Canon

The Star Wars canon is the continually evolving body of authoritative works comprising the official story of Star Wars, encompassing movies, television series, novels, comics, and video games. George Lucas set the original main six Star Wars films and the content he developed and produced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars as canon. These stories are defined to be the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.

Since the 1990s, Lucasfilm licensed a vast collection of interconnected stories produced by numerous authors, including comics, novels and video games, forming what was known as the official Star Wars Expanded Universe, existing parallel to the "universe" directly overseen by Lucas. The Expanded Universe was referred to as "quasi-canon" as opposed to Lucas' canon, which was described to be the definitive canon, or the "only true canon" among "different degrees of canon" or "absolute canon." In 2000, Lucas Licensing created an internal database tracking and organizing all the fictional elements created for the Star Wars universe, making up a hierarchical system listing different levels of canon, which could've been divided into George Lucas' canon and vision of the Star Wars universe, comprised of the six movies and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, occupying the highest level, which have had "absolute authority", whereas material collectively referred to as the Expanded Universe, constituting Lucas Licensing's vision, was ranked as lower level of canonicity.

After The Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm on October 30, 2012, the Expanded Universe was rebranded as Legends.

Text and facts from the “Canon” article on Wookieepedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified for this site.