Lets talk all things Star Wars
- Status
joberg
Legendary Member
Riceball
Master Member
I doubt it. As CXO that person is usually so high up in the company hierarchy that they only answer to the company's CEO or President, so I'd be very surprised if he would still report to KK after this promotion, very surprised. I did see something, but didn't watch or read it, that said that they would work together, apparently as equals. This may or may not mean that KK is, at the very least, being sidelined, if not kicked out, but sidelined most likely. With FIloni taking on this new position, Disney will most likely give KK some kind of promotion that sounds flashy and prestigious but would take her away from making any decisions on productions, or at least anything that has to do with Star Wars.
Solo4114
Master Member
I think what this is is a reorganization that recognizes that KK doesn't really have a great sense for what to do story-wise, and needs a guy with vision. She's in charge of the money and making things work production-wise, he's in charge of the vision and directing the general flow of the storytelling, which also means picking projects and probably setting a "house style."
Say what you will about his choices, but Filoni at least has a vision and a coherent sense of what Star Wars is to him. I think the company badly needs that kind of leadership, and it was lacking with KK. KK is, fundamentally, a money-person. She understands certain aspects of production and while she's been generally successful, I think she's also demonstrated some poor oversight in recent years and some misunderstandings of what her brands really are and how valuable they actually are. She made some canny moves, and some dumbass moves, and now here we are.
Examples:
- Setting aside all the criticisms of the prequels and TV shows, KK did recognize that the timing of release was essential to create a new generation of Star Wars fans and keep the brand front and center in the public's mind. I'd say that was a pretty canny move, although I'd argue that it came at the expense of a coherent vision for the Sequel Trilogy which more and more just seems to have had a single unifying plan of "We will get a new trilogy out, it'll be like the older stuff but updated, and it will be there in front of kids to bond with." But it did seem to work, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of kids still identify with and dig Star Wars broadly.
- As far as dumbass moves go, the two biggest I'd say were with her handling of the Solo film and the approach to Indiana Jones. Solo wasn't a bad movie. Solo was actually a decently popular movie. But the buck stops with KK for the unmitigated disaster that was Solo's production. She basically let the movie get almost to final cut before stepping in and saying "This isn't right," and then brought in Ron freakin' Howard to reshoot something like 90% of the film and change its tone. And that's all down to her and her bad decision to hire Lord & Miller, coupled with her also bad decision not to ride herd more closely on that production. With Indy, I'd say her major misstep was in badly overestimating the value of the brand itself and its cultural relevance. And yet, they spent $300M making it, and it only brought in just shy of $400M. Again, bad management.
And none of that gets into the tendency for Lucasfilm to announce some new Star Wars project, only to cancel it or allow it to languish in development hell. I don't get the point of any of that. I don't get how the decisions are being made to tap a person, go public with the selection, and then....nothing for years until it's canceled, dropped, or fades from public memory and into oblivion.
I don't think she's up to the task of having a vision for story, but I think Filoni is. I think he and Favreau have gotten the closest to emulating Lucas' approach and style, while still also having some interesting original ideas. Honestly, I've really enjoyed everything that's come out from them that I've seen. I haven't seen everything, of course, but I've dug all of it for what it is. It feels "Star Warsy" to me, and I think that's why they're tapping him.
My only concern is that he may not be quite as willing to push the envelope as I'd like. I'd love to see Star Wars move beyond the "classic" era and beyond "classic" tropes. Jedi vs. Sith, Rebels vs. Empire (or Quasi-Rebels vs. Quasi-Empire, a la the ST), trilogies as "the format", etc.
I'd like to see Star Wars move beyond that. I mean, you can still play around in that arena. There are plenty of "classic" stories to be told and they can be told in plenty of different ways (Andor certainly proved that). But as I see it, Star Wars is a setting, a backdrop that can serve as a vehicle for all kinds of storytelling provided it happens within a certain framework. I think Filoni has a pretty good handle on what the core of that framework is. I'm just curious what he thinks the outer bounds are.
Does it really matter who runs Lucasfilm at this point? There's certainly fans salivating at this announcement, but it's semantic at best. The only person who might be affected by this title change is Filoni himself. He isn't the "savior" of Star Wars, and frankly, never was. I know there's a subset of the fandom who thinks he's King Midas, but the brand on the whole is in decline. It's natural for a 50 year old brand to lose its relevance and popularity as the years race on. It's only a bad thing if you have nothing else to enjoy.
Despite the current popularity among children that always gets cited as evidence of the brand having a new generation of fans to carry the torch, it's highly unlikely that they'll continue caring into adulthood enough to keep Star Wars alive. The only reason why so many of them even care at all is because the original Star Wars generation hyped these kids up to try and think the way we do, but those kids have far more options than we did. Nostalgia alone can't keep a story alive if the generation who inherits it doesn't value the past.
Trust me, when the original Star Wars generation dies off, most of the fandom likely will too. The Tik Tok generation has their own heroes to admire. They ultimately don't care about the heroes their parents admire because so much of what Gen Z values is disposable at best. Think about it. 98% of Tik Tok consists of 20 second videos of people lip synching to popular music they don't have the talent themselves to make, and THIS is the generation who is supposed to bring Star Wars into the future? Please.
Why would they care about a 50 year old movie series their parents loved? That's lame to them, but that's also the natural order of things. I have no expectation about whether my future children will like the things I do. They aren't meant to be the surrogates of my personal interests. If they want to enjoy the things I do, great, but I want them to have their own things and there's nothing wrong with either generation thinking of the other's tastes as lame, especially when they're teenagers. I don't base my interests on the opinions of others and neither should they.
My dad grew up idolizing the Beatles, and I enjoy their music, but I have my own musical icons. It would be silly for him to expect that I love his favorite band, yet we have this expectation that our kids will love Star Wars the way we do, despite them never having experienced what we did growing up? That's unrealistic.
Deep down I think that's partly why the current iterations of our childhood icons mostly suck, because we kept telling our kids that they needed to worship our idols when we could have been out there making our own, choosing instead to retell stories that ended decades ago rather than having the guts to create something totally new. It's no wonder remix culture is so rampant and why the icons of our youth have only diminished because we can't accept them being part of the past.
Despite the current popularity among children that always gets cited as evidence of the brand having a new generation of fans to carry the torch, it's highly unlikely that they'll continue caring into adulthood enough to keep Star Wars alive. The only reason why so many of them even care at all is because the original Star Wars generation hyped these kids up to try and think the way we do, but those kids have far more options than we did. Nostalgia alone can't keep a story alive if the generation who inherits it doesn't value the past.
Trust me, when the original Star Wars generation dies off, most of the fandom likely will too. The Tik Tok generation has their own heroes to admire. They ultimately don't care about the heroes their parents admire because so much of what Gen Z values is disposable at best. Think about it. 98% of Tik Tok consists of 20 second videos of people lip synching to popular music they don't have the talent themselves to make, and THIS is the generation who is supposed to bring Star Wars into the future? Please.
Why would they care about a 50 year old movie series their parents loved? That's lame to them, but that's also the natural order of things. I have no expectation about whether my future children will like the things I do. They aren't meant to be the surrogates of my personal interests. If they want to enjoy the things I do, great, but I want them to have their own things and there's nothing wrong with either generation thinking of the other's tastes as lame, especially when they're teenagers. I don't base my interests on the opinions of others and neither should they.
My dad grew up idolizing the Beatles, and I enjoy their music, but I have my own musical icons. It would be silly for him to expect that I love his favorite band, yet we have this expectation that our kids will love Star Wars the way we do, despite them never having experienced what we did growing up? That's unrealistic.
Deep down I think that's partly why the current iterations of our childhood icons mostly suck, because we kept telling our kids that they needed to worship our idols when we could have been out there making our own, choosing instead to retell stories that ended decades ago rather than having the guts to create something totally new. It's no wonder remix culture is so rampant and why the icons of our youth have only diminished because we can't accept them being part of the past.
Last edited:
Riceball
Master Member
I strongly disagree, by putting Filoni in charge means that Star Wars, and likely Disney as a whole, has a creative mind in charge of production now and for Star Wars in particular, has a singular creative mind that's over all in charge, something that the IP hasn't really had since it was sold to Disney. That should, hopefully, right the ship that is Star Wars and fix some of the things that Disney got wrong previously because I don't think that any aside from Luca himself understands Star Wars more than Filoni and whether or not you like his vision of Star Wars at least he has a vision for Star Wars, something that it desperately needs.
As for the future generation, I think that the kids of today that are growing up on the ST and all of the Disney + shows will continue to be fans into adulthood. So long as Disney continues to regularly produce Star Wars content to keep it fresh and relevant there will be fans. After all, the OT fans were still fans during that period between RotJ and the '90s Rennaissance where there was little to no new Star Wars content coming out. Eventually the PT came out and while derided by many OT fans, inclduing myself, it created a brand new generation of fans. The same thing is happening with the ST and the D+ shows, it's creating a new generation of fans. Eventually, if Disney is smart, they're release some more movies in another 20 - 30 years and create yet another generation of young fans. Just because the IP is 50 years old, doesn't mean that it's run its course. The Lord of the Rings is even older and it still has tons of fans, both young and old. And look at Disney itself, Mickey Mouse and his friends are still every bit as popular now as they were when Walt was still alive. So I'd argue that age really doesn't matter, as I listed above, there are plenty of old IPs out there that are still as popular as ever despite their age.
Quality stories will remain/ or become classics. The rest will be forgotten. Though I see Marvel really being the catalyst that fills the "SW generation" void in the sense that if future generations care at all about this stuff into adulthood (and I'm not sure they will) Marvel will be their poison, not Star Wars. Marvel is miles ahead of it in terms of overall reception, box office returns, and a mountain of content to choose from by comparison.
Ultimately time will be the judge of all of this.
As for Filoni being the visionary of Star Wars? I sincerely doubt that. Even George Lucas couldn't make up his mind about his own story and what it ultimately was about, and he created the whole thing. For him Star Wars was a beloved hot rod he tinkered with until he finally caved and sold it. His technical innovations were where his visionary status comes from. Filoni being mentored under George means he likely adopted the same mentality of constantly changing his mind. So I don't give much credence to Dave being a visionary because I've seen no evidence that he's innovated anything.
Ultimately time will be the judge of all of this.
As for Filoni being the visionary of Star Wars? I sincerely doubt that. Even George Lucas couldn't make up his mind about his own story and what it ultimately was about, and he created the whole thing. For him Star Wars was a beloved hot rod he tinkered with until he finally caved and sold it. His technical innovations were where his visionary status comes from. Filoni being mentored under George means he likely adopted the same mentality of constantly changing his mind. So I don't give much credence to Dave being a visionary because I've seen no evidence that he's innovated anything.
Solo4114
Master Member
I think you raise a worthwhile point in that media and culture are much broader and come at us at a much faster pace now and from a broader array of sources. I don't think anything -- Star Wars, Marvel, whatever -- can hit now the way it did in the past. And that's because consumption of media simply works differently these days.
But I also don't think there's necessarily a need for it to be consumed as it was, either to be successful or to be enjoyed. This kind of gets at a meda-discussion that we've been having across this board on a range of topics, but a lot seems to come back to the shifting nature of media consumption and production. I don't think we necessarily need to consider something "dying" or "a failure" or whatever because how it's received doesn't conform to our past understandings of success. What constitutes a "success" over time is going to change. Much, of course, depends on the budget spent to make it (i.e., whether it was a financial success), but that's also a separate discussion from what constitutes a good story or one that ends up being appreciated down the road.
Star Wars may die out over time. Nothing lasts forever. That's ok. But I also don't think that the last not-quite-decade is the final word on Star Wars and how the culture relates to it. It's still broadly enjoyed, including by little kids. And that matters for their propensity to consume it in the future.
Look at it this way: would you have predicted EVER that people would have positive things to say about the prequels? I wouldn't have. But there's a generation of kids that grew up on them, and grew up on The Clone Wars, and they friggin' LOVE them. Even if they admit the flaws of the films, they still just love the overall story and setting. They're adults now, sure, but they still love that stuff. We may yet see the Sequels treated that way. Or we may not. Maybe it'll be other stuff from this era that grabs people. Certainly there's a ton more content for people to enjoy, so it doesn't necessarily have to come down to just the films, which I think is a good thing.
It sounds like you don't have kids, so you may not really be aware of how people approach this stuff. I can't speak for anyone else, but I can't make my kid sit and watch anything if she resolutely doesn't want to. Moreover, while I'd like her to enjoy the stuff that I enjoy, it's more because I want to share that experience of joy with her and not about her being like, I dunno, some statement of my fandom.
Moreover, it's much more about just exposing my kid to different aspects of culture than it is about indoctrinating her. I'm not trying to teach her the "right way to fan." (I mean, within reason -- I showed her the Harmy versions.) I'm mostly just exposing her to stuff to see if she likes it and help broaden her horizons. I like sharing the things I love with her, but I don't demand that she love all of it. With Star Wars, she likes it quite a bit, but Harry Potter is way more her thing because that's what she and her friends play together. She's read all the books, seen all the movies, and is over the moon for that world, even though she also digs Star Wars.
And you know what? That's fine. It's great. She's got stuff she loves and worlds in which she can play, and that's all I really care about. I'm glad she likes Star Wars, but I'm way happier that she just has things she really enjoys and that are fantastical and a fun escape for her. That matters way more to me. Besides, as a kid, I loved all kinds of stuff. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I really got more into Star Wars, and that was in the early 90s when it was coincidentally undergoing another boom in content production.
I don't think this can be overstated, really. Star Wars has felt creatively directionless for a while. Or rather, it felt narratively directionless. There wasn't a coherent vision for the storytelling. It was, instead, sort of slapdash, one-off efforts to do this or that, but it wasn't in service to anything other than "the brand".
Look at the way the ST got produced. They had no clear sense of the story. It'd all be up to the directors to figure out their own story. And the end result is that the ST is at best uneven and at worst a bad case of narrative whipsawing. JJ's films feel like big budget fan films with really poorly told stories that are more about jumping from cool sequence to cool sequence. TLJ is a great film for most of what it does, but feels wildly out of place within that narrative, and it has some pacing issues, too. Rogue One is great, but apparently was hell to make and itself had multiple different endings and shot sequences that were wholly cut. There's a whole part where they run across the beach with the data tapes, trying to evade the Imperials. That appeared maybe in small bits in the trailer, but otherwise it was cut entirely. Think about what that means in terms of production, though. Think about the time and money wasted on those parts. And then look at Solo and the production trainwreck that that film was. Great end product which I thoroughly enjoyed, but the process of getting there basically wound up making two movies for one end product. And again, I think that's largely because they didn't have a coherent vision or in-house style, and Kennedy hasn't been up to the task of creating that.
She knows how to make movies that make money. The Sequel Trilogy definitely did that. But consider what's happened in the wake of that with the "Star Wars Stories" and the myriad films announced and never seeing any real development, I dunno. I just get the sense that she's kinda shooting in the dark because her focus is on production rather than storytelling.
Having someone with a sense of "We want to tell these kinds of stories in this kind of way," I think matters A LOT with a property like Star Wars. Towards that end, Filoni can provide it. Even if you don't love his stuff, you can't deny that he's got a point of view and it seems to me like Kathleen Kennedy's point of view is "Improve our brand position and produce money-making products." Which is also important, but which lost sight of the storytelling part with some (I think) fairly significant mistakes in the process.
Exactly. I don't think we can guess at the future of the Star Wars brand. I mean, again, nothing lasts forever, but we've seen the brand ebb and flow before, and the fandom with it.
I don't know how much of Filoni's stuff you've seen, but I don't think he's "changed his mind" about stuff. I mean, not in any meaningful way that I can think of. I think Filoni's work on The Clone Wars, Rebels, and (I guess) The Bad Batch (which I haven't seen at all yet) is the best look at his sensibilities. And while those were shows targeted at a younger audience, I think they evince a pretty clear sense of what Star Wars is and can be. The main concern I'd have is that they're all locked within a particular timeframe, and I think the franchise needs to move outside of that timeframe.
But based on what I've seen, I think he's as good a guy as any to do it, and he's the franchise's best chance at surviving longer-term.
So pretty soon, we're gonna see huge chromed rims on the Falcon, hydraulics to make the X-wings "bounce", and Star Destroyers with tint on their portholes?
I don't know why I enjoy this so much, but I do. If your a fan of Bobby Lee and his podcast you know what to expect.
I think the whole thing with Dave is KK is using him as a shield. They were damaged by that South Park episode and panicked. They want to make it look like she's not really in control. I think there are many factors that contribute to what's going on and that would be the story group as well. When the people coming up with the stories want to inject their ideology into everything instead of concentrating on a story, Dave Filoni can't fix that. So guess who the new fall guy will be when new SW projects bomb?
I saw this pic on another site and it made me laugh.
I saw this pic on another site and it made me laugh.
Solo4114
Master Member
I...can't really credit the notion that a billion dollar business like LFL is seriously influenced in its business decisions by the guys from South Park.
CB2001
Master Member
I know a lot of us know this quote from George Lucas, and have used it to show how hypocritical he was to modify the original trilogy to where the versions that made people fall in love with it in the first place doesn’t exist anymore:
The reason I brought it up is because I recently realize it applies even more and more today towards the studios. The reason Lucas said this was because studios were colorizing films for the then “modern audience”, in order to sell their films, basically destroying the visual context. That is what has happened to modern Hollywood, especially with Star Wars. They have taken works of art and have altered them for profit, but instead of modifying the visuals they’ve done it to the story. Lucas was right, and they are the barbarians. And they did it worse than anything Lucas, as the author of the Star Wars franchise could ever do when he owned it. Talk about me being late to the party. XD
The reason I brought it up is because I recently realize it applies even more and more today towards the studios. The reason Lucas said this was because studios were colorizing films for the then “modern audience”, in order to sell their films, basically destroying the visual context. That is what has happened to modern Hollywood, especially with Star Wars. They have taken works of art and have altered them for profit, but instead of modifying the visuals they’ve done it to the story. Lucas was right, and they are the barbarians. And they did it worse than anything Lucas, as the author of the Star Wars franchise could ever do when he owned it. Talk about me being late to the party. XD
When Lucas said that, I'm pretty sure he excluded himself from that remark. If anything, he probably felt that those colorizing those films weren't the original people who made them at the time and he was the original person who made Star Wars.
All the same: it does come across as hypocritical, but you raise a good point: Disney mutilated it far more than Lucas ever did.
I look forward to seeing how Dave Filoni is portrayed in the South Park sequel…
Panderverse II: Pander Harder.
Last edited:
The prequels have fans because genuine artistic mojo generates fans, period. The prequels were flawed but Lucas had aimed as high as ever with them. He injected something real & personal into the culture and people respond to that.
People worry so much about AI (and people with jobs in Hollywood should be worried). But today's big-budget corporate filmmaking is practically AI already. The human creativity & statements are being wrung out of it and replaced with a focus-grouped checklist of blockbuster components. AI is just a way to reach the same corporate finish line with fewer man-hours.
I dunno how much longer SW will last, culturally. It's definitely stalled out and free-falling. Right now it still has some altitude left to pull out of it. (If Disney is still making weak content on the current trajectory in 2030? That's gonna be harder.)
Either way, SW is showing its age now. It's full of 20th-century ideas. Spaceships are greasy mechanical hot rods. Giant empires use military weapons to take/hold economic & political power. Blowing up a planet with a Death Star is an exaggeration of blowing up a city with a nuclear bomb. Luke loses a limb and gets it replaced with a perfect mechanical one (not regrown living tissue, which seems more likely now). The various adventures show little evidence of an 'internet' of communication that permeates the galaxy. The military craft all need individual live pilots and their lives are often thrown away cheaply. Etc.
SW fiction writers can fill in the blanks with rationalizations for stuff like this, but it doesn't change the general feel of the place. SW is a distinctly 1970s view of the future. George tried to make it timeless and I dare say he did really impressive job, but it's an impossible task. Even the "timeless" fairy tales from the past generally have ties to their period & place.
Star Trek reflected the 1960s in a similar way. It was built on an idealism that imagined a lot of common social strife (racial, gender, etc) being "solved". It imaged quality-of-life being on a long-term climb for everyone. It imagined NASA having enormous budgets for generations to come. Etc.
People worry so much about AI (and people with jobs in Hollywood should be worried). But today's big-budget corporate filmmaking is practically AI already. The human creativity & statements are being wrung out of it and replaced with a focus-grouped checklist of blockbuster components. AI is just a way to reach the same corporate finish line with fewer man-hours.
I dunno how much longer SW will last, culturally. It's definitely stalled out and free-falling. Right now it still has some altitude left to pull out of it. (If Disney is still making weak content on the current trajectory in 2030? That's gonna be harder.)
Either way, SW is showing its age now. It's full of 20th-century ideas. Spaceships are greasy mechanical hot rods. Giant empires use military weapons to take/hold economic & political power. Blowing up a planet with a Death Star is an exaggeration of blowing up a city with a nuclear bomb. Luke loses a limb and gets it replaced with a perfect mechanical one (not regrown living tissue, which seems more likely now). The various adventures show little evidence of an 'internet' of communication that permeates the galaxy. The military craft all need individual live pilots and their lives are often thrown away cheaply. Etc.
SW fiction writers can fill in the blanks with rationalizations for stuff like this, but it doesn't change the general feel of the place. SW is a distinctly 1970s view of the future. George tried to make it timeless and I dare say he did really impressive job, but it's an impossible task. Even the "timeless" fairy tales from the past generally have ties to their period & place.
Star Trek reflected the 1960s in a similar way. It was built on an idealism that imagined a lot of common social strife (racial, gender, etc) being "solved". It imaged quality-of-life being on a long-term climb for everyone. It imagined NASA having enormous budgets for generations to come. Etc.
Solo4114
Master Member
But...the studios haven't altered Star Wars. Lucas did, but actually one of my biggest gripes with the Disney era of LFL is that they haven't released an "archival" version that is basically the theatrical versions, but in widescreen at 4K or higher.
The "altering" discussed here is changing the original product, not making what some think are sub-standard derivative works. As I recall, this came up in the context of some legal issues that also were popping up in the '80s, such as European courts recognizing "moral" rights to works, which resided perpetually with the author, rather than the rights-holder. The guys from Monty Python sued to prevent some station (not PBS) in the US from airing chopped-up versions of their shows, edited for American audiences. They argued on the basis of "moral rights." The colorization efforts were also swirling around at this time, too. It was kind of a hot topic because it just hadn't really come up prior to this.
I don't think Disney/LFL has altered anything about Star Wars in terms of the original stuff. What they've done is made sequels and spinoffs and TV shows that relate back to it, but they haven't changed the core stuff. If you wanted to ignore them completely, you're free to while still watching the last version Lucas himself issued of the original material he created. None of those things have been altered other than what Lucas himself altered.
There are really two main threats posed by AI.
One threat is that it would be an acceleration of the existing trends of corporate-controlled, non-creative-designed stories, where the AIs inputs are just controlled by suits and mass produced. AI just makes that approach a lot easier because it removes the current barrier for suits to actually doing it and replaces it with a baseline level of marginal competence in writing.
But the other threat, the deeper one, is that the law can't keep up with the development of technology and the AI is being developed by essentially "absorbing" the works of other people. Part of the debate around this is what you consider the way that AI engines are built. Are they "learning," or are they "compiling" in a sense? I think the distinction is really, really important. To my way of thinking, "learning" implies some basic sense of autonomy -- and therefore actual creativity -- for the AI. The argument surrounding "learning" by AIs is that the AIs "learning" process is no different from our own: we absorb large amounts of inputs over time, and then eventually create our own outputs that cannot help but be influenced by those inputs. But I would argue that, again, this presupposes that the AI is itself something other than a bunch of ones and zeroes programmed by human hands. The AI can't "learn" because the AI isn't alive, isn't sentient, and isn't autonomous. It's programming that's been written by other people. Now, maybe at some point, AIs will become so advanced that they are actually sentient, and we'll have to consider their rights and such, but we ain't there yet by a longshot. And in the meantime, the way AIs are taught is by dumping a bunch of already-created material into them, and basically letting them shuffle it around in very complex ways to spit out an end product.
It used to be that those end products were a joke. Think about all the "We forced an AI to watch 1000 hours of blah blah blah" memes, where the outputs were comically bad. Now the outputs seem creative, but are still really just the repeated shuffling of existing material based on whatever prompts you give the AI. This gets even murkier when the studios actually own the rights to specific individual works (including the rights to create derivative works from those works), but that's a whole other discussion.
I don't know how long Star Wars will last, either. I don't think anyone does. Much will depend on the nature of the stories that are told. That said, I don't think the "20th century" elements you highlight are necessarily going to hold it back. Those elements are really the surface-level stuff in Star Wars. Like, yes, I think most people who know anything about space recognize that "WWII dogfights in space" are not how that stuff would actually work. Hell, high-energy beam weapons are also not especially likely; you're far more likely to see things like railguns, with space battles operating somewhere between submarine encounters and battleship encounters where range and sensor-capacity matter a hell of a lot more than hotshot pilots and pew pew lasers.
At the same time, we're still telling stories in this modern era about people using swords, in spite of the fact that swords aren't really used in combat, and haven't been in any mass sense since probably the Franco-Prussian war when horse-mounted cavalry was last relevant. (Yes, I know there are WWII standouts like the Polish cavalry and Japanese officers getting a katana to wear, but that's not the same as mass usage of it. And yes, I also recognize that sword usage was never as widespread in terms of actual land warfare as we make it seem in cinema anyway, and things like polearms were way more common.) But people still dig swords of all kinds in popular culture.
What I think will matter way more is the core of the storytelling and whether those stories resonate because they ultimately take the human experience and filter it through an entertaining prism of the fantastical. Ultimately, what worked about Star Wars was that it was familiar fairy-tale and other cultural tropes mixed together and presented in a new, interesting way coupled with state-of-the-art visual f/x. That, in turn, created an interesting setting. We'll see how long that setting remains interesting, but I think there's at least the possibility of it continuing if the storytelling is good and compelling.
I don't, however, think that Star Wars will survive by relying solely upon its most surface-level elements. It's one of the main reasons why I think both JJ's Trek and Star Wars films end up not quite working: they're all about surface elements, and don't get the spirit of either franchise. They're just roller-coasters that have been repainted for whatever the franchise is, like that one "and the people ride UPSIDE DOWN!" roller coaster at your regional Six Flags park.
Star Wars was essentially dead to the public-at-large in the mid 80s to early 90s/ I know, because I lived it. After ROTJ and the 2 Ewok TV movies, there was no SW. The "last 17" action figures in the Power of the Force line were NOT flying off the shelves. The film trilogy was over. People moved on.
Star Tours opened in Disneyland in 1987; Mark Hamill said that when people would ask him about more SW films, now they had this Disneyland simulator attraction to scratch that itch.
It wasn't until the 1990s with the Zahn Trilogy that there was any resurgence (and nostalgia) for SW; then in 1997 with the OT Special Editions and the announcement that Lucasfilm was making the Prequel Trilogy.
- Status
Similar threads
