The Complete Star Wars Canon Timeline – Part One

Get ready for The Force Awakens with CS’ new visual guide to every single story in the new Star Wars canon

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 canon timelines with all the latest official additions to the Star Wars canon. In the gallery viewer below, you can check out the first half, which includes the prequels and The Clone Wars. Click here to move on to the second timeline, which features the original trilogy and everything else on the road to The Force Awakens!

When Disney bought Lucasfilm three years ago, some big changes were made to the Star Wars canon. 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 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.

The new Star Wars canon is now thriving with the addition of all sorts of expanded universe stories. In a two-part feature, ComingSoon.net is taking a look at every story that currently holds a place in the new Star Wars canon. In the gallery viewer below, you can check out the first half, which spans from The Phantom Menace past the end of the Clone Wars and the fall of the Republic.

Because The Clone Wars series aired out of order, we’ve compiled the below list of episodes based on the official chronology and included new Star Wars canon material like Marvel Comics’ Kanan: The Last Padawan comic book series and a few non-television adaptations of unreleased Clone Wars episodes, such as the novel Dark Disciple.

Check back next week for part two of the Star Wars canon timeline. It begins, appropriately enough, with the novel A New Dawn and goes all the way through to The Force Awakens and beyond!

On a desktop, click Full Screen to read each entry.

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