Letting the Old Beasts Die: The End of Star Wars

STAR WARS is dead, and the rest of the old beasts are soon to follow. I want to see what comes next. A personal essay.

On May 25^th, 1977, STAR WARS (later rechristened STAR WARS – A NEW HOPE) was released in movie theaters across America. On this most blessed day, I was three months old, having been born into the vale of tears in March of the same year. Go forward a few years, and one of the earliest memories I have is sitting in a movie theater with my father and grandfather watching THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, in particular the scene where Darth Vader reveals the truth to Luke Skywalker about his parentage. The image of Mark Hamill’s face on a giant movie screen screaming Nooooo is seared into my memory as one of the few definite things I can remember from the 80’s.

I don’t remember when I first saw RETURN OF THE JEDI, but I did buy my ticket for THE PHANTOM MENACE months in advance, handling it like a sacred relic picked up on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to the point that by the time the day came, that scrap of paper was all but falling apart. I could on in this vein, but the point I'm trying to make is that STAR WARS and I grew up together. It was the background story of my childhood in many ways, the mythos I kept an eye on, much as a lad growing up in medieval France might have a soft spot for the tales of Charlemagne or King Arthur.

This was by no means an atypical experience for someone from my generation. Scratch any Gen X geek, and you’ll find images of lightsabers and Princess Leia slave girl costumes mingled with John Williams iconic soundtrack. People like Kevin Smith have made names and fortunes for themselves mining this deep seam of nostalgia...but it’s more that than. Fandom for a Galaxy Far, Far Away approximated something a religion. And for those poor heretics and pagans who rejected the True Faith, they might find their solace in Star Trek, Marvel and/or DC Comics and so on (for the record, I liked Star Trek as well, though I always through Deep Space Nine was the best of the lot.)

Fast forward to today. Like many others, I have a Disney Plus account mainly for the reason that I haven’t gotten around to canceling it yet (The House of the Mouse makes a small profit from my laziness.) I’m watching the latest STAR WARS TV show, Ahsoka, and….it’s all right I suppose. All the critics rave about Andor, but I never got past the third episode. I never saw THE RISE OF SKYWALKER and I doubt I ever will, and I regard the prospect of more STAR WARS related content with a profound, unshakable meh...whatever.

And again, this is not an atypical experience.

All the people I know who were hardcore fans and were, let’s just say, disappointed, by way things have gone over the last ten to fifteen years have moved beyond any sense of upset they might have felt in the last to a broad plateau of indifference. And this attitude is by no means confined to STAR WARS. All the great creative properties seem to be stuck in a rut, telling the same stories, caught up in culture war nonsense. They are ignored, met with polite applause at best, compared to the great offerings of the past and found wanting. Popular culture has become stagnant. Stuck. Trapped in a mire of mediocrity, up to its neck in quicksand and running out of the will to save itself.

There many reasons proffered for the stagnancy that has afflicted pop culture, or at least those parts of it hardcore geeks like your humbler scribbler cares about. If you go on YouTube, you’ll find no shortage of colorful commentators giving their theories as to why that is. Many tend to point the finger at politics, running from claims that STAR WARS, Marvel, etc have committed the cardinal sin of going woke and are now going broke, to those who come at it from the opposite point and say the people telling these stories are not Diverse and Inclusive enough (however you define those terms). I won’t state my thoughts on that particular argument, mainly because I find both sides tiresome, but also because I think they both wrong. They are mistaking the symptoms for the disease.

Here’s an idea...creative properties are like living things. They are born, experience a golden youth of rapid expansion and creativity, then reach a glorious adulthood where they dominate the environment, gathering unto themselves praise from the critics, adoration from the fans, and profits for those who own the rights.

But then they get old. They get set in their ways and run out of ideas. Time moves on, audiences change and they are unable to adapt, choosing instead to retell the old stories, old wine in new bottles, to diminishing returns.

And that is the problem. STAR WARS is old, and so are all the other creative multimedia franchises that have dominated pop culture since before the turn of the century. And now all these old beasts are dying...but they are not yet dead. They are kept on life support, lingering on, occupying the center of the culture and preventing younger, nimbler creatures from taking their place.

The result is stagnancy, and indifference. And no matter how people try to spin it, this is not a good thing.

I’m going to focus mainly on STAR WARS, since it holds a place in my memory beyond anything else.

I was a fan from the beginning. When the movies first came out on VHS, I wore the tapes out on the family VCR. And then in the 90’s came something even better: the Expanded Universe. The novels (starting with Heir to the Empire), the comic books, the computer games, even the audio dramas (!) - for fans of my generation the EU was STAR WARS. The original movies and later the prequels introduced the universe, they built the house, to mangle a metaphor. But it was the EU that filled it with furniture, that shone light into shadowy corners and found new rooms. The Expanded Universe was where STAR WARS came alive.

But it did more than that. It also advanced the story. A full recounting of the plot line after the ed of Return of the Jedi would be an article in its own right, see below if you want to go into the details.

And lets be clear - not everything that went into the EU was good. Great literature it was not – for every Timothy Zahn writing Heir to the Empire, there was a hack writer phoning it in and pumping out barely readable rubbish, which was nonetheless published on the assumption that anything with the STAR WARS brand on it would sell. And sadly, they were right. But it didn’t matter in the end. Characters and concepts from the EU became as much a part of STAR WARS as those things found in the movie. The fandom thrived (the backlash against the Prequels can, in retrospect, be seen as a sign of this devotion taken too far. Personally I thought the Prequels were okay, that Camille Paglia is right in pointing to REVENGE OF THE SITH as an important work of art, and that a lot of people owe George Lucas an apology for the nonsense they put him through.)

In 2012, Disney bought Lucasfilm, and one of the first things they did was put the EU out to pasture. The Expanded Universe became Star Wars Legends, likely with the intention of being forgotten over time. It’s understand why they did this – having bought the franchise, the Mouse and its minions would want as much of a clean slate as possible. But that came with corresponding danger – having swept away the old canon, whatever replaced it had to be at least as good, if not better.

And at that STAR WARS 2.0 – The Disney Years failed to measure up. The Force Awakens was essentially STAR WARS – A NEW HOPE with cosmetic surface changes (a female lead being the most touted.) The remaining sequel movies were incoherent, grossly misusing a talented cast and denying longtime fans the change to see Han, Luke and Leia together again and in action. There was no overarching story beyond “plucky band of rebels against evil empire,” which has been done before and done better.

Worse was to follow. STAR WARS under Disney quickly fell into a rut, telling and retelling the same stories. Focus turned from the core characters to new ones that had little appeal, or older characters that were treated shabbily(re: Kenobi, Boba Fett). Quality fell. Plots were nonsensical. Creativity dried up, stagnation set in, and people stopped paying attention.

The thing is, all this would have happened anyway, even if Disney’s handling of the franchise was competent, even if the Mouse House hadn’t dropped the ball. Take a step back and it becomes clear that STAR WARS’ creative peak was in the decades before Disney bought it, and that by the time they stepped in it had already begun its downward slide. Legacy of the Force, a comic book series that advanced the plot a hundred years in the future and focused on a descendant of Luke Skywalker, was also a “plucky band of rebels against evil empire” story, that rehashed old ideas and concepts. It was running out of ideas.

Thus, Disney’s mismanagement of STAR WARS accelerated an existing problem -STAR WARS is getting old. Competent management on their part might have delayed the reckoning for a while longer, perhaps wrung another ten to fifteen years out of it, but the decline was inevitable.

Every great creative property has certain things which give it form. The Legend of King Arthur has Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot and of course Arthur himself. The Lord of the Rings has Hobbits, Sauron and Middle Earth. The Wheel of Time has Rand al’Thor, the Dark One, and a highly detailed system of magic. These are the things that define them, shape them, make into what they are...but also place restrictions on what can be done, shaped in part by audience expectations. Go beyond them and the story becomes something else entirely, becomes unrecognizable.

For example, imagine retelling the Legend of King Arthur as a saga of corporate intrigue, with Arthur as the embattled CEO, Guinevere as his trophy wife who has an affair with his right hand man Lancelot, and Merlin as the embattled CFO trying to keep Camelot, Inc. on track while protecting them all from a hostile takeover by an upstart corporate raider named Mordred. Now, that would be an interesting story (any fanfic writers wanting to take up the challenge, have at it.) But is it a KING ARTHUR story? I would contend that it is not, that the level of change required turns it into something new and different. Consider Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as a Twilight fanfic, and then went on to becomes its own thing.

So what are the key components of STAR WARS? Plucky rebels...evil empire, Jedi, Sith, The Force, a veritable army of supporting characters in a detailed galaxy far, far away. There are certain things an audience expects from a Star Wars story. But after 46 years, it may be that STAR WARS is hitting the creative limits of what it can do, that there are only so many variations on the basic theme that it can tell.

The sequel trilogy only make this particular problem worse, since they are set decades ahead in the time line. Everything that has been done in STAR WARS since the sequel as been set before them, either during the original trilogy (Andor, Rogue One) or in the period immediately after Return of the Jedi (The Mandalorian, Ahsoka). Thus they are all prequels to the sequels. This acts as a creative block, it makes all the stories ultimately meaningless, since everything will ultimately end up at Rey Skywalker.

Dipping into the old EU for ideas might help, but won’t be a cure. STAR WARS faces another problem – unlike the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) or Marvel, its movies are its creative foundation, not a book or a comic book series. LOTR is still being read, is still a literary classic which the fans can always com back to, which means that misfires like the Rings of Power won’t kill it off. Marvel fans will always have the comics (particularly the classic ones from the last century), Game of Thrones is based on A Song of Ice and Fire. These are sources that exist outside of their adaptions, to which fans can always return too.

But STAR WARS is the movies, everything grows from them. When the old EU was declared non-canonical and relegated to the Legends imprint, cutting them off from the movies that are the fountain head of the story, they were rendered irrelevant, doomed to be forgotten except by the hardcore fans like your humble scribbler.

Which leads to the next problem. STAR WARS is a Gen X thing. We grew up with it, it is our mythos. The hardcore fans who carried it through the lean years are those who became invested in the story as it was told, who followed the EU as it expanded book by book, comic by comic, game by game. We grew into adulthood, and then entered middle age as fans Which would explain why so many of the changes made by Disney have been so bitterly resented.

Meanwhile, younger audiences are less likely to care. Now, before we continue, let me clear that there are many people under the age of thirty who are STAR WARS fans, I know some of them, they are out there. But when viewed from a thousand feet above, the difference in numbers an intensity is clear. When I went to Mega Con in Orlando, earlier this year, one could judge the size and intensity of the fandom by counting up the cosplayers. STAR WARS fans were distinctly outnumbered by those dressing up as manga and anime characters. Which isn’t surprising, as manga and anime have large growing fanbases outside of Japan.

Why would twenty-somethings be interested in a creative property that first came our when their parents were children, that hit its creative peak when they were still infants, and which is running out of gas? For them, STAR WARS isn’t something new and fresh, it’s something in the background that their parents were onto. And so STAR WARS faces a dilemma – the old fans are alienated, and the new audiences just don’t care.

STAR WARS, like all the other great IP’s, was something born out of a particular time and place. The whole Rebels vs. Empire dynamic made sense in a world divided between East and West, the US vs the USSR, communist tyranny vs. capitalist freedom (although George Lucas once said that he had the Viet Cong in mind when he created the Rebel Alliance.) Modernizing it, making it diverse, relevant, or any of the buzzwords people like to use in this situation is doomed to fail, because it would mean breaking the things that make it unique.

This isn’t a problem unique to STAR WARS.

Star Trek is another franchise in decline. It tried to reboot itself by retelling the The Original Series (TOS) with a new cast, with subsequent TV shows following in its path, even though most of the existing fanbase grew up watching The Next Generation and all its spin-offs (Deep Space Nine was the best of them all, in my opinion). Again, stuck in a creative dead end, retelling the same old stories. Old wine in new bottles.

The Marvel MCU seems to be running out of gas. The classic stories from the past have long since been mined out, and whats come since Avengers: Endgame is largely an exercise in substandard wheel spinning.

DC is even worse – how many times can they retell the origin stories of Superman or Batman? How many times can Krypton be blown up, or Joe Chill gun down Bruce Wayne’s parent’s before his eyes? It’s becoming a joke. The whole superhero genre is reaching its endpoint, as far as moves and TV are concerned, the way disaster movies in the 70’s eventually wore out their welcome.

Even Harry Potter is showing symptoms of this – there are plans to reboot it as a TV series (one season per book, supposedly,) only 12 years after the last movie came out.

Aside from being subjected to an endless cycle of reboots and retreads, there’s one other thing all these creative properties, franchises, shared universes, whathaveyou, all have in common. All of them have origins in the second half of the 20^th century. There was something in the air in the period between the end of the Second World War and the Y2K Crisis-that-never-was, some strange formula in the water that led to a creative upwelling unlike anything else. All these wonderful stories, when they first arrived they were something new and exciting. Nothing like them had ever been seen before.

But now the old beasts are past their prime. They sit on the stage, rotting and immovable, sucking all the oxygen in the room. Stuck in the past, immobilizing the present, preventing the future form being born. We’re stuck with the same old stories, while anything new and interesting struggles to emerge from the primordial ooze and take that first gasping breath of air.

The cycle of birth and death, of decay and renewal in creativity is as natural as sun and shadow. Old stories fade, new ones rise to take their place – this is not new, its supposed to happen. Examples of this are not hard to find.

In 1934, a cartoonist named Al Capp created L’il Abner, a satirical newspaper comic strip that at its height had over 60 million readers and in 900 American newspapers and 100 foreign ones. It ran until 1977. Today, no one remembers it.

Horatio Alger was a bestselling novelist in the 19^th Century, who rose to fame and fortune writing rags to riches stories(18 novels, along short stories and poems) about poor boys who pulled themselves out of poverty through good honest works. Today he is remembered largely as an expression (‘a true Horatio Alger story,’ for someone who pulled themselves up through grit and hard work.)

James Fenimore Cooper was arguably America’s first great literary star, and wrote 32 novels in his lifetime. Today he is known only for The Last of the Mohicans (and I’ll bet most people reading this are more familiar with the movie version starring Daniel Day Cooper and Wes Studi.) (If you haven’t seen it, please do so at your earliest convenience. It is very good.)

I could go on, but the point should be clear. One generation passes on, and another takes its place. Only the process seems to have stalled...at least for now. But it won’t remain that way forever, or even for much longer. Time marches on, and the time of the old beasts is almost over.

So what to make of this? Whither STAR WARS and all the other creative properties mentioned? If you are the CEO of Disney, with a multi-billion franchise on the line, on whose success or failure the fortunes of a massive entertainment corporate behemoth depend, the answer is quite simple – it has to work. The corpse has to be propped up as long as possible, or at until after the next quarterly earnings report. Anything different – like perhaps creating something new – is deemed too risky to contemplate. Change is uncertain, it cannot be controlled, cannot be measured and planned for on a spreadsheet or P&L statement. Risk aversion is the spirit of our dispirited age, which would explain why everything is so chaotic.

But for the rest of us, who don’t have the weight of shareholder approval on our shoulders, we have the benefit of seeing things as they are. STAR WARS (and Star Trek, and Marvel, and so on…) is dying. It’s time has passed, it run out of ideas. Attempts revive it increasingly resemble a Frankenstein’s experiment on a dead body, with the end result being a gruesome pastiche of the real thing. Perhaps its best to leave it to the Gen X fans who grew up with it and, despite repeated and savage disappointments over the last decade, love it still.

Let the old beasts die.

And as for those who come after...let see what they can come up. What the are stories of the future, the great creative properties of tomorrow? What shared universe, multimedia creative franchise can they come up with, to be monetized and marketed to an inch of its life and ridden until, thirty years from now, there’s nothing left by skin and bones, with the process to begin anew?

Clear the stage. Who knows what might happen? Either way, it will be interesting.

STAR WARS is dead, and the rest of the old beasts are soon to follow. I want to see what comes next.