Speaking as someone who never was a terribly big Star Wars fan, I'm also a little distressed to see what's become of its legacy. For all the problems I had with the original trilogy, I could never deny their energy, enthusiasm, or their massive impact on popular cinema. Star Wars deserves better than to be a cultural punchline.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Yeah, set 3000 years before Luke et al, but it's Star Wars, for Star Wars fans who grew up with Star Wars and are still fans.

Now, let's not forget 1978's Star Wars Holiday Special. Though loaded with scenes that were clearly geared at grownups (such as grandpa Itchy watching what can only be described as a music video porno for wookies), it was definitely marketed to children (and, let's be honest, you had to be under 12 to enjoy it even a little). Nor should we forget the two Ewok T.V. movies in 1984 and 1985 which, again, had no appeal to anyone over the age of reason.

Producing lousy material in the Star Wars universe geared at kids is hardly a new phenomenon for Lucas.

Interesting article. On my train journey home today I actually ended up talking to a random stranger about Star Wars and how Lucas can't seem to leave the original films alone, let alone rein it in on all the related stuff. I still love the original trilogy but it feels it's really diluted by the continual new output. Talking to friend's kids it's clear they're not so interested in the old films. It seems a bit sad when the original central character is so sidelined.

Basically, all I care about regarding SW nowadays (and, indeed, for the past decade) are the Expanded Universe novels.

@Kyle haha - I have TRIED to forget the Holiday Special. Never quite sure who that was aimed at, not sure many kids would have sat through it. There were also the Ewoks and Droids cartoons I guess.

Star Wars used to be the story of Luke and the audience liked that because that's the representation of the audience. But everyone fell in love with Darth Vader who represents who the audience wants to be.

I think Lucas saw who people really liked -- the dark, mysterious, powerful guy -- and decided to rewrite the story from his perspective. He turned the saga from Luke's coming of age to Vader's epic.

I can see this being appealing, but it involves a very clunky reworking of narrative, effectively putting square pegs in round holes. Lucas should have done sequels instead of prequels. In the end, he took a great in medias res set of films and gave it a bunch of backstory.

In the writing world, this is like building a multi-chapter prologue...which many people might skip to get to the real story.

The people that get excited about the same thing in a newer shinier package baffle me. I already have the holy trilogy on VHS. The original version. I guess when that degrades I'll replace it with whatever the format is at that time. For now, though, Lucas ain't getting any more of my money.

"showing them Revenge of the Sith in which the hero slaughters children and is nearly burned to death by his best friend isn’t a movie for little kids" - There's this too. My daughter is 5 right now. She hasn't seen any of the Star Wars yet. I'm not sure when she will.

The biggest problem I had with the prequels is they never made me care about Anakin. Not when he was a little kid, and certainly not when he was an arrogant sob.

Nearly every single Star Wars thing that has been released in the post-prequel era is aimed at kids or is really immature.

Yes, long gone is the mature, adult appeal of Kenner action figures or _Droids_ and _Ewoks_ Saturday-morning cartoons! (Which, incidentally, I loved.)

I, for one, approve of the fact that the Star Wars franchise is building a second generation of fans. Recently, I spent much quality time with an adorable 4-year-old who, like me, has been a Star Wars fan "all his life." Sure, I prefer the original trilogy, while he likes the _Clone Wars_, but we bonded over a game of Lego Star Wars, and it was all good!

@3 kyle
Fair point! But at least back then, there were new movies coming out about real characters. Not a bunch of clones and legos

@5 SaltmanZ And I assume that's because it's about the original characters and not legos or clones.

I have been a fan all my life, and my kids who are now in their twenties were raised on SW of various vintages (including those funny ewok live action movies with the brother and sister who crashed there, who my then six year old daughter loved)--and it has always seemed to me to be about fun--good, serious fun (like the movie serials Lucas based it on, with Flash Gordon, etc.). The films are there, and all the other stuff, and you can watch what you want and take it however you want. There are some parts I don't enjoy, but so what? There's so much that I do enjoy, and I view the whole phenomenon as a great creative gift to me and my family from talented people making stories. We even enjoyed the legos and the clones (though my daughter really still likes the children on the ewok planet tv movie the best). Seriously.

Well, not Legos, anyway. There have been some clones. XD

@11 Jedikalos

That thing about your daughter liking the children on the ewok planet just warmed my heart. At staff memeber here at Tor.com actually saw those movies first. It's in this post

My 6 year old loves all things Star Wars, although I definitely haven't allowed him to see Ep. III yet. And, yes, he's more into Anakin than Luke, but he was still very excited to find a "Jedi Luke" (Ret. of the Jedi version) action figure yesterday. It really does make for a great bonding experience between us. He gets excited to hear how I remember seeing Empire the day it came out when I was his age. And, as an older fan, I still enjoy watching the Clone Wars with him, even if I cringe that he does, in fact, find Jar-Jar funny.

When today's kids grow up, they may not remember Star Wars with the reverence that we do, but they will certainly rank it up there as a great childhood memory that they will hopefully maintain contact with. For the bonding factor between me and my son (and even my 2 year old daughter, who sings the Imperial March whenever she sees anything related to Star Wars...doo doo dooooo do da dooo do da doooo), Star Wars remains plenty relevant.

I used to be a huge star wars fan. Hell, I even have a bootleg copy of the Holiday Special.

Then came Phantom Menance, with an 11 year old, *elected* monarch of a planet. WTFO? When I heard that, I started rooting for the Japanese Stereotypes, who were blockading her planet for...yeah...and the Senate didn't know because in a galaxy with faster than light travel, there's still no CNN.

But I persevered. I watched Attack of the Clones. I wished I hadn't. But I did.

I watched Revenge of the Sith when it came out on cable. I won't watch anything else.

Looking back, was the original trilogy as good as I'd made it out to be? That's a hard question. Certainly by "Jedi" they were starting to dumb it down (e.g. the frog eating the fly in front of Jabba's Palace, or Chewie's Tarzan cry, or the ewoks). But it stood up. I watched the Special Edition flicks in the theater. I was excited for the Prequels, but what we got just wasn't very good. I think editors and having people read your script to make it better actually works sometimes. Lucas, with his billions of dollars, doesn't seem to have anyone around him to tell him, "hey, this sucks - rewrite it and apply actual thought." He really needs one...

Star Wars and Harry Potter are almost mirror images, Harry Potter got better over the course of 7 stories. Star Wars has gotten worse. There are moments in each series where that doesn't hold true, but overall, I think it's true. It's sad when the Star Wars video games are better than any of the movies in the past 20 years.

@15

Though I'm not sure Harry Potter got better over 7 stories, it is an interesting point. Thanks for mentioning that. I'm going to bring that one to some of the staff here and see how they respond. :-)

@15

Though I'm not sure Harry Potter got better over 7 stories, it is an interesting point. Thanks for mentioning that. I'm going to bring that one to some of the staff here and see how they respond. :-)

So I'm a 30-something dad who grew up on the OT, lived through the disappointment of the PT, has a very soft spot for the Lego Star Wars franchise, is very fond of the Clone Wars series (in that 'simultaneously loving its promise and yet being infuriated by its many near-misses' way) and has watched his own geeklet - currently 5 - become enraptured by the SW universe of his own accord.

The thing I've come to realise is that Star Wars isn't a movie, or a TV series, or even a franchise any more. It's a shared setting. It's been around for long enough and made such an impact in its original form that many of us who were children of the 70s and 80s treat it more like a modern tribal mythology than a specific work of fiction. Lucas thinks he owns it, and he still retains the power to decide what's 'official', but I believe the setting has long since outgrown his effective control - I think the typical 'long-suffering' fan would agree that they love Star Wars in spite of Uncle George's efforts, not because of them. (It's often seemed from interviews and commentaries that Dave Filoni, exec producer for the CG series, chafes more than he'll admit on-camera at having to defer to GL's 'vision' for the SW universe.) I'd go so far as to say that the success of Star Wars exceeded Lucas' own understanding of it; he doesn't really seem to grasp how and why it works.

And that's where I loop back to my son, and his (for a while) borderline obsession with Star Wars. Lucas' biggest success with ANH and ESB - which he himself seems to have missed or forgotten - was in sketching the broad strokes of an engaging universe around the bones of a tried-and-tested story archetype, and leaving the details to the viewer's imagination. It's that sense of narrative space that's captured my son's imagination, the idea that the story (or the scope for more stories) is bigger than what he actually sees on screen. From the first time he saw ANH, he's wanted to know everything about the characters and their lives beyond the films. He watches and rewatches the films (ObligParentingNote: except RotS, natch) but is just as happy to make up his own stories. Needless to say, he also loves the Lego Star Wars games, not least because he can take control of the characters and do his own thing with them.

So yeah. All of which rambling comes to: I don't think Lucas really understands his own creation. But in some measure, I also think that's largely irrelevant. What's interesting to me now is the stories that other people can tell, the ones who've grown up steeped in this imaginary mythology that GL launched in their childhoods. It's also a measure of the scope of that shared narrative space that those stories can run the gamut from light kid-friendly comedy to much more adult-oriented fiction.

Very interesting article. I was born in the 80s and had a distaste for Star Wars anything except the Droids and Ewoks cartoons as a kid. Eventually I saw the OT as a preteen and loved it. The PT came out during my senior year and I found it an interesting expansion to the storyline, but became more and more disinterested with the franchise with each PT movie. I couldn't really get into the Clone Wars cartoon beacause that period of time in the storyline seems particularly uninteresting to me. Maybe I should mention I watched the Ewoks movies, though there was a lot of death in them for a family movie.

Anyway, my advice to the author if he is seeking a legitimate modern Star Wars experience is to try out The Knights of The Old Republic. I just started playing it, and even though it's not from the current generation of games, it holds up visually and it really does a great service to the OT. I'm a little lukewarm about the upcoming MMORPG based on this time-period because it looks like they too are choosing to portray the SW universe in a more cartoony style...

@10: Actually, the novels cover everything. From back during the Old Republic (thousands of years pre-movies) to the next generation of Solo/Skywalker kids (with the Big Three still hanging around, of course.) And honestly, some of the books set during the Clone Wars are the grittiest, most mature SW tales yet told. Specifically, Stover's Shatterpoint and Traviss' Republic Commando series.

Listen, I was born in the seventies. I grew up with the films. I also grew up with the Star Wars characters turning up on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show. I grew up with The Ewok Adventure and the Ewoks and Droids Saturday morning cartoons.

I grew up with countless, countless Kenner action figures.

All these things were aimed at (guess what?) little kids.

Don't pretend that little-kid-targeted officially sanctioned light, humorous SW spoof stuff only happened in recent years. Really. It's been around since the start.

The Golden Age of Star Wars is age 10.

If I had a hundred million dollars I would remake 1,2,3 and 6 with my children fantasies memories.

To be fair, Luke was also an immature, whiny child for most of the original trilogy.

The toys didn't show up right away when Star Wars (not episode 4, not A New Hope) took control of the boxoffice that summer. If I remember this right, the toy companies had to rush to sign deals, design the toys then produce them for Christmas and even then some of them were late. That summer some of the actors - both in and out of character - showed up on various teen and adult oriented shows. John William's opening title music (the complete cut at first) got play on AM Top 40 Radio stations. Imagine that. The London Symphony Orchestra being heard on AM radio. It was clear that this was a movie the whole family could enjoy. Then the toy sales went through the roof that winter and then kept going strong.

On to Phantom Menace. I've said this before and I'll say it again. Anakin wasn't a hero. He just pulled a Homer.

You're absolutely right. There are two topics that caught my attention the most here.

1. The quality of Star Wars material (at least in terms of films and the TV show and all) has just degraded. Revenge of the Sith was decent, having vaguely resembled Star Wars, but it's hard to make up for the abomination that was Phantom Menace. Like another commenter said, some of the best stuff you're going to find about Star Wars are the books written by better writers than George Lucas. Honestly, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones in book format were much better than the movies. Terry Brooks and R.A. Salvatore > George Lucas.

2. Good point- Lucas and his cohorts mention that it'll be cool showing these films to a younger audience. When should this be done, exactly? Phantom Menace is too childish for a teenager, but Revenge of the Sith shouldn't be shown to kids much younger than 13. In my opinion, anyway. Not entirely sure what his goal with that is. Episode I is too kiddy, II and IV are probably in the middle, and III, V, and VI were more violent (I think the Ewoks and Emperor Palpatine torturing Luke kind of balance out). There's no natural progression to it.

Yeah... I'm depressed by the fate of Star Wars too, and like you said, the Blu Ray box set cover just sets it in stone.

That's so sad! Just pretend the new stuff doesn't exist (or tell yourself it's just internet fan fiction that was broadcast by mistake) and enjoy the real movies for what they are.

And on the bright side, not all the new Star Wars things are bad. Knights of the Old Republic was great.

I think I came into Star Wars a little later than many here(indeed, my first big-screen exposure to SW was watching AotC! ...which may be why that remains one of my favorite movies, despite its flaws) and so I think I have a little more ambivalence in regards to SW's popular perception. I just know that I enjoy what I enjoy(went through a brief action figure collection craze in my freshman year in college, still enjoy playing Star Wars: Battlefront and SW: KOTOR, have made goofy videos with my sisters...) and what I don't enjoy, I tend to shrug off(most of the Clone Wars stuff).

From what I know though, isn't Star Wars more relevant now than it was in the mid-90's or so? I would definitely argue there's been a resurgence since '99. Maybe the latest offerings(Clone Wars...which I've *still* not seen!) are a little more kid-oriented, but surely the action figures and kids cartoons of the '80s/'90s were the same?

Admittedly, I'm one of those who aren't as bitter about the prequels. I think it is because I was never a big Star Wars fan prior to the prequels(saw the OT maybe twice before seeing AotC...didn't even see TPM in theatres). The years of the prequels('02-'05) were the heights of my SW fandom. And I remember them fondly for that. I don't care for the newer stuff as much(but, SW Robot Chicken is *hilarious*!!), but I don't really mind that, I guess. Let's see what SW produces in another 10 years. Movies VII-IX, anyone? Let's trash the EU while we're at it!!

I really appreciate the idea behind this great post.You are doing a fine job.Keep blogging.
School Papers

@16 - thanks! to be very clear, I was referring to the quality of the Harry Potter books vs the Star Wars movies. A bit apples and oranges, I admit, but at these were the stories as told by Lucas and Rowling, they are a closer comparison than comparing the Harry Potter movies to the Star Wars movies.

Revisionism in the SW universe should come as no surprise: Lucas began doing that almost from the moment that the toys started selling; his line went from 'homage to Flash Gordon' to 'in the best tradition of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey'.
At least back then the direction was striving for a greater/deeper intellectual connection (no matter how false and ridiculous the contention is/was).
Now. Well, now at least the whole thing is being revealed for what it really is: a pretty piss-poor space opera cum science fantasy who's only reason for being is to sell toys to children.

Ugh. This article makes me sad.
I recall my grandfather, a self-proclaimed science fiction fanatic, claim that everything after 2001 (released in 1968) was utter trash. Star Wars included and especially - that the genre had become some type of hyper drama of small people in a big universe. I tend to agree. I loved Star Wars - but I relegated that to my early memory of that time. I accept everything that has come since as separate entities to be taken on their own merits.
For your own sanity, it is best just to assume that nothing in the realm of fiction is sacred. There are more important things in life. Seriously.

Complaining about the final 3 Star Wars movies has become an industry all its own. I think a lot of it has to do with what people expected in their own vision of what the story would be rather than just enjoying what was on the screen. Had I been in charge, I would have made some different choices but that wasn't my call. It's very easy to be a critic, but Luca's vision was never about eps 4-6, it was a story of redemption. That's why kids have a different hero in the Star Wars movies. It takes some time to come to terms with it.

To be fair, Luke was also an immature, whiny child for most of the
original trilogy.

I initially misread this as "Lucas"... which makes just as much sense as written.

Anyway, as far as the thread topic goes, I'd diagnose it as half regression to the mean (everyone has a best work, Lucas just had it early) and half rose-colored hindsight (anything you see at age 10 seems much more awesome than it really is and the effect sometimes persists when rewatching it later).

P.S. Anyone on this thread who hasn't yet seen Kurosawa's _The Hidden Fortress_ should do so. You'll see why it's relevant.

@2 : indeed. Actually, the only non-childish Star Wars content (apart from the books, which I haven't read) is probably in the video games these days, and TOR looks promising...I was actually able to briefly play it, and let me tell you, it's gonna make its mark when it finally comes out.

I wonder if that's the direction they're taking ? Making the films/cartoons as kids-friendly as possible and pushing all the "adult" content in the related products (videogames, novels, comics, etc) ?

I don't really understand the fervor that most people have in their feelings toward Star Wars. I saw the films when I was a child, after they came out on VHS, so I can understand people who saw them in theatres have an emotional connection to them. I get the historic importance of the popularity of a science fiction movie in that time period and how it expanded the culture incredibly. I can't deny the cultural impact of the movies.

But when I watch the movies, and I have several times, the new and old, to me they are obviously not very good. In special effects terms, they were ahead of their time, but the story? It's generic. Lucas admits this often when talking about the hero's journey/Joesph Campbell stuff. The acting? It's not bad, but it's not good. Mark Hamil and Carrie Fisher; could anyone say they were going for an Oscar? When they shot the first movie, they all thought they were doing a fairly straight forward sci-fi that wasn't going to go anywhere. I think Ford even said that in an interview. No one was delivering on all cylinders. Alec Guinness had so little faith in the film that he almost didn't do the film, he noegotiated a huge contract boon (piece of the gross and anything produced after) because they couldn't afford his rate.

My point is, I think there's a big disconnect between the intrinsic quality of the movies, and the fandom that surrounds it. You guys really love the characters, the settings, not because the product was initally great, but because I think the fandom sees the potential inherent in the setting. If you look at it, that makes more sense. Why was Boba Fett, a character that did little in the films and then died rather pathetically, beloved by fans? He looked cool and there was a potential story there, one more interesting than what Lucas came up with. From this character was spun all manner of stories about the Mandalorians, the Bounty Hunters, etc. Was it in the movies? No. Was it in the expanded universe? Yes.

Rogue Squadron is another example; there is nothing important about these characters in any of the movies. Yet they are popular enough to have several books series, comics, two video games, and an extended mythology. There's potential in these characters that are not there in characters like Luke.

You seem to take task with what you might call the usurption of the series by Anakin Skywalker and things like the Clone Wars cartoon. It seems...petty. You like Luke more than Anakin. That's really it. You ask the question "To the average 9-year-old, is Luke even relevant?" and my answer is "Of course not." Why would they? The Clone Wars is a 30min cartoon with eye-catching CGI, militaristic shoot-em ups, high-adventure featuring super powers, all of which is able to be absorbed by the ever-changing whimsical brain of a 9 year old. Luke appears in feature-length movies that are about 2 decades older than them, with considerably less interesting visuals, superpowers that show up later in the film when a 9 year old is likely to be bored, who spends most of the movie wearing a white bathrobe/karate gi, making Darth Vader the most visually interesting character on screen. What exactly do you expect the average 9 year old to like in this scenario?

Essentially, your argument is like the old man saying to the kids, "Music was better when I was your age." Nothing is taken away from Star Wars by the various (and hilarious) parodies of the series; it honestly deserves a good ribbing here and there. But these ribbings are done by and appreciated by people who understand Star Wars, who can laugh because they have a shared knowledge of what's being referenced. Even less is taken away from the series by the Clone Wars because at the very least, watching it gets kids more interested in the Universe of Star Wars, which is where most of the good storytelling has happened anyway, and which will necessitate the kids watching your beloved Luke's story at some point. The relevance of the Star Wars does not reside in the storyline from any of the movies. It resides in the fandom that has been created, the cultural relevance of its existence and pervassiveness in pop-culture. Star Wars is a part of a shared knowledge of the world; you don't need to have seen the movies to know what Star Wars is or get a joke about it.

Everything, even this grab-for-more-money Blu-ray, that keeps Star Wars in the public view will help to keep Star Wars relevant. I think what you don't understand is that it's not about Luke, or Anakin, or Han. They're just characters. The Universe is what matters.