Old Characters Who Would've Made The Force Awakens Better

As anyone who's seen trailers and posters for The Force Awakens knows, old characters like Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca, C3PO, and R2D2 make up a sizable chunk of the film's cast. But not every old character could make the cut, often because they're dead. This is a shame because, as awesome as The Force Awakens is, and as welcome as the new characters are, the film would have been extra awesome simply by reintroducing some of the following old favorites. And, of course, major spoilers follow...

Han's fellow pilot and old friend (the Empire Strikes Back betrayal notwithstanding), Lando Calrissian is conspicuous by his absence in The Force Awakens, despite surviving Return Of The Jedi alive, healthy, and heroic. Having him appear alongside Han and Chewie, or making him an "old friend" they consult along the way to Luke, would have made the rapturous applause the audience gave every other classic character even louder and longer-lasting. Especially if it means we got to see Cloud City again.

Luckily, we may get our wish to see Lando yet. In an interview with Vanity Fair several months before The Force Awakens premiered, the film's writer Lawrence Kasdan addressed Lando's future, saying, "right now, there's no Lando Calrissian in this movie. But Lando I don't think is finished in any way, shape, or form." So don't be shocked to see the real Two-Face grace our screens come Episode VIII, IX, or whatever else Disney wants to do after that (and with the money they're making, expect a lot more after that).

Boba Fett is easily the most badass, iconic character in Star Wars history who didn't actually do anything. He delivers Solo to Jabba but, other than that, he mostly stands around, looks cool, and gets eaten. Plus, with the entire Expanded Universe demoted to "legend" status (fictional stories about the Star Wars universe, within the Star Wars universe), any story of Fett scratching and clawing to escape his Sarlacc-guts fate is just that: a story.

Sadly, director J.J. Abrams hasn't turned these stories back into canon, and Fett hasn't returned for The Force Awakens. It would've been easy—even with his sad end in Jedi, Boba Fett is absolutely believable as a guy who could blast his way out of a giant everything-eating plant/worm. Besides, with Han still around (for most of the film, anyway) why wouldn't somebody want to pay Boba to finish him off for good? Yes, Fett's getting his own movie in 2020, but it's a shame Disney's making us wait that long to see him.

Speaking of Boba Fett, there's no reason not to give us at least a cameo appearance by the creature that's currently digesting the poor bounty hunter for another 970 years: the Sarlacc. There's never any mention that the one we see in Return Of The Jedi is the only one in the galaxy, so there's no reason for our heroes to not have stumbled upon one while searching for Luke and fighting the First Order. Abrams appears to have teased us a bit, with the scene where Poe's X-Wing gets swallowed up by an unseen sand monster on Jakku, but we never get any official indication that it's a Sarlacc. Our own headcanon can pretend it was (in which case, have fun digesting metal for a millennia) but, until we actually see that lovably hungry scamp, all we can do is dream.

Poe Dameron, Finn's X-Wing pilot buddy, is a great addition to The Force Awakens, but he would've benefited even more by having his predecessor, Wedge Antilles, appear as a mentor of sorts. The appearance of a legendary pilot like Wedge—one of the few non-Luke Rebel pilots to survive Return Of The Jedi—would've provided an unspeakably high morale boost for the new Resistance. Plus, just because he's older, doesn't mean he couldn't climb into a cockpit himself and show Poe exactly how to take down a giant space weapon or two.

Sadly, we're not likely to see Wedge in any future installments for the same reason we didn't see him in The Force Awakens—the actor playing him didn't want to do it. During a screening of his movie The Machine, Denis Lawson confirmed that Disney did indeed ask him to portray Wedge in the new film, but he turned them down because "it just would have bored me." According to a report by BirthMoviesDeath, the issue appears to be that Wedge would have continued to be a minor character, and that wasn't satisfactory enough for Lawson. We don't disagree—Wedge might not be Luke-and-Leia important, but his accomplishments more than warrant him screen time beyond a mere quick cameo.

Unlike Boba Fett, Samuel L. Jackson's Mace Windu character is unequivocally, undeniably dead. Getting zapped with Force lightning, being thrown through the air, and falling hundreds of feet to your doom isn't good for anyone's health, and no story since has mentioned him at all. So, as far as we can tell, Windu absolutely dies in Revenge of the Sith, which is a major bummer part of the final prequel. If anyone deserved to survive the great Jedi purge that was Order 66, it was him. Why? Because it's Samuel L. Jackson.

But that doesn't mean Windu has to stay dead—this is science-fantasy, after all, where people miraculously survive death more than soap opera villains. Plus, as we've stated, it's Samuel L. Jackson. Very few characters could get away with cheating death without explanation, but anybody played by him is one of them. If they had turned him evil, so as to retain Luke Skywalker's "last Jedi" status, that would've been perfectly fine. It's not like Jackson can't play a believable baddie. And, let's face it—a lightsaber battle between Darth Windu and Rey would have been so epic, one could only describe it using Jackson's favorite worlds, which are all way too salty for this site.

If Boba Fett was the coolest disappointment in Star Wars lore, Darth Maul is easily the biggest tease. One of the only good parts of The Phantom Menace, Maul's devil makeup and double-sided lightsaber made him instantly iconic, and his ignominious death at the hands of Obi-Wan Kenobi left many of us with an empty feeling of "that's it?" Seeing him again in The Force Awakens would've allowed us to forgive at least one of Menace's many, many mistakes.

And best of all, it wouldn't be screwing with canon to resurrect Maul, because he's not dead! In the Clone Wars animated series, Maul returns as a half-cyborg, with the upper half of his body surgically grafted onto a robot torso. So now he's a Satanic Terminator—how could that not instantly make any movie extra cool? He'd probably be super-dangerous to both sides too, since he's been betrayed time and again by the Dark Side, but is too corrupted to ever move to the Light. It's probably best for Kylo Ren's future that Maul didn't come back, since an unstable, enraged, highly skilled, wild-card robo-devil would quickly overshadow anything a Vader-wannabe throwing Anakin-style temper tantrums could ever hope to accomplish.