The Death and Rebirth of Star Wars: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I documented how the Star Wars franchise, which burst so spectacularly onto the scene in 1977, fizzled out by the end of 1986. Before the first movie had even celebrated its tenth birthday, George Lucas had stopped making not only new Star Wars films, but Star Wars comics, cartoons, TV movies, action figures, novels, video games—you name it:

But of course the story didn’t end there. In May 1991, the franchise rumbled back to life, resuming all of those product lines, and eventually going on to release new Star Wars movies:

What’s more, all of those products have continued in some form or another until today.

What explains that four-year-long gap, when Star Wars disappeared? And why did the franchise return, and why has it stuck around since then?

In order to answer those and other related questions, I wrote my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, which I encourage you to buy and read! But if you want the short version of the story, then read on …

As I mentioned in my last post, when Star Wars first came out, it appealed to three different demographics. General audiences liked it as a pop culture phenomenon. Star Wars (later rebranded A New Hope) sold enough tickets for 2/3 of the people living in the US at the time to go and see it. For a while, Star Wars was everywhere, as everyone tried to cash in on the craze.

But pop culture phenomena, almost by definition, are short-lived. More casual viewers enjoyed the film, then moved on. They had other, better things to do with their time than to live and breathe Star Wars.

Kids also loved Star Wars, and nearly all of the merchandise that Lucas made between 1977–86 was targeted at them. (See the first post for a survey of these products.) But kids grow up fast, and just like adults, the kids of the 1980s eventually moved on from the franchise, especially as their attention got diverted by other fads: Transformers, Cabbage Patch Kids, Garbage Pail Kids, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

As it happens, though, there was still one more demographic that liked Star Wars, and that was hungry for more Star Wars product. What’s more, unlike the previous two groups, this demographic wasn’t eager to move on. It wanted to eat, breathe, and live Star Wars. In other words, it was a perennial demographic, one that was happy to reliably spend money year in and year out.

That demographic was geeks—techie people who get their kicks by applying the STEM disciplines to science fiction and fantasy. For them, Star Wars was more than merely a fad, or a cute kiddie movie. They liked Star Wars because, just like Star Trek, it was realist and immersive. So just like with Star Trek, the geeks went to work embroidering and expanding the Star Wars universe, pushing on its boundaries, trying to see how far they could travel.

Realism is a complex topic, and I intend to devote one or more blog posts to it in the future. But for now, here’s a simple way to think about it: it’s a mode or manner of making art in which the artist uses artifice to conceal signs of their presence. Got it? Put another way, it’s the use of contrivance to hide any signs of contrivance.

For example, here’s a screen capture from the 1956 film Forbidden Planet:

Everything about this image looks contrived. The forbidden planet of the title is obviously a set on a Hollywood soundstage. The background is a matte painting. The humans are actors in make up under bright lights, positioned to stand facing the camera. Their costumes and props look brand new, as though they were manufactured for the film—indeed, everything in the image bears this look. (Note that I’m not knocking Forbidden Planet, which is a marvelous film, not to mention an influence on Lucas.)

Compare that image with the following screen capture from Star Wars:

Look at what Lucas has done here. The location is an actual desert. You can feel the hot daytime sun beating down on everything (especially poor C-3PO), because it is. The costumes are dirty and worn, as are the robots and the Jawa Sandcrawler. The composition is more relaxed. The Jawas are going about their business in the background, oblivious to the presence of the camera. C-3PO and Uncle Owen are also looking away from the camera, and the human faces are shadowed, not fully lit. Lucas, who studied documentary filmmaking, went to great trouble to give his space opera a rough, unpolished look—the appearance that in order to make the film, he’d traveled to an actual alien planet, where he filmed real aliens and droids and vehicles.

Mind you, there are moments in the film where Lucas wasn’t as successful. Here’s a capture of what I consider to be the worst shot, and worst scene, in Star Wars, taken from the part where Luke discovers Threepio’s hiding because Artoo has run away:

For whatever reason—time limitations, budget limitations—this shot lacks the care and craft on display in the rest of the film. It looks cheap and fake. During this scene (which thankfully doesn’t last long), the documentary spell is broken as the movie’s finely-crafted air of realism breaks down.

Moments like this in Star Wars are mercifully rare (though Return of the Jedi, sadly, has several more of them). For the most part Lucas was wildly successful, which is why geeks (and others) fell in love with the movie. Watching it, you constantly get the impression that in addition to what you see happening onscreen, more is happening off-screen—that the world extends in every possible direction, both temporarily and spatially. Mos Eisley, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, looks like a real place. If we only had a spaceship, we could fly there and walk around, bumping elbows with the aliens and droids busy going about their business …

Lacking spaceships, geeks of the late ’70s and early ’80s wanted the next best thing, which was some means of pretending they could take a vacation on Tatooine.

Now earlier, when I said that no Star Wars products were released between 1986–91, I wasn’t being entirely truthful. As it happens, there was one tie-in product, released in 1987, which would turn out to be arguably the most important piece of Star Wars merchandise ever made: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game.

Long story short, this book was published by a small gaming company, West End Games, in an effort to capture some of the success of Dungeons & Dragons. To that end, the source book contained all the information that players needed to have their own adventures in the world of Star Wars.

In order to do that, however, the people at West End Games had to invent a great deal of information that wasn’t in the original films. Suppose the players wanted to go have a drink at the Mos Eisley Cantina. And suppose that while they were there, they wanted to talk with one of the aliens. Namely, this one—the one on the right:

That handsome fellow appears in Star Wars in one shot that lasts five seconds. During that time, we don’t learn much of anything about him. Nor did we learn much from the toy that Kenner released the following year:

According to the packaging, this alien’s name is Hammerhead. Wow, how’d someone think of that? Well, the kids might like that name, but if you are a geek, it simply won’t do. What kind of silly name is that? (Remember, geeks like realist fantasy—STEM-infused fantasy—not kiddie stuff!)

So someone at West End Games had to figure out who Hammerhead really was, and where he came from, and how he wound up at the Cantina. They decided that, actually, his name was Momaw Nadon, and that he was an Ithorian priest on the run after handing his people’s botanical secrets over to the Empire. (And so on—you can read more about the guy here. As you’ll see, he had good reason for surrendering those secrets!)

The fine people at West End Games did this for all of the characters in the original movie, seeking out little patches that they could expand on and embroider. Realism is an endlessly restless spirit, always pushing against any limits or perceptible boundaries in the artwork—anything that reminds us that we aren’t, in fact, looking at real life, but at something that someone made up.

Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game won awards and sold well. And at some point, it caught the attention of George Lucas, who believed Star Wars more or less finished. I picture Lucas picking the book up and thumbing through it, being taken aback by the characters and locations he’d created but now had a new life of their own. “Momaw Who-now?” he must have wondered. “What’s going on here?”

Gradually, Lucas realized that even though he was done with Star Wars, the geeks weren’t finished. They were only getting started. They wanted more products that could help them flesh out that galaxy, expanding the illusion that it was a real place they could visit. And gradually Lucas realized that geeks were an untapped demographic, a niche market that wanted something different than the other demographics. Geeks wanted to know who all the alien species were, and what languages they spoke, and how lightsabers worked, and what the dimensions of the Millennium Falcon were, and how it was laid out, as well as how fast it could go—all this and more. And they wanted to know what happened after the Rebels defeated the Galactic Empire, as well as what happened before that conflict, as well as during it. Indeed, these people were so eager to know this stuff, that if no one sold it to them, they would go and make it themselves, the same way they had with Star Trek during the 1970s, after that show went off the air.

That’s why the world-building done by the people at West End Games didn’t stay confined to the roleplaying game. Instead, Lucas and his company embraced it, and used it to help create other products. As I write in my book:

In 1989, Bantam Books, which was presumably looking to replace the lost Star Trek license, approached George Lucas with an offer to create a line of Star Wars novels. Lucas agreed, suggesting that they start with a sequel trilogy. He’d given up on his plan of ever filming one, preferring to focus on the prequel films. Bantam selected Timothy Zahn to write the sequels, finally giving fans the chance to learn what Luke and Leia and Han did after the Battle of Endor. According to Zahn, he was given mostly free rein in writing Heir to the Empire and its two sequels […]. But while Zahn worked, someone at Lucasfilm sent him West End Games’ sourcebooks, telling him he should use them to round out the corners of his adventure. Zahn did as asked, adding elements like Interdictor Cruisers and the dimensions of the two Death Stars. When his novels were published (between 1991 and 1993), they became bestsellers, thereby conveying West End’s world- building to an even greater audience both in detail and in spirit. Now everyone, not just hobby gamers, could see that Star Wars didn’t have to end.

Something new was starting to take shape: the Star Wars Expanded Universe, a wealth of additional content for fans who wanted more than just the original movies.

The backstories about Momaw Nadon, meanwhile, and all his drinking companions, were transformed into actual short stories in another book, Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina, published in 1994. The characters were also memorialized in new action figures series, first in 1996 …

… then in 2006 …

… then in 2011.

Each iteration is more custom-tailored to geeky tastes: increasingly detailed, increasingly lifelike, increasingly realist. Not to mention increasingly expensive. That 12-inch figure of Hammerhead will set you back $600!

(Free shipping, though!)

So that’s the story of how Star Wars died only to be reborn—not as a kiddie cartoon or as a campy television movie, but as a product designed for geeks, a new market that would prove astonishingly loyal—and that was about to become increasingly affluent. No one knew this in 1991, but the geeks were about to experience a boom. Geek culture would prove to be a growth market, swelling in size throughout the decade, then exploding into the mainstream around the turn of the millennium—but how that happened, and why it happened, is a tale for another time! (Though you can read about it right now in my book!)