Culture news The Acolyte series breaks a 47-year-old Jedi rule. George Lucas didn’t want to do that with Star Wars
Star Wars The Acolyte has just been released on Disney+. The new series features many Jedi, including a wookie. A seemingly innocuous character who nevertheless breaks a rule established by George Lucas himself years ago.
Wookiees don’t wield lightsabers
The series The Acolyte was recently released on Disney+ and marks the return of Star Wars. Taking place during the High Republic period years before the story of the main films, The Acolyte features many characters capable of using the Force. And among them, we find Kelnacca, a true Wookie Jedi master.
The series is part of the Star Wars canon established by Disney, so this character does indeed exist within this universe. But it nevertheless goes against a rule decreed by George Lucas himself, who did not consider Wookies to be a Force-sensitive species. A rule already established at the time of the creation of Chewbacca, which persisted for many years despite the creation of Jedi Wookies within transmedia works.
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A rule rarely respected
Before selling LucasFilm to Disney, George Lucas was committed to certain principles that governed the Star Wars universe. And for him, certain species in the Galaxy could not aspire to become Jedi. This was true for the Wookies, but also the Tuskens and the Vulptereens as explained by Randy Stradley, author and editor at Dark Horse Comics who worked on several Star Wars comic series. But this principle has not always been respected and we find traces of several Jedi Wookies, notably in some of the Star Wars novels published in the 90s and early 2000s, which ultimately led to the filmmaker to prohibit the creation of such characters.
George Lucas personally opposed the creation of a Wookie Jedi who was to appear in the video game ”’Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords”. Obsidian wanted the bounty hunter Hanharr to originally be a Dark Jedi, but the idea was rejected by the filmmaker, before he officially ruled it out in 2005, shortly after the release of the Nest novel trilogy Obscure, that Wookies could not become Jedi (According to Reverse).
This rule therefore held at least until 2012, the date of George Lucas’ retirement which also coincided with the release of season 5 of the animated series The Clone Wars. In this season, fans were able to discover the character of Gungi, a young Wookie padawan who participated in the search for a kyber crystal to create his lightsaber. The filmmaker therefore ended up letting go, before selling his creation to Disney who ultimately decided to completely ignore this rule.
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