Two years ago today, The Acolyte did something Star Wars live-action had never done before. It stepped away from the Skywalker timeline and walked into the High Republic. On June 4, 2024, The Acolyte premiered on Disney+ with two episodes, bringing viewers into an era set long before the fall of Anakin Skywalker, the rise of the Empire, or the Rebellion’s fight against Palpatine. StarWars.com’s original Acolyte premiere announcement positioned the series as a major new mystery story, while the official series page for The Acolyte places it firmly in the High Republic era. That alone made it important. Not because it was perfect. Because it was rare. Star Wars Tried a Different Door Most live-action Star Wars has stayed close to familiar gravity. The Empire. The Rebellion. The Clone Wars. The Mandalorian era. The shadow of Darth Vader. The Skywalkers, directly or indirectly, always nearby. The Acolyte tried to…
Star Wars History
On This Day: Star Tours Turned One Ride Into a Randomized Star Wars Multiverse
On June 3, 2011, Star Tours: The Adventures Continue opened at Disneyland and quietly changed what a Star Wars ride could be. The original Star Tours was already a landmark: a motion-simulator trip through the galaxy before Disney owned Lucasfilm, before Galaxy’s Edge, before Star Wars became a full theme park land. But The Adventures Continue did something smarter than just making the ride shinier. It made Star Wars unpredictable. The Same Ride, But Never Quite the Same Trip The big hook was randomization. Instead of sending every guest on the same fixed adventure, The Adventures Continue mixed different destinations, characters, transmissions, and action beats into multiple possible ride combinations. Wired’s 2011 preview of the upgraded Star Tours: The Adventures Continue noted that the ride could produce 54 different story combinations. For a theme park attraction, that was a brilliant little trick. You were not just riding Star Tours. You…
The June 1 Lucasfilm Move That Quietly Started Modern Star Wars
Before Disney bought Lucasfilm, before The Force Awakens, before Grogu, Andor, Ahsoka, the sequel trilogy, the streaming era, and the endless online arguments, there was a quieter announcement. On June 1, 2012, Kathleen Kennedy was named co-chair of Lucasfilm. At the time, it looked like a major leadership move. In hindsight, it looks like one of the first visible steps toward the modern Star Wars era. In a later StarWars.com reflection on the future of Lucasfilm, Pablo Hidalgo described that June 1 announcement as one of the early pieces of news that came before the much bigger October reveal: Disney was acquiring Lucasfilm, and new Star Wars films were coming. That is the strange thing about franchise history. Sometimes the biggest turns do not arrive with a lightsaber ignition. Sometimes they arrive as a press announcement. The Quiet Before the Disney Era Kennedy’s arrival at Lucasfilm came months before the…
On This Day: Galaxy’s Edge Opened and Turned Star Wars Into a Real Place
On May 31, 2019, Star Wars stopped being something fans only watched, read, played, or argued about online. It became a place you could physically walk into. That was the day Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opened at Disneyland Resort in California, inviting visitors to step onto Batuu, a new planet built specifically for the theme park experience. StarWars.com confirmed the May 31 opening date, with the Walt Disney World version following later that same year. Seven years later, Galaxy’s Edge still feels like one of the boldest Star Wars experiments ever made. Not quite a movie. Not quite a game. Not quite a museum. More like a playable piece of the galaxy. Batuu Was a Smart Choice The clever thing about Galaxy’s Edge was that it did not simply rebuild Tatooine, Hoth, or Coruscant. Disney and Lucasfilm created Batuu instead, a new frontier world that felt familiar without being trapped…
A 1977 Star Wars Trading Card Box Just Sold for $25,000
Somewhere out there, someone is looking at an old box of trading cards and wondering whether it should be insured, framed, or escorted by Rebel security. A sealed 1977 Topps Star Wars trading card trade counter box has sold at Vectis Auctions for more than £22,000, or over $25,000, according to Jedi News. Yes, a box of Star Wars cards just went for the price of a decent used car. And honestly, in the world of vintage Star Wars collecting, that is not even as ridiculous as it sounds. A Sealed Piece of 1977 Star Wars History The key word here is sealed. The original 1977 Topps Star Wars trading cards were not made to become museum pieces. They were made to be opened, traded, chewed over, shoved into pockets, bent in school bags, and eventually lost in the great childhood black hole where stickers, comics, and lunch money go…
Ashley Eckstein Is Right: The Clone Wars Helped Save Star Wars
Before Star Wars became a Disney+ machine with Mandalorians, Ahsoka, Grogu, Boba Fett, Thrawn teases, animated spin-offs and enough interconnected lore to make a Jedi archivist quietly resign, there was a much stranger period. There was just The Clone Wars. Ashley Eckstein, the voice of Ahsoka Tano, recently reflected on that era during a Clone Wars cast reunion, saying that when the show was on the air, it felt like Star Wars might genuinely be over. As covered by GeekTyrant, Eckstein said the animated series was basically the only Star Wars thing keeping the flame alive before Disney bought Lucasfilm. And honestly? She has a point. The Clone Wars Arrived When Star Wars Felt Finished It is easy to forget now, because modern Star Wars never really stops moving. There is always another series, film update, game rumor, book release, comic arc, convention panel, or suspiciously marketable alien child waiting…
Obi-Wan Kenobi Premiered Four Years Ago and Still Feels Complicated
Four years ago today, Obi-Wan Kenobi arrived on Disney+ carrying one of the heaviest backpacks in modern Star Wars. The series premiered on May 27, 2022, with its first two episodes launching together, bringing Ewan McGregor back as the exiled Jedi Master and Hayden Christensen back into the shadow of Darth Vader. That alone was enough to make it feel like an event. But four years later, Obi-Wan Kenobi still sits in a strange place. It gave Star Wars some genuinely powerful moments, a few unexpected emotional punches, and one of the most anticipated rematches in the franchise. It also remains one of the Disney+ shows people still argue about like the fate of the Republic depends on it. Ewan McGregor Was Never the Problem The easiest part to agree on is Ewan McGregor. He understood exactly where Obi-Wan was supposed to be: broken, guilty, exhausted, and hiding from the…
Christopher Lee Gave Count Dooku the Class Star Wars Needed
Some Star Wars villains enter the room like a thunderstorm. Count Dooku entered like a man who had already judged the furniture, the wine, the government, and your lightsaber technique. Christopher Lee, born on May 27, 1922, brought something unusually sharp to the prequel trilogy when he arrived as Dooku in Attack of the Clones. Star Wars already had monsters, tyrants, masked nightmares, cackling Sith Lords, and bounty hunters with jetpacks. What it did not have, at least not quite like this, was a villain who felt like aristocracy had personally discovered the dark side and decided it was better managed with a cape. Dooku was not loud. He did not need to be. A Sith Lord With Manners The official Star Wars Databank describes Dooku as a former Jedi trained by Yoda, later disillusioned with the Order and drawn into Darth Sidious’ grand design. On paper, that is already…
May 25 Is the Real Star Wars Day, and the Movies Prove It
May the 4th has the pun. May 25 has the receipts. Long before Star Wars Day became a hashtag, a merch wave, and the annual moment where every brand with a social media intern suddenly discovered lightsabers, May 25 was already the date that changed the galaxy. The original Star Wars arrived in theaters on May 25, 1977. Six years later, Return of the Jedi opened on May 25, 1983. That is not just trivia. That is the franchise’s cinematic birth certificate and the original trilogy’s victory lap landing on the same calendar square. So yes, May the 4th is fun. But May 25 is the day Star Wars actually became Star Wars. The Day the Galaxy Opened When the film now known as A New Hope first opened in 1977, it was not yet a sacred text, a streaming category, a theme park ecosystem, or a multi-generation licensing empire….
Looking Back at Every Star Wars Celebration Ahead of 2027 Ticket Sales
With Star Wars Celebration 2027 tickets going on sale on May 6, this feels like the perfect time to look backward before the fandom charges forward again. We already know the next Celebration is going to be a big one. The event heads to Los Angeles in 2027, and with ticket sales around the corner, the usual mix of excitement, planning, badge stress, hotel panic, and “should we actually do this?” energy is starting to kick in. If you missed the latest update on badge pricing and the on-sale date, we already broke that down in our guide to Star Wars Celebration 2027 tickets, prices, and the May 6 on-sale date. But before everyone starts refreshing ticket pages and wrecking their budgets, it is worth taking a step back and remembering just how long and strange the road to Celebration 2027 has actually been. This article is also built around…
Lucasfilm Turns 55 Today — and That Is a Pretty Wild Star Wars Milestone
Before there was Star Wars, before ILM rewired blockbuster filmmaking, and before Lucasfilm became one of the most important names in modern franchise history, it was just a company George Lucas started on April 20, 1971. That means Lucasfilm turns 55 today. Lucasfilm’s own company history says George Lucas incorporated Lucasfilm in 1971 after making THX 1138, creating the company as a way to support his future projects. A new anniversary post from ILM adds a more precise date, noting that Lucasfilm was established on April 20, 1971, in Mill Valley, California, when Lucas was just 26 years old. And honestly, that is a bigger anniversary than it might first sound. Before Star Wars was even Star Wars It is easy to think of Lucasfilm purely as “the Star Wars company,” but that came later. In 1971, this was basically George Lucas building a home for the work he wanted…
George Lucas and Star Wars Galaxies: The MMO That Was Closer to His Future Than People Realized
When people talk about Star Wars Galaxies, they usually start with the obvious landmarks: the sandbox systems, the player cities, the housing, the professions, the social chaos, and the long shadow the game still casts over Star Wars MMO history. All of that matters. But one of the more interesting angles is how closely Galaxies seems to line up with the way George Lucas thought about technology, online interaction, and participatory storytelling. This was not just a Star Wars game where players ran missions. It was one of the earliest serious attempts to let people actually live inside the galaxy, which is a big reason it still deserves a prominent place in our complete Star Wars games hub. Lucas was already thinking beyond passive entertainment One reason Galaxies feels so relevant in hindsight is that George Lucas had been talking for years about technology, media, and the future of storytelling….
What Carrie Fisher Revealed About Her Affair With Harrison Ford in The Princess Diarist
Few behind-the-scenes Star Wars stories have lingered quite like the Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford affair. Part of that is obvious: it involves two of the most iconic faces in the franchise, and it stayed out of public view for decades. But the reason people still search terms like “Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford affair” or “did Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford have an affair” is not just gossip. It is because Fisher eventually told the story herself, in her 2016 memoir The Princess Diarist, using journals she kept during the making of the first Star Wars. The book was published by Blue Rider Press in November 2016 and is explicitly framed around her younger self’s diaries from that period. Yes, Carrie Fisher said the affair happened The short version is yes: Carrie Fisher said she and Harrison Ford had a three-month affair during the filming of the original Star…
How StarWars.com Changed Over the Years, According to the Wayback Machine
If you’ve ever wanted proof that the internet used to look like it was held together by duct tape, optimism, and a lot of beige, the best place to start is the Wayback Machine That archive is basically a time machine for the web, and when you run StarWars.com through it, you’re not just looking at old homepage designs. You’re watching Star Wars learn how to exist online. Over the years, the official site went from a pretty modest promo page into a full-blown franchise mothership packed with news, videos, Databank entries, Disney+ tie-ins, games, and enough navigation tabs to make a 1998 modem cry. The fun part is that the changes on StarWars.com don’t just reflect web design trends. They track the changing priorities of Star Wars itself. In one era, the site was all about movie hype. In another, it became a fan hub. Later, it shifted into…
Star Wars: A New Hope Began Filming 50 Years Ago Today
Fifty years ago today, Star Wars stopped being an idea and started becoming a movie. On March 22, 1976, principal photography began on what was then called The Star Wars, with cameras rolling in Tunisia on the edge of the Sahara. Lucasfilm is marking the date today, framing it as the moment one of the most important films in modern pop culture officially went into production. The Day the Galaxy Really Started Moving That date matters because it was the point where George Lucas’ risky space fantasy became something real. By then, Lucas had already pushed through years of development, multiple screenplay drafts, studio skepticism, and the early build-out of the creative machine that would eventually become part of Star Wars legend, including Industrial Light & Magic and Ben Burtt’s sound work. But March 22, 1976 was when the project finally moved from concept art, scripts, and headaches into actual…
Complete List of All Star Wars Games Ever Made (1979–Present)
Over more than four decades, over 100 officially licensed Star Wars video games have been released across arcade machines, consoles, PC, handheld devices, and mobile platforms. Since the release of the first officially licensed Star Wars video game in 1982, the franchise has produced dozens of titles across arcades, consoles, PCs, handheld systems, and mobile platforms. These games have ranged from space combat simulators and role-playing epics to strategy games, shooters, and experimental projects that never made it to release. The history of Star Wars gaming is also closely tied to the evolution of the industry itself. The rise of LucasArts in the 1990s helped define the golden age of Star Wars games, producing classics such as X-Wing, Dark Forces, and Knights of the Old Republic. The closure of LucasArts in 2013 marked a major turning point, shifting development to external studios under publishing agreements. In the years since, Star…
Star Wars Games (2006–2012): The Fall of LucasArts
The period between 2006 and 2012 marks the most turbulent and uncertain era in the history of Star Wars gaming. Following the experimental beginnings of The First Star Wars Games (1979–1989) and the explosive growth seen in Star Wars Games of the 1990s (1990–1999) — before reaching the creative peak documented in Star Wars Games (2000–2005): The Golden Age of Star Wars Gaming — this era represents a dramatic shift in direction for the franchise. After years of innovation and success, LucasArts entered a period defined by shifting priorities, cancelled projects, and an increasing reliance on safer, more predictable releases. While several major titles still launched during these years — including The Force Unleashed, LEGO Star Wars, and The Old Republic — the broader direction of Star Wars gaming began to fracture. Behind the scenes, ambitious projects were repeatedly started, reworked, and ultimately abandoned. Internal restructuring, technological challenges, and changing…
Robert Duvall, George Lucas’ First Leading Man, Has Passed Away at 95
Hollywood has lost one of its most legendary actors. Robert Duvall — a towering presence in film for more than seven decades — has passed away at the age of 95. And while many will remember him for The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Tender Mercies, Star Wars fans have a unique reason to reflect on his legacy: Duvall was George Lucas’ very first leading man. Before lightsabers, before the Death Star, and long before a galaxy far, far away took over pop culture, there was THX 1138. George Lucas’ First Leading Man Released in 1971, THX 1138 was George Lucas’ first full-length feature film and a bold, experimental entry into science fiction cinema. At its center was Robert Duvall, who played the film’s titular character — a worker in a dystopian future society stripped of identity, emotion, and freedom. The film wasn’t a mainstream blockbuster, but it became a cult…
Kenneth Colley, Admiral Piett Actor, Left $1 Million to a Cat Sanctuary in His Will
Kenneth Colley, best known to Star Wars fans as Admiral Piett, left behind a legacy that extends far beyond the bridge of an Imperial Star Destroyer. According to reports, Colley — who portrayed Piett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi — bequeathed $1 million to a cat sanctuary in his will. A villain on screen. A hero off screen. The Face of the Empire Admiral Piett holds a unique place in Star Wars history. Introduced as a nervous officer trying to survive the unforgiving command structure of Darth Vader, Piett went on to become one of the longest-serving Imperial officers in the original trilogy. While many officers met sudden ends, Piett’s character arc stood out for his quiet determination — even if his loyalty ultimately placed him on the losing side of the Galactic Civil War. Colley’s performance gave Piett something rare among Imperial ranks: humanity….
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace Returned to Theaters in 3D 14 Years Ago Today
Fourteen years ago today, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace got a second life on the big screen — this time in 3D. Originally released in 1999, the film marked the beginning of the Prequel Trilogy. But in 2012, audiences were invited back to Naboo, Tatooine, and Coruscant for a theatrical re-release that brought podracers, lightsabers, and battle droids into the stereoscopic era. The First (and Only) Prequel 3D Release The 3D version of The Phantom Menace premiered in theaters on February 10, 2012, as part of a larger plan to convert all six live-action Star Wars films into 3D. That plan ultimately never reached completion, making Episode I the only saga film to receive the full theatrical 3D treatment. For fans, it was a chance to revisit iconic sequences in a new format: The added depth gave those already ambitious scenes a slightly different cinematic feel —…
51 Years Ago Today, George Lucas Completed Adventures of the Starkiller, Episode I: The Star Wars
Long before A New Hope changed cinema, Star Wars existed in a very different form. On this day 51 years ago, George Lucas completed the second draft of his screenplay titled: Adventures of the Starkiller, Episode I: The Star Wars It’s one of the most fascinating “what if” moments in film history — a version of Star Wars that looks familiar, strange, and wildly ambitious all at once. A Galaxy That Almost Was This draft wasn’t just a stepping stone. It was a radically different blueprint for the saga. Elements that would later define Star Wars were already present: But nearly everything was shaped differently. Names, relationships, and roles shifted constantly in this era. Characters we now know as Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Obi-Wan Kenobi existed in early forms — but not yet as the figures fans recognize today. “Starkiller” Before Skywalker One of the most famous relics from…
Someone Digitally Remastered Princess Leia’s “A Day To Celebrate” — And Somehow It Feels Like 2026 Needed This
There are many things the Star Wars fandom will do in the name of history. We will preserve rare toys.We will archive deleted trailers.We will analyze blurry set photos like they’re CIA documents. But nothing — nothing — fully prepares you for the fact that in the year 2026, someone has decided the world urgently needed a digitally remastered version of Princess Leia singing “A Day To Celebrate” from the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. And… honestly? They were right. 👉 Watch it here: Because if there’s one thing Star Wars fans love more than lightsabers and lore debates, it’s resurrecting cursed media and polishing it until it sparkles. The Holiday Special: the galaxy’s most haunted VHS tape The Star Wars Holiday Special holds a unique place in pop culture. It’s not just “bad.” It’s the kind of bad that becomes folklore. Like a ghost story that people swear they’ve…
George Lucas Donated $1 Million to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial — and His Message Still Hits Hard Today
Star Wars is usually where people go to escape the real world. But every once in a while, the galaxy far, far away loops back into something very real — and very human. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a story has been resurfacing online that feels especially worth remembering: George Lucas donated $1 million to help build the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C. And the quote Lucas shared about Dr. King back then?It still lands like a brick. The Lucas Donation: $1 Million Toward the MLK Memorial The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. wasn’t just built through government funding — it relied heavily on private donors. And among the names on that donor list is George Lucas, who contributed $1 million to the memorial project. This isn’t one of those “internet factoids” with no source, either — it was covered at the…
Ben Burtt Becomes Lucasfilm’s First-Ever 50-Year Service Award Recipient
Some people define a franchise with a face.Ben Burtt defined Star Wars with sound. Lucasfilm has honored Burtt with its first-ever 50-year Service Award, marking half a century of work that didn’t just support the galaxy far, far away—but quite literally gave it a voice. This isn’t a ceremonial milestone. It’s a recognition that without Burtt, Star Wars as we know it simply wouldn’t exist. Why This Matters Now As Star Wars approaches its own 50th anniversary, Lucasfilm is quietly shifting focus from characters and eras to the people who built the foundation. Awarding a 50-year Service Award for the first time sends a clear message: legacy isn’t just about stories on screen. It’s about the craft behind them. And no one represents that craft more completely than Ben Burtt. The Sounds That Built a Galaxy Burtt didn’t just design effects. He created a language of sound that modern cinema…