The Epic Continues never made it past this presentation point, however—conflicting stories say either Lucasfilm approved the idea only for Kenner’s upper management to wind down the Star Wars line anyway based on market research showing declining interest in the series, or that Lucasfilm just wasn’t quite ready to take steps in solidifying a new Star Wars continuation at the time. Either way, The Epic Continues was over before it started, and with it, Kenner’s Star Wars toy line came to an end in 1985.
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And yet, its legacy did live on in some ways. Just years later in the ‘90s, the Expanded Universe began with Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, and with it, a new era of Star Wars storytelling that would pay homage to the concept work done for The Epic Continues in various ways, from West End Games’ Star Wars tabletop roleplaying game, to illustrations made for Star Wars Galaxy magazine. Of course, Star Wars toys themselves would make a comeback too—a decade after The Epic Continues would’ve began, Kenner, now owned by Hasbro, restarted its Star Wars toy line with a revived Power of the Force wave of figures, paving the way for a revival that would go into overdrive a few years later with the debut of the Phantom Menace toys. Along the way, the aforementioned Imperial Sentinels that borrowed from the same design roots Epic Continues’ Atha Prime did got made into action figures by Kenner, a funny twist of fate!
But while so much of The Epic Continues’ legacy is rooted in Star Wars’ past, not all of its inspirations are quite so old. Those weird Mongo Beefhead mashups? They made a blink-and-you’ll miss it cameo in the pages of 2021’s Darth Vader #18 as an unidentified alien species—finally canonized after 35 years of waiting in the shadows.
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