Star Wars: Ahsoka Trailer Dialogue Is Deep Legends Reference to Thrawn
During the Lucasfilm Studio Showcase at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023 on Friday, Lucasfilm unveiled the first Star Wars: Ahsoka trailer. That trailer featured Rosario Dawson reprising her role as Ahsoka Tano and offered the first looks at Star Wars Rebels characters Hera Syndulla, Sabine Wren, and Ezra Bridger in live-action. It also offered a glimpse at Grand Admiral Thrawn, played by Lars Mikkelsen, who is a legendary Star Wars villain from both the Star Wars Legends and current canon Star Wars universes. In the Star Wars: Ahsoka trailer, Ahsoka Tano calls Grand Admiral Thrawn "the heir to the Empire." Ahsoka's line of dialogue refers to Grand Amiral's Thrawn's potential to unify the Imperial Remnant under a new strong leader, making them a much more dangerous threat to the New Republic, but it is also a callback to one of the defining Star Wars stories that didn't take place in film or television.
Heir to the Empire is the title of the first installment of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars novels. As one might guess, it introduces Grand Admiral Thrawn as the new top villain in the Star Wars universe. Heir to the Empire was a monumental moment for Star Wars fans when it was released in 1991, after a four-year period where Lucasfilm released no new Star Wars stories. It also did the unprecedented by setting its story five years after the conclusion of the original Star Wars trilogy. Its release established the Star Wars expanded universe as most fans would come to understand it, and that universe grew quickly with the release of the other novels in the Thrawn trilogy (Dark Force Rising and The Last Command), Dark Horse Comics taking over the Star Wars comics license and publishing Dark Empire (set one year after the Thrawn trilogy), and Bantam Spectra's continued publication of additional Star Wars novels set after and before the original Star Wars trilogy.
Dave Filoni on Heir to the Empire
With as big a Star Wars fan as Dave Filoni as the helm of Star Wars: Ahsoka, it's clear that the "heir to the Empire" line in the Star Wars: Ahsoka trailer was no accident. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak to Filoni after the Star Wars: Ahsoka panel at Star Wars Celebration Europe on Saturday and asked him about the impact of Zahn's novels on his life and his appreciation for Star Wars.
"The interesting thing about it is, you know, I have a very, very, very strong memory of walking past the bookstore and seeing the stand for Heir to the Empire, and that blew my mind," Filoni said. "And my brother and I would stare at the stand and look at it and you look at the cover and the painting and you were like, 'There's more!' Because back then there wasn't a lot more. Tthere were comic books that delved into it, but Star Wars hadn't really had the wide expanded universe. Like, if you went to a different section of the books or the Star Trek books, they had already a lot of books about Star Trek. Star Wars didn't really have that. We had novelizations, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, but there wasn't a lot. So that really changed things, so my brother and I poured through that book."
Star Wars: Ahsoka debuts on Disney+ in August.