‘Star Wars’: Meet the Man Responsible for Keeping the Story Straight
"If someone will come into a situation and say, 'Have we ever done a story like this?' And I could be able to say, 'Yeah, we did that, but it was, like, in a 1978 comic book, so, you know, take that as you will.' "
The namePablo Hidalgo might not be one that’s familiar to anyone but the most hard-coreStar Wars fans, but perhaps it should be: He is, after all, the man responsible for keeping the tangled web of the mythology straight across the many formats it exists in.
“I became the kind of go-to guy for any sort of deepStar Wars mythology questions,” HidalgotoldVanity Fair about his tenure atLucasfilm, where he’s gone from the online marketing department to part of the story group created to keep track of thenewly organizedStar Wars canon.
“If we’re going to build onto this franchise, it’s important to know what’s happened in the past, to know what’s been established, to know what George’s intentions were, and stuff like that,” Hidalgo said, explaining the purpose of the revised canon. “I just got more and more roped into this process to the point where I’m now part ofKiri Hart’s story group. Among things that I do is, I offer that kind of level of deep knowledge.”
That “deep knowledge” involves knowing everything about what he describes as “any sort of storytelling that’s been done in theStar Wars space” — including not only movies and TV shows but comic books, video games and novels. “It’s like if someone will come into a situation and say, ‘Have we ever done a story like this?’ And I could be able to say, ‘Yeah, we did that, but it was, like, in a 1978 comic book, so, you know, take that as you will,’ ” Hidalgo explains.
When it comes to those early comic books and novels now consigned to the non-canonicalStar Wars Legends line, Hidalgo admits that the guidance provided to authors byGeorge Lucas was…maybe a little less than helpful.
“It was sort of guidance by absence, in a weird way,” he said. “Like, he told us what not to do but not necessarily what to do. It was like, ‘Don’t do this with that character, don’t do that.’ ” And yet, he didn’t remember to tell everyone not tokillChewbacca? (Don’t worry, everyone; that’s not in the canon anymore.)
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