I have mentioned my love of Star Wars in a few posts recently. I have been compelled to comment on the debacle that was the Acolyte and the subsequent craziness that ensued after its cancellation on a few niche corners of the internet.
Ideologically captured actors and (so-called) creatives blamed YouTube commentators like Star Wars Theory, Nerdrotic and The Critical Drinker for the show getting axed, accusing them of launching targeted hate campaigns against the show. In my view, most of these were just rightfully voicing their opinions and dissatisfaction with the Disney era of Star Wars and were honestly critiquing the show via their own channels, to their own fans. For these supposed sins, they were called racist, far right and bigoted. (Yep! That stuff again).
Other outlets that are more friendly to Disney, such as Star Wars Explained, jumped in on the bandwagon and called for these channels and others to be demonetised or otherwise censored. YouTube obviously declined all these requests because no terms of service were ultimately violated, just film critics offering criticism of movies/tv shows. But in response there is talk of defamation lawsuits being filed; between Star Wars themed YouTube channels. What the ever loving fuck is this world coming to?
But the reason this is on my mind is such; I miss Star Wars. I miss getting hyped about the movies in the run-up to the release. I miss talking with my son about weird little Easter eggs we spot in the spin-off shows and video games. I miss watching videos about theories for future stories and reading comics that flesh out certain background character’s backstories. I miss a time where people cared about Star Wars as a fictional world that they enjoyed spending time in, rather than weaponising it as part of their partisan political ideology.
This is my main gripe with Star Wars now: its fandom has become the same as everything else in the West. Tribal and partisan. Disney fans versus George Lucas fans. Yeah, I lean to the latter side but I am under no illusions that Disney is not here to stay. They are not selling the Star Wars property anytime soon so the sensible thing to do is to try and deescalate the faction fighting and try and create popular stories again.
Disney is a business and money is their king. They tried making movies and shows for a particular subset of fans in the last decade or so, and they lost a lot of money doing it. I believe they have learned their lesson and will pivot in another direction. Whether that is a subtle course correction or a sharp U-turn, I can’t say. But I am confident that the hard left wokeism of the Acolyte is in the rear view mirror for good (I hope).
Cards on the table, I’m an older Millennial. I grew up with the Original Trilogy and was one of those who hated the Prequel trilogy when it came out, though I have warmed to it (slightly) over the years. Partly of course because I have naturally become more docile and chilled out as I have aged, less impassioned about fictional stuff that (in reality) doesn’t matter all that much. But a bigger part of my coming to appreciate the Prequel Trilogy more was Dave Filoni and his animated shows.
The Clone Wars has its ups and downs and some of the bad episodes are some of the worst pieces of narrative fiction I have ever seen. But when it was good, it fleshed out Prequel characters and story arcs, recontextualised aspects in new and interesting ways and retconned a lot of George Lucas’ more contentious nonsense that I disliked in those films.
I still hate Jar-Jar Binks, the awful dialogue and the ugly 90s video game, hyper-CGI aesthetic of those films; but I have an appreciation for Anakin (and Hayden Christensen) in those movies that I never felt originally. I care about the clones more after the show told unique stories centred around several members, fleshing them out as individual agents. The depth and ingenuity of Shiv Palpatine’s insidious plan to seize control of the galaxy and insert himself as a supreme dictator is expanded upon at length. Characters like Count Dooku, General Grievous and Sifo-Dyas all of a sudden make some form of sense, (at least to me).
And I think that is what will happen with the Disney era missteps that Lucasfilm have made in recent years; Dave Filoni or someone else like him will spend years retrofitting the lore changes into the canon to recontextualise where they can and retconning what they need to.
The fans have voted with their wallets and Disney has apparently listened, if the cancellation of The Acolyte means anything. Maybe that means we might get the old Star Wars back, I doubt it, but we live in hope.
Some have advocated for a ‘decanonising’ of all Disney Star Wars projects. To throw it all out and start from the end of Return Of The Jedi again. Either recast the original core characters or (please no) recreate the original actors in their youth with CGI, like they did with Luke in The Mandalorian.
I don’t want the latter at all. I think they should have recast Leia after Carrie Fisher’s devastating passing in 2016 for the monstrosity that ended up being The Rise of Skywalker.
[Edit] (Since uploading this essay, Disney are being sued by the estate of the late Peter Cushing for digitally recreating the actor in Rogue One. Maybe this will put an end to the digitally de-aged or recreated actors practice at Lucasfilm).
Yes Fisher is synonymous with the Leia character and a legend, of course. But I don’t believe any actor is bigger than their character.
I think Marvel refusing to recast T’Challa in the MCU after Chadwick Boseman’s tragic passing was a huge mistake. That character means an awful lot to an awful lot of people and retiring him and intrinsically tying him to one single actor guarantees he won’t reach as many people. To use a sporting analogy, ‘no player is bigger than the TEAM’ and characters need to be reimagined for new generations so their message can continue.
I supported the recasting of Han Solo, even if the film flopped by Star Wars standards, and wish that Disney had persevered with that model from day one. A movie with Alden Erenreich as Han, Millie Bobby Brown as Leia, Sebastian Stan as Luke and Donald Glover as Lando sounds like fun to me. The four of them try to rebuild a galaxy wide Democratic Republic, fighting Empire Loyalist factions and fringe religious zealots loyal to the Sith. That could have worked, I feel. It would have been much better than the Boba Fett series, that’s for damn sure.
As I alluded to above, I think we will end up with a compromise of a reversion to the tried and tested Star Wars of old, with a heavy dose of new canon retrospectively added to it to tie the whole thing together in a huge mess.
But I am not completely against that. As Dave Filoni recontextualised the prequels enough for me to appreciate them more, I believe the same can be done for some of Disney Star Wars. The Rise of Skywalker is irredeemable in my eyes but I’m open to being proven wrong. In fact, I welcome it.
I do not hate all of Disney Star Wars, as those shouting for its deletion apparently do. I enjoy a lot (not all) of Mandalorian. I adore Ahsoka Tano from the Clone Wars and am deeply invested in her character. As I am with the Rebels cast of characters, especially Grand Admiral Thrawn who came from the extended universe into main canon. These storylines combined in Rebels and again the Ahsoka live action show which picks up the thread from all these characters. The show is essentially Rebels: Season 5 and, although it has its problems and is by no means perfect, I am here for that. I love Rebels and want to live with those characters more.
I disagree with the ‘Decanonize Disney Star Wars’ faction about The Last Jedi a lot too. Again, it has its problems and is not perfect, but I don’t think it is the travesty that a lot of these fans claim. It is true though that I never revered Luke Skywalker in the way that some of these fans clearly do, and I think that plays a big part in our differing outlooks.
I was fine with him being a bitter and broken old man who hid himself away after a failure (that was established in the previous film anyway and Rian Johnson had to address such a major plotpoint). It also hit on George Lucas’ idea for Star Wars trilogies rhyming, as this was exactly what Yoda had done. He was hiding from Darth Vader for twenty years after he failed to stop Palpatine’s coup d'etat.
The idea that Luke would think about killing Ben Solo in his sleep pissed a lot of people off as they thought such a thing was a betrayal of their ‘Jedi Superman’ character. I disagree. Luke was always impulsive, impatient and quick to anger, and part of his arch in the original trilogy was overcoming these innate character flaws. He rushed back to his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and put himself in needless danger. He went against Yoda’s advice and abandoned his training on Degobah to try and save Han and Leia, losing a hand for his troubles. This arc culminated in him controlling his impulses on the second Death Star, staying his hand from killing Vader when he had him dead to rights.
But as the Ancient One (Marvel Comics) said ‘we never defeat our demons, we only learn to live above them’, and as Han Solo explained in The Force Awakens, Luke was devastated when a talented student (Ben) destroyed everything he had built and in his shame walked away. I bought that Luke’s character could have relapsed to his baser nature in a moment of weakness and under extreme stress. It made him more human to me, it made sense. But people just like their Supermen to be impervious, I think.
The other element people pushed back against is the painting of the Jedi as colonisers and oppressors. I agree that it is egregious and was done in bad faith, but I am not entirely against a soft postmodernist approach to looking at the Jedi religion. I concede that this is motivated by my bias against Abrahamic Monotheism, as I am an apostate and an atheist. But I think now more than ever, it is important that we are freely allowed to critique and question the dogmas and tenets of ideologies in any form, be they religious or not. When Luke says that the ‘hubris of the Jedi’ and their dogmatic adherence to the tenets of their faith blinded them to Palpatine’s rise, it is hard to argue against the point. That grumpy old man was right about that.
But The Last Jedi has a lot of crap baked into it, that’s for sure. The subplots with Rose Tico, Finn and Poe Dameron in that film are legitimately some of the stupidest and most ridiculous stuff I have ever watched, I admit. Luke should have died in the third film, I just made very little sense to finish him off mid-trilogy. The Snoke death scene was an interesting, impactful and subversive choice that I appreciated. But the fact that they had no plans for a main villain after they killed him off, reveals the whole thing to be a massive error on Lucasfilm’s part and an embarrassing example of shortsightedness. The ‘somehow Palpatine returned line’ has rightfully become a meme to signal the ridiculousness of this trilogy and symbolic of its innate failure as a story.
The whole trilogy is full of nonsensical crap like that and that is the kind of stuff that I think Disney will in the future just stop mentioning. Good riddance, I say.
Hopefully, we are turning a corner and Star Wars (and Hollywood as a whole) will go back to hiring talented people and creating great stories. Until then, at least we have SubStack to write bitchy essays about it.
Thanks for reading,
The Common Centrist
Star Wars as a brand was weakened by churning out all those TV shows for Disney+. Since the current content is so subpar, fans look back on the original trilogy and ask, "Was that bad, too?"
The original trilogy is still great, but they are movies for children. Watch them when you're ten, and you'll love them forever. As an adult, they're good to watch with your own kids.
Star Wars worked best as a brand when there was a bit of mystery around it.
Obviously, there was a ton of merchandise around the franchise - toys, clothes, video games, etc. - but that didn't weaken the brand in the mid-to-late 1980s through the 1990s.
I'm a casual fan of Star Wars. I never read the extended universe comics or novels from this era.
For me, Star Wars was at its peak coolness through this period, right up until The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, because the franchise was a bit enigmatic.
Now that Disney has explored every nook and cranny of the Star Wars universe, there's no mystery.
The best way to make Star Wars culturally relevant again is to put it away for a while.
Stop making Star Wars content for 5 to 10 years - which will be hard because Disney will lose heaps of money in the short-term - then bring it back for a new generation of children.
I think that's the only way to restore the Star Wars brand.
The first three Star Wars films, (I'm talking about the Luke Skywalker story now) resonated with me, my wife and my sons as nothing else had before. I had been an incredible fan of T.H. White's THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING and the first movie, "A New Hope" had Luke as Arthur and Ben as Merlin with Darth as the Black Knight and Leia as Guenevere. It was glorious and still is. The prequels disappointed us as they were dark and you knew where they were going. "The Force Awakens," recaptured the joy of the first films with three wonderful characters and a terrific new villain in Adam Driver. But the second and third movies were atrocious. On the Disney Channel Jon Favreau has the right touch in thei Mandolorian. He knows the magic of lovable characters, humours lines and excited fights with villains. I think that's the formula that needs to be adhered to in all projects. New characters can work very well, as we say in "The Force Awakens," if they are well cast and have a lively scritp that keeps alive the spirit of the firm Star Wars films. - Sorry for going on so long, but I care.