Star Wars Unplugged
Star Wars has awakened from a long slumber and there is no knowing where this lumbering giant will take us but we are all expecting a rampage through box office records and fandom discussion forums. Let’s face it, people love to hate on Star Wars and George Lucas and now that George Lucas has walked away from the Empire (or, the New Order) it’s open season on any new memes, tropes, or snipes that come out of J.J. Abrams’ retooling of the Star Wars universe for Disney. But let’s all be clear about one thing: while Star Wars is no longer George Lucas’ story to tell, it is NOT J.J. Abrams’ story to tell. Star Wars is now exactly what George Lucas said the original movie was to his cast and crew in 1975: “It’s a Disney movie”.
We’re not in Lucas Land any more, children. Be prepared for a whole new range of Star Wars canonistic arguments. The fan wiki sites are already trembling with doubt and the hints of debate over what is and will be “canon”.
Not that canon really matters in the greater scheme of things. There are so many different versions of the Star Wars universe already that we devoted a page to Star Wars fan films on Xenite.Org’s newly launched Star Wars Movies portal. Oh yes. Did I neglect to mention that Xenite.Org added a Star Wars section to its science fiction movies portal earlier this week? It was months in the planning, almost weeks in the making. Hey, we saw the movie coming so we figured, “Why not add a Star Wars portal to Xenite.Org?”
You can argue that Lucas ruined the franchise if you want to but it is still one of the most successful film franchises of all time and Disney paid Mr. Lucas a cool $4 billion to hand over the keys to his kingdom. That’s a lot of money for “ruin”. And who doesn’t expect Disney to turn Star Wars into a money-making machine? Lucas may have proven that you can franchise every film into a huge merchandising empire but Disney will take this monstrosity to new heights.
And along the way they will bring in some killer directors to tell some rollicking good stories. No one will much care if the Disney machine is churning out candy as long as it’s good candy, so let’s hope for the best.
But what may go missing in the coming years is George Lucas’ overarching vision. As the franchise passes through the hands of new generations of directors and screenwriters there will be divergences in the Force. The soap opera in space that George Lucas was sharing with us has for all intents and purposes come to an end. We were not really in a Disney movie before; George just wanted it to feel that way. Now we have a real Disney movie.
Early reviews from fans and critics are mostly ecstatic. I think that’s a good thing because every story eventually has to evolve or it will grow stale and boring. Sometimes I felt George evolved his story too much in response to criticisms. Take the infamous “Han fire first” controversy. Why did George Lucas change the scene? Because the MPAA insisted that the original scene was too intense, too “adult” for a G or PG rating. Han, you cold-blooded murderer, you. You should have waited for Greedo to blow you away before reaching for the blaster. Yeah, that was an adult move, but it was better the way it was originally told than the way George changed it to satisfy a movie industry association.
You can’t really blame George Lucas for not wanting to put up with the abuse any more. Fan ignorance drives much vitriol and it is by no means limited to Star Wars fandom. Pick any topic in the science fiction and fantasy genres and you’ll find idiots and snarks drooling over the dumbest ideas. We’re still trying to get people to understand that, yes, there is racism in Middle-earth; it’s there to show readers what a bad thing it is, not to put down minorities and uphold the idiocy of white supremacists (who are all descended from Black African ancestors, which makes the dark-skinned folks the real “pure bloods” of the human race). You have to have Neanderthal DNA to be a white supremacist (and I apologize to Neanderthals for associating them with a sub-human species).
Lucas incorporated racism into the Star Wars universe, too. He wanted to make a point about how racism harms us but I think it was largely missed. Will the new Disney Star Wars universe acknowledge racism and help wage a war of enlightenment or will political correctness win out? The Disney track record on racism is hardly stellar by any measurement. They have gone too far in some directions and then too far in the opposite directions. Then again, no one seems to be happy with Disney on racism so maybe they are in the Goldilocks Zone of doing something right because they have pissed off everyone.
There are good moments in the George Lucas movies. They are memorable and in some cases even incredible moments. In fact this week I celebrated some of those good great moments with an article on Top Ten Topia called “Ten Unforgettable Star Wars Movies Moments”. The Lucasian Star Wars films will fade into history. They no longer define The Canon. There is a new canon, now. A stronger canon. It will root out fandom corruption and bring about order to the galaxy of opinions and likes and dislikes. You don’t have to like the new canon but you will have to live with it.
Unless a quiet rebellion grows up. The immediate reaction to the Disney movie has so far been incredibly positive (although that first teaser trailer they released last year led to some rocky moments). But fans are fickle. They will love you during the honeymoon period and start picking apart your story lines at the seams. It is inevitable. J.J. Abrams is understandably nervous about following in the footsteps of George Lucas. “When six Star Wars films and three television specials you have made, not so calm will you look, hm?” as Yoda might say.
In a way Lucas has helped Abrams by killing off some of the best characters in the Star Wars universe: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Mace Windu, Yoda. They are all gone. You have to start with almost a clean slate now. Sure, Han, Chewie, Leia, and Luke will be back but they are really the old-timers who are passing the mantle of protecting the galaxy from the Dark Side of the Force to a new generation. In time they will fade away and be almost forgotten.
We cannot go back, no matter how badly we want to, and live new adventures with those characters. Instead of rebooting the franchise Disney is taking the conservative approach of just continuing on with older heroes. It’s a safe bet because the actors are still available and because — let’s be honest — they can always reboot the franchise in the future. If this new Star Wars trilogy starts out with a bang but ends with a wimper (and history shows that is how the first two Star Wars trilogies ended) then some enterprising executive at Disney can always send out an email saying, “Maybe we should reboot the franchise”.
Given the way Hollywood regurgitates film franchises, it’s not a matter of “IF” they reboot but “WHEN”. That day is coming. May the Force be With Us when it happens.
But lest you start shaking in your boots, remember that other huge franchise that has produced six big movies: Middle-earth. It will be years before someone works up the nerve to reboot Middle-earth and retool it away from Peter Jackson’s vision. In that respect Star Wars is very much like Tolkien’s literary creation. It carries the momentum of established tradition.
In another article I wrote this week I looked at how Star Wars is like The Lord of the Rings. This is an old, old topic that has been done to death over the decades. I approached it reluctantly but I needed to publish something on the Middle-earth blog and I was in a Star Wars state of mind. So I decided to see what I could say that I had not already read elsewhere.
Comparisons with other franchises are part of the territory but once again Star Wars is blazing new trails. It will be to Star Wars that other franchises are compared when new minds and visions take control over the properties. You could say that has already happened in the fractured Marvel cinematic universe but I don’t think so, not in the same way. We can point to the changes in the character of the Hulk (from1980s TV show to several 2000s cinematic retoolings). And we can point to re-imaginings of characters like Nick Fury (originally played by David Hasselhoff) and Captain America or Thor. But those earlier productions were not part of a single massively coordinated franchise.
The Avengers franchise may be heading into “Phase Three” but it is still in Generation One. Star Wars and Star Wars alone has moved into Generation Two, unless you want to somehow compare Star Wars to James Bond. But the James Bond franchise went batshit crazy before it was finally rebooted with Daniel Craig. Yes, you knew “Casino Royale” was a reboot, right? Never mind the fact that Judy Dench appeared at the end of the first series of movies and then started the second series of movies. Actually, I think James Bond is still batshit crazy.
We can’t easily pass the torch from one generation to the next in any franchise, but Disney paid Lucas to give it a shot and when Lucas saw what was happening with his baby he just walked away. Like it or not, we’re now in Generation Two and the reboot card has yet to be played. So Star Wars hasn’t yet gone batshit crazy and maybe it won’t have to. But it will be different. It will be very different.
This is exciting to me. This is something new. I welcomed the new “Planet of the Apes” reboots (two of them) before losing interest because they went all batshit crazy really fast. But having been burned I am still a moth easily drawn to the flames. We’re talking about Star Wars here and there has been nothing like it in the last 100 years. That is what George Lucas did for us. That is what we cannot take away from him.
All you Jar Jar haters completely missed the point. The point is that George Lucas wanted to tell a story that was so interesting, so compelling, that we would come back for more. He lost viewers with the 2nd and 3rd movies in both the trilogies but when “The Phantom Menace” came out more people went to see Star Wars than had ever been before and than would see the next two movies.
That may be what’s happening now. The record advance ticket sales may just be a collective release of fannish tensions, of people having grown tired of hating what they want to love, and so they are flocking to the theaters to find love again. But they may still be looking for love in all the wrong places. It’s only a matter of time before fandom goes batshit crazy again and starts hating on this Generation Two Star Wars.
When that happens there will be die-hard fans who, knowing no other movies, will defend the new trilogy to the death. Old geezers who long for the original “Star Wars” (before the dark times, before the trilogies) will be as incomprehensible to new generations of fans as Alec Guinness’ distaste for the movies was to the original generation of fans. It’s easy to predict fannish hate and vitriol. That is, unfortunately, what science fiction fans have become: haters, vitriolic judgmentalists, unsatisfied cry-babies who complain about every little detail that doesn’t meet their formulaic expectations.
Science fiction fandom matured a little bit when “Star Wars” was released in 1977. People started coming out as “science fiction fans”, having hidden their genre book collections for years because they didn’t want the mundanes to ridicule them. Now WE are the masters and WE ridicule the mundanes. But the lesson of “Star Wars” has been lost on two generations of squabbling, opinionated, power-engorged fandoms who have turned away from the Enlightened Side of fiction to the Darkened Side of whining. It’s not even criticism. It’s just whining and complaining.
The Jar Jar Binks you hate was the pivotal character that George Lucas needed to turn the galaxy from an enlightened republic into an oppressed empire. It would not have worked if someone like Padme or Bail Organa had proposed the creation of the Grand Army of the Republic. The political about-face had to be engineered without ruining the characters who served as sacrificial heroes to the story; hence, you need a Jar Jar Binks, who can be easily influenced by the Force without completely losing his innocence. Jar Jar is the one character who doesn’t need redemption because he really was acting with everyone’s best interests in mind.
And the fans treated him badly, treated Lucas badly. It will go no better for some future character in the Star Wars universe. At some point some good story-teller is going to devise a character that has a deeper purpose and fans won’t understand or appreciate that deeper purpose and they will turn on Disney, on its characters, and they will chew them up the way they chewed up George Lucas and Jar Jar Binks.
Star Wars was George’s story to tell but instead of just accepting the story for what it was many people leaped up and yelled out, “No! Tell the story THIS way!” Thinking they were in an “I am Spartacus!” moment the fans became the villains of the saga, launching wave after wave of attacks against the man who brought them all together, just as the Clone Troopers turned on the Jedi and became Imperial Stormtroopers. The irony of the sick and vicious hatred that took hold of science fiction fandom has not been lost on me. I have rarely seen so many people so willingly turn to the Dark Side with such glee and abandon.
So this is how pure science fiction fandom dies. With thunderous applause as George Lucas leaves the Star Wars building forever and the fans descend into the chaos of a New Order of their own making.
May the Force bring balance back to the fandom, for the fans surely cannot do so by themselves. Good luck, Disney. You’re going to need it after the honeymoon is over.