One of the best things about Star Wars regardless of what phase of the franchise you started with is the world that it can suggest. A passing line about the Clone Wars suggests an intriguing history that then can play out as its own series, or a mercenary can have less than ten lines and become a legend. Like many things in the course of production, the different colors of the lightsaber came down to production decisions. Having two white lightsabers fight made it hard to differentiate the blades, so the blades were turned to blue and red. When blue clashed against the blue sky, green was added. When a major star like Samuel L. Jackson wants a purple saber, another color is added. But just because these are production considerations, the story that they suggest has been built on, discarded, and then built on again. Whether it’s through the Expanding Universe or through the Disney canon, the colors of the lightsabers have evolved and gained meaning for the force user that wielded them. Some of the characters that have become tied to the color of their lightsabers, like Ahsoka’s white lightsabers or the Darksaber of the Mandalorians have helped to refine and define what the colors might mean, even when they don’t particularly mean that much. So what is the difference between canon and the Expanded Universe, and what do all the colors mean? We’ll take a look at what the colors use to mean, what some of the colors mean now, and what they might mean in the future as the Star Wars universe expands under the Disney stewardship.
