So. I loved the new Star Wars movie even though it had a few problems. And it had a few problems. One of the problems that I didn't have but a friend did was that it kept cribbing from the Star Wars movies.
And, yeah, it did. But it was like GoldenEye; cribbing from Ye Olde Bygone Better Days to lure people back for three awful sequels and then a recast and reboot that similarly schizophrenically tried to be "the same but different" and wound up stuck up its own bunghole with a truly shit villain and no plot save for a mishmash of homages to previous entries and...
...oh.
But, no, I'm willing to give The Force Awakens a pass for its liberal cribbing of the earlier films. It was reassuring. What was annoying was how it threw out the old book canon... and then kept cribbing from it.
Star Trek Generations
The seventh film of the franchise kills off one of the longest-running characters in science fi... oh. Sorry, the books. Right.
The Thrawn Trilogy
Sadly not a whole lot. Anakin's lightsaber got recovered somehow and ends up being wielded by an action girl character, who uses it to beat The Dragon. Alas, they reworked how hyperspace works, apparently, so we'll never see the Interdictor trick on the big screen. That said, Zahn is basically the only EU author who a) uses Luke Skywalker b) without abusing his god-mode, and I detect a bit of that mindset at play here - although I wonder why the Resistance is so eager to find the guy who ran away when his apprentice went berserk. And this isn't like an Obi-Wan situation where Leia didn't know his crappy teacherage is a big reason why Vader's the way he is... Anyway that's off topic. The Empire is back after a hiatus, and they've - stretching here - got an insane Dark Jedi on their side.
The New Jedi Order
Well, given that the books chronicle a nightmarish advance by a barbaric army of scary dogmatic evildoers while the politicians dither and pretend there isn't a crisis (Stackpole in particular was basically a prophet), it's not surprising that Hillary-supporter JJ Abrams didn't nick too much from this series. Obviously it's most notorious for killing off a loved character from the Original Trilogy.
Legacy of the Force
Where to begin? Han and Leia have a son who turns to the dark side for outrageously nebulous reasons. Said son murders a fan-favorite character, the spouse of a Skywalker sibling, to complete his conversion and then gets beaten by a heretofore-not-demonstrating-much-lightsaber-prowess Action Girl character.
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