The Mandalorian season 3’s third episode contains several Star Wars Legends Easter eggs, bringing locations, lore, and foodstuffs from the now-bygone continuity into the current canon. While Legends (formerly known as the Expanded Universe) was relegated to an alternate timeline in April 2014, its various non-movie materials have served as a wellspring of ideas for the ongoing canon. The Star Wars sequel trilogy and The Mandalorian often reimagine elements of the Legends continuity or simply reference its lore, as The Mandalorian particularly often does.
The Mandalorian season 3, episode 3 “Chapter 19: The Convert” includes notable Legends references when Dr. Pershing travels through Coruscant via air taxi. The taxi’s droid driver mentions two Legends-era Coruscant locations - the Skydome Botanical Gardens and the Holographic Museum of Extinct Animals - as well as Mysess blossoms and mantabogs, which are Legends-era flora and fauna. Pershing and other former Imperials also mention travel biscuits, a Legends-introduced food.
The Mandalorian's Star Wars Legends References Explained
The Skydome Botanical Gardens and the Holographic Museum of Extinct Animals both appeared in The Jedi Academy Trilogy of novels by Kevin J. Anderson, with the former debuting in Jedi Search and the latter in Dark Apprentice. Mysess blossoms appeared in the Legends-era MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies as a rare plant found on Kashyyyk, while the mantabogs of Malastare are referenced in the 2003 sourcebook Coruscant and the Core Worlds. Travel biscuits appeared in both Star Wars Galaxies and The New Jedi Order: Balance Point by Kathy Tyers, though in Legends, they are simply nutritious biscuits with long shelf lives, not Imperial rations,
Coruscant Was Created By Legends As Much As Lucas
The idea of the Imperial capital being a planet-wide city is one of George Lucas’ oldest concepts for the Star Wars franchise. The Imperial Center was once planned to be the setting of Return of the Jedi’s action-packed finale on a world called Had Abaddon (a name later used for a different Legends-era planet), but the limitations of filmmaking technology made it impossible. While the Empire’s capital is mentioned and shown in part in Marvel’s classic Star Wars comics, the planet is featured for the first time in greater detail in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, where the name Coruscant also debuted.
When Coruscant finally made its first live-action appearances in Return of the Jedi’s 1997 Special Edition and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, it notably resembled the Coruscant described in Zahn’s novel and is referred to as Coruscant rather than Had Abaddon, demonstrating how seriously Lucas and Lucasfilm took the then-Expanded Universe at the time. Coruscant is as much the Legends timeline’s creation as Lucas’, so bringing its more obscure elements into the current canon is fitting. The Mandalorian season 3’s Easter eggs show that the current canon’s Coruscant closely resembles its Star Wars Legends counterpart, in ways large and obscure.