anakin Skywalker if you will, actually died back in 1983 in Return of the Jedi. And while prequels like Rogue One, flashbacks like in the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, and Force dream sequences (or whatever that was) in Ahsoka can bring a character back, we have to wonder if they should bring back a classic character like Vader again and again.

Take, for example, the prequel trilogy, which told Anakin's origin story and had him portrayed first by Jake Lloyd and then by Hayden Christensen. I would argue that whether or not you believe these films ultimately work as original stories, they at least attempted to do something new with Anakin by revealing the events that led to his downfall over the course of three entire films. Can the same be said about Rogue One or Obi-Wan Kenobi, where Vader was more of a “how cool is it that we brought him back” game than anything else?

Of course, the danger of living on forever in an ever-shrinking series of Star Wars films now extends beyond the masked and non-human characters. The debate over the use of Cushing in Rogue One, 22 years after his death, is nothing new; nor is Mark Hamill's sequence-like return as a younger Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. Even our three main heroes from the original trilogy – Luke, Leia and Han – are all now dead in canon, but they have also all returned in one form or another. And in the case of the late Carrie Fisher, digital trickery was used to (unconvincingly) insert old footage of her into The Rise of Skywalker.

In fact, the idea of ​​the dead returning to the land of the living dates back to the very first Star Wars film, when Obi-Wan's ghost whispered, “Run, Luke, run!” But this was an unexpected and cool continuation of Luke's story, not a ploy to sell more tickets or Alec Guinness plush toys.

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