This Official 'Star Wars' Style Guide Invalidates 'The Phantom Menace' and 'The Force Awakens'

For Star Wars fans, Pablo Hidalgo has the greatest job on the planet. He has a long history stretching back to the mid-1990s working for Lucasfilm on Star Wars-related ventures, but following Disney’s 2012 acquisition of everything from the galaxy far, far away, Hidalgo was given the spiffy new job title of Creative Executive for the Lucasfilm Story Group. That means his main job is to make sure to maintain a single cohesive canon for anything and everything in the Star Wars universe.

It’s tough to unify books, video games, comic books, toys, TV shows, and movies in modern times, let alone way back in 1994. It was then that West End Games, who paved the way for the expanded universe by creating a series of comprehensive Star Wars roleplaying games, sent out a style guide stipulating what official creators could or could not do to in a post-Return of the Jedi, pre-The Phantom Menace world. It just so happens that Hidalgo is also highly active on Twitter, and today tweeted out some pages from that 1994 style guide. It has some tough but fair truths for the prequel trilogy and even the newly minted sequel trilogy.

The people at West End Games sound like they mean business. No amateur Star Wars fans need apply.

This one could go in any normal editorial style guide, except here they’re railing against intergalactic hyperbole. Perhaps J.J. Abrams and co. should have realized they couldn’t just make Starkiller Base a bigger Death Star for The Force Awakens and get away with it circa 1994. We won’t hold it against them, though.

There’s no shortage of new alien species in the Star Wars universe, but we’re certain the Millennium Falcon could have used a super-duper hyperdrive on more than one occasion. Too bad the style guide made it tough on Han and Chewie.

Hmm, “not everything or everyone should be from Tatooine.” We guess George Lucas didn’t get a chance to read this style guide before he sat down to write the prequels in the mid-’90s. Old George went straight back to Tatooine for The Phantom Menace and never looked back. Bonus points to the style guide for the sick burn on Boise, Idaho.

Don’t write about anything before the 1977 original. George will ruin it for himself.

An orphan from a desert planet suddenly finds themselves caught up in a galactic battle between good and evil while helping a band of rebels defeat an evil empire with a world-destroying weapon. Way to stay original, J.J.!

This rule goes for this galaxy and any galaxy, for that matter.