I just heard that they just got the Patterson cut pulled. Disney and LucasFilm trying to keep their heads in the Tatooine sands.
More just protecting their IP. With trademarks (which are part of the IP in the films and shows), if you don't actively defend them when people try to pirate them, you can lose them as the Patent & Trademark Office rules that you "abandoned" them. Basically ignoring infringement can lead to an abandonment claim. With copyright, it's a little more complicated, but ignoring violations can block you from enforcing against a specific violation (not the same as losing the rights altogether, though).
Mottrex That's another huge factor that could equally be applied to the franchise of Star Wars, or any 1980's intellectual property too. Sure I know there are kids who enjoy it, but I still feel the only reason that it's even survived this long is the adults who carried the torch for it since childhood and passed it on to our children and grandchildren. Without us, this property would have been relegated to the past like countless others. I think the testament to its longevity will be when we die off and if our young descendents carry that same love with them into their adulthood, or if they grow out of it and it gets mostly forgotten.
As enduring as the quality of the original films are, once the original Star Wars generation is dead and gone, the impact it had on the culture and its influence may very well fade out with us. Not to sound morbid or anything, but then again, we won't live to see that happen. lol
I think it's perhaps a bit easy to dismiss inasmuch as there is also a whole generation now in adulthood that grew up with the prequels and Clone Wars cartoon as "their" Star Wars. They may recognize the prequels as flawed, but they love them anyway (whereas the original trilogy fans recognize them as flawed and range from tolerance-mixed-with-mild-enjoyment to hatred of the prequels, in my experience).
My 2c:
There is a big Smyths toy store near me. Think Toysrus size.
Its always fairly busy when I 've been in. It is chock full of action figures from all manner of franchises. But the SW section is tiny, like, blink and miss it. You have to make a concerted effort to find it.
The toy section in my local supermarket has no SW toys outside of smaller Lego sets.
Far as I can tell, people just generally don't want Star Wars toys for whatever reason.
Consider too that Star Wars is no longer the number one selling toy franchise and hasn't been for a few years now. In the last decade Hasbro's selection of Star Wars, G.I.Joe, and Transformers in every department store I've been in the last decade has been virtually nonexistent. If you're lucky you'll see a few meager rows of figures. That's about all.
I think there are some underlying structural factors that play into this. In the late 70s, the 3.75" action figure thing was a brand new concept. Nobody had done it up to that point; everything else was Barbie/Mego-sized dolls. Star Wars the film and Star Wars the toy franchise both kinda took the world by storm out of nowhere.
By the 80s, the action figure thing was in full swing, though. One of the key differences was, in my view, the kind of "centralized" approach to getting those toys to kids. There were a ton of toy making companies (I mean, beyond just Kenner, Mattel, and Hasbro), but there were more centralized distribution outlets in the form of toy stores, and more centralized ways to advertise them. Kids still watched TV on 6 channels (much of the time -- cable, too, in many areas), commercials were still a constant thing, and the shows themselves were designed as 30-minute toy advertisements. Literally. Like, new storylines in the G.I. Joe comic and cartoon would feature new characters and -- critically -- new toys. All designed to coincide with those toys hitting the shelves. So you could read about Wet-Suit and Leatherneck attacking Cobra Island on the new Devil Fish boat toy, go buy all three toys at the store, and then watch those same characters use the same toy in a different adventure at 4:30pm on your local station that carried the G.I. Joe cartoon.
This strategy was used with all manner of toys that came and went, too. Sectaurs, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, COPS, Centurions, Spiral Zone, etc., etc., etc. All while kids were also watching all manner of candy and breakfast cereal commercials, too.
All that is different now. Kids don't consume media that way. Parents don't shop that way as much. Even before the pandemic screwed everything up, it all just works differently now. There's much more distributed and diffuse methods of getting content to people and showing kids "Here is a cool thing for you to get your parents to buy you."
I think, as a result, a lot of the "legacy" toys like G.I. Joe, Star Wars, Transformers, etc. just...aren't as popular.
As for why Star Wars isn't itself as popular toy-wise, I think the above is part of it, but I also think it's the dominance of Marvel in the film arena. Marvel probably comes closest to the ubiquity that you had with the old toy franchises of the 80s and 90s. It's EVERYWHERE. As are the toys. And I think for a lot of kids, that just crowds everything else out.
Anyway, I still don't get the dislike of Reva. Admittedly, I haven't dug too deeply into it, but I found her interesting and I'd be curious to see more stories about her. I'm good with us never getting any more Obi-Wan, though. I don't think it
needs more story, although I could see where you could tell a good one in the future with that character, given where he ends up by the end of the show.
