But alas, it's a myth that many people buy into.
Yes, but my point is that it's a smaller percentage of the audience than we assume. They dominate the internet, but online-active people are not a statistically representative sample of the whole, because they're a self-selected minority representing the more active, engaged subset of fandom. Also, self-selected commenters are always biased toward those with negative opinions, because people are more likely to speak up about things that bother them than things they're satisfied with. So online activity creates the misconception that critics and purists are a much larger percentage of the audience than they really are.
For instance, online reaction to
Star Trek 2009 made it seem that the movie was widely hated and a complete failure, but the actual box office returns proved it was quite popular with audiences, pretty much the most financially successful Trek movie of all time.
And there was an element of truth in the pre-Disney Lucasfilm attitude: at the time, SW novels were fewer in number, lower in frequency of release, and probably more tightly controlled, than ST novels, and while I distinctly remember that the initial plan was for 12 movies, the "official story" on the number of planned movies quickly dropped to 9, then to 6. So it wasn't difficult to treat the novels as canonical, even if the novelization of the first film characterized Palpatine as a puppet, and even if the very first original SW novel, ADF's Splinter of the Mind's eye, suggested a Luke/Leia romance.
No, that does not agree with my memory of how it was at the time. Not only were there a substantial number of novels, but there were plenty of comics and video games that were also claimed to be canonical, and that were required to treat each other as canonical even when new movies and shows ignored them. And it did require a lot of bending over backward to retroactively reconcile early works like
Splinter and the original Marvel Comics series with the novel/comic/game continuity that began in the '90s with
Dark Empire and the Thrawn trilogy, just as it required a lot of convolutions and retconning to adjust the so-called "canonical" tie-ins to fit when new movies and
Clone Wars stories contradicted them. It's completely rewriting history to claim it "wasn't difficult." It was a mess. The official party line was that it all fit together, but that was always a pretense.
I think the Arnoldian attitude out of the studio in the late 80s was basically, "it's not Star Trek, don't waste your money and your time." The point I'm trying to make was the official policy for a long time -- I feel it's more of a benign neglect now -- was that fans shouldn't engage with the tie-ins, and the studio was actively inhibiting the business of their licensees by telling their customers not to bother. A canon policy as rigid as the Arnoldian policy is, imho, destructive to fandom.
Well, I find that hard to reconcile with how successful the tie-ins were in the late '80s and '90s, when the Pocket novels' output increased from six per year to two dozen per year and there were almost always one or more Trek comics series coming out monthly. I was a customer of the tie-ins at the time, and I certainly don't remember the studio ever telling me not to bother. I know they discouraged continuity between novels and comics, but my whole point is that it's a false premise that continuity is a prerequisite for value.
Eh, I think a lot of casual fans pick up on this, for better or for worse. Guy in my STA group was enthusing to me about IDW's Star Trek continuation comics last year (the new ongoing, I forget what it's called, I haven't read it), and kept adding, "it's canon!" (I try to not be an obnoxious superfan in person (only on the Internet) so I just smiled and nodded.)
I'll agree that it's more common now due to the influence of the internet. But I don't agree with Allyn's premise that it was important to that many fans back in the era when Richard Arnold had influence. After all, there had been no tie-in continuity to speak of in the '70s and early '80s, and the loose novel continuity that emerged in the mid-'80s was piecemeal and never encompassed all the books. So any regular reader, like I was, would have been accustomed to different Trek novels and comics contradicting each other, offering alternative interpretations of the universe. That was the norm, and continuity was the exception. To me, that range of different interpretations was a feature, not a bug, because it was interesting to explore different authors' variations on a theme, the way writers like Joe Haldeman and David Gerrold and Vonda McIntyre and Diane Duane -- and heck, even the likes of Marshak & Culbreath and Sonni Cooper, in their ways -- filtered Trek through their own authorial styles and imaginations and made it their own.
I don't think fandom started obsessing over canon until the 1989 Roddenberry/Arnold memo -- and the Lucasfilm policy toward SW tie-ins -- instilled audiences with the false perception that canon is an official policy dictated from on high, that a work of fiction needs a seal of approval from an authority in order to "count," rather than just being a story for enjoyment.
