Star Wars Rebellion history: How the Rebel Alliance has been depicted

From the moment the words “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire” appeared in the opening crawl of Star WarsThe fans’ minds raced to create the conditions for that win. While 2016’s Star Wars Rogue OneStory tells the story of the events. However, there are many interpretations and stories that have been told over the years about how the Rebel Alliance became a uniting force to win their first victory.

With the publication of Andor Disney Plus is a new series that promises to track the evolution of Rogue One protagonist Cassian Andor from his days as a budding rebel to his death on the sands of Scarif, it’s worth looking back on some of the previous efforts to dramatize the words in the crawl and explain how the Rebel Alliance came to be, as well as examining how Andor It is unique to be able to combine some of the different narratives in a coherent whole.

The Rebellion’s origins on radio

Vintage format is the original way to show the opening crawl of the Rebel Alliance and more detail about it. NPR broadcast a Star Wars radio drama that was based in 1981. A New HopeProduced with George Lucas’ blessing. You could hear sounds and music taken from the movie, as well as Mark Hamill’s and Anthony Daniels in their original cinematic roles. One of the fun things about the radio drama is it dramatizes scenes left on the cutting room floor (like Luke’s encounter with his old friend Biggs Darklighter on Tatooine) while also adding scenes which didn’t appear in the movie, notably in its second and third episodes, “Points of Origin” and “Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns.”

In “Points of Origin,” Leia and her father (then called Prestor Organa, rather than Bail) are entertaining the odious Imperial Lord Tion on Alderaan. Leia discovers the existence and plans of Rebel agents following an assault on an Imperial convoy. Tion attempts to capture her after Leia reveals the information. However, she is finally shot. This prompts Leia’s father to more directly help the Rebellion, and Leia convinces her father to let her take their ship, the blockade runner Tantive IV, to the rebels on the planet Toprawa to retrieve the plans.

In “Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns,” Leia receives the Rebel transmission from Toprawa, but is detected by Darth Vader. She is pursued by Vader’s Star Destroyer as she attempts to reach Obi-Wan Kenobi and recruit him to the cause of the Rebellion, thereby bringing the radio drama up to the point where the first film begins. Evidently, this is the last act of Rogue OneAlthough the story has been retconed, the radio drama is still a great early look at the Rebel Alliance’s origins in a different format.

Books and video games build out more of the Rebellion’s history

Del Rey

Star Wars was able to relaunch itself in 1991, after having been somewhat neglected since the release of Return of the JediIn 1983. It started not as a series of movies but rather through novels. In particular, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy (comprising of Heir to Empire, Dark Force RisingPlease see the following: The Last CommandNamed after the central antagonist, Grand Admiral Thrawn. The success of those novels would lead to a burgeoning “Expanded Universe” of semi-canonical stories told across multiple media, from books to comics to video games, over the next two decades.

The Thrawn Trilogy is set five years later than the End of the World. Return of the JediIt does, however, briefly touch on the history of the Rebellion through the introduction of a new character: the Corellian Garm Bel Iblis. Zahn reveals that in the early days of the Rebellion, Bel Iblis was one of the leaders of three different rebel factions, with the other two being led by Leia’s father (now Bail Organa) and Mon Mothma (the political leader of the Rebel Alliance in Return of the Jedi). In the story, Bel Iblis is credited with bringing the three groups together to form the nascent Alliance via the Corellian Treaty, though the more aggressive Bel Iblis often butted heads with the pacifistic Mothma and Organa (not unlike Saw Gerrera’s later relationship with the Rebellion). After the destruction of Alderaan and the loss of Organa’s mediating influence, Bel Iblis and forces loyal to him left the Rebellion to wage their own private war on the Empire (before returning in the Thrawn trilogy’s “present” day).

A.C. Crispin’s Han Solo trilogy, another book series from later in the Expanded Universe era, revisits the events surrounding the capture of the Death Star plans. The final novel in the trilogy is called “The Death Star Plans”. Rebel Dawn, Han’s then-love interest Bria Tharen is revealed to have become a Rebel commando. Like in the radio drama, she is involved in Toprawa’s assault. She beams the Rebel plans to Leia on the Tantive IV. In shades of Rogue OneAll the Toprawa rebels, including Bria are murdered in order to get the plans out.

This is the groundbreaking videogame Dark ForcesThis article offers another perspective on how the Death Star Plans were acquired. It credits Kyle Katarn (a former Imperial who became a mercenary and future Jedi Knight), with their retrieval. Mon Mothma hired Kyle Katarn to steal plans from the Imperial facility at Danuta. Later video games Force Unleashed, offers one of the most significant and eyebrow-raising looks at the formation of the Rebel Alliance up to that time, revealing that the game’s protagonist, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice Starkiller, was responsible for planting the seeds of what became the Rebel Alliance at the direction of Vader himself, who hoped to use the Alliance against the Emperor to his own ends.

The Revenge of the Sith’s deleted scene

Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

Originally, Genevieve O’Reilly’s Rebel leader Mon Mothma (introduced in Revenge of the SithBefore making a reprise appearance in Rogue OneThe animated RebelsThe future and all the details Andor) had a much larger role in the final prequel movie (one which also would have given Padmé Amidala much more to do in the film aside from fret and die of a “broken heart”). That role lives on mostly in the form of the “Seeds of Rebellion” deleted scene (available as part of the Revenge of the SithExtras on Disney Plus and TheRevenge of the Sith novelization (which is based on an earlier draft of the movie’s script).

In “Seeds of Rebellion,” Mon Mothma is present for a meeting of senators, including Padmé and Bail Organa, in which they discuss the formation of a senate bloc opposed to Chancellor Palpatine’s ongoing manipulation of the constitution to his own ends. This scene is part of a bigger subplot Lucas originally incorporated into the movie, and which receives some play in novelization. It involves the Loyalist Committee, a bigger group of Senators dedicated to preserving the Republic and limiting Palpatine’s power. Their signature action was the creation of The Petition of 2,00,000. This document, which urged Palpatine to relinquish the emergency powers he took at the Clone Wars’ start, was signed by more than 2,000 senators. Many of these senators would support the Rebel Alliance or join it, including Bail Organa.

The canonicity of these events remains questionable, existing as they do in a weird sort of limbo — they’re part of an official film, but also not. Yet given the continuity Genevieve O’Reilly brings to the role and the time frame of Andor, it’s entirely possible the series could reference them directly as it develops Mothma into the leader of the Alliance we see in Rogue One.

Expanding the Rebellion’s story in television and recent Star Wars movies

Lucasfilm

Many elements have been added to the Rebel Alliance since 2012’s acquisition by Disney of Lucasfilm. These elements have been incorporated into a variety of stories. Andor, set in the same timeline as those stories and featuring the journey of a character from before he joined the Rebels to when he played a critical role in that crawl-teased “first victory,” in the unique position of being able to stitch all those pieces together.

The animated Clone WarsAnd Bad Batch series, for example, feature, to varying degrees, Saw Gerrera’s Partisans, one of many disparate rebel factions functioning in the time between the prequel and original trilogies. Solo: A Star Wars Story introduces Enfys Nest and her group of pirates/rebels as a way to tease Han’s future involvement with the more formally organized Rebel Alliance of the original trilogy. Obi-Wan Kenobi recently introduced “The Path,” a sort of proto-Rebel Alliance/underground railroad that provides safe passage to Jedi and Force-sensitive survivors of the Emperor’s Jedi Purge. RebelsAnother animated series is. A New Hope, It depicts one small rebel unit on Lothal’s world that gradually becomes part of the wider galactic rebel movement. It also introduces the concept of “Fulcrum,” a coded identity for a secret agent working to inform and coordinate different rebel cells (an identity once used by Cassian Andor), while later stories confirmed characters from that series would go on to serve in the larger alliance.

Andor: What does it mean?

Stories set in the same “between trilogies” era as Andor They aren’t uncommon. We should not forget Cassian Andor’s crucial role in the final moments of the film. Rogue One, Andor This series is the first to feature a character that is present at the time when the Rebel Alliance is what it is in the original trilogy. The creative team also includes Andor The series will follow the story of the protagonist, according to Henriques. Rogue OneHe effectively placed his character and that of the Rebel Alliance development in parallel.

Cassian is the main focus, however it was also confirmed that there were other people in the area. Andor The series will continue to explore the Rebel Alliance through the addition of characters such as Mon Mothma or Saw Gerrera, with Forest Whitaker reprising this role. Mon Mothma brings continuity between the early days of the scattered Rebellion slowly evolving from her group of loyal-to-the-Republic senators in Revenge of the Sith and the formalized Alliance of the original trilogy, while Gerrera’s Partisans can provide a look at what lines the Alliance won’t cross in its fight with the Empire, defining what it is by making a point about what it is not.

We can only hope that it will happen. Andor The film will try to bring together all of the rebel groups that were left in this period. It is not a Wookieepedia entry, but it does have the potential to entertain. But by chronicling the development of Cassian Andor’s relationship with the Rebellion alongside notable guiding hands, it will hopefully be able to provide a framework that allows fans to connect the dots and see how the other different factions may fit together. Andor has its own story to tell, and it’s one with the potential to piece together a larger narrative, as the Rebel Alliance grows from scattered groups with their own agendas doing their best to strike small blows against the Empire into a cohesive whole that can coordinate their actions to achieve a collective victory against the evil Galactic Empire, fanning the flames of hope throughout the galaxy.