I think at least one of the Story Group is also waiting for an excuse to put them back into the canon.
Either way, it was a bad idea presented in a very ill advised manner. As in shockingly casually to the point it may as well have been like watching a recording. But that sort of ties in with how ridiculously godlike certain Jedi powers started to get late on in the EU. Well that's just normal everyday time travel, just sped up a bit. Functionally no different than the 'Space Seed' style trope of finding an ancient ship with the crew all still in stasis. Which is itself just a variant on the Briar Rose fairy-tale, something that would fit right in in Star Wars if played just right. I'm not opposed to the idea. I mean they just sort of brought in the crying mountain from the old Ewok comics, so why not? Even so, my initial point is that I like to think that the original version of these stories (regardless as to which elements get brought into canon down the line) are themselves stories told within the universe. That way it doesn't matter if they're contradictory, inaccurate, utterly ridiculous or just badly written. Some like the TotJ & KoTOR material could be cultural fables, while the classic Han Solo novels could be tall tales told by some old spacer in a cantina somewhere. If you want to really take the concept to the extreme, then the whole Del Rey run could be alternate history fiction, revisionist history from some isolated wild space colony or some badly garbled data file from a thousand years down the line.
Which things exactly? If you mean Shaak Ti's death. She dies by being stabbed in the back by Anakin at the Temple according to the Story Group, so that scene is still true.
IIRC the first thing Yoda sees is a bunch of clearly recognisable Jedi (including the likes of Windu & Kenobi) tearing into ranks of clone troopers, which of course never happened.
Nevertheless I feel it's a fairly major detail and there's no way they didn't know full well this would contradict RotS when they animated it. There's several ways one might interpret it, but I like to speculate that this could be a version of events where the Jedi were somehow forewarned of Palpatine's treachery. Yes, everything else seemed to play out as we know it did, but note how those glimpses are mostly without context. Who's to say Windu wasn't killed in a different time and place, but under very similar circumstances? The same could go for Shaak Ti and the other council members. Perhaps the Jedi were able to evacuate the temple, but their hidden sanctuary was infiltrated by Vader whom they didn't know had turned and that is were the slaughter of the younglings took place?
Some interesting theories floating around. I admit I was thinking of a Back to the Future style of time travel - I guess fiction has so many different ways of depicting time travel. In some established fiction, you can't meet yourself but you replace yourself when you time travel to another point in your own lifetime (is this the HG Wells approach? I've never read it) but in Back to the Future, you can have duplicate personas running about at the same time. Two "time travel-esque" methods that I feel would "fit" into the established world of Star Wars might be: The Past The Force flashback visions of the past thing. We've already seen that with Rey in The Force Awakens. JD mentions the Legacy of the Force book in which an event in the past is viewed that way, Reverend says it's like watching a recording - which is exactly how I choose to view the past. It cannot be altered, so in a sense, viewing the past in some sci-fi way is exactly like viewing a recording. The Future It's a one way trip via being frozen in carbonite or something similar. No problems there. Carbonite freezing stops aging, right? That's how I figured one day we might see Ahsoka in future live action films, were she preserved somehow for that purpose. I'm not saying she needs to be in the sequel trilogy, it's just an idea how she could be. Anyway. Is it autumn yet?
Uhh, no. Wells's Time Traveller did not travel within his own lifetime, but went to the far distant future. The way the workings of the time machine were described, it was as if he and the machine were simply greatly slowed down and saw the world around them racing forward in time lapse while they remained in place. Except that it could go in reverse as well as forward. You may be thinking of the movie and TV series Time After Time, which posited that Wells had actually built the time machine (rather than being one of the Time Traveller's friends, as he presented himself in the actual novel), and which portrayed him as using it to travel forward to where the time machine already was in an American museum exhibit in the present day. Which is not consistend with what Wells actually wrote; in the novel and the George Pal movie, when the machine was moved a short distance by the Morlocks and the Traveller then used it to go back, he arrived an equivalent distance from where he'd started out. I don't know. It's never been canonically portrayed as lasting long enough to demonstrate that, as far as I know. If anything, Harrison Ford aged 3 years between TESB and ROTJ while only six months (I think) elapsed in-story, so that would suggest that being carbon-frozen actually accelerates aging. Which makes sense, since it would certainly be stressful on the body.
Makes sense to me, in most sci-fi/sci-fantasy series, when some is put in hibernation/cryo-sleep/whatever you want to call it, they don't age. I've always assumed the same was true for being frozen in carbonite, since it's basically Star Wars' version of it.
For what it's worth, in the EU carbon-freezing did indeed halt the ageing process. As for canon... Spoiler: The Crimson Corsair and the Lost Treasure of Count Dooku It definitely works for a more conventional medical cryo stasis since that's how... Spoiler: Twist ending Kix makes it into the TFA timeframe.
I wouldn't really think so. Given the dialogue in TESB, it seemed that carbon freezing wasn't something that was normally done to living beings and wasn't known to be safe. That's the reason Vader had Solo frozen -- he was an expendable guinea pig to make sure it could be done nonlethally in order to capture Luke for delivery to the Emperor. They weren't sure he'd even live through the process, and Vader promised Boba Fett that he'd compensate Jabba if Solo died. That really doesn't sound like a process whose primary purpose is to preserve life; it sounds like some kind of industrial process being jerry-rigged for a human use it was never designed for, and was thus highly strenuous and potentially lethal to a human. If they'd actually had a tried and true cryogenic process, then none of that would even have been necessary. Which is why it bugged me that The Clone Wars did a storyline where Anakin and a Jedi/clone task force used carbon freezing to sneak into a top-security Separatist prison. That was clearly meant to explain where Vader got the idea of using carbon freezing 20-odd years later, but the episode treated it like a routine, proven thing even back then, which seems hard to reconcile with the whole story motivation for Han's freezing. (Although I guess maybe you could rationalize it by saying that it was just Cloud City's specific carbon-freezing unit that had never been rated for live use, or something.) And now, as Reverend says, there's a canon story saying that it does work to preserve life for decades, so I guess the new intention is that it is the equivalent of normal sci-fi cryosleep. Which I don't think is what the writers of TESB intended.
I beg to differ. C-3PO understood what was happening to Han in Cloud City, and realized that Han would "be quite well protected," if Han survived the freezing process. That explicit dialog tells us not only that encasing someone in carbonite had been used before as an effective means of hibernation, but also that there was a known risk in the freezing process itself. It is clearly the intent of the writers of TESB that this is an application of previously established processes that always had known risks but which nevertheless could work. That known risk provides us, the viewers, with a plausible explanation for why it's not done more often. Furthermore, there's no reason why that risk couldn't have applied in that episode in The Clone Wars. Anakin's confidence could have sprung simply from his having seen the future that it worked.
Actually that TCW episode makes tESB make MORE sense, not less. 1) Vader knows it works because it is totally a done thing and he's not just making up an improbably feasible method of stasis out of unrelated industrial equipment. 2) He still needs Solo as a canary because (as he & Lando quite specifically say) the facility is crude and only used for carbon-freezing. As in not expressly built for medical use as the one at the temple was and as such he has to make sure it's set right for humans before he can risk shoving Luke in the thing. 3) Lando tells Han "you're being put into carbon-freeze". If this were some new technique that line wouldn't make any sense as Han would have no idea what he means. That nobody questions it says, it is indeed a known technique. Indeed, even 3PO knew what was going on.
Well, what I was thinking was that maybe carbon freezing was a familiar and proven technique for, say, preserving perishable foodstuffs or something, but not normally rated for human use. Lando's line was, "We only use this facility for carbon freezing. If you put him in there, it might kill him." That pretty unambiguously suggests that carbon freezing, in general, is not something people consider conducive to human safety. In context with Vader's line about it being crude but adequate, maybe the idea was that there are various related forms of freezing technology, and carbon freezing was the crudest, least safe version. But of course, when an idea is introduced in a fictional franchise, later writers tend to reuse it to the point of oversimplification, so carbon freezing became treated as the only freezing method.
As I said, that was the whole reason for freezing Han -- because they weren't sure it was safe and needed to test it before using it on Luke. I just quoted Lando's actual dialogue saying "it might kill him." Even if it had been done successfully before, it must've also failed before. They knew it could theoretically work, but it was a far cry from being a reliably safe, routine practice.
That or Vader just wanted one more excuse to cause some pain to Luke's friends before handing Solo off to Boba Fett.
For me, the clincher is Threepio's reaction. He's a protocol droid, not a medical droid or a mining droid and as we see later on, he can't tell a power socket from a computer terminal. If he knows it works, then it's a good chance it's a well known method of stasis. All of this information in in tESB and has nothing to do with later writers taking liberties. Indeed, one of those "later writers" was Lucas himself as he oversaw the Clone Wars show, including the episode where it was shown how Vader had first hand knowledge of the process. If the suggestion had been brought up and it wasn't in tune with his original intent, you can bet he'd have said "no, that's not how it works."