The Complete Canon Star Wars Timeline – Part Two

This Star Wars Timeline includes Rebels, the original trilogy and every other canon story leading to the The Force Awakens

Updated November 30, 2015: With less than three weeks to go before The Force Awakens hits the big screen, we’ve gone back and updated our Star Wars timelines with all the latest official additions to the Star Wars canon. In the gallery viewer below, you can check out the second half, which contains Rebels, the original trilogy and everything else leading up to The Force Awakens. Click here to go back to the first timeline, which features the prequels and The Clone Wars.

Part Two of the Star Wars timeline begins, appropriately enough, with the novel New Dawn, introducing the characters that will come together aboard the Ghost in Star Wars Rebels. The Star Wars timeline then continues through the original trilogy and all the various comic books, novels and video games that represent the new Star Wars canon. Check it out in the gallery viewer below and, if you missed it last week, take a look at the first part of the Canon Star Wars Timeline

When Disney bought Lucasfilm three years ago, some big changes were made to the Star Wars timeline. The canon — meaning the Star Wars stories considered “official” by Lucasfilm — were largely wiped out after a 2014 announcement. Prior to that, the company had used a soft approach to the Star Wars timeline canon. They basically argued that, while only the original films were completely official, any Star Wars story at all could be considered official until it wasn’t.

“The analogy is that every piece of published Star Wars fiction is a window into the ‘real’ Star Wars universe,” LucasBooks’ Christopher Cerasi said in 2001. “Some windows are a bit foggier than others. Some are decidedly abstract. But each contains a nugget of truth to them. Like the great Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi said, ‘many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.'”

With plans for what would soon be known as The Force Awakens to continue the Star Wars canon on the big screen, a lot of fans were left wondering what would happen to the many post-Return of the Jedi stories, such as Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy. In 2014, Lucasfilm offered an update on the status of the Star Wars canon:

While Lucasfilm always strived to keep the stories created for the [expanded universe] consistent with our film and television content as well as internally consistent, Lucas always made it clear that he was not beholden to the EU, He set the films he created as the canon. This includes the six Star Wars episodes, and the many hours of content he developed and produced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. These stories are the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.

Now, with an exciting future filled with new cinematic installments of Star Wars, all aspects of Star Wars storytelling moving forward will be connected. Under Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy’s direction, the company for the first time ever has formed a story group to oversee and coordinate all Star Wars creative development.

We’ve updated the first part of the Star Wars timeline with the recently-announced Marvel Comics miniseries, Obi-Wan and Anakin (the first canon story set between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clone). We’ll try to keep both halves of the Star Wars timeline correct and up to date moving forward. If you see that something is missing or out of place, please let us know in the comments below.

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