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Atha Prime To Be Canonized Into Star Wars Continuity…Again

Posted by Chris on 10/24/24 at 07:05 AM Category: Star Wars Misc, NYCC, Kenner

https://www.banthaskull.com/images/news/imperial_sentinel2.jpg

It's hard to not call this story bizarre, and I absolutely love it. Like a movie begging for Oscar recognition, we'll tell the last part first, and then fill in the backstory. If you're a fan of deep cuts, it would be hard not to consider the news coming out of NYCC as seismic. There is
a new ongoing comic series coming soon called Jedi Knights, which will follow the stories of prequel trilogy Jedi before the events of Episode I. According to Gizmodo, writer Marc Guggenheim announced that the character Atha Prime would be canonized into Star Wars continuity. They write:

Pitched in the style of Marvel’s famous Two In One anthology series, Jedi Knights will pair characters new and old from across the Order for new adventures. One of these will apparently feature the canonical debut of a truly deep cut in a story, appropriately titled “The Deepest Cut.”

That story, Guggenheim announced to a room of Star Wars fans flummoxed into silence, will feature the first appearance in current Star Wars continuity of Atha Prime.

Some of you are reading that name and saying "who?" while others are doing the Nicholson nod:

Nicholson nod

For those of you in the first group, it's time to take the story back to the beginning. We have to go all the way back to the vintage Kenner era. By 1985, the Star Wars line was dying. With no new entertainment, sales were slumping. In an effort to reinvigorate the line, Kenner pitched continuing the story via the toy line. This narrative would center around the antagonist Atha Prime. In their presentation binder, Kenner described the character as such:

A powerful force long kept in exile in a remote fringe of the galaxy has been released by the death of the Emperor. It moves now, like a plague, securing control over the shattered remnants of the empire and re-enslaving newly freed worlds. Atha Prme, genetics master, ruler of the dark worlds and architect of the Clone Wars, is free again. His advanced army of combat clones has already decimated rebel outposts along the galactic frontier. His goal is to crush forever the Rebel Alliance and control the Galaxy.

So Lucasfilm is about to canonize a character wholly invented by a toy company that as been absorbed into Hasbro, right? Not quite. While Kenner did invent the story, the visual design was lifted entirely from Return of the Jedi concept art. The design is almost a verbatim swipe of Nilo Rodis-Jamero's concept painting for the Emperor's Royal Guard. If you think this story is starting to feel like the snake eating its tail, it's not even done.

You will notice that the tile says that Atha Prime is getting canonized again. That's because it once existed in Star Wars continuity prior to Disney's great "EU purge". Sort of. If you count the visuals, that is. The Imperial Sentinel, which was also based off of the Emperor's Royal Guard concept art, was featured in the now Legends Dark Empire comics. To further continue the madness, Kenner, which was still operating as a division of Hasbro, introduced an Imperial Sential figure in 1998. That is effectively an Atha Prime figure.

So to recap, this is a character that started life as a LFL concept art, which was then reappropriated by Kenner as the antagonist for a toy line that never happened, which was then visually introduced into a canon comic book, which was de-canonized, and the character will now be introduced into a new canon comic book.

Linguo

So, yeah, I'll probably start campaigning for an Atha Prime figure on a Power of the Force (85) card to tribute the line that never was, but will soon be canon.


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