‘Star Wars’ Style Guide From 1994 Revealed, Proves Why ‘The Force Awakens’ Was Good

Lucasfilm creative executive Pablo Hidalgo must have been in the middle of a Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up moment yesterday because he managed to unearth a copy of his 1994 Star Wars style guide. That guide was basically a Star Wars bible used to inform the thought process behind West End Games’s Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game and its accompanying Adventure Journal, projects Hidalgo worked on back in the day.

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The Verge examined some of those guidelines and framed them as cautionary warnings about the Star Wars prequels that George Lucas decided to ignore. For example, the 1994 guidelines state that “not everyone or everything should be from Tatooine,” at which point the Verge imagines Lucas beginning to write The Phantom Menace and scrawling: “EXT. TATOOINE - ANAKIN’S HOME” on a legal pad.

Hidalgo viewed The Verge’s take with humorous skepticism, per this tweet:

Personally, I find it more interesting to read that style guide and find examples of things Star Wars: The Force Awakens took to heart, and also completely failed to heed.

The 1994 document advises, “Do Not Talk About the Past.” “You may not discuss anything of galactic significance that occurs prior to Star Wars: A New Hope,” it says, including the Clone Wars. The Force Awakens totally takes that advice to heart.

“There’s a galaxy of billions of stars, with a hyperspace-linked culture that has been around for over 20,000 years,” the guide also says. “There is room for an astounding amount of diversity.” Astounding diversity … huh, that sounds like The Force Awakens also.

But J.J. Abrams and Co. obviously didn’t adhere to every maxim in Hidalgo’s treasure trove of Jedi truths. “Original themes are cool,” the guide says. “Stay away from Star Wars clichés (ice and desert planets, Hutt crimelords, smugglers with Wookiee copilots…) and don’t do something that’s an obvious swipe from someone else’s stories.”

Hey, nobody’s perfect. And even Star Wars bibles are open to interpretation, right?

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