The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV [1st ed.] 9783030529574, 9783030529581

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The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV Edited by Dominic J. Nardi · Derek R. Sweet

The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV

Dominic J. Nardi  •  Derek R. Sweet Editors

The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV

Editors Dominic J. Nardi Department of Political Science George Washington University Washington, DC, USA

Derek R. Sweet Department of Communication Studies Luther College Decorah, IA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-52957-4    ISBN 978-3-030-52958-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

At the time of this writing, the Disney+ streaming service represents the future of Star Wars television—and, quite possibly, the brightest promise for the future of the Star Wars franchise, full stop. The debut 2019 season of the first live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, seems to have united passionate and often feuding Star Wars followers while also appealing to more casual viewers. On December 3, 2019, Travis Clark of Business Insider reported that figures from Parrot Analytics confirmed The Mandalorian was “the top TV show in the world.”1 During the 2019 holiday gift-exchanging season, enthusiastic fans of “The Child,” popularly known as Baby Yoda, gave and received notifications of pre-orders for merchandise featuring the little green favorite that wouldn’t be available until spring or summer. Those who are familiar with the holiday season of 1977 can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu. During that earliest wave of Star Wars mania, Kenner Products found great success in selling Early Bird Certificates in empty boxes, placeholders for Star Wars action figures that would arrive the following year. Forty-two years later, however, the groundswell of demand for not-yet-produced merchandise was inspired not by a film, but by a Star Wars series crafted for the small screen. The Mandalorian also brings the tale of Star Wars on television full circle. After all, the initial glimpse Star Wars audiences had of a Mandalorian—a glimpse that made a lasting and profound impact on the 1

 Clark, “‘The Mandalorian’ on Disney Plus is the Top TV Show in the World.”

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franchise—was on television, in 1978’s infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. The special offered not only the first made-for-television Star Wars content, but also the first official Star Wars cartoon. George Lucas wrote the special’s “The Faithful Wookiee” segment himself, and the animation firm that created it would go on to produce the Star Wars cartoon series Droids (1985–1986) and Ewoks (1985–1986). “The Faithful Wookiee” introduced viewers to the bounty hunter Boba Fett, visually stunning and enigmatic in his Mandalorian armor, quite unlike anything or anyone yet seen in the Star Wars galaxy. It is fitting, perhaps, that fan-turned-maker Jon Favreau—the creator, head writer, and showrunner of The Mandalorian—chose television as the medium best suited to the ongoing effort of unpacking the secrets originally suggested by the fascinating anti-­ hero in his inscrutable Mandalorian helmet. The line that extends from the Star Wars Holiday Special to The Mandalorian intersects several Star Wars films across decades and trilogies. It is worth pointing out, though, that a substantial amount of the lore and details harnessed to such positive effect in The Mandalorian comes from earlier (and still-canon) Star Wars television series, most notably The Clone Wars (2009–2014, 2020) and Rebels (2014–2018). Building The Mandalorian on such a foundation rewards invested fans, of course, but, thanks to the fact Disney+ has made these earlier series available for streaming, it also encourages new viewers to explore older Star Wars television content. Current Star Wars television works, then, are built on and reinforce the importance of past Star Wars television works. Furthermore, the increasingly integrated multimedia nature of Star Wars storytelling underscores how integral Star Wars television stories are to the larger, overarching Star Wars narrative. One need only point to the character of Saw Gerrera to illustrate this. Gerrera originated in the animated The Clone Wars series, became a live-action main character in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), returned to animation in Rebels, and played a key role in Star Wars novels such as Rebel Rising (2017) and Guardians of the Whills (2017). Gerrera is not an exception to the rule; other characters follow similar cross-media trajectories. For that matter, of the ten powerful Light Side characters who voiced support for Rey as a Jedi in the climactic scene of the 2019 film The Rise of Skywalker (2019), all ten had played major roles in past Star Wars television series, and two of them—Ahsoka Tano and Kanan Jarrus—were altogether new to Star Wars live-action films, having appeared primarily in Star Wars television series. In short, Star Wars

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television is inextricably woven into the fabric of Star Wars storytelling, and the crucial role it plays in the franchise only continues to grow. The future of a franchise on the scale of Star Wars requires not only new audience members now, but new generations of audience members on the horizon. Over the decades, Star Wars television works have sought to perform the significant role of the proverbial gateway drug. Creators have designed series for children with the aim of capturing their imaginations, catching them up on past storylines, and creating lifelong fans. This strategy began with live-action, made-for-television films such as Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985) and continued with the animated series Droids and Ewoks. Some contemporary examples of series for young viewers include various Lego Star Wars specials and series (through All Stars in 2018), Forces of Destiny (2017–2018), and Star Wars: Resistance (2018–2020). Given the convenience of moving between Star Wars stories crafted for a variety of age groups on Disney+, for example, viewers can easily “graduate” from text to text as they and their interests grow. Perhaps no recruitment effort to expand the ranks of Star Wars fandom has proved as consistently fruitful, however, as the global phenomenon of Star Wars merchandising. Star Wars forever changed the industry and created a synergistic relationship between the text and the toy. A key cause for that success story lies with the television advertisements that sold Star Wars to buyers not only as a story to consume, but also as an experience to create. YouTube channels and podcast episodes attest to the fact that these Star Wars commercials and the slice-of-life scenarios of childhood that they depict inspire nostalgia in their own right. The earliest of these also preserve important popular culture history; before home video releases, one of the primary ways children remembered the Star Wars films was by reliving them, reinventing them, through play. Commercials reflected this. In other words, young audiences have learned what to expect from both Star Wars tales and Star Wars toys from television. Today promotions for the Star Wars attractions at various Disney theme parks add to the mix, ensuring that young consumers will remain a priority for those at the Star Wars helm. The larger takeaway here, then, is that Star Wars is and has always been a multimedia franchise, not simply a film franchise, and any assessment of the history, scope, or current state of Star Wars storytelling must acknowledge its many incarnations. The current international buzz surrounding The Mandalorian serves as a reminder that the long-lived and vital

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relationship between Star Wars and television demands not only recognition, but also serious scholarly attention and thoughtful analysis. Fortunately for readers, the editors and authors of this welcome anthology appreciated and responded to this need. The following essays offer valuable insights on the contributions made by Star Wars television works, and no doubt they will inspire critical and popular discussions for years to come. Bristol, VA March 2020

Amy H. Sturgis

Bibliography Clark, Travis. “‘The Mandalorian’ on Disney Plus is the Top TV Show in the World.” Business Insider. December 3, 2019. https://www.businessinsider. com/the-mandalorian-disney-plus-is-top-tv-show-in-world-2019-12.

Amy H. Sturgis  is an author, speaker, and scholar of science fiction/fantasy studies and Indigenous American studies. She earned her Ph.D. in intellectual history from Vanderbilt University and serves as Editor in Chief of Hocus Pocus Comics, faculty at Lenoir-Rhyne University and Signum University, and staff with the Hugo Award-winning StarShipSofa podcast.

Acknowledgements

An edited academic volume such as The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV is inevitably a collaborative effort. In addition to the authors listed in the Table of Contents, this book benefitted from the help and encouragement of countless people during the past few years. As editors, this support proved invaluable to helping us see the book to completion. Here, we hope to express our gratitude to those who made a difference along the way (and apologize in advance if we forget to mention anyone). We chose Palgrave as our publisher because of its experience publishing academic works about film and TV media. We were impressed with how easy they made the publication process seem. In particular, we would like to thank our editors, Camille Davies and Liam McLean, for reviewing the manuscript, and the production team, including Mary Amala Divya Suresh, Ragunath Munirathinam, and Aroun Kumar J, for making sure the book came out on time. We would also like to thank Dan HasslerForest, who reviewed this manuscript. Of course, this book project would not have happened without George Lucas, Dave Filoni, and all of the talented actors, artists, and writers at Lucasfilm. The fact that scholars are studying tie-in media is a testament to their collective imagination. This book was the brainchild of Sean Guynes, who years ago foresaw the importance of television to the Star Wars franchise. He recruited both of us to serve as editors. As hardcore The Clone Wars fans, the opportunity to work on an academic volume about Star Wars was a professional milestone. We hope the final product reflects Sean’s vision for the project. ix

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Finally, as noted above, this book is a passion project that ended up consuming much of our free time for more than a year. We are both fortunate that our spouses not only tolerated our working late nights and weekends on a book about Star Wars TV shows, but even encouraged us. All of our work will have been worth it if you, our readers, gain a deeper appreciation of the Star Wars saga as it exists beyond the films. August 2020

Dominic J. Nardi and Derek R. Sweet

Contents

1 Introduction: Star Wars from Big Screen to Small  1 Dominic J. Nardi and Derek R. Sweet

Part I Marketing and Commercials   9 2 The Enduring Force of Kenner Star Wars Toy Commercials  11 Jonathon Lundy 3 The Holiday Special and the Hole in the Archive 37 Andrew Ferguson 4 The Battle for Endor: Ewok Television Films as Transmedia Brand Extension 53 J. Richard Stevens 5 “The circle is now complete”: Transmedia Storytelling and Nostalgia in Star Wars Television Adverts 77 Lincoln Geraghty

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6 The Princess Strikes Back: Forces of Destiny and the Capitalization of the Disney Princess 97 Federica Giannelli

Part II Worldbuilding and Storytelling 119 7 Several Decades Ago in Your Living Room: Ewoks, Droids, and Star Wars Saturday Morning Cartoons121 Joseph J. Darowski 8 From Monk to Superhero: Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars and the Transformation of the Jedi137 Tiffany L. Knoell 9 Of War, Peace, and Art: Mandalorian Culture in Star Wars Television153 Lena Richter 10 Canonical Legends: How the Expanded Universe (Selectively) Lives on TV175 Dominic J. Nardi Index201

Notes on Contributors

Joseph J. Darowski  received a PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University. He is the author of X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor and the editor of the Ages of Superheroes essay collections. He co-authored Cheers: A Cultural History and Frasier: A Cultural History with Kate Darowski. As well as analyzing popular culture through academic writing, he is the host of The Protagonist Podcast. Andrew Ferguson  is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Having with this article exorcised the Holiday Special from his brain, he is now free to move on to other obsessions, including the videogaming practice of speedrunning, the weird Internet erotica of Chuck Tingle, and the poetics of spam. His critical biography of the science fiction author R.A.  Lafferty is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. Lincoln Geraghty  is Professor of Media Cultures in the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth. He serves as editorial advisor for The Journal of Popular Culture, Transformative Works and Culture, Journal of Fandom Studies, and Journal of Popular Television with interests in science fiction film and television, fandom, and collecting in popular culture. He is Senior Editor for the online open access journal from Taylor Francis, Cogent Arts and Humanities. Major publications include Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe (2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television (2009), and Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (2014). xiii

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Federica Giannelli  is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). She has received an MA in foreign languages from an Italian university and an MA from USask for her work on vampires in contemporary forms of popular culture. A lifelong Star Wars fan and avid video gamer, her PhD dissertation will focus on the Star Wars franchise to investigate how culture and cultural production are changing through the advent of new media such as videogames. She has also a seven-year experience in communications and journalistic writing which has led her to a passion for science writing and media outreach. Tiffany L. Knoell  is an assistant teaching professor in the department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. When not writing about Jedi, she can be found writing about Warner Bros. animation, Animaniacs, and animation as a historical object. Jonathon Lundy  is a doctoral candidate in the Communication, Culture, and Media program at Drexel University. His dissertation research explores the role of toyetic media in the development of generational identity and vintage toy collection. Generally, his work focuses on issues related to the reciprocal relationship between media and culture, audience and reception studies, media materiality, and communication technology. Dominic J. Nardi  is a political scientist with a PhD from the University of Michigan and a J.D. from Georgetown University. He has published extensively about political institutions in Southeast Asia and teaches comparative politics at George Washington University. He has also published articles about political themes in speculative fiction, including an award-winning article about J.R.R.  Tolkien’s views on democracy in Mythlore and a chapter about ethnicity in Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy. He is editing a book about Frank Herbert’s Dune saga (McFarland). Lena Richter  was born in 1985 and lives in Hamburg, Germany. She is a writer, translator, and podcaster mostly focusing on Pen and Paper roleplaying games and discussing the topics of diversity and representation in TTRPG.  She co-hosts the Genderswapped Podcast, a feminist RPG discussion podcast. After The Force Awakens, she fell hard into the Star Wars rabbit hole and continues to learn about the wonders of the galaxy far, far away.

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J.  Richard  Stevens is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and is the author of Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon (2015/2018). Stevens’ research delves into the intersection of ideology formation and media message dissemination; how cultural messages are formed and passed through popular culture; how technology infrastructure affects the delivery of media messages; and how media and technology platforms shape public discourse. Derek  R.  Sweet is Professor of Communication Studies at Luther College and explores the intersection of rhetoric, popular culture, and politics. His book, Star Wars in the Public Square: The Clone Wars as Public Dialogue, positions the animated series as an important cultural voice in ongoing deliberations regarding US post-9/11 war efforts. In addition to Star Wars, he has also published chapters focused on Battlestar Galactica, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and HBO’s The Leftovers. His current project explores recent superheroine narratives as resistance to the alt-right.

List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 Type of EU Content Referenced in Canon SW TV Shows. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/Legends story elements in each show associated with each category. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive 183 Fig. 10.2 How Canon SW TV Shows Adapt EU Content. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/ Legends story elements in each show by the role played in the story. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive 185 Fig. 10.3 Type of EU Sources Referenced in Canon SW TV Shows. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/Legends story elements in each show from each type of medium. The data are drawn from the first appearance of each particular story element in the EU. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive 189 Fig. 10.4 Era of EU References in Canon SW TV Shows. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/ Legends story elements in each show from each era of the chronology. The data are drawn from the first appearance of each particular story element in the EU. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive 192

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Star Wars from Big Screen to Small Dominic J. Nardi and Derek R. Sweet

Star Wars The very name evokes billion-dollar blockbusters and movie magic. For most casual audiences, Star Wars is the Star Wars films. Seeing a Star Destroyer envelop the silver screen as it chased a Rebel Blockade Runner was a formative cinematic experience for many kids and young adults in 1977. The original Star Wars trilogy inspired a generation of filmmakers— including James Cameron, Peter Jackson, J.J. Abrams, and Rian Johnson— to make their own science fiction and fantasy films. The Prequel Trilogy—although critically less well received—used advances in special effects technology to create spectacular worlds and epic space battles then possible only on a movie budget. The hype surrounding The Force Awakens

D. J. Nardi (*) Department of Political Science, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. R. Sweet Department of Communication Studies, Luther College, Decorah, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_1

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in 2015 seemed to indicate that audiences believed real Star Wars belonged in a movie theater. Yet, the films are simply the tip of the iceberg of the Star Wars megatext. During the past 43 years, starting before anyone had even seen the original Star Wars in theaters, the Star Wars franchise branched out across every form of media imaginable. The galaxy far, far away expanded into hundreds of novels, thousands of comics, dozens of video and analog games, uncountable action figures, and, of course, television shows, specials, and commercials. The recent animated TV shows have increasingly become entry points into the franchise for newer fans, especially younglings. Lucasfilm reinforced the franchise’s multimedia nature when it reset the Star Wars continuity in April 2014 and announced that the Original Trilogy, Prequel Trilogy, The Clone Wars TV show, and all tie-material going forward would be canon. Aside from the theatrical films, the television shows have been the most high-profile story products attached to the Star Wars brand. During the late 1970s and 1980s, Lucasfilm experimented with different formats for adapting the Star Wars storyworld onto the small screen. The infamous Holiday Special (1978), which aired on broadcast television just a year after the original Star Wars film was released in theaters, combined depictions of the domestic life of Wookiees with musical skits and an animated segment produced by Nelvana. After Return of the Jedi was released in 1983 and George Lucas decided to stop making Star Wars theatrical films, Lucasfilm produced two live-action Ewok TV films—Caravan of Courage (1984) and Battle for Endor (1985)—as well as the Droids (1985–1986) and Ewoks (1985–1986) animated shows. Tellingly, despite the use of characters, alien species, and planets from the films, these television products differed drastically from the storytelling conventions of the Original Trilogy and failed to resonate with many fans. These stories were rarely referenced by other Star Wars texts, even before they were removed from the official canon. The Clone Wars micro-series (2003–2005), produced by Genndy Tartakovsky, served as an intermediary step to the next era of Star Wars television. Unlike the earlier TV shows, Clone Wars had exciting action and epic battles. As a direct continuation of the story depicted in Attack of the Clones (2002), it was more integral to the megatext than previous Star Wars TV projects. The Clone Wars received critical acclaim and won multiple awards, although the relatively short duration and limited, cable network distribution reduced its exposure to the Star Wars fanbase. The show

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also led George Lucas to view animated television as a promising vehicle for future Star Wars stories. Star Wars television reached a new phase with The Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020) and the hiring of director and executive producer Dave Filoni. Unlike previous Star Wars television projects, Lucas himself was heavily involved in the art style, stories, and other aspects of this show. Lucasfilm treated it as canon and part of Lucas’s vision for the saga. TCW retroactively added depth to the characterizations and worldbuilding of the Prequel era, increasing fan investment in that portion of the Star Wars megatext. Filoni himself, widely seen as Lucas’s protégé, became a fan favorite at conventions. After Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, Filoni remained to oversee Star Wars animation, producing Rebels (2014–2018), which continued the story of many of the characters he had introduced in TCW. Both shows featured the epic battles and character drama fans had come to expect from the feature films, but also introduced new story elements, such as Godzilla-like monsters and mystical Force gods. These newer TV shows saw a much closer integration with other Star Wars storytelling and merchandising strategies. New characters from both shows, particularly Ahsoka Tano, gained a popularity that had eluded those from earlier Star Wars TV projects. Not only did Lucasfilm license merchandising based on story elements from the shows, it also incorporated story elements from TCW and Rebels into other Star Wars media.1 This integration peaked when Maul—who was apparently killed in The Phantom Menace (1999)—appeared in Solo (2018), puzzling viewers who had not seen his return in TCW. Far from being treated as secondary to the Star Wars storyworld, some aspects of the TV shows became critical to fully understanding the films. In late 2019, The Mandalorian (2019–) became the first live-action Star Wars episodic television show, and the first live-action Star Wars story told in a televisual medium since the Ewok films. The series was a flagship product for the Disney+ streaming service. As with the animated shows under Filoni, Lucasfilm has integrated The Mandalorian into its broader management of the Star Wars property. For example, the seventh episode, which aired a few days before the release of The Rise of Skywalker (2019), 1  Boba Fett did appear in the animated segment of the Holiday Special two years before The Empire Strikes Back (1980), but the character was originally designed by Lucasfilm for the feature film. Likewise, Lucasfilm used Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars micro-series to introduce General Grievous to viewers before the character appeared in Revenge of the Sith (2005).

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showed the Child use a Force healing ability that Rey would use in the film. The success of the show—and the underperformance of some the theatrical films—led Lucasfilm to pivot to television as a primary focus for new Star Wars content. The Star Wars franchise’s various TV iterations have intersected with and often reflected significant changes in televisual media. The Holiday Special reflected an attempt to fit Star Wars into the then-popular variety show format, akin to The Muppet Show. The Ewoks and Droids cartoons aired after the Reagan-era Federal Communications Commission loosened regulations on children’s entertainment programming, leading to closer integration between corporate merchandising and storytelling strategies. Both shows aired on broadcast channels, which required them to appeal to a relatively broad audience in order to stay on air. Clone Wars, The Clone Wars and Rebels aired on premium cable channels (Cartoon Network and Disney XD, respectively), which afforded storytellers greater creative freedom to depict more mature themes and violence. The rise of digital video recorders and audience familiarity with serialized storytelling during the 2000s also allowed these shows to tell stories set across multiple episodes and to provide characters with series-long arcs. By the early 2010s, digital platforms and the increasing number of cord cutters disrupted traditional TV business models and led to a significant decline in TV advertising spending. These changes necessitated new strateges for Star Wars TV content. The availability and popularity of services like YouTube allowed content creators to create niche content for specific audiences. Lucasfilm took advantage of this to create the Forces of Destiny (2017–2018) web series, which could target young girls without having to worry about mass appeal. By the late 2010, several media conglomerates, including Disney, created their own streaming services in order to compete with Netflix. This allowed Disney and Lucasfilm to circumvent traditional TV distribution networks and to create an entire ecosystem of Star Wars content—including the films and previously aired TV shows, as well as new shows such as The Mandalorian—exclusive to the service.

Scholars for Star Wars Since May 1977, scholars have devoted considerable attention to Star Wars, treating it both as a story text and as a cultural phenomenon. For example, Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka’s Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars and Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars contain a

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collection of essays about the films, including gender and racial representation and Campbellian hero’s journey, as well as the ways in which the films influenced political discourse and pop culture. While the bulk of this scholarship still focuses on the Original Trilogy, there have also been significant studies of the later live-action films, including Paul McDonald’s reevaluation of the Prequel Trilogy in The Star Wars Heresies and Dan Golding’s consideration of nostalgia during the Disney-era in Star Wars after Lucas. Despite the increasing importance of non-film media to the Star Wars franchise, there is still relatively little scholarship about Star Wars beyond the films. This omission is especially noticeable for the Star Wars TV properties. Some works, such as Rich Handley and Joseph F.  Berenato’s A Long Time Ago: Exploring the Star Wars Cinematic Universe, mostly focus on the films but also include analyses of Star Wars television content. Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest’s Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling is one of the first major academic volumes to focus on the multimedia nature of the Star Wars franchise, but only dedicates a handful of chapters to the TV shows. A notable exception is Derek R. Sweet’s Star Wars in the Public Square, which examines the treatment of certain political issues in The Clone Wars. As the first academic volume dedicated exclusively to the study of Star Wars televisual content, The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV attempts to this gap in the literature. Our volume takes a transmedial approach to the material, recognizing that the TV projects interact with and relate to other Star Wars texts. While the chapters in this volume take different approaches to the subject matter, they take as a basic premise that the televisual entrants into the Star Wars transmedia storyworld are both important texts in the history of popular culture and also key to understanding how the Star Wars franchise—and, thus, industry-wide transmedia storytelling strategies—developed. The book expands previous work to consider television studies and sharp cultural criticism together in an effort to bring both long-running popular series, long-ignored texts, and even toy commercials to bear on the franchise’s complex history. The first half of this book critically examines the ways through which Lucasfilm and Star Wars creators used the medium of television to market the Star Wars franchise and associated products. Jonathon Lundy’s chapter, “The Enduring Force of Kenner Star Wars Toy Commercials,” demonstrates the impact of the Kenner toy commercials and argues that these ads became an important part of the Star Wars experience for younger

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viewers. In “The Holiday Special and the Hole in the Archive,” Andrew Ferguson takes advantage of videotape recordings to explore how the various skits in Holiday Special interacted with the ads that aired during commercial breaks. In “The Battle for Endor,” Richard Stevens discusses the storytelling tropes used in the two live-action Ewok movies, but also bemoans the fact that they did not take advantage of the televisual medium to increase representation of women and persons of color in Star Wars. Lincoln Geraghty’s “The circle is now complete” examines the use of Star Wars characters and story elements to advertise third-party commercial products, arguing that these ads play an important role in creating nostalgia for the wider Star Wars narrative universe. Finally, Federica Giannelli’s chapter, “The Princesses Strike Back,” looks at how the Forces of Destiny YouTube series, which she argues both reinforces and challenges problematic representations of gender. The second half of this book looks at how various Star Wars TV projects have added to the storyworld or changed the storytelling techniques available to the franchise. Joseph Darowski’s chapter, “Several Decades Ago in Your Living Room,” argues that 1980s animated shows failed in large part because they lacked the unique blend of fantasy and science-fiction genres that fueled the success of the films. In “From Monk to Superhero,” Tiffany L.  Knoell traces the development of the modern Jedi to Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars, which gave Jedi superpowers that would have seemed unimaginable in 1977. Ultimately, this made the Jedi more marketable in an era when the superhero genre had already started to take off. In “Of War, Peace, and Art,” Lena Richter chronicles the history of the Mandalorians throughout the Star Wars megatext, noting how TCW and Rebels took what was once a warrior culture and gave it greater depth by depicting Mandalorian artwork and pacifist movements. The final chapter, Dominic J. Nardi’s “Canonical Legends,” analyzes how the canonical animated TV shows used story elements from the noncanonical Expanded Universe (EU) tie-in media. He finds that the shows primarily used EU story elements for worldbuilding, but also adapted important characters and story events, effectively (re)incorporating them into the canon. The landscape of Star Wars television has changed considerably even in the few years since The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV was first conceived. The first season of Resistance (2018–2020) had just aired, while The Mandalorian had not yet launched (hence why these two shows receive little attention in this book). This book also comes at a time of transition for Star Wars on TV. Before 2019, all existing TV projects in the

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Star Wars canon were animated shows primary intended for younger audiences. With the success of The Mandalorian, Lucasfilm invested more in live-action content and has announced plans for additional TV shows. Several of the chapters in this book focus on TV commercials, but with the Disney+ streaming service future Star Wars television shows might no longer need to incorporate such advertising content. As televisual content is only going to become a more integral part of the Star Wars megatext and brand development, this book comes at an opportune time to reflect on this unique corner of the Star Wars phenomenon.

Bibliography Brode, Douglas, and Leah Deyneka (editors). Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars and Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012a. ——— (editors). Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2012b. Golding, Dan. Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Guynes, Sean, and Dan Hassler-Forest (editors). Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam, 2018. Handley, Rich, and Joseph F. Berenato. A Long Time Ago: Exploring the Star Wars Cinematic Universe. Edwardsville, IL: Sequart Organization, 2016. McDonald, Paul F. The Star Wars Heresies: Interpreting the Themes, Symbols and Philosophies of Episodes I, II and III. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. Sweet, Derek R. Star Wars in the Public Square: The Clone Wars as Political Dialogue. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015.

PART I

Marketing and Commercials

CHAPTER 2

The Enduring Force of Kenner Star Wars Toy Commercials Jonathon Lundy

On December 12, 2015, NBC’s infamous late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) debuted a humorous commercial parody for the film release of The Force Awakens.1 The fictional advertisement, fashioned in the style of a retro toy commercial, featured SNL cast members Bobby Moynihan, Taran Killam, and Kyle Mooney as overly enthusiastic adult toy collectors continuously disrupting the fun of three young boys. As the kids try to just play with their toys as intended, the stereotypical obsessive grown-ups encourage them to “leave them in the box” or “just look at it!” While the children seem perfectly happy with their unboxed figures, the adults are more concerned with keeping the toys in pristine condition and maintaining cinematic fidelity. At one point, Moynihan’s character even correctively demonstrates a more “movie accurate” recreation of the Millennium Falcon’s landing sequence. 1

 Saturday Night Live, “Star Wars Toy Commercial—SNL.”

J. Lundy (*) Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_2

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The Farce was strong with this creative spoof that was both a nostalgic nod to classic toy commercials and a satirical jab at the adult toy collection phenomenon. The skit continues to be immensely popular with SNL’s official YouTube channel, amassing over 5.4 million views and 2800 comments. For some viewers, the sketch’s deeper resonance came from its critique of Star Wars fan culture, particularly adult toy collectors. Moynihan, Killam, and Mooney masterfully play the lonely, geeky, white-­ male fan archetypes, best illustrated when one boy asks Killam’s character, “Does your wife like toys too?” With John Williams’s somber music coming to the aural foreground, the camera zooms in to reveal the man’s dejected realization. As is the case with all effective parody however, its popularity also lies in the masterfully exaggerated imitation of an original work. For individuals of a certain age, the sketch was instantly recognizable as a Star Wars toy commercial through its successful appropriation of all the classic Kenner toy advertisement aesthetics from a pre-Internet youth. Originally, mass-­ produced to further the films’ financial success, Star Wars toys have, over four decades, become a cultural force of their own and a central component of the franchise. The “vintage” Kenner toyline (1977–1985) simultaneously revolutionized the toy industry and gave the first generation of Star Wars fans a material connection to their beloved fictional storyworld. Some popular attention has been paid to the significance of Kenner toys within the Star Wars franchise and among adult fans. Less explored, however, is the role Kenner toy commercials played in making Star Wars the most successful and beloved transmedia property of all time. Using data obtained from an in-depth content analysis and a previously unpublished survey of fans, this chapter will (1) recount the history of Kenner Star Wars; (2) explain how the original Kenner advertisements and their aesthetic template refined the action-figure commercial genre in American TV; (3) address Kenner’s influence on the transmediality of Star Wars and the toy industry; and (4) demonstrate how Kenner toys and their commercials cultivated an enduring legacy of fandom for the first generation of Star Wars collectors.

The True Galactic Empire In 1977, George Lucas’s Star Wars (later renamed A New Hope) captivated audiences worldwide and transformed the film industry by setting new standards for special effects and visual storytelling. Lucas’s true

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genius, however, was the strategic integration of filmmaking and merchandising that extended the Star Wars experience beyond the movie theater through an endless array of products. For children, this meant that all aspects of their lives were voluntarily colonized by Star Wars. Kids could play with Star Wars toys, eat Star Wars cereal, wear Star Wars clothes, cover injuries with Star Wars band-aids, and sleep in Star Wars sheets. While many of the “vintage” commodities became collectible, the Kenner toys became especially important material reminders of the film experience. The story of Star Wars quickly became intertwined with the history of its toys to the extent that some argue, “Star Wars is a toy franchise, not a movie franchise.”2 The action figure line in particular has, since its inception, been an economic and fictive cornerstone, while Kenner became a well-known character in the Star Wars saga to many original fans.3 Kenner, named after the street where the original corporate offices were located,  was founded in 1946  in Cincinnati, Ohio, by brothers Albert, Phillip, and Joseph Steiner. Kenner gained some notoriety with its Bubble-­ Matic (1946), a toy gun that blew bubbles; Easy-Bake-Oven (1963), a light bulb powered toy cooker; and the Kenner Gooney Bird, the 1960s era corporate mascot logo with signature catch phrase: “It’s Kenner! It’s fun!” Kenner, however, became a true household name after securing the lucrative merchandising license for Star Wars. Today, Kenner’s story has become its own legend, a metanarrative inexorably tied to the franchise, retold in books,4 YouTube series,5 documentaries like Netflix produced The Toys That Made Us (2017),6 and the fan-made Plastic Galaxy: The Story of Star Wars Toys (2014).7 Bernie Loomis, a toy development executive for Kenner, famously passed on the merchandising rights for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)—because the film wasn’t “toyetic” enough—in favor of George Lucas’s Star Wars.8 By toyetic, Loomis meant the  Meslow, “Star Wars isn’t a movie franchise. It’s a toy franchise,” 1.  Scott, “#Wheresrey?: Toys, Spoilers, and the Gender Politics of Franchise Paratexts,” 138–147. 4  Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as popular culture, 94; Geraghty, Cult Collectors. 5  Analog Toys, “History of Star Wars Toys: Vintage Kenner Action Figure Review / Collection”; or an abridged version Toy Galaxy, “The History of Vintage Star Wars Figures— Need to Know #1.” 6  “Star Wars,” The Toys That Made Us, season 1, episode 1. 7  Stillman, Plastic Galaxy: The Story of Star Wars Toys. 8  Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture, 94. 2 3

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suitability of the film for merchandising, particularly in modes amenable to children, through play or collectability. If merchandising is “the materiality of licensing, an extension of virtual screen texts into physical paratexts,” then toyetics is the “interactive ‘make-and-do’ aspect of merchandising, encouraging audiences to engage and play with aspects of the screen text.”9 Toyetic properties must possess creative characters, technology, or storyboard enough to produce merchandise with play value.10 As a high-concept space opera, visually striking and stylistically innovative, Star Wars had the look (imagery), the hook (market appeal), and the book (accessible narrative) to be perfectly toyetic.11 Kenner, wanting to capitalize on the diverse characters and technology present in Star Wars, soon realized that standard action figure sizes (8”–12”) were too large for a scalable universe of toy vehicles, creatures, and playsets.12 It was thus decided that the main line of action figures would be 3.75” tall, meaning that, in light of the 1970s oil crisis, a greater variety of figures could be produced, sold for an affordable price, and work interchangeably with vehicles and creatures.13 Kenner also deviated from industry norms by producing figures, primarily with molded clothing, specific to each character, instead of a single figure, like G.I. Joe, with multiple outfits suitable for different applications. The smaller size and diverse assortment of toys was also more conducive to collection, a goal that was explicitly and repeatedly encouraged in their TV commercials through direct addresses like “collect them all” and the sale of seven distinct “collector” cases. Star Wars debuted in May 1977, but Kenner was unable to produce enough toys in time for Christmas. Instead, it bravely sold the “Early Bird Certificate Package,” an empty box containing a diorama display stand, some stickers, a fan club membership card, and mail-away certificate redeemable for four action figures.14 To spread the word about this promise of toys to come, Kenner aired its first television advertisement in the months leading up to the holidays. The commercial featured a boy and 9  Bainbridge, “Fully Articulated: The Rise of the action figure and the changing face of children’s entertainment,” 25. 10  Toyetic merchandise could also mean clothing, lunchboxes, or food. 11  Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, 22. 12  “Star Wars,” The Toys That Made Us, season 1, episode 1. 13  Alexandratos, Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on Toys and Their Messages, 7. 14  xboxphanatic, “Kenner Star Wars Early Bird Commercial 1977,” June 3, 2012, video, 00:30, https://youtu.be/0CmGs9ixpNU.

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girl enthusiastically playing with the Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, and R2-D2 in front of the diorama display. One of the children even demonstrated how to fill out the certificate, which Kenner hoped would mitigate the disappointment of receiving an empty box for Christmas. The four figures shipped in February 1978, and soon eight more figures were available in stores. By 1979, 21 individual figures were available, along with a handful of vehicles and playsets. Retailers had trouble keeping product on shelves and the toyline generated an estimated $100 million in revenue during that first year. Kenner went on to produce an estimated 300 Star Wars-themed products between 1977 and 1985 with the action figure line as the hallmark of a vast toy galaxy encompassing plush toys, inflatable lightsabers, blasters, and games. Profits eclipsed $2.5 billion by the end of the first three films;15 in 1985 there were more Star Wars action figures on the planet than US citizens.16 The seemingly ubiquitous popularity of Star Wars at the time might suggest that the toys sold themselves; however, an important, often underrated component in Kenner’s triumph was its strategic use of television advertising. The content of toy advertising has been explored previously, mostly regarding gender and racial representation, but there is a lack of research on the formal features of children’s commercials and their impact on viewers.17 Furthermore, it is even rarer for television commercials to be explicitly analyzed as televisual genre.18 However, if the commercial was treated as genre, “it would be among the most ubiquitous and the most influential of its forms and hence deserve[s] the attention of the serious critics and theoreticians of that art.”19 Due to their limited timeframe and explicitly persuasive intent, the form and style of TV advertisements are more important than other televisual genres.20 Kenner did not invent the action figure commercial genre, but its advertisements firmly established its presence within American children’s culture. 15  Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, 269. 16  Taylor, “How Star Wars Conquered the Galaxy.” 17   Chandler and Griffiths, “Gender-Differentiated Production Features in Toy Commercials,” 503. 18  Hernandez, “Blurring the Line: Television Advertainment in the 1950s and Present,” 13. 19  Esslin, “Aristotle and the Advertisers: The Television Commercial Considered as a Form of Drama,” 96. 20  Messaris, “Visual Persuasion. The Role of Images in Advertising,” 86–87.

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Kenner Commercializes Star Wars The first toy advertised on national television was “Mr. Potato Head” (1952), a kit of plastic facial features, backed with push pins, to be stuck in your tuber of choice (“potato not included”).21 More toy commercials would follow, including Mattel’s 1959 advert for the iconic fashion doll Barbie.22 However, the first action figure commercial didn’t air until 1964, when Hasbro debuted its poseable 12” scaled “G.I. Joe” doll. Conventional wisdom held that boys would not play with dolls, so Hasbro marketed “Joe” as the world’s first “action figure.” The one-minute advertisement featured an original patriotic theme song, quick jump-cuts highlighting the variety of authentic equipment that would, according to the authoritative male narrator, enable a child to “have the greatest realism, the greatest fun you ever had in playing soldier.”23 Several boys enthusiastically shouted commands and demonstrated how to equip their clearly-not-dolls with uniforms, tools, and weapons on an elaborate playset. Thematic music, rapid cutting, masculine voice-over, and demonstrative play would remain staples of the “boy toy” commercial genre. By the 1970s, the toy commercial genre was well established, but it would jump into hyperspace with the Kenner’s Star Wars toyline. Roughly 100 toy commercials aired on US television sets for the original Kenner Star Wars toys,24 with an additional 10 TV advertisements 21  VintageTVCommercials, “Vintage Original Mr and Mrs Potato Head commercial 1960’s.” 22  BarbieCollectors, “1959 First EVER Barbie Commercial High Quaility HQ!” 23  Tommy Retro’s Blast From The Past! “G.I. JOE (1964) Debut TV Commercial!” 24  The data regarding Kenner commercials discussed within this chapter is the product of a systematic content analysis made possible only by the thorough cataloging and curation of several passionate fans. Particularly essential, were SKot Kirkwood’s “The Star Wars TV Commercials Project” and Geoff1975’s “Chronological Order—Kenner Toy Commercials” discussion board posts located at TheOriginalTrilogy.com. These comprehensive lists were cross-referenced with the work of other dedicated fans including the “Vintage Star Wars Kenner Toy Commercials 1977 to 1985 Compilation,” https://youtu.be/lJY709chKLw, found at the All Things 80s YouTube channel, and the “Vintage Star Wars Kenner Toy Commercials 1977 to 1985 Compilation,” https://youtu. be/lJY709chKLw; the Star Wars—All 1977–1978 Kenner Toy Commercials—Compilation,” https://youtu.be/AhNus5u1zCs; “The Return of the Jedi—All 1982–1984 Kenner and Palitoy Toy Commercials—Star Wars—Compilation,” https://youtu.be/tuAifof9VdM; and the “The Empire Strikes Back—All 1978–1982 Kenner Palitoy Toy Commercials—Star Wars— Compilation,” https://youtu.be/mQcMW-gLXiQ all available at Eric Stran’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUNUHkV6k-Oq_jDRIri6XQw.

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made exclusively for Palitoy,25 the company that produced Kenner toys in the United Kingdom.26 Commercials were 30 seconds in length, typically airing in between weekday children’s programming, before and after school hours, or during Saturday morning cartoons, prime viewing times for American kids. The bulk of commercials promoted the 3.75” action figures and their vehicles, creatures, and playsets. The latter were an intentional focal point of the advertisements, with child actors demonstrating how the figures fit, literally and figuratively, into the strategically miniaturized  universe. Commercials emphasized special features, weaponry, and the ability of figures to fit inside an ever-increasing network of easy-to-­ handle spaceships and playsets.27 There were also spots for other Kenner Star Wars products like games, puppets, inflatable lightsabers, plush Ewoks, and the diecast metal “Micro Collection,” which had 1.25” tall figurines and scaled down connectable playsets that would have been too expensive to replicate in the 3.75” scale. Kenner’s toy galaxy expanded to the public in five distinctive waves: Star Wars (1977–1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1979–1982), Return of the Jedi (1982–1984), The Power of the Force (1984–1985), and Droids and Ewoks (1985).28 Commercials airing between  1977–1979 were produced by 20th Century Fox and included toys for A New Hope (ANH) and The Empire Strikes Back (ESB). In 1980, licensing changed to Lucasfilm LTD, which was responsible for the remainder of ESB, Return of the Jedi (ROTJ), and The Power of the Force (POTF) lines, and toys made for the Droids and Ewoks animated series, respectively.

25  The Palitoy commercials, produced in the United Kingdom for Empire and ROTJ toys, were of much higher quality with more special effects than their US counterparts. The film looked cleaner, with a more advanced graphics and creative transitions including wipes and dissolves. Adverts in the United Kingdom generally displayed a greater quantity of figures, like entire units of Stormtroopers, that would make any kid envious. Furthermore, Palitoy seemed to think that children were best seen and not heard, with young actors merely playing with the toys as notable actor of stage and screen Tony Jay dramatically voiced-over the entire commercial to the Star Wars theme song. 26  Information regarding toy commercials produced for other international audiences is harder to come by, but fans that research this believe advertisements were produced for other global markets as well. 27  Keidl, “Between Textuality and Materiality: Fandom and the Mediation of Action Figures,” 3. 28  The Power of the Force (1984) and Droids toy lines each only had one known commercial produced. No known commercials were made for toys from the Ewoks (1985) animated series. Multiple copies are available on YouTube.

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In 2020, streaming services and YoutTube unboxing videos have changed the meaning of “television” and the impact of traditional toy commercials. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, Kenner progressively refined a particular aesthetic that emerged as a unique televisual genre, capturing the attention of consumers during an era of true national audiences.

The Kenner Aesthetic Most Kenner Star Wars adverts opened with a closeup or zoom-out of the featured toy, by itself or being moved into frame by a child, granting it the appearance of autonomy. Child actors were prominently featured in the early spots but, as time went by, Kenner appeared to embrace the product-­ as-­star approach. The toys themselves dominated screen time with only the children’s arms or hands visible manipulating the toys, or a few shots of their facial reactions as they delivered key lines such as “Wampa!” or “Now I know The Force is with us.” Closeup shots of toys were strategically used, as is common in toy advertising, to make the toys seem larger than life, build intensity, and potentially increase their importance in young viewers’ minds. The commercials for the Star Wars collection commenced with an adult narrator directly addressing the kids at home and introducing toys, typically with a slogan like “New from Kenner Star Wars.” During ESB commercials, kid actors spoke first,29 setting the scene through dialog and moving the toy into frame, before narration introduced the toys and gave obligatory disclaimers. As one might expect given the type of toy being sold, the commercials were strategically crafted to feel like action-packed narratives. The rapid cutting, jump-cuts, close-up shots, and cinematic music all cultivated excitement in prospective young consumers and, for some fans, made them feel “like Hollywood movie premieres each time they aired.”30 29  While the specific reason for this is unknown, it does feel consistent with an industry shift that began in the 1960s with advertisers directly addressing kids as consumers, opposed to their parents, and other attempts to sell products to children using peer power to define what is cool versus adults telling kids what to buy. 30  Lundy, Star Wars Fan Survey. In 2019, I conducted an original survey of 68 self-identified Star Wars fans, recruited from a variety of Facebook groups and YouTube channels related to Kenner Star Wars toys. Specific references to fans, like this one here, come from this survey unless otherwise cited.

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Kenner effectively smuggled the aesthetics of the big screen onto the small one. Film-editing theorists contend that rapid cutting is used to build dynamic moods such as excitement, intensity, and tension in contrast to more static shots and dissolve transitions, which tend to develop more reflective moods like tranquility, calm, and relaxation.31 Such aesthetic differentiation has been linked with gendered stereotypes in marketing. Some 1980s studies showed that advertisements targeting boys or a mixed audience exhibited higher cutting rates and shorter shots, a marketing practice consistent with a perceived masculine preference for action-­ orientation than commercials directed at girls, which employed more passivity through long shots and dissolves.32 Given Kenner’s target demographic, the prominence of the former aesthetic choices seems consistent with industry assumptions of the day.33 Both indoor and outdoor play environments were used in the Kenner commercials, with the latter being more common. The creative DIY playsets, made with average household items or backyard scenery, both mirrored those built by many viewers and inspired new ones, whether that be knocking your Boba Fett figure into a green bucket buried in the dirt (Great Sarlacc Pit) or racing your temperamentally explosive Speeder Bikes through the legs of your kitchen table chairs (Forest Moon of Endor). My favorite playset was the Endor “security shield,” an upside-down Styrofoam cup with window cutout for a guard look-out, in front of a cellophane strip, stretched between two upright sticks. This “sandpit aesthetic” would be used in future action figure commercials for toylines like Hasbro’s Transformers.34 Indoor scenes were generally brightly lit to emphasize the fun nature of play and of course to highlight product. Several commercials featured darker lighting to convey more dire tones, like the ROTJ collection advert in which, on a stormy night, a young boy challenges his Darth Vader poster to a lightsaber duel.35  Zettl, Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics, 250 & 256.  Chandler and Griffiths, “Gender-Differentiated Production,” 503. 33  Huston, Greer, Wright, Welch, and Ross, “Children’s Comprehension of Televised Formal Features with Masculine and Feminine Connotations,” 707–716. Children as young as 6 years old can use formatting and visual style of a medium, in conjunction with content cues, to determine if the product is designed for their gender or not. 34  Geraghty, “Back to That Special Time: Nostalgia and the Remediation of Children’s Media in the Adult World,” 203–220. 35  All Things 80s, “Vintage STAR WARS Kenner Toy Commercials 1977 to 1985 Compilation,” 38.02–38.32. 31 32

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Production quality noticeably improved after 1979. At first, special effects (SFX) were limited to simple text that stated toy names, copyright information, and disclaimers. Commercials for the ESB collection introduced more SFX like advanced backgrounds, the Kenner logo, animated Star Wars and ESB title graphics (also synergistically featured on the respective toy packaging), and integration of actual film footage. Two advertisements even included exclusive footage of C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) as spokes-droid, alongside Chewbacca, on the deck of a spacecraft addressing the “parents of Earth” to promote Kenner’s “toy universe of heroes, villains, fantastic space vehicles, and far away galaxies.”36 Lucasfilm stepped its game up  with the ROTJ series. Each commercial opened with advanced computer-generated graphics, including either a fly-in, electrified, or a red-laser blasted logo over an animated space background. Most commercials also used John Williams’s authentic Star Wars theme as the audio backdrop where previous commercials used a generic, Star Wars-esque sounding tune. One of the more elaborate commercials recalled by fans was for a trio of toys from the ROTJ collection: Speeder Bike, Ewok Combat Glider, and Ewok Assault Catapult.37 Three boys play on a bedroom floor when suddenly one digitizes, Tron-style, into an “Imperial Biker Scout” action figure riding a “Speeder Bike” through an elaborate and impossibly replicable model forest, eventually crashing into a tree. The boys enthusiastically voice-over the commercial, reinterpreting the major Endor conflict with all the appropriate figures and an enviable army of Imperial troops. After the cardboard shield bunker takes a hit from Wicket’s catapult, the camouflaged “trench coat Han Solo” figure rematerializes back into a boy, and the kids celebrate a hard-fought ludic victory. Another high-quality commercial of note is the one-off, rarely seen, 1984 POTF advertisement with giant CGI collector coins floating through the sky above a typical suburban neighborhood. Many of these production features had been used previously in toy commercials, but Kenner perfected the template for effectively advertising action figures on television. Today, action figure commercials still look, 36  This is one of the rare instances when parents were directly addressed. Starting in the 1960s, advertisers shifted their messages for children’s products from parents, directly to the kids themselves, during kids programming on the radio or television, and in comic books and magazines. 37  Lundy, Star Wars Fan Survey.

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sound, and feel quite similar to the classic Kenner advertisements. While innovative in form, the commercials’ content often followed representational tropes of action figure marketing.

Sex, Race, and Age in a Plastic Galaxy, Far, Far Away Unsurprisingly, considering the target market for “action figures,” 93% of the advertisements featured boys. To Kenner’s credit, when girls were present, they had relatively equivalent screen time and number of speaking lines compared to their male counterparts. In fact, Kenner’s first TV commercial featured a female actor. The mere presence of females in Kenner ads might suggest some progress in the highly gendered toy marketing of that era. However, the performative roles for girls in the commercials largely conformed to cultural stereotypes. Not entirely unlike some real-­ life play patterns I remember, the girls were relegated to playing R2-D2, a popular yet obviously less actionable character, or Princess Leia, seemingly the only female character of importance in the entire galaxy (other than Mon Mothma). Boys frequently engaged in battle play, whereas girls and their plastic avatars were often reduced to the damsel-in-distress trope, either being chased, captured, or rescued by the boys and their heroic male figurines. The largely mimetic play of the child actors surprisingly did not reflect the strong heroinism present in the Original Trilogy and celebrated by many. Girls were featured more significantly in ads for toys intended for younger fans like the “cuddly” plush Ewoks from the ROTJ and the “Ewok Family Hut” from the Kenner Preschool line. Perhaps more telling of Kenner’s assumptions about market demographics than girls’ roles in ads is that, although Princess Leia was a major protagonist in the films and immortalized in five distinct figures, the character only appeared in 5% of commercials. Furthermore, the singular instance of a boy playing with a Leia figure was in a commercial featuring her Boushh Disguise variant, with her identity only revealed at the end. Kenner produced three other female characters: Sy Snootles (1982) from ROTJ; Kea Moll (1985) from the Droids cartoon; and Urgah Lady Gorneesh (1985) from the Ewoks cartoon. Only one, Snootles, was featured in a commercial.38 38  Kea Moll’s figure can be briefly seen in one shot of the 1985 Droids toy advert. Kenner also developed two unproduced prototypes for female characters, Jessica Meade (1986) from Droids and Morag (1986) from Ewoks.

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Some minority groups were also noticeably absent in those cherished Kenner commercials of yesteryear. Nearly 90% of primary presenters in the adverts were White/Caucasian. The presence of African American/black children accounted for 10% of the total kids on screen. Given the estimated percentage of African American/black citizens in the United States in the early 1980s was around 12%, they were at least close to proportionately represented. However, another 1% of actors race was indeterminate, suggesting Hispanics and Asians were underrepresented. No girls of color were present. It’s difficult to say why more minority children were not in the adverts, but considering the time period, relative to the slow progress of societal inclusivity, and that minorities are still underrepresented in commercials today, this is not shocking. The Star Wars saga and Kenner’s plastic approximation of it featured a great variety of characters, but there was a lack of human racial diversity. In the Original Trilogy, the only major character of color was the smooth-talking, retired smuggler, and administrator of Cloud City, Lando Calrissian. Lando was a primary protagonist in ESB and ROTJ, widely popular with fans, and Kenner produced three separate figures of him.39 Only one other human-minority figure was produced, a black-skinned Bespin Security Guard.40 Although Kenner couldn’t control the lack of humanoid diversity in the filmic universe, it perhaps missed an opportunity to create unique figures that would represent and appeal to a greater number of children.41 Only 16 adults appeared in the commercials, accounting for about 8% of the total on screen talent.42 Adults usually appeared in the background, silently watching the action or reading the newspaper. There were a few exceptions in which Kenner let the family—or at least fathers—play with 39  Kenner first produced “Bespin” Lando figure captured his likeness as seen in ESB, both with toothy grin and without variants. The most valuable version of Lando is the cloth-caped version honoring his promotion to General in the Alliance fleet, from ROTJ, one of the “Last 17” figures produced by Kenner. The “Surprise, surprise, I’m Lando in disguise” Lando figure was perhaps the most memorable. This quote is from the 1982–1983 commercial for ROTJ, featuring Lando in his “Skiff Guard Disguise.” It is also one of the earworms noted by survey respondents that has stuck with them into adulthood. 40  Another figure was produced, also a Bespin Security Guard prominently rocks a Fu Manchu mustache, which some fans argue, represents an onscreen character that could be Chinese or Hispanic. However, the photo of the character featured on the action figure’s card-back is of a bearded Caucasian man. 41  For instance, perhaps Kenner could have created a more racially diverse cast of generic “Hoth Rebel Trooper” or “Endor Rebel Soldier.” 42  Lundy, Star Wars Fan Survey.

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the products. For example, in the “Radio Controlled R2-D2” commercial, a boy excitedly displays its functions to his father until dad decides to hog the remote.43 Similarly, in the 1979 advertisement for the “Electronic Battle Command” micro-computer game, a father gets too involved and in Kenner’s first use of advanced SFX, transforms into a Stormtrooper as footage of a space battle from A New Hope fills the room’s windows.44 As would become common in toy advertising through the 1990s, fathers, if present, were portrayed as uncool, inept toy users who just didn’t “get it.” In children’s commercials, adults often “enforce a repressive and joyless world” where products or brands come to the rescue of oppressed kids by supplying kid-centric fun.45 The “kids rule” promotional ethos of cable networks like Nickelodeon frequently frame adults as too serious and authoritarian.46 Mothers were even less involved in Kenner promos, with only three women present in commercials, most prominently in the advert for the “Kenner Preschool Ewok Family Hut” playset. Kids were understandably the focal point of the Kenner’s campaign, yet there was a consistent adult presence. Over 90% of commercials featured dramatic, authoritative, masculine narration that introduced product, highlighted new features, and reiterated obligatory information like “New from Kenner Star Wars” or disclaimers like “batteries not included.” Later commercials even featured notable vocal artists like Victor Caroli, the iconic narrator from the original Transformers cartoon series (1984–1987), and Tony Jay, known for his villainous role as Frollo in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996).47 Several commercials were narrated by the kids themselves and the rest utilized young men. The predominant use of masculine voice-over was—and remains—common in the toy ­advertising world for toys marketed to boys and girls. Even Barbie’s first commercial in 1959 featured a male narrator, talking over a Disneyesque female vocalist. It was believed by some marketing experts that kids would perhaps feel more compelled to buy and play with certain toys if they were told to or encouraged by an authoritative male voice. 43  All Things 80s, “Vintage STAR WARS Kenner Toy Commercials 1977 to 1985 Compilation,” 1:33–2:03. 44  All Things 80s, 11.58–12.28. 45  Schor, Born to buy, 53. 46  Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and consumer citizenship. 47  Tony Jay even lent his distinctive baritone to voice over to a series of promotional marketing videos for prospective Kenner investors. See 12BACK, “Star Wars Vintage KENNER Marketing Video—Toy Collection 1983 v2 [Remastered].”

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Another—now common—strategy Kenner utilized was the use of children slightly older than its target market. A handful of older boys (12+), all fashionably dressed in either sport coats or sweaters over collared shirts, were used as spokespeople to highlight entire figure collections, or special mail-away offers like the “Action Figure Survival Kit.” One such commercial promoting the new “Darth Vader Collector’s Case” even featured two soon-to-be stars, Christian Slater and Peter Billingsley.48 Furthermore, while the recommended age for the toyline was four and up, most actors were much older. The “cool kids” strategy became standard in toy advertising as marketing experts thought children would want toys if they were promoted by older kids, whom they naturally saw as determiners of what was “cool.”49 Without insight from the creative minds behind Kenner’s campaign, we can only speculate as to the noticeable absence of female and minority children. Surely Kenner wanted all boys and girls to purchase their toys. The reason for female underrepresentation seems more understandable. Conventional industry wisdom held that girls were not interested in action figures for any number of reasons, including gendered play patterns, either inherent or socially constructed; a lack of female characters in the Star Wars media, and thus fewer female figures produced; or the absence of targeted marketing. Despite fewer gender-specific signs in toy aisles today, this wisdom prevails, outside of rare instances like the Forces of Destiny line (2017–2018), which is described in advertisements as a set of “adventure figures,” and marketed as both action figures and fashion dolls. This longstanding debate about girls’ interest in action figures quickly turns into a chicken-or-the-egg causality loop. Industry insiders claim toy companies and retailers do not market action figures to girls because they do not buy them, and consumer advocates counter that girls do not buy action figures because they are not marketed to young girls. What isn’t debated is that representation issues persist in children’s advertising. Such issues notwithstanding, Star Wars has become the most successful transmedia franchise of all time and the toys and their commercials have synergistically contributed to its ever-expanding narrative in meaningful ways. 48  Slater starred in movies such as Heathers (1989), Gleaming the Cube (1989), True Romance (1993), Very Bad Things, (1998). Billingsley is best known for playing Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story (1983). 49  BanetWeiser, Kids Rule! This seemed to be the prevailing wisdom through the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, however it is unknown by this scholar whether this is still the case.

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Toyetic Transmedia Intertextuality Transmedia storytelling is the unfolding of a narrative “across multiple media platforms, with each text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole.”50 For example, Star Wars, initially introduced in the film Star Wars, has expanded through tie-in novels, comic books, animated series, video games, toys, and immersive experiences like the Disney theme park Galaxy’s Edge. Materials that surround an original narrative, or paratexts, extend its reach, allowing audiences to inhabit and explore the officially licensed story-world.51 Toyetic transmedia texts, including the Kenner toys and their commercials, have played a variety of roles in the Star Wars transmedia saga. Practically, before Google or IMBD, toyetic paratexts revealed information about tertiary characters not revealed in the films.52 Many background characters, such as Hammerhead, had very little screen time and were of relatively minor importance to the story. Other canonical material would eventually expand their biographies, but fans initially learned basic information like their names through toys. More significantly, toyetic paratexts enabled a unique, more tactile, form of audience engagement through their material affordances during the formative ages at which most individuals engaged them. Many fans were introduced to Star Wars through Kenner toys and this embryonic fandom fostered a tangibly affective relationship that informed and framed future memory and interpretation.53 The first generation of fans grew up “imagining themselves as part of the Star Wars universe, [and] the toys [were] integral props in the make-believe relationship they have with that fictional world.”54 As familiar media derivations, Kenner toys facilitated group play and cooperative storytelling through shared codes and narratives.55 As plastic avatars of onscreen characters—as well as creatures and vehicles—with identifiable visual traits, certain possibilities for play were manifest. Players more familiar with the Star Wars narratives often transformed onscreen dialogue, personality, action, and theme into “play scripts,” leading to more symbolic  Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 95–96.  Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. 52  Lundy, Star Wars Fan Survey. 53  Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play, and Memory across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds, 147. 54  Geraghty, Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture, 127. 55  Seiter, Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture, 168. 50 51

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or mimetic play,56 although as toys the potential for unscripted play also existed. References to onscreen content and themes in the Kenner commercials functioned more as triggers for possible action than as authoritative guidelines for screen accurate reenactment.57 Thus, Kenner encouraged both narrative-based play consistent with the story-world in question and more free-range enjoyment.58 This dialectic is illustrated in the many Kenner commercials in which kids reenact key scenes from films, reinterpret major plot points, and create entirely new stories. Kenner’s “Creature Cantina Action Playset” (1979) was a plastic base with stairs, a bar, table, revolving discs, action levers, and a cardboard background featuring an artistic rendering of the bar’s interior. In the playset’s advertisement, several boys use the toy’s special features to reimagine the blaster showdown between Han Solo and Greedo. This time, however, instead of a smoldering hole in his chest, Greedo humorously receives a stern warning before being knocked down. In this example, we see more scripted play, albeit a child’s reinterpretation of movie action, influenced by the specific characters, the playset, and their associated filmic histories. The scene is also an exemplar of how the television medium requires the reduction of complex narrative into succinct, easily understood and memorable, 30-second vignettes. A model of off-­ script play occurs in an Empire commercial, in which a “Hoth Rebel Trooper” altruistically brings an injured Imperial Snowtrooper to the “FX-7” medical droid for treatment.59 After the eight-appendaged droid heals the enemy combatant, the puzzled Imperial asks the Rebel why he saved him, to which the hero responds, “When the Force is with you, your duty is to do good.” This drama has no cinematic referent but is illustrative of the many pro-social messages related to using “The Force” that are present in these toyetic transmedia texts. Thematically most of the commercials strongly reinforced good guys (and gals) versus bad guys war play, with a few exceptions like the one just mentioned. During the three-­ year gaps between films, Kenner toys also helped sustain Star Wars fever and build anticipation between sequels.

 Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing.  Keidl, “Between Textuality and Materiality,” 3. 58  Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” 67–82. 59  12BACK, “Star Wars Vintage KENNER Commercial—FX-7, Rebel Soldier, Chewbacca, Snowtrooper [Remastered].” 56 57

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Although Kenner’s first toy series succeeded the release of A New Hope, some toys and advertisements preceded the releases of ESB and ROTJ. Promotions for ESB toys first appeared in 1978, including significant new figures and playsets depicting major plot points. One commercial even revealed Lando’s betrayal on Bespin and Han’s carbonite freezing.60 Thus, toy commercials acted as spoilers and “prophetic objects that … paratextually [revealed] the relative significance of characters, settings, and scenarios of the forthcoming film.”61 Furthermore, the very development of certain figures or vehicles suggested their importance to the storyline, reinforced by their appearance in commercials. Fans today still use paratexts like toys, trailers, cast interviews, and leaked set photography for this type of speculative play,62 a key component of modern media fandom.63 Toyetic transmedia can even generate anticipation and fandom around individual characters of seemingly minor significance. When Boba Fett officially debuted in ESB (1980), the notorious bounty hunter was an instant fan-favorite despite having only 6.5  min of screen time and 27 words of dialogue. While undeniably badass, his popularity was a result of his paratextual presence, two years in the making. Fett first appeared as an animated character in the CBS Holiday Special (1978),64 but was introduced to most fans through an action figure mail-away offer. Kenner decided to release Fett’s action figure in advance of ESB through a proof-­ of-­purchase campaign, advertised in Kenner catalogs, on the back of figure packaging, and in a well-remembered television commercial.65 Initially advertised with a spring-loaded “rocket firing back pack,” this design was abandoned after the choking death of a three-year-old boy caused by a similar Mattel Battlestar Galactica toy missile.66 Only a secondary 60  Another memorable commercial moment reported by fans, Han’s carbon freezing involved him being lowered into an empty drinking glass by string. 61  Scott, “#Wheresrey?: Toys, Spoilers, and the Gender Politics of Franchise Paratexts,” 138. 62  Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community, and Star Wars Fans, 115–128. 63  I can recall a particularly frustrating moment in 1999 at a local Fred Meyer after I read “Qui-Gon’s Noble End” as a song title on the soundtrack for The Phantom Menace (1999). 64  DJameyson, “Star Wars Holiday Special, The (1978) [Nice Copy].” 65  Lundy, Star Wars Fan Survey. 66  Kenner removed the spring, molded the rocket permanently to his back, and covered the rocket-action information on cardbacks with a black, sticker, that many fans removed. Despite what some fervent fans claim, no rocket-firing figures were ever shipped to consumers or sold in stores. However, Kenner did produce several prototypes that have become “Holy Grails” for collectors, selling for over $20,000. Only one carded figure is known to exist and is currently listed on eBay for $150,000.

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character in ESB, Fett’s paratextuality propelled him to legendary status among fans, leading to more screen time in ROTJ, a retconned appearance in the 1997 Special Edition of A New Hope, major story arcs in the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars (TCW) animated series (2008–2014), and numerous other transmedia incarnations.67 The Boba Fett toy saga is one of several examples of the non-linear intertextuality of toyetic transmedia, where a toy, created to represent a narrative, can reflexively influence the story.

A Tale of Two Snaggletooths Kenner’s “Cantina Adventure Set” (1978) captured the highly toyetic scene from A New Hope when Ben Kenobi and Luke Skywalker visited that wretched hive of scum and villainy known as the Mos Eisley Space Port. The playset was a cardboard base and backdrop depicting the outside of the dimly lit, yet lively, droid-unfriendly cantina, where most of the best freighter pilots socialize. Sold exclusively through Sears, the set included four figures, along with their respective blasters and handful of plastic foot pegs: Greedo, the unfortunate recipient of Han’s preemptive laser blast; Walrus Man,68 the ill-tempered alien whose arm met the unfortunate edge of Kenobi’s lightsaber; Hammerhead,69 a bar patron on screen for six seconds; and the most storied figure, Snaggletooth, an incorrectly sized and colored version a character, appearing briefly in A New Hope, but more prominently in the much maligned Holiday Special. Based on limited information, Kenner produced Snaggletooth, 3.75” tall, with gloves, silver boots, and a blue flight suit.70 However, his on-­ screen persona was half-sized, had exposed, hairy hands and feet, and wore a red flight suit. The figurine was redesigned before hitting store shelves as a carded figure and thus today “Blue Snaggletooth” is one of the rarest and most collectible Kenner action figures. Blue Snaggletooth’s unique origin story became folkloric among fans, some of whom apparently became creative contributors to the franchise. Blue Snaggletooth would reflexively make an on-screen appearance in the aptly named TCW episode 67  For a comprehensive list of Boba Fett’s presence in the Star Wars universe, both Canon and Legends, check out this link: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Boba_Fett. 68  In later canonical works, we would come to find out that his name is Ponda Baba. 69  In later canonical works, we would come to find out that his name is Momaw Nadon. 70  Sansweet, Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible, 68.

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“Revival” as a Snivvian Space station Superintendent named Morlimur Snugg.71 In this reverse toyetics, or toyesis, Snaggletooth’s paratextuality, like Boba Fett, has obscured his textual origins to the point that he becomes multi-platformed and multi-origined, enabling his text to easily “flow from screen to material media and back again.”72 Original fans would likely recognize Snugg as a nostalgic nod to the fabled toy of their youth, while younger fans might only view him as a new character, unaware of his toyetic origins. There are other examples of Kenner cameos reemerging in various transmedia incarnations. An animated version of Walrus Man, clearly based on his action figure design—and not his filmic counterpart—can be seen in TCW episode “Missing in Action.”73 A recurring Kenner cameo in Star Wars transmedia is the Imperial Troop Transport (ITT), a vehicle with authentic film sounds, exclusively seen in a 1977 television commercial. The ITT was one of Kenner’s first “just off-screen” concept toys;74 something unseen on film, but that was designed to fit right into the Star Wars universe.75 After its toy commercial debut, the ITT first reappeared in a Marvel 1979 Star Wars comic,76 and was later included into several Rebels episodes.77 The ITT most recently appeared in The Mandalorian episode “Redemption”78 and Hasbro released a new version of the toy for its 3.75-inch scale “Star Wars: The Vintage Collection” in March 2020. For fans, Kenner’s “off-screen” contributions aided in world-building, a key trait of transmedia storytelling, where each textual extension helps construct and enrich a broader fictional “world” to create a more cohesive entertainment experience for audiences.79 These appearances in TCW, Rebels, and The Mandalorian are also significant because they “officially” establish Blue Snaggletooth and the ITT as canon after Disney’s April  “Revival,” The Clone Wars, season 5, ep. 1.  Jason, “From Toyetic to Toyesis: The Cultural Value of Merchandising,” 33. 73  “Missing in Action,” The Clone Wars, season 5, ep. 12. 74  Errico, “Star Wars Toy Pro Spills 40 Years of Secrets: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Kenner Classics.” 75  Kenner would similarly produce “Mini-Rigs” (1981–1984) and “Body Rigs” (1985), smaller, more affordable just off-screen vehicles. Several of these would appear onscreen in other media. 76  Goodwin and Infantino, “Return to Tatoonie.” 77  Including “Fighter Flight,” Rebels, season 1, ep. 4 and “Breaking Ranks,” Rebels, season 1, ep. 6. 78  “Redemption,” The Mandalorian, season 1, ep. 8. 79  Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 95–96. 71 72

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2014 announcement that all future tie-in materials would be considered part of the canon. Additionally, these examples demonstrate the continued influence of Kenner toys and commercials on Star Wars’ transmedia narrative, which ultimately created an ongoing desire to collect.80

Kenner Will Be With You, Always In order to explore the long-term impact of Kenner Star Wars, I surveyed 68 self-identified Star Wars fans, ages 18–55, using an online questionnaire. Participants were recruited from Facebook groups, discussion boards, and YouTube channels related to the original trilogy and vintage memorabilia collection.81 Unsurprisingly, 76% of respondents were born in the 1970s, with the largest concentration being ages four to seven when A New Hope was released, making them a prime age  demographic for Kenner. Nearly 94% of participants currently collect toys and 90% of those participants indicated that toys they owned as children were important to the development of their lifelong Star Wars fandom. Fans surveyed collected many different types of Star Wars toys. While 80% reported interest in vintage Kenner action figures, vehicles, and playsets, most collected other Star Wars toylines as well, such as Kenner/Hasbro’s The Power of The Force 2 (1995–2000)82 and Hasbro’s Black Series (2013–). Many respondents recalled seeing Kenner commercials when they originally aired. A significant portion reported that the advertisements were successful in making them want to buy the toys and prompting them to employ “pester power” or “the ability of a child to influence a purchase decision of a parent through the use of nagging, pestering, or aggressive behaviors.”83 These individuals were not alone. An estimated 300-plus million Star Wars toys were purchased between 1977 and 1985. The

80  If interested in other Kenner toy inspired transmedia incarnations, check the “The Kenner Cameo Chronology” on: http://4lomkuss.com/the-kenner-cameo-chronology/. 81  This survey population is not broadly representative of all Star Wars fans. Participants were recruited specifically because of their interest in or knowledge of vintage Star Wars memorabilia and the Original Trilogy. The goal of the survey was to specifically explore their knowledge of and feelings about Kenner commercials. The skewed percentage of vintage collectors was expected. 82  Some now consider this to be “vintage” as well. The majority of longtime collectors, however, strongly disagree. 83  Prible, “Product Packaging, Pester Power, & Preschoolers,” 462.

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commercials’ greater accomplishment however might have been in cultivating and sustaining an interest in collecting. As kids, fans used the toys to remember, reenact, and revise the on-­ screen stories. As adults with discretionary income, those vintage toys became valuable commodities, bought and sold in-person, at toy shows, through magazines, amateur-produced catalogs, and eventually online. During what is commonly referred to by fans as, “the Dark Times,” the period between 1986 and 1995,84 when no new Star Wars films or Kenner toys were produced, “fandom continued to thrive and toy collection became an integral part of the belonging to and participating in adult fan groups.”85 Fans also kept The Force alive by recording, re-watching, and sharing the original Kenner toy commercials that fostered their desire to collect. In the 1990s, “a VHS compilation of Star Wars toy ads became a particularly hot commodity, a boon to any grown fans trying to relive their childhood days in front of the TV after school.”86 Those same commercials, now digitized, curated, and cataloged online, still play a role in fandom. Almost all original Kenner commercials are currently viewable, either individually or in curated compilations, via YouTube and other dedicated online platforms. Fans have carefully compiled separate videos for each series (Star Wars, Empire, ROTJ, etc.), with the most comprehensive compilation running over one-hour in length, with over 500,000 views, and an active comment section. One dedicated YouTube member “12Back”87 even digitally remastered over 100 of the old adverts. Palitoy’s ROTJ commercial for the AT-ST Scout “Chicken” Walker is the most popular individual commercial on YouTube, garnering over 839,000 views. These digital time capsules are continually being uploaded and watched. Among the fans I surveyed, 57% still watch the original commercials with some regularity, with nearly 60% having viewed at least one within a month of study participation.88 Among the numerous elements of the aged adverts fans enjoy today, they overwhelmingly love seeing kids play with the vintage toys, perhaps vicariously and retroactively seeing themselves in those children, playing with friends, and reliving scenes and  Yes, I’m counting Caravan of Courage (1984) and Battle for Endor (1985).  Geraghty, Cult Collectors, 120. 86  Blevins, “Star Wars Relives Its Own History through Vintage Kenner Toy Ads.” 87  12back is a reference to blister card-backs that the original 12 action figures were packaged on. 88  Lundy, Star Wars Fan Survey. 84 85

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themes from the films. Respondents also fondly recalled the outdoor play environments featured in the commercials, particularly the creativity and elaborate backyard-playsets, that were seemingly impromptu, although frustratingly difficult for the average kid to replicate. YouTube has enabled fans to immortalize the retro commercial aesthetic of grainy film, dated sound, and classic tropes like demonstrative play, dramatic voice-over, homemade playsets, and obligatory disclaimers like “figures each sold separately.” Clearly Kenner’s success played an important role in the lives of fans, but this merchandising miracle also revolutionized the toy industry.

That’s No Toy… It’s an Advertisement The success of Kenner’s 3.75” action figures encouraged other companies to similarly pursue the profitability of character marketing and smaller, more scalable, and more collectible toys. Most notably, Hasbro relaunched its classic 12” G.I. Joe action doll in 1982 as G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, a 3.75” figure line with an ever-increasing array of characters with multiple points of articulation, vehicles, command centers, and a backstory chronicling the heroic Joes’ conflict with the evil terrorist organization, Cobra. These narratives played out first in Marvel Comics, marketed with TV commercials featuring animation that laid the groundwork for a syndicated series. This relates to the second, even more significant Kenner-inspired industry change. Instead of waiting to acquire the licensing rights for a potentially toyetic property like Star Wars, toy makers and product licensers started working synergistically to develop their own properties, primarily in the form of animated television. Prior to Star Wars, the primary narrative preceded the toy tie-in; however, post-Star Wars, toys were developed before, or concurrently, with a story to promote them. Both elements became integral to the 1980s marketing supersystems in which toys performed across a multitude of media platforms.89 This approach was incredibly successful at introducing new characters into children’s culture, orienting kids to new products, fostering excitement, and generating an overwhelming desire to buy, play-with, and collect all characters in a line. Star Wars’s impact was aided by good timing. Before the 1980s, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) strictly regulated children’s 89  Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 123.

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advertising because of concerns over media’s negative effects on children and pressure from advocacy groups. However, in 1983, the FCC lifted its unofficial prohibition against “program-length commercials,” opening the proverbially floodgates for content producers, marketers, and toy manufacturers to develop a transmedia approach that intentionally blurred the lines between product and advertisement. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983–1985), Transformers (1984–1987), and Thundercats (1985–1988) were all animated series created explictly to market toylines created by Mattel, Hasbro, and LJN, respectively. The “Shortcake Strategy,” named after American Greeting Cards’s Strawberry Shortcake character,90 worked and by 1989 certain blocks of TV guide resembled a Toys “R” Us catalog. Over the past 40 years, the kid’s consumer market has become highly lucrative and transmedia marketing is the new normal, thanks, in large part, to Star Wars. Kenner commercials made a galaxy far, far away feel much closer to home, allowing children to imagine themselves recreating, extending, or creating entirely new adventures with officially licensed props. These advertisements established a Star Wars presence on television, even before the Holiday Special (1978), A New Hope’s home video release (1982), or the film’s network TV premiere on CBS (1984). The sheer number of adverts produced, coupled with the frequency and longevity of exposure (1977–1985), firmly ingrained Kenner in the minds of the first generation of Star Wars fans inspiring them to connect and collect. The current memorialization and curation of the advertisements should not be dismissed as mere nostalgia, nor should their role in Star Wars’s transmedia success overlooked. Today, both the toys and commercials that advertised them are collectible connections to the past and generational identity markers that highlight the central role of both in the transmedial experience of Star Wars.

Bibliography 12BACK.  Star Wars Vintage Marketing Archive. YouTube. Posted April 2007–January 2012. https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UC7IgzmbFrZlX5w5KNxqRw1w.

 Engelhardt, “Children’s Television: The Strawberry Shortcake Strategy,” 68–110.

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All Things 80s. “Vintage STAR WARS Kenner Toy Commercials 1977 to 1985 Compilation.” May 21, 2019. YouTube Video, 40:53. https://youtu.be/ lJY709chKLw?t=2282. Alexandratos, Jonathan. Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on Toys and Their Messages. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. Analog Toys. “History of Star Wars Toys: Vintage Kenner Action Figure Review / Collection.” August 3, 2017. YouTube Video, 15:53. https://youtu. be/8R1n8tfDvMU. Bainbridge, Jason. “Fully Articulated: The Rise of the action figure and the changing face of children’s entertainment.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 6 (2010): 829–842. Bainbridge Jason. “From Toyetic to Toyesis: The Cultural Value of Merchandising.” In Entertainment Values, edited by Stephen Harrington, 23–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and consumer citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. BarbieCollectors. “1959 First EVER Barbie Commercial High Quaility HQ!” October 29, 2008. YouTube Video, 01:00. https://youtu.be/9hhjjhYGQtY. Blevins, Joe. “Star Wars relives its own history through vintage Kenner toy ads.” The A.V.  Club. February 9, 2016. https://news.avclub.com/ star-wars-relives-its-own-history-through-vintage-kenne-1798244047. Brooker, Will. Using the Force: Creativity, Community, and Star Wars Fans. New York: Continuum, 2002. Chandler, Daniel, and Merris Griffiths. “Gender-differentiated production features in toy commercials.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (Summer 2000), 503–520. Creeber, Glen. The Television Genre Book. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Engelhardt, Tom. “Children’s Television: The Strawberry Shortcake Strategy.” In Watching Television, edited by Todd Gitlin, 68–110. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Engelhardt, Thomas. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Eric Stran. “Star Wars—All 1977–1978 Kenner Toy Commercials—Compilation.” February 17, 2014. YouTube Video, 14:23. https://youtu.be/AhNus5u1zCs. Eric Stran. “The Empire Strikes Back—All 1978–1982 Kenner Palitoy Toy Commercials—Star Wars—Compilation.” March 27, 2016a. YouTube Video, 20:47. https://youtu.be/mQcMW-gLXiQ. Eric Stran. “The Return of the Jedi—All 1982–1984 Kenner and Palitoy Toy Commercials—Star Wars—Compilation.” April 6, 2016b. YouTube Video, 13.30. https://youtu.be/tuAifof9VdM. Errico, Marcus. “Star Wars Toy Pro Spills 40 Years of Secrets: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Kenner Classics.” Yahoo! Entertainment. May 25,

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2017. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/star-wars-toy-pro-spills40-years-secrets-everything-wanted-know-kenner-classics-190948626.html. Esslin, Martin. “Aristotle and the Advertisers: The Television Commercial Considered as a Form of Drama.” The Kenyon Review 1, no. 4 (1979): 96–108. Fleming, Dan. Powerplay: Toys as popular culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Genette, G. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Geraghty, Lincoln. Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2014. Geraghty, Lincoln. “Back to that special time: Nostalgia and the remediation of children’s media in the adult world.” In The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From comics to games, edited by Elisabeth Wesseling, 203–220. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2016. Gibson, James J. “The Theory of affordances.” In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by Robert Shaw and John Bransford, 67–82. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977. Harvey, Colin. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play, and Memory across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hernandez, Carolina. “Blurring the Line: Television Advertainment in the 1950s and Present.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas, 2011. Huston, Aletha C., Douglas Greer, John C. Wright, Renate Welch, and Rhonda Ross. “Children’s Comprehension of Televised Formal Features with Masculine and Feminine Connotations.” Developmental Psychology 20, no. 4 (1984): 707–716. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.20.4.707. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kahlenberg, Susan Michelle Hein. “Progression on Nickelodeon? Gender-Role Stereotypes in Toy Commercials.” Sex Roles 62, no. 11–12, (2010): 830–847. Keidl, Philipp Dominik. “Between Textuality and Materiality: Fandom and the Mediation of Action Figures.” Film Criticism 42, no. 2 (November 2018): 29–43. Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Kline, Stephen. Out of the garden: Toys and children’s culture in the age of TV marketing. London: Verso, 1993. Lundy, Jonathon. Star Wars Fan Survey. Unpublished raw data, 2019. Meslow, Scott. “Star Wars isn’t a movie franchise. It’s a toy franchise.” The Week, September 4, 2015. http://theweek.com/articles/575363/star-wars-isntmovie-franchise-toy-franchise.

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Messaris, Paul. “Visual Persuasion. The Role of Images in Advertising.” Medie Kultur: Journal of Media and Communication research 13, no. 27 (1997): 86–87. Peruta, Adam, and Jack Powers. “Look who’s talking to our kids: Representations of race and gender in TV commercials on nickelodeon.” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 1133–1148. Plastic Galaxy: The Story of Star Wars Toys. Directed by Brian Stillman. New York: Vimeo, 2014. Prible, Casie. “Product Packaging, Pester Power, & Preschoolers.” Dissertation, Eastern Kentucky University, 2017. https://encompass.eku.edu/etd/462. Sansweet, Stephen J. Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992. Saturday Night Live. “Star Wars Toy Commercial—SNL.” December 13, 2015. YouTube Video, 2:06. https://youtu.be/EYyuo7gm-aQ. Schor, Juliet B. Born to buy. New York: Scribner, 2005. Scott, Suzanne. “#Wheresrey?: Toys, Spoilers, and the Gender Politics of Franchise Paratexts.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 2 (2017): 138–147. Seiter, Ellen. Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Taylor, Chris. “How Star Wars Conquered the Galaxy.” Reason, January 2016. https://reason.com/2015/12/09/how-star-wars-conquered-the-ga/. Tommy Retro’s Blast From The Past! “G.I. JOE (1964) Debut TV Commercial!” February 6, 2014. YouTube Video, 01:05. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9X382bCvVvo. Toy Galaxy. “The History of Vintage Star Wars Figures—Need to Know #1.” November 5, 2015. YouTube Video, 5:37. https://youtu.be/Xxp7AIBi72U. The Toys That Made Us. Directed by Brian Volk-Weiss and Tom Stern. New York: The Nacelle Company in association with Netflix, 2017–2019. VintageTVCommercials. “Vintage Original Mr and Mrs Potato Head commercial 1960’s.” January 26, 2009. YouTube Video, 01:06. https://youtu.be/ ICGrjmJouWA. Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and marketing in Hollywood. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994. Zettl, Herbert. Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. Belmont, CA: WadStar Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1999.

CHAPTER 3

The Holiday Special and the Hole in the Archive Andrew Ferguson

In their 2006 Publications of the Modern Language Association article, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” Sean Latham and Robert Scholes outlined a problem bedeviling those attempting to study the form of the periodical magazine in its entirely: namely, that the entire magazine often no longer exists.1 Various archival repositories, in a misguided attempt to save space, took to shearing off the advertising sections that bookended many periodical publications of the early twentieth century, excising with them vital cultural and sociological information about the era and the magazine’s assumed readership. Given this “hole in the archive,” Scholes and Latham prevailed upon institutions to change their archival practices and encouraged field researchers to track down, document, and digitize intact publications that remained in private hands, all the while teaching a new way of reading periodicals (or, perhaps, reviving an old way) that is

1

 Latham and Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” 520.

A. Ferguson (*) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_3

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attentive to interplays between advertisement and text, marketer and audience, platform and purchaser. A similar problem perhaps even more pervasively troubles the field of television studies: while archives of original programs are voluminous, between DVD/Blu-ray sets and streaming services, it is vanishingly rare to encounter a broadcast in anything like its original form, with advertisements intact. With this absence, entire modes of inquiry go missing, and will remain so unless rapidly deteriorating videocassette tapes are digitized and preserved. But there are a few exceptions that fill the archival hole, likely none odder than the failed 1978 cash-in, The Star Wars Holiday Special. Famously reviled by George Lucas and multiple of the Star Wars franchise’s stars, the Holiday Special was denied the revisiting and lavish repackaging given to all other Star Wars material during both Prequel Trilogy (1999–2005) and Sequel Trilogy (2015–2019) revivals. Yet, it survived as a sort of cult artifact, transferred from Betamax tape to Google Video to various additional Internet repositories. Crucially, some (though not all) of these preserve the original ads in their original placements. In this article, I read these ads alongside the Holiday Special, showing that, far from being castaway materials, they serve as critical paratexts shaping the reception of the Star Wars mythos at the moment when it was developing into a transmedia commercial dynamo. Beyond that, I argue that the central material of the Holiday Special is not the canned drama and bizarre skits of the program, but rather the ads themselves, which provide the only context in which one can parse the narrative excesses of by far the most unorthodox installment in the Star Wars franchise. Ultimately, it is these ads that are the truly indispensable content of the Holiday Special; to discard them is to toss aside some of the earliest indicators of what Star Wars, and science fiction under Lucas’s influence, would rapidly become.

A Special Holiday Marketing Disaster In mid-1978, the Holiday Special must have seemed like a no-brainer. Star Wars had just returned to theaters nationwide for an encore run; in some locales it had never left the screen since its debut the previous May. It had long since surpassed Jaws (1975) as the highest-grossing film at the box office. As the next installment would not be ready for another year or two, some sort of booster shot seemed necessary to bridge the gap—in

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particular, something that would remind children and parents that there was a whole galaxy of Star Wars toys that would make ideal Christmas presents. George Lucas saw a chance to extend his universe while also remedying one of the few missteps in the marketing of the movie: the previous year’s failure to parlay the film’s huge popularity into holiday merchandise sales.2 This is not due to any lack of foresight on Lucas’s part—quite the opposite, as he had begun planning the film’s merchandise alongside his early concept art, even before any of the primary actors had been cast. From the outset, Star Wars served as an extended advertisement for toys that did not yet exist. The reason those toys did not exist was because Lucas so zealously guarded the film’s script and art that, by the time he relinquished them to toymaker Kenner, there wasn’t enough time to manufacture figurines for the 1977 holiday season. Instead, young fans and incipient collectors had to make do with the Early Bird Certificate Package, a cardboard placard with pictures of 12 Star Wars characters, as a promise of the toys that would be shipped to their addresses.3 Even these early figurines often weren’t made from scratch; rather, they were the result of “‘labelslapping,’—that is, retrofitting recycled toys with new paint and slapping new stickers and the Star Wars logo on them.”4 Whether Lucas took inspiration from this stage of the merchandising process or not, the Holiday Special resembles both the Early Bird box, as a colorful but empty promise of better things to come, and also the labelslapped figurines, as a hasty repurposing of original elements mixed haphazardly with others from wildly disparate genres, in particular the variety show format. According to an oral history assembled by Mental Floss, the original impetus came from CBS, which approached Lucasfilm and distributor 20th Century Fox with a proposal for a special set in the 2  See also Lundy, “The Enduring Force of Kenner Star Wars Toy Commercials,” in this volume. 3  Cf. Lambie, “Star Wars: How an Empty Box Became a Must-Have Item in 1977” and the “Star Wars” episode of the documentary series The Toys That Made Us. “Star Wars,” The Toys That Made Us, season 1, episode 1. 4  As Melissa Leon details, the prototype figurines were even more rushed: “former FisherPrice truck drivers, just carved up, whittled down, and remolded with Bondo putty.” In one instance, a designer’s sock toe was made to serve as a Jawa cloak. Leon, “How ‘Star Wars’ Revolutionized the Toy Industry.” Any further connections between the phenomenon of “labelslapping” and Star Wars outside the context of the Holiday Special, I leave to the reader to draw.

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Star Wars universe.5 This was likely prompted by ABC lining up Star Wars characters to appear the previous September on Donny & Marie, where the youth and vivacity of the Osmond siblings had injected some life into the decrepit variety show format. But as far removed as Donny & Marie might seem from the Star Wars galaxy, the former’s slurry of dance and musical numbers, skits, banter, stock footage, spoofs, and incongruous animated elements is nonetheless as close a blueprint for the Holiday Special as any other out there—especially as it already included establishing shots spliced from the theatrical release, in lieu of any new effects. The Osmonds’s “Star Wars Spoof” featured C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chewbacca, as well as guest appearances from Redd Foxx as a joke-slinging Jedi, Kris Kristofferson as a disco-inflected Han Solo, Paul Lynde as a ranting Imperial commandant, and the titular siblings as Luke and Leia.6 It is atrocious. Every new song cue comes to carry as much dread as the sound of Darth Vader’s respirator or lightsaber.7 But it is also barely more than ten minutes long, whereas the Holiday Special would have to fill two hours with content, and do it with a fraction of the budget put into the original 1977 Star Wars. Accounts of the Holiday Special—and there are more than a few—are confusing because everyone’s priority is to find somebody else to blame.8 Multiple waves of writers were brought in, and a quarter century later the rifts between them are still evident. Several criticize the directors, both the original one who walked off the project and the newer one brought in to salvage it. No one attacks George Lucas directly, but there is general consternation about his insistence on centering the Holiday Special on the domestic life of Wookiees, especially since it would require filming in heavy prosthetics during the peak of a Los Angeles summer, as well as his decision (in the midst of shooting Empire Strikes Back) to turn the final editing over to a pair of variety-show songwriters. Around the same time, Lucas removed his name from the show’s credits.  Rossen, “The Dark Side.”  One must wonder how awkward that was when revisited after The Empire Strikes Back, and then how strangely perceptive (if still awkward) after Return of the Jedi. 7  A good quality rip of the entire show has been archived on YouTube by the account “Dave’s Osmond Videos”—except, of course, for the ads. The Star Wars content begins at 36:38. 8  See, variously, Harris, “How Did This Get Made”; Roy, “‘The Star Wars Holiday Special’ aired only once.”; Rossen, “The Dark Side”; and Thomas and Freer, “The Star Wars Holiday Special: A Retrospective.” 5 6

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On one of the rare occasions Lucas spoke about the Holiday Special afterward, he noted, “It just kept getting reworked and reworked, moving away into this bizarre land. They were trying to make one kind of thing and I was trying to make another, and it ended up being a weird hybrid between the two.”9 It’s easy to see this tug of war as taking place between the deeper Star Wars lore that Lucas wanted to investigate and the variety-­ show formatting that the writing crew and the network were more comfortable with. But it would be more to the point to see it as a competition between marketing strategies. CBS saw the program as a way to pander to their established 18–49 demographic, many of whom clearly must have seen Star Wars in the previous year. But Lucas was aiming younger, as replacement director Steve Binder came to understand: “What I realized was, the public was not told this wasn’t going to be Star Wars. It was not the second movie. It was going to be a TV show to sell toys to kids. That was the real purpose of the show.”10 From either perspective, as indeed from any other imaginable, the Holiday Special must be accounted a failure: viewership plummeted between the program’s first hour and its second, and the overwhelming chorus of bad reviews led Kenner to spike the line of toys they had planned featuring Chewbacca’s family. But it is a failure that proves incredibly instructive about the shape and tactics of the franchise going forward. For all his later disavowals—a journey that took him from stating that “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of the program and smash it”11 to poking fun at it on Seth Green’s stop-­ action skit comedy show Robot Chicken12—what Lucas learned from the Special was that maintaining creative control over the universe he had created meant, first and foremost, maintaining absolute veto power over how any aspect of that universe was marketed.

 Rossen, “The Dark Side.”  Rossen, “The Dark Side.” 11  Higgins, “Hollywood Flashback.” 12  Appropriately enough, Lucas’s self-insert character in the Robot Chicken sketch claims that what convinced him to do the skit was the production of the George Lucas action figure that would be required for the skit to be recorded. 9

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Adding in the Ads In what follows, I consider the Holiday Special as an often-contentious dialogue between its variety-show and science-fiction elements, which is also to say between their respective implied marketing demographics, by reading the entire two-hour show—ad breaks and all—as a more or less coherent creative whole. Doing so requires filling in the hole in the archive, so a quick note on sources is in order: for this project, I relied on the Internet Archive, which preserves two intact versions of the Special, as well as several that have been edited to some degree. My primary text was the special as it aired on flagship station WCBS in New York City,13 while a secondary version was the one aired on WMAR (then a CBS affiliate) in the Baltimore area.14 While the broadcast portions of the show remain identical, there are a few differences in the ads that I highlight in passing, reminders that completely filling the archival hole would require obtaining broadcasts from every market in which the show appeared.15 One such difference appears at the very start: a reminder that “Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk will not be presented this evening.” This program note is preserved only on a copy from which most of the ads have been excised16 but serves to situate the broadcast within the ongoing competition between the three major networks, a competition in which CBS trailed overwhelming ratings leader ABC. Many remember these superhero dramas fondly, but their audiences lagged far behind ABC offerings such as The Love Boat (which would again win its time slot this night, handily beating out the Special and NBC’s Diff’rent Strokes). The date was November 17, 1978, a Friday night leading into the weekend before Thanksgiving. Those viewers who tuned in were greeted, after the preemption announcement, with familiar shots of the Millennium Falcon flying through space, pursued by Star Destroyers—so familiar, in fact, that many would likely have identified them as repurposed clips from  Scott, The Star Wars Holiday Special.  emijrp, “The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) [With Commercials].” The Baltimore broadcast appears to be the one used by Mystery Science Theater 3000 offshoot RiffTrax as the basis for their commentary. This version represents an upgrade on a lower-resolution version of mysterious provenance that floated around Google Video for a number of years, and which was prior to the Archive uploads the sole reliable source. 15  This would mean not only all domestic stations, but also all foreign markets fortunate enough to receive such quality programming. 16  Grumby, “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” 13 14

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the actual movie. But the first sixty seconds, at least, including a brief scene between Han and Chewie about “Life Day,” set the expectation that the program would at least be tonally consistent with Star Wars, with the further reassurance of “all your Star Wars favorites,” as a network promo had it, appearing in the opening credits. And there’s a list of guest stars— Bea Arthur, Art Carney, Diahann Carroll, Harvey Korman, and thematically appropriate musical group Jefferson Starship—familiar enough to dedicated TV audiences, but unlikely to excite viewers tuning in to see the younger Hamill, Fisher, or Ford. These three had been listed in promotional materials for the special, likely creating the expectation that the program would center around their further heroic exploits.17 The credits, however, promise new characters: one, mysteriously unnamed, who would be introduced in “an animated Star Wars story,” and then others that viewers were not expecting to spend most of the night with: Chewbacca’s family, including his wife Malla, creepy child Lumpy, and decrepit father Itchy. What follows the credits is one of the most bewildering segments ever to air on network television, almost avant garde in its refusal to provide any accommodation to the viewer. For the next 11 minutes, Chewbacca’s family members mime their way through domestic interactions, their Wookiee honks and gargles entirely untranslated and unsubtitled. The lone lifelines to the original movie are a picture of Chewie that Malla and Itchy gaze at wistfully—though even that emotion is hard to sell through the costuming—and a brief conversation with Luke via telescreen, in which he attempts to navigate between R2-D2’s bleeps, Malla’s bleats, and the billows of smoke coming off of his X-wing. All of this just establishes that Luke doesn’t know anything either; in this entire segment no new plot information is established until the very end, when old footage of Darth Vader is newly dubbed to have him say that imperial soldiers will conduct door-to-door searches for as-yet-unidentified Rebel attackers. This counts as the cliffhanger to get viewers to stick around through the commercial break, which features a minute-long promo for lead sponsor General Motors (GM), and a shorter ad for Kenner’s electronic Trailtracker toy, a van that follows a path drawn on a special mat. It should be noted, lest anyone argue the variety-show elements ruined the Holiday Special by watering down the science-fiction elements, that all

 See the poster preserved in Harris, “How Did This Get Made.”

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of the foregoing came from Lucas.18 Even TV veteran Carney, as a Han Solo sort gone to seed, seems to fit within the Star Wars universe. But television is a medium dependent on certain formulas and conventions, which to this point the Holiday Special had largely ignored. Only in conversation with the ads—and the Kenner ad in particular—does any of it make any sense. When the domestic scene opens, Lumpy is playing with an X-Wing toy; a few minutes in, he makes use of another (a holographic machine that would appear futuristic if it weren’t controlled by a standard cassette recorder) to watch an interminable acrobatic routine. As a trader/ smuggler, Carney’s Saun Dann has access to many more consumer goods; he is introduced while selling an all-in-one groomer to an embarrassingly mustached Imperial officer, and when in the next segment he makes his way to the Wookiee household, he brings Life Day gifts, each with its own piece of electronic consumer interaction. Malla gets a portable holographic sound system, Itchy an uncomfortably sexual program disk for his virtual reality chair, and Lumpy a “mini-transmitter” that he will eventually use to trick all but one of the stormtroopers into leaving the house. Playing out against these and other segments, each notorious in its own way (especially Harvey Korman’s turn as a volcano-headed bar patron sexually menacing Bea Arthur in the Mos Eisley Cantina) is the rhetoric of the various advertisements, which come as a shock to the system in a variety of ways. First, it might be odd to see ads at all, at least beyond the five or fifteen seconds mandated by YouTube before the “Skip Ads” button activates. In an age of DVRs and streaming services, the traditional 30-to-60-second TV ad is now largely the province of elections, Super Bowls, the Academy Awards, and other live “big event” broadcasts. While there are any number of rhetorical and critical analyses of individual ads, as well as of overall marketing trends in a given year or decade, the hole in the archive makes it difficult to analyze across and between ads in the context of single programs.19 Thanks to its own uniquely extenuating circumstances, The Star Wars Holiday Special offers a rare chance to consider 18  Eventual credited director and fall guy Steve Binder notes that when he came aboard, he was sent “a bible, basically, on the Chewbacca family. A pre-life that George Lucas had written.” Cf. Harris, “How Did This Get Made.” 19  For a summary of the obstacles faced by anyone seeking to do a more systematic survey along these lines, see the documentary Recorder, on the life of archivist Marion Stokes, who surreptitiously taped more than 30 years of television news and other programming and whose collection (once fully digitized) will provide the sole known source for many network broadcasts in their entirety, as the networks themselves discarded their tapes long ago.

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these texts as they are set within their original “flow,” to borrow a Raymond Williams term already well in circulation by 1978.20 While my focus here will remain largely on the Star Wars aspects, it’s worth noting how broad a net is being cast. Here is a breakdown of the two-hour program’s seven(!) ad breaks, ranging in duration from 90 seconds to upwards of five minutes. • First break: General Motors, Kenner (Trailtracker toy); • Second break: CBS bumper, Bristol-Myers (Comtrex cold medicine), International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Bell (telephones), CBS bumper, United Brands Company (A&W root beer), local news bumper; • Third break: General Motors, Procter & Gamble (Duncan Hines cake mix), Pillsbury (Hungry Jack biscuits), CBS Newsbreak, SmithKline Beckman (Contac cold medicine), CBS bumper, Castle Toys (UFO Attack toy), McDonalds (glass mug promotion), local news bumper; • Fourth break: Schaper Toys (Tobor robot toy), Revlon (Cream Blush cosmetics), Whirlpool; • Fifth break: American Home Products (Anacin headache powder), American Home Products (Woolite fabric softener), Gulf and Western Industries (Sheer Indulgence pantyhose), McDonald’s (Egg McMuffin), CBS bumper, American Dairy Association (milk), Universal Pictures (Animal House), local news bumper; • Sixth break: FTD (floral delivery), Northwest Industries (Fruit of the Loom briefs), Bell System (long distance service), Gulf and Western Industries (No Nonsense pantyhose); • Seventh break: Clorox (Twice As Fresh air freshener), Kenner (Star Wars toys), Heublein Spirits (Italian Swiss Colony wine).21 Contrary to the expectations of today’s hyper-targeted marketing ecology, the advertisers here provide a little something for everyone, so long  Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 88.  In the WMAR broadcast, make the following substitutions: for the A&W root beer ad, sub Standard Brands (Reggie! candy bar); for the UFO Attack toy ad, sub Allied Artists (The Wild Geese); for the McDonalds glass mug promo, sub local car dealer Gladding Chevrolet; for the American Dairy Association, sub Lincoln-Mercury (Bobcat and Zephyr station wagons); for Animal House, sub fellow Universal Pictures project The Wiz. Also, several of the local news bumpers are replaced with general CBS show ads, and in one case a public-service ad from the Consumer Protection Center. 20 21

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as “everyone” means white suburbanites. The only people of color featured in the ads are a worker who is the main focus of the first GM ad, talking about how great it is to work for GM; several of the singers in the ILGW union ad; and an actor dressed as a bunch of grapes in the Fruit of the Loom ad. In the Baltimore broadcast, there is one black man among the vox pops testifying to the excellence of The Wiz, an all-black production. Gender roles are rigidly enforced, with women limited to selling products for women and the home—the Twice as Fresh air freshener ad appears to show a father who has just changed a diaper, but his general cluelessness and the congratulations his wife bestows on him imply that this is a rare performance. Still, the implied audience is hardly as male or as young as one might expect: both markets get an ad for an R-rated film, no children’s programming is mentioned, and even the car ads focus on family cars and factory camaraderie. The one outlier is the toy ads, which likely would not have appeared on evening programming; even so there are only three or four scattered among the domestic goods and entertainment plugs. The CBS Newsbreak segment—which in the absence of round-the-­ clock cable news networks provided capsule reports on stories that would be filled in during the late-night news broadcasts—contained two lead stories focused on the Cold War. The first was a confirmation from Premier Leonid Brezhnev that the Soviet Union had tested—but never produced— a “neutron bomb, that’s the bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing” (The country that was putting them into production was, of course, the United States). The other focused on hapless low-level CIA employee William Kampiles, who was convicted of stealing and selling “top-secret government documents”—a manual for the KH-11 spy satellite—to the Russians. One wonders if dedicated fans would have heard a parallel to Princess Leia’s attempt to transmit the Death Star schematics to the Rebels, or at least registered the oddity of science-fictional weaponry making an appearance on the nightly news? Or would the bulletin have passed them by entirely?

Selling Toys The advertisements pose innumerable additional questions, but one is obviously within my scope: why is the actual advertisement for the Star Wars figurines—as shown above, Lucas’s most obvious motivation for agreeing to license his characters in the first place—buried in the middle of

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the final commercial break, stranded between ads for air freshener and subpar wine? To the extent that this programming decision can be defended, it can only be in the context of the entire program, segments and ads alike. Nestled among the other consumer goods, the toys become yet another signifier for quality of life and social standing—a sign that the parents in the household could afford to acquire new, firsthand toys, at costs ranging up to $18 (more than $70 in 2020 dollars) for the multi-­ level Death Star set. It also normalizes the toys, making Star Wars lore as much a part of the standard household as cold medicine and pantyhose. But that does not explain the placement; even Tobor, the “telesonic” remote-controlled robot whose entire justification is summed up in its tagline, “Tobor is robot spelled backwards,” gets a better spot during the fourth ad break. By appearing in the final break of a show that had largely functioned as an extended (if terribly ineffective) ad for the Star Wars universe, the minute-­long Kenner spot becomes the climax of the entire production, the grand closer for the variety show formula.22 The show’s entire dramatic premise is: will Chewy get back in time to celebrate Life Day? The climax should have been when Han and Chewy do finally arrive (suddenly, without any indication of how they got from the Falcon to the planet’s surface) and save Lumpy from a final stormtrooper who is standing guard specifically against the arrival of the paterfamilias. But the soldier, incompetent even by Imperial standards, manages only to trip and fall fatally out of the treetop dwelling after the briefest of scuffles. So, the long anticlimax of the show settles in as Chewbacca and his family prepare to celebrate their holiday. The rites begin with the family holding up some crystal spheres and using them to enter an ill-defined communal space where many other Wookiees (and, confusingly, Han, Luke, Leia, and the droids) are gathered. As Leia sings—something which, one assumes, is not a traditional part of Life Day—Chewbacca flashes back, not to any memories of his family, but to a fairly random sampling of scenes from the first movie, a final opportunity to labelslap the footage before the characters recede from the collective dream back into their individual homes.23 22  This is especially acute in the one archived version that excises all ads except the Kenner Star Wars one, turning the entire production into an extended informercial; this particular copy is preserved only by an infrequent uploader going by the anti-Semitic name SchlomoSchekelstein. 23  The Life Day footage comes off, unavoidably, as chintzy and cheap; the production had run out of money, to the point that all the Wookiees in the final scene had to be filmed wear-

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The Kenner commercial, by comparison, is absolutely packed with action, and features almost as much original C-3PO dialogue as the entire rest of the Holiday Special. The opening scenes of children navigating their X-Wing and TIE fighters through domestic space visually echo Lumpy’s play in the opening scene. Throughout the commercial, the characters are portrayed as actually doing things, whether it’s Luke piloting a landspeeder or trying to escape the Death Star trash compactor, Darth Vader lifting a lightsaber menacingly, or a remote-controlled R2-­ D2 exploring the floor. In short, the toys promise action, not just the revisiting of the film’s drama (though there is that too), but the possibility of new adventures, something which appears in the Holiday Special only in the Moebius-influenced cartoon segment introducing Boba Fett.24 Lincoln Geraghty writes of the early stages of Star Wars toy production as an exercise in reconstituting the war play that had lost its savor amid 1970s disillusionment with the US military: “[Lucas’s] new franchise reversed the feeling of loss after Vietnam and literally replaced it with A New Hope.”25 Throughout the Holiday Special, the characters rarely engage in active resistance, instead frustrating Imperial agents through misdirection, evasion, and exploitation of the occupying force’s operational weaknesses. While not the outright guerrilla insurgency that the Ewoks will carry out in Return of the Jedi, this reliance on passive resistance might nonetheless have resonated uncomfortably in a superpower short of confidence. It is the toys that promise a return to active engagement, to the strength required to take on the Evil Empire. In the one moment of the Special that maintains some pathos, several stormtroopers search Lumpy’s room, trashing his possessions and ripping the head off a Bantha figure, which the child expresses grief over losing. It is this violence against toys that inspires Lumpy to carry out the most daring and subversive act of the show, using yet another toy—the transmitter that was

ing Chewbacca masks, lending to that final scene an air of Being John Malkovich (1999). The depiction is further unfortunate in prefacing the cult murders carried out at Jonestown the following day. 24  This cartoon, “The Story of the Faithful Wookiee,” remains the only part of the Holiday Special ever to get an official release, albeit as an Easter egg buried in the Blu-ray release of the Complete Star Wars Saga—after, of course, stripping out the ad break that separates the cartoon into two parts. 25  Geraghty, “Aging Toys and Players,” 212. See also Geraghty, “The Circle Is Now Complete,” in this volume.

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his Life Day gift from Carney’s trader—to send out a fake all-clear signal to the Imperial officer. The Kenner ad does not reference the Christmas season directly—it hardly needs to, given that every parent would have been well aware of its approach26—but it’s a clear enough message. Just as the other advertised goods provide consumers with the illusion of increased agency in the age of late capital, the toys will afford their children the agency that will mean they’ll never themselves be reduced to passive resistance. In closing the commercial, C-3PO says, “May the force be with you … and with your children!” In hindsight, this innocuous statement reads fairly ominous, given how things turn out in the Revenge of the Sith (2005) when children and the Force are mixed. But it’s also rather ridiculous, following upon two hours in which, cartoon aside, the Force is never used, and all of the characters from the movie show less life than the action figures modeled upon them. Lucas’s frustration with the Holiday Special is understandable on aesthetic grounds alone, some but not all of them attributable to the clash with the variety show format. But more acute is the missed opportunity to establish Star Wars as a presence on TV and accelerate the transition into the transmedia juggernaut that we know today. Whatever their positions on the original film, almost every critic acknowledged that it represented, for better or for worse, something clearly new, a mode of storytelling that, whether it is described as a “cult blockbuster”27 or the beginnings of a transmedia empire,28 invites the participation of the audience in constructing the world across a variety of cultural and media flows. It is furthermore clear that the Holiday Special does not invite participation to the same degree, with even the hardiest fans regarding it as an endurance ritual of sorts, something to spring on associates unawares. When asked in 2005 in an interview with StaticMultimedia.com, Lucas said of the experience: I can’t remember what network it was on, but it was a thing that they did. We kind of let them do it. It was done by… I can’t even remember who the group was, but they were variety TV guys. We let them use the characters

26  The only ad that references gift-giving directly is Ma Bell, then on the verge of an antitrust breakup, but still doggedly trying to sell consumers on the idea of giving each other telephones for Christmas. 27  Hills, “Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory and the Museum,” 178. 28  Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia, 149.

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and stuff and that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but you learn from those experiences.29

Feigned ignorance of details aside, it is clear that what Lucas regretted was an even temporary ceding of control of his characters and their commercial possibilities. Few would argue that Lucas, in the decades after the Holiday Special debacle, was not guilty on occasion of flabby or outright enervated storytelling. But never again would he write or direct a movie that was anything other than “toyetic,” able to be transformed rapidly into playtime plastic.30 It’s not that advertisers were ignorant of the possibilities of their craft, but Lucas was working toward something else entirely. Traditional advertising aimed to provide engaging content that would bring in an audience, who could then be sold a variety of things on the side. This content might (and in the SF pulps nearly always would) include glimpses of alternate worlds, but the ads would serve to pull them back out of such reveries. Lucas proposed bringing into being an alternate world so vast and internally coherent that it would serve as a continual advertisement for itself, a space that the audience ultimately never had to leave behind. Such a world would naturally contain its own versions of telephones, underwear, baked goods, and all the other things being advertised, as well as all the things that could potentially be advertised. Consumers would buy these branded products not begrudgingly, as necessities of life, but rather eagerly, in order to bolster their core perceptions of their own identities as part of this world.31 Today, the idea of any science fiction TV special, much less so thoroughly branded a one as Star Wars, containing ads for headache powders, cosmetics, and floral delivery seems almost as bizarre as any of the segments that give the Holiday Special its thoroughly deserved reputation. Possibly, in our present streaming era, when The Mandalorian is the most  Pasternack, “The Star Wars Holiday Special Was the Worst Thing on Television Ever.”  The term was coined by Kenner executive Bernard Loomis in conversation with Steven Spielberg, while explaining why Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was not amenable to tie-in licensing. It is instructive here to consider the break between the Lucas of THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1973), and Radioland Murders (1994)—which despite its release date was a product of his pre-Star Wars days—and the Lucas of Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Willow (1988), etc. I suggest as a tentative term the “Kennerization” process. Furthermore, when undertaking this exercise, I advise not looking too closely at Strange Magic (2015), lest Strange Magic look closely back at you. 31  Cf. Geraghty, “Aging Toys and Players,” 220. 29 30

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recent Star Wars televisual analog, it might seem more natural for there not to be any ads at all. But this has less to do with the “prestige TV” formulas of the present and more to do with the archival practices, errors, and gaps of the past. The archival success of the Star Wars Holiday Special is predicated on its commercial failure; had it proven popular, its advertising contexts would have disappeared the moment it was locked into the Lucas vault to await later repackaging and re-release. (CBS, of course, would have thrown out the original broadcast tape long ago, as it did all its others.) Today, mass-cultural media products are so tightly bound up in the logics of transmedia storytelling and targeted marketing that it is becoming difficult to recall what it was like prior to their market dominance. Paradoxically, it is Lucas, the primary architect of this dominance, whom we have to thank for this briefest of glimpses into a long-­ago marketing era, in a cultural galaxy that feels ever farther and farther away.

Bibliography Dave’s Osmond Videos. “Donny & Marie Osmond Show W/ Star Wars Characters.” June 5, 2019 [original airdate September 23, 1977]. YouTube Video, 49:19. https://youtu.be/pPmVdOqG0Ig. emijrp. “The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) [With Commercials].” August 13, 2016 [original airdate November 17, 1978]. Internet Archive Video, 1:56:53. https://archive.org/details/youtube-S8MrPe6i5YU. Geraghty, Lincoln. “Aging Toys and Players: Fan Identity and Cultural Capital.” In Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise, edited by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and John Shelton Lawrence, 209–223. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Grumby, Jonas. “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” August 8, 2018 [original airdate November 17, 1978]. Internet Archive Video, 1:37:27. https://archive.org/ details/DerSoylentgrn1973. Harris, Blake. “How Did This Get Made: A Conversation with Steve Binder, Director of the Star Wars Holiday Special.” Slashfilm, December 25, 2015. https://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-holiday-special-oral-history/. Harvey, Colin B. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Higgins, Bill. “Hollywood Flashback: The ‘Star Wars’ Holiday Special Got Past George Lucas in 1978.” Hollywood Reporter, December 25, 2019. https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-flashback-star-wars-holidayspecial-got-past-george-lucas-1978-1263309.

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Hills, Matt. “Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory and the Museum: The Cultural Status of the Cult Blockbuster.” In Movie Blockbusters, edited by Julian Stringer, 178–89. London: Routledge, 2003. Lambie, Ryan. “Star Wars: How an Empty Box Became a Must-Have Item in 1977.” Den of Geek!, December 18, 2019. https://www.denofgeek.com/ us/culture/star-wars/251879/star-wars-how-an-empty-box-became-a-musthave-item-in-1977. Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 121, no. 2 (2006): 517–31. Leon, Melissa. “How ‘Star Wars’ Revolutionized the Toy Industry.” The Daily Beast, January 6, 2018. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-star-warsrevolutionized-the-toy-industry. Pasternack, Alex. “The Star Wars Holiday Special Was the Worst Thing on Television Ever.” Vice, December 24, 2014. https://www.vice.com/en_us/ article/kbzaez/the-star-studded-star-wars-holiday-special-was-the-worstthing-on-television-ever. Rossen, Jake. “The Dark Side: An Oral History of the Star Wars Holiday Special.” Mental Floss, November 19, 2018. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/72863/dark-side-oral-history-star-wars-holiday-special. Roy, Jessica. “‘The Star Wars Holiday Special’ aired only once. 40 years later, it’s still weird.” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2018. https://www.latimes. com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-et-hc-star-wars-holiday-special20181117-story.html. Scott, Jason. “The Star Wars Holiday Special (CBS WCBS TV New  York City, 1978 11 17).” August 13, 2016 [original airdate November 17, 1978]. Internet Archive Video, 1:56:53. https://archive.org/details/The_Star_ Wars_Holiday_Special_CBS_WCBS-TV_New_York_City_1978-11-17. Slade, Darren. “The cast of Star Wars on TV: the Donny & Marie show, 1977.” Episode Nothing: Star Wars in the 1970s, October 21, 2016. http://episodenothing.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-cast-of-star-wars-on-tv-donnymarie.html. The Toys That Made Us. Directed by Brian Volk-Weiss and Tom Stern. New York: The Nacelle Company in association with Netflix, 2017–2019. Thomas, William, and Ian Freer. “The Star Wars Holiday Special: A Retrospective.” Empire no. 235, January 2009. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/star-wars-holiday-special/. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form, edited by Ederyn Williams. London: Routledge, 1990.

CHAPTER 4

The Battle for Endor: Ewok Television Films as Transmedia Brand Extension J. Richard Stevens

In many ways, the transmedia strategies of the Star Wars franchise emerged before the initial film was even released in May 1977. Prior to seeing the film, consumers could read Star Wars comics and the novelization of the script. Soon after the film’s release, an impressive amount of licensed material became available, including storybooks, toys, comics, lunchboxes, and clothing. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that the Star Wars franchise would also extend its branded narratives to the small screen. Transmedia franchises are thought to follow certain logics, with corporate culture and sharing arrangements affecting the creative contribution to installments across different media.1 Star Wars presents unique opportunities to scholars who study transmedia franchises, given Lucasfilm’s longevity and evolving configuration over time. Long before episodic shows such as The Clone Wars (2008–2014), Rebels (2014–2018), Resistance (2018–2020), and The Mandalorian (2019) would regularly allow Lucasfilm to extend Star Wars narratives to 1

 Johnson, Media Franchising, 32, 92–94, 140–141.

J. R. Stevens (*) University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_4

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television audiences, two Ewok made-for-television films—Caravan of Courage (1984) and The Battle for Endor (1985)—transported viewers back to Endor for new adventures featuring the furry hunter-gatherer Ewoks. Released during the mid-1980s, these films represent an unusual case in the story of Star Wars media. Although the productions lost money, they did manage to reach a large audience and potentially have an impact on younger Star Wars fans. This chapter explores the narrative contributions of the two Ewok television films, noting ways the otherwise competent filmmakers of Lucasfilm missed opportunities arising from the change in media format. The two films rely heavily on nostalgic storytelling tropes from the theatrical Star Wars films, but do nothing to expand the ethnic or gender diversity depicted in the franchise. Although they provide escapism and enjoyment, Star Wars texts also perform tremendous ideological work. Lauded for its celebration of “freedom, adventure, and resistance to oppressive forces,”2 the film series challenges contemporary political structures and ideologies. And yet, the Star Wars screen mostly reinforced dominant cultural stories. If “ideologies are about meaning in the service of power,”3 Star Wars—including the Ewok films—mostly serves dominant hegemonies of social relationships through its representations of characters. Caravan of Courage and The Battle for Endor represent a less common media format: feature-length films produced specifically for television. When considering transmedia franchise texts, it is important to consider the media experiences of the creators. Among mass media, television is particularly powerful at connecting to children,4 the audience for whom Lucas repeatedly claims he made his Star Wars content.5 The Lucasfilm team, while experienced with filmmaking, appeared to have, at best, limited television experience. The power, conventions, tropes, and stereotypes function differently on television than they do in theatrical films, and so the Ewok films represent a particularly disappointing missed opportunity on this front.

 Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 27.  Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, 25–26. 4  Lauer & Lauer, Marriage and Family. 5  Alexander, “George Lucas reiterates Star Wars is for ‘12-year-olds.’” 2 3

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Extending the Star Wars brand and narrative space back into television had long been a goal of Lucas.6 However, after the poor reception of The Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978,7 Star Wars stories did not appear on television again until after the Original Trilogy concluded, and the film saga entered its first long hiatus. According to Thomas G.  Smith, producer of the two Ewok television films, they originated as Lucas’s desire for a half-hour television project. After each network passed on the project, ABC expressed interest in a modified version that could fit into its 2-hour “movie of the week” Sunday 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. block.8 The initial project became Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, written by Bob Carrau and directed by John Korty.9 Caravan of Courage aired on November 25, 1984 (the Sunday after the Thanksgiving holiday), and 65 million viewers tuned in for ABC’s second-highest Sunday night rating of the year. The program achieved a 40% share of the time slot and led all network viewings by a wide margin.10 The broadcast of Caravan of Courage—and its theatrical release overseas—was generally well-received (certainly well-viewed). The Battle for Endor was produced for the following year. Lucas would later claim that the rising costs of production prevented a third planned film from being produced,11 though his biographer described The Battle for Endor as “a dry run for Willow,”12 the 1988 fantasy film produced by Lucasfilm. Both TV films were produced by a team drawn from Lucasfilm’s previous filmmaking structures, resulting in filmmakers without a great deal of television production experience working in television. Caravan of Courage director John Korty had directed animated shorts for Sesame Street, but all his other work had involved film or television movies. Writer Bob Carrau had no previous experience before writing the teleplay for the film. Producer Tom G. Smith had worked at ILM on several feature films, but no television projects. The Battle for Endor was a big break for Jim and Ken Wheatly, who had not worked in television before. And George Lucas

 Alter, “‘Star Wars.’”  Hofstede, What Were They Thinking?, 204–206. David Hofstede ranked the variety show special “the worst two hours of television ever.” 8  Alter, “‘Star Wars.’” 9  Caravan of Courage. 10  Smith, George Lucas, 155. 11  Warren, “George Lucas: Father of the Force,” 45–51. 12  Baxter, Mythmaker, 345. 6 7

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himself—who directed part of the first Ewok film and has writing credits on both films—had never worked in television. Most notably, the two Ewok television films present alternative styles of storytelling compared to the Star Wars feature films, ignoring key Star Wars narrative conventions even as they drew upon the Star Wars brand. The results provide a glimpse into the post-Return of the Jedi Star Wars franchise, before the company focused its energy and resources on the storylines and characters created by the Prequel Trilogy (1999–2005). Because Star Wars was created as a transmedia franchise from the beginning, its texts and metatexts are polysemic, theoretically providing scholars with multiple points of access to interrogate the franchise structure, corporate cultural forces affecting its construction, and the resulting effects on the material culture of production.13 But in the 1980s, Lucasfilm was not yet as diverse or complex as it would later become, and George Lucas’s influence on all iterations of the Star Wars franchise was much greater than is typically enjoyed by creative personalities. This centralization of authority should have resulted in stronger consistency of performance, but, in this particular case, the Lucasfilm team’s lack of experience with television also resulted in missed opportunities related to the different access, settings of consumption, and audience forces specific to television.14

The Ewoks Emerge Lucas originally described Star Wars as “an intergalactic dream of heroism,”15 and drew inspiration from many previous action-adventure and fantasy texts. As one biographer noted, Star Wars is “a combination of Flash Gordon, The Wizard of OZ, the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the ’30s and ‘40s and almost every Western ever screened—not to mention The Hardy Boys, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Fairie-­ Queene.”16 Lucas drew on these texts intentionally, explaining that film had changed since his childhood, resulting in kids having “to sit through films of insecurity.”17 Although Lucas had grown up with films that “were glorified morality plays,”18 the increasing moral relativism in 1970s  Pratt, “The Culture Economy,” 124.  Johnson, Media Franchising, 142–143. 15  “Star Wars,” 31. 16  Baxter, Mythmaker, 243. 17  “Star Wars,” 31. 18  Kline, George Lucas: Interviews, 84. 13 14

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affected the films of that decade, demythologizing the Western genre as spaghetti westerns, while anti-heroes began to populate the screen. In Star Wars, Lucas intentionally sought to revitalize mythology as a force of moral storytelling: I wanted to do a modern fairy-tale, a myth. One of the criteria of the mythical fairy-tale situation is an exotic, faraway land, but we’ve lost all the fairy-­ tale lands on this planet. Every one has disappeared.19

Set in a “galaxy far, far away,” Star Wars would seem to have an endless selection of worlds to construct, but Lucas also intended fairytales with a moral message, films that presented stark frames of clearly identifiable black and white: I wanted to make a kid’s film that would strengthen contemporary mythology and introduce a kind of basic morality. Nobody’s saying the very basic things; they’re dealing with the abstract. Everyone’s forgetting to tell kids, “Hey, this is right and this is wrong.”20

Lucas’s desire for moral authority was central from the beginning of Star Wars; he penned the first drafts of the Star Wars script throughout the early 1970s as he reacted to the events of Vietnam and Watergate (former President Richard Nixon was reportedly an inspiration for the Emperor), with his politics finding their way into his films.21 Compared to the technologically superior Empire, Lucas’s Rebel Alliance values personal affiliation, harbors a suspicion of technology, and believes in a pro-social ideology that celebrates the sense that “small was most assuredly beautiful.”22 Nor was it lost on critics and reviewers at the time that the United States was not necessarily framed as the protagonist force in the saga. As one scholar describes the series, Darth Vader and the Empire represent “the evils of American imperial militarism.”23  Salewicz, George Lucas Close Up, 44.  Pollock, Skywalking, 144. 21  Lucas himself described Emperor Palpatine in 1981 as “a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy and he was really evil. But he pretended to be a really nice guy” in Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars, 69. 22  Meyer, “Star Wars, Star Wars,” 101–102. 23  Simon, Trash Culture, 69. 19 20

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Return of the Jedi (1983) continues these narrative themes in a particularly stark fashion by introducing the Ewoks, whom Mark Decker observed were modeled after the Vietcong guerillas in Vietnam,24 a connection that Lucas himself confirmed.25 While the Imperial forces in Return of the Jedi use heavy equipment, artillery, and military firepower, the Ewoks confound and help defeat them using spears, camouflaged traps, and primitive-­ looking means of asymmetrical warfare. The Ewoks also serve the literary role of noble savages, a tribe of “others” not corrupted by civilization (particularly imperialism) and therefore symbolizing innate natural goodness.26 According to Lucas, the idea for the Ewoks was “just a short Wookie … they evolved and started getting cute. Dare to be cute.”27 The cuteness aspect of the Ewoks would arouse cynicism that merchandising concerns governed their creation instead of narrative goals.28 Such suspicions are understandable: Star Wars was the first film to use merchandising to increase market appeal, and Lucas famously used the proceeds from Star Wars merchandising to secure the funding to bankroll the other films.29 Marvel Comics had promoted the Star Wars comic series at the 1976 San Diego Comic-Con, the first public exposure of the series (and the first time a Comic-Con panel had ever been devoted to a film property).30 Marvel had adapted the movie script into the first six issues of the comic series, and the first two issues were released before the movie came out. Sales were positive, and once the movie premiered the series was selling more than a million copies per month.31 The novelization of the script was also released prior to the film.32 Kenner certainly produced Ewok figures, playsets, and even a line of plush dolls to accompany the release of Return of the Jedi. However, despite criticism that Ewoks were inserted into Return of the Jedi and the two TV movies to sell stuffed toys, the release schedule of toys and ancillary media suggests that merchandise was used to sell the film rather than

 Decker, “They Want Unfreedom,” 432.  Lucas, “Commentary.” 26  King, Echo-Hawk, & Rosier, Media Images, 22. 27  Salewicz, George Lucas Close Up, 103. 28  Canby, “Lucas Returns.” 29  Wyatt, High Concept, 22. 30  Parker, “Comic-Con’s First ‘Star Wars’ Panel.” 31  Shooter, “Roy Thomas.” 32  Foster, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. 24 25

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the other way around.33 For example, the Ewok plush toy line released in 1983 to accompany Return of the Jedi (ROTJ) was discontinued before the first television film aired and before the rest of the ROTJ merchandise ran its course (action figures from the film continued to be released into late 1985).34 Other than the plush line, Ewoks toy merchandise appeared primarily among the regular Kenner figure lines and playsets. None of the characters introduced in the television films were made into action figures or toys in 1984 or 1985, though several of the new plush characters not featured in the Return of the Jedi appeared in the Star Wars: Ewoks cartoon that first aired on September 7, 1985 (Kenner also released an action figure line based on the cartoon series). If Kenner and Lucasfilm had collaborated to produce the Ewok TV films to promote a merchandise line instead of the other way around, the absence of any toy merchandise when the television film aired would have been a dismal failure of that strategy. Lucas himself appeared to want to use the Ewoks to tell stories for children, which is likely why the two television films were made with no merchandise tie-ins.35 Furthermore, as noted above, Lucasfilm actually lost money on both the Ewok television films.36 When analyzing the Ewoks’ role in Return of the Jedi, Meyer suggested the film reinforced dominant themes from the previous two films, namely that “small is beautiful,” initiative and risk-taking always overcome superior technology, and technology corrupts human capacity and judgment.37 The Ewoks are central to the presentation of these themes: The ultimate irony of technological advantage is demonstrated most dramatically in the final earth battle, in which the Ewoks defeat Imperial forces using sticks, rocks, spears, catapults, winged assault, ropes, and hand-to-­ hand combat. With bravery and superior tactics, the tiny Ewoks are able to seize walkers, defeat stormtroopers and ultimately help disable the force  Margulies, “Ewoks Take Spotlight,” F12.  In fact, the only plush Ewok scheduled for release after the initial wave of Ewoks and Woklings, Zephee with a backpack for Woklings, was shown in catalogs, but never produced. 35  In 2010, a Teek figure was produced by Hasbro as part of a special Star Tours Boarding Party figure set, commemorating the characters (including Teek) used to introduce the original Star Tours ride (Smith, “Disney Cast Member”). The set was limited to 15,000 pieces and remains the only figure of Teek ever released. 36  Largely owing to Lucasfilm’s pre-production agreement to receive $2 million from ABC, while the $3 million production budget would continually increase until it reached $4.5 million. Collinson, “Bringing Star Wars to the Small Screen.” 37  Meyer, “Star Wars, Star Wars,” 106. 33 34

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shield to make the rebel victory possible. Importantly, after the battle the Ewoks are able to put down their weapons and hold an ecstatic dancing celebration around a fire. It’s impossible to imagine the stormtroopers doffing their helmets and dancing similarly if they had won. Ewok weaponry is versatile and subservient to Ewok designs. In contrast, Empire technology overwhelms both victims and perpetrators.38

Though ideological discourses do not depend on the conscious intentions of those who create them, understanding Lucas’ motives for the Ewok television films is important, given that they are unlike any of the theatrically released Star Wars films.39 Set as a prequel to the events of ROTJ, Caravan of Courage and Battle for Endor give viewers a chance to explore the forest moon of Endor beyond the battleground setting of the film. The television films—and later the animated television show—portray an Endor teeming with life, featuring many different beings and species. Although the title of the film includes the catchphrase “An Ewok Adventure,” the film itself mostly centers around the human Towani family, which is stranded upon Endor. A more fitting title might have been “An Adventure WITH Ewoks” because, like most Star Wars texts, the cognitive estrangement present in the film does not explore alien perspectives or motives beyond aesthetic qualities, and the non-human Ewoks mostly portray traditional human social behavior in support of the human characters’ agenda. Furthermore, any alien or non-human social statement presented by the Ewoks breaks down in favor of the moralism of fairy tale.

A Caravan of Genres Drawing upon literary conventions of fairytales and convention of serialized adventure films, the Star Wars films together contain a collection of stylistic conventions that defined the “space opera” genre. However, while the Ewok TV films adopts some stylistic aspects of Star Wars theatrical films, they also introduce new conventions unique among early Star Wars texts. For example, Burl Ives, well-known for narrating holiday special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, narrates the Caravan of Courage, explaining to the audience the significance of certain events, and speaking for the Ewoks in several scenes in which they converse in their native  Meyer, “Star Wars, Star Wars,” 107.  Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes,” 37–38.

38 39

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language.40 This meta-discourse removes much ambiguity from readings of the text, including the intended moral message, which the narrator states at the end of the film: “courage, loyalty, and love are the strongest forces in the universe.” Caravan of Courage offers an exploration of Endor from a child’s perspective, with the Ewoks serving as supportive guides. In the opening sequence, Jeremitt and Catarine Towani search for their missing children—Mace and Cindel Towani—but are captured by a giant Gorax. The Ewoks discover the children the next day and the film presents a quest to reunite the family. The teenaged Mace also undergoes a coming of age character arc in which he learns to appreciate and respect his parents in a reinforcement of old-fashioned family values.41 Cindel’s golden locks and innocence are almost characters of their own, and the four-year-old girl likely represents Lucas’s intended target audience for the film.42 As Mace experiences his character arc and Cindel continues in her helpless innocence, the Ewoks facilitate the journey and family restoration. In ROTJ, the Ewoks’ home, known as Bright Tree Village, is shown as a functioning community, particularly during the celebratory song and feast sequences at the end of the film, but Caravan of Courage shows a more robust Ewok society, complete with remembered history and ritual.43 Viewers learn that Wicket—the first Ewok to encounter Princess Leia in ROTJ —has parents and two older brothers; he is young enough that his parents do not expect him to be responsible, yet old enough that he is included on the caravan. His relative youth allows him to serve as an avatar for the Ewoks with Cindel, the character who serves the parasocial identification function for the target audience.44 The Ewoks mostly talk in the alien language used in ROTJ, although Wicket does learn to communicate with the children using a broken  Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  In fact, reviewer Elvis Mitchell in his review for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner took Caravan of Courage to task for so explicitly signaling a “fifties mentality” and “suburban middle class” values. 42  According to director John Korty (Goldberg), the origin of the first Ewok film can be traced to Lucas’ 3-year-old daughter Amanda, who was particularly taken by the Ewoks and wanted to see more. 43  In Return of the Jedi, the village is built into the treetops, but as a production consideration the Ewok village in the television films is established on the ground. 44   Giles, “Parasocial Interaction,” 279–305; Hoffner, “Developmental Differences,” 1065–1074. 40 41

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version of their own language. Even without common speech, the Ewoks communicate through gestures and actions, using a communication of caring for others, sharing resources, and benevolence as an expressed intercultural language compatible with the New Left values of Lucas, and in sharp contrast to the imperialism shown in intercultural interactions in the main theatrical films. The Ewoks perform the noble savages trope, innocent of the corrupted politics of the galaxy far, far away, and as active agents of benevolence, powerful enough to affect the lives of those they encounter. The “caravan of courage” is assembled through careful selection. The group encounters Logray (the Ewok “medicine man” who appeared in Return of the Jedi), who gathers them for what the narrator tells the audience is a “traditional Ewok ceremony” in which Logray can, as the narrator says, “bestow upon them the sacred totems of the legendary Ewok warriors.” This scene is meant to establish a predestination sentiment to the quest (each item has a particular use, necessary to the success of the quest), but also to connect the Ewok actions to Ewok lore. By integrating the symbols of the past into the present quest, the Ewoks demonstrate the transmission of their cultural values between generations. In addition, two totems remain unassigned, to communicate to the two additional members Logray says are needed for the journey. The White Wings of Hope are given to Deej (Wicket’s father), the Red Wings of Courage got to Weechee (Wicket’s oldest brother), the Magic Walking stick goes to Wicket, the Blue Wings of Strength go to Widdle (Wicket’s older brother), the Candle of Pure Light is given to Cindel, and a stone is given to Mace. This scene draws on several prominent media tropes, most notably the Ethnic Magician (in particular, the Magical Native American trope), noted for the power and secret wisdom gained from a closeness to nature. Logray performs this trope by presenting the totems to the members, seemingly insignificant objects that later prove integral to the specific challenges faced by the caravan. Mace rejects his totem as it does not align with his “civilized” sensibilities: “A rock? These little bears are nuts!” he says as he throws it away. Wicket retrieves the stone and keeps it, and it turns out to be essential to the success of the quest—and an integral performed part of Mace’s character journey. The idea of a “traditional Ewok ceremony” establishes a vague sense of history and lore for the tribe. Together with the presentation of totems as having belonged to “legendary Ewok warriors,” the film normalizes the idea that Ewoks can be fierce and effective in combat. Where Return of the

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Jedi surprises the audience with the juxtaposition of cute furry creatures killing stormtroopers and disabling heavy equipment with primitive means, the Caravan of Courage television film presents the capabilities of Ewoks as a natural outcome of their culture and environment. Several times in the film, the Ewoks encounter large and fierce creatures (a giant spider, a giant boar hound, and the Gorax itself), and each time the small beings’ naturalistic wisdom and fearless actions protect the humans from harm. The two leftover totems, a crystal and an ivory tooth, are used to recruit the final two members of the caravan. The ivory tooth fits the armored breastplate of Chukha-Trok, the fiercest warrior in the film, and helps convince him that he is meant for the quest. The crystal convinces the Ewok priestess Kaink to join, after it first transforms into a lizard and then a mouse. Each totem (except for the wings, which appear to convey recognition of status only) serves a particular narrative purpose: the walking stick is the only item that can save Mace from drowning in an enchanted lake; the crystal hypnotizes a giant spider before it can eat the Ewoks; the Candle of Pure Light entraps fairies when they attack (and then one of those fairies proves instrumental to defeating the Gorax); and Mace’s simple stone later is revealed to be hollow and contain an enchanted arrowhead that leads the caravan into the Gorax’s lair. Each item extends the fairytale sentiment of the narrative, even as it adds a mythic predestination quality to the story’s significance. These items were destined for these individuals on this quest, and the whole of Ewok history is embodied in the caravan to rescue the Towani parents and reunite their family. The caravan is successful, though not without great sacrifice. Chukha-­ Trok is mortally wounded in the final confrontation with the Gorax. Mace, who had previously challenged Chukha-Trok and the Ewoks at several turns, is humbled as Chukha-Trok mutters the word “friend” and hands him his axe, just before dying. Mace then uses the axe to finally kill the Gorax. The family is reunited, Mace apologizes to his parents, and Jeremitt expresses his pride in his son’s actions, completing the coming of age journey. And so it is that, in “The Ewok Adventure,” the Ewoks take the majority of the risks, share the most intimate portions of their culture, risk and sacrifice lives, travel to forbidden territory to reunite a human family, and teach a teenager to respect others. In the fairytale framing of the story, this adventure was preordained in Ewok mysticism and history, all to serve the needs of one human nuclear family.

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The first television film drew a large audience, but reviews were mixed. Cinefantastique reviewed the film as “an embarrassment for Lucasfilm.”45 Critics applauded the technical aspects of the production (the film received two Emmy nominations, Outstanding Children’s Programming and Outstanding Special Visual Effects, the latter of which it won), but the child-centric focus seemed to throw older fans and critics off guard. Though similar in length to the original Star Wars feature films, Caravan of Courage was produced in a fraction of the time and with a far smaller budget. Relying on the existing, popular Star Wars brand increased the chances that Lucasfilm’s first foray into television would be a hit, but the storytelling formula for the television films varied substantially from Lucas’s approach to the theatrical films.46 Noticeably absent was any mention of the Force. In ROTJ, Luke Skywalker tricks the Ewoks by using the Force to simulate magic use by C-3PO, suggesting that the Ewoks had no knowledge of the Force. However, Caravan of Courage depicts several instances of magic on Endor, including magical acts performed by Ewok characters and magical phenomena present in the environment, such as the enchanted lake that entraps Mace. In this context, Caravan of Courage informs the viewer that perhaps the Ewoks were not afraid of mere superstition because magic has historically been an observable part of Endor life. The magic elements also appear among other fairytale tropes embedded in the story, consistent with the storytelling narration, the moralizing of the themes, and the story structure. But this pattern of storytelling is not consistent with the first three Star Wars films, and the Star Wars brand appeared to create expectations about the story that some viewers of the Ewok TV films struggled against. Although Mace’s character arc resembles that of Luke Skywalker—a miniature version of the Hero’s Journey that Lucas openly utilized, albeit one that resulted in Mace learning to respect his position in the nuclear family instead of transcending into adulthood—critics and audience tended to note the differences between the TV films and the saga films more than the similarities.

 “Hansel and Gretel in Space.”  Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, 17.

45 46

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The Battle for Endor Likely in response to the criticisms about how different Caravan of Courage was from the original Star Wars theatrical films, the second Ewok adventure film more closely followed recognizable Star Wars storytelling patterns. No narrator explained the plot of The Battle for Endor to the audience.47 The film contains a “Big Bad” and recognizable villains, as well as extended battle sequences that represent a call-forward to the Ewoks’ battle with Imperial troops in Return of the Jedi. After being reunited at the end of Caravan of Courage, the Towani family finds itself split apart permanently. As the family prepares to leave Endor, they and the Ewok village are attacked by Sanyassan Marauders.48 Jeremitt, Catarine, and Mace perish within the first 10 minutes of the film, leaving young Cindel alone to be captured by the Sanyassan Marauders. But, of course, she is “Not alone,” Wicket explains in broken English, for “Wicket take care of Cindel … Wicket Cindel’s family now. Ewok’s family now. Cindel live, Wicket live. Must have hope. Must escape.” Wicket and Cindel do escape, and they encounter a small being named Teek, who leads the pair to the hut of his human companion, Noa Briqualon, played by Wilford Brimley.49 Noa is a shipwrecked human who has lived alone on Endor for many years, slowly repairing his starship in an attempt to leave the planet. The main plot of the film involves Noa initially rejecting Cindel, but then begrudgingly taking her in, and eventually forming the foundation of a surrogate family for her. After Cindel is once again captured by the Sanyassan marauders, Noa and the Ewoks set out to rescue her and mount a heroic infiltration of the Sanyassan stronghold. Noa risks the ship’s power source (his means of escape) and his life to confront Sanyassan leader, Terak. After he defeats Terak, he winds up leaving the planet with Cindel.

 Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.  Though the film doesn’t provide an origin for the Sanyassan, paratext sources like Wookiepeedia and the Star Wars Role Playing game document that the Sanyassans were pirates that crashed on Endor about 100 years before the events in the film. The pirates do not seem to understand much about space travel, evidenced by Terak’s misunderstanding that the power cell for the starship is a magic talisman that could grant him power over the galaxy. However, the Sanyassans do carry blasters, and provide a fighting force more akin to the Imperial troops that the Ewoks will face in Return of the Jedi. 49  In the Star Wars Legends continuity, Teek would also be the name of his species. 47 48

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If the phrase “courage, loyalty, and love are the strongest forces in the universe” represents the explicit moral theme of the first film, the dangers of the pursuit of power and the destructive ends of unbridled ambition frame the second. Terak spends the film in a dogmatic search for literal power, specifically a starship power cell that he mistakenly believes will allow him to conquer the galaxy. The second film still makes statements about family though, as adoptive family serves as a theme for the protagonists throughout the film. The narrative continually presents characters with opportunities to achieve individual goals, only for them to wind up sacrificing those goals in order to care for others. Lucas reportedly had recently seen the movie Heidi with his daughter Amanda, whose favorite character in Caravan of Courage was Cindel.50 This inspiration doomed the other members of the Towani family, a decision that made the legacy of the first film awkward; what should a viewer think on subsequent screenings, rooting for characters who would almost all perish in the first 10 minutes of the next film? Furthermore, given the strong predestination trope presented in the first film, the family members’ deaths in the beginning of the second make the Ewok lore and mysticism, not to mention Chukha-Trok’s sacrifice, seemingly meaningless. As in the theatrical Star Wars films, the television films repeatedly reproduced well-worn stereotypes. Lucas’s intentionality in using recognizable patterns and tropes can be considered part of his style, the signaling of nostalgia to transport younger members of the audience to safe and predictable narrative terrain.51 An example where this approach works well is recognizing the true nature of Wilford Brimley’s Noa, a prickly curmudgeon whose frustration at being marooned drives him to seek to preserve isolation. Brimley’s previous roles in Cocoon (1985) and The Natural (1984) had involved characters who started off as cynical and world-weary, but later found wonder and joy through the experiences of others. The Battle for Endor presents Noa as a stereotype of this same character.52 Read against the Star Wars context, the turmoil and questioning from the 1970s political environment initially strands his cultural authority, so that he seeks retreat from the social world. And yet, the plight of the younger generation draws him from his security to embrace the challenges of family  Smith, George Lucas, 160.  McVeigh, “Do We Get To Win This Time?,” 475. 52  In 1987, Brimley would become a celebrity spokesman for Quaker Oats, another role playing to similar stereotypes from his performances. 50 51

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and ultimately risk his life and freedom in heroic fashion to save Cindel and to rejoin the social world. Within the film context, Terak and the Sanyassan marauders can be best understood through storytelling tropes. Monstrous reptiles in appearance, the marauders tower over the Ewoks, and seem intent on enslaving them (the purpose of the enslavement is never disclosed and the marauders appear content to lock the Ewoks away in cells). They live in a castle with a dungeon and Terak sits on a throne, while the other Sanyassans play games and assault each other. Like the imperials in Return of the Jedi, the Sanyassans underestimate the Ewoks, putting their faith in technology they see as magic rather than in the natural world. Terak seeks to escape Endor to conquer the galaxy, but his ambitions and motives are otherwise unclear. The other mysterious villain in the story is a witch named Charal.53 Using a magical ring, Charal is able to alter her appearance, take the form of animals, and perform various feats of magic. She begins the film as an ally of Terak, but her inability to make sense of the stolen power cell infuriates Terak. After she turns herself into a crow, Terak steals her ring. This ring would ultimately prove to be his undoing, as Wicket uses a slingshot to activate the ring, which burns Terak alive. The obsession with “power” fits a mainstay Lucas theme in most Star Wars films. The power cell taken from the Towani spacecraft represents Noa’s ability to leave Endor and rejoin society, but he puts the component at risk in the confrontation with Terak to save Cindel. Terak’s obsession with the power cell and Charal’s ring is consistent with many of Lucas’s villains, who seek expedient power at great risk, only to perish by the actions of an underestimated protagonist. The second television film may have more closely resembled Star Wars film conventions, but ratings were 25% lower than the first, ranking 12th among the 32 competing programs in the time slot.54 The Battle for Endor would be Lucasfilm’s final foray into live-action Star Wars television for Lucasfilm until the The Mandalorian premiered in November 2019. Lucasfilm instead briefly turned its attention to animated shows (two

53  Like the Sanyassans, Charal is not clearly identified in the film itself, but subsequent media and paratexts identify her as a Nightsister of Dathomir. 54  Bierbaum, “CBS Edges NBC for Top Spot in Ratings,” 8.

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seasons of Ewoks and one of Droids) for another two years,55 but then it would be another two decades in between animated television projects. In addition to the declining audience, the legacy of the Ewok television films includes the apparent increase in the generally poor fan reaction to Ewoks themselves.56 When Lucasfilm reset the Star Wars continuity canon in April 2014, the Ewok films were notably missing from the official canon lists.57 Recently, elements from the films, such as the Gorax, have been reintroduced into the modern Star Wars continuity by virtue of appearing in new programming.58

The Whitest Moon of Endor Historically, science fiction tended to place white males at the center of its narratives, and Star Wars was no exception.59 The cognitive estrangement that exists in Star Wars texts centers white heroes that explore the fantastic alien diversity of a galaxy far, far away. Lucas himself appeared to implicitly buck some of these trends by including strong female characters like Leia Organa, and nonwhite characters like Lando Calrissian. However, some scholars point to the inclusion of Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes as little more than tokenism. Adilifu Nama even argues that, given his divided loyalties between his white friend Han Solo and the symbolically black Darth Vader, and forced to betray his comrades in order to navigate the white society, Lando is ultimately never on equal footing with his white comrades in arms.60 Even prominent Prequel Trilogy characters like Mace Windu have been described as mere tokens.61 Of course, The Phantom Menace (1999) notably presented several problematic ethnic stereotypes that received widespread criticism.62 Critics have also observed that the main two female protagonists of the first two film trilogies, Leia Organa and Padmé Amidala, have some good moments, but “overwhelming serve

 See Darowski, “Several Decades Ago in Your Living Room,” in this volume.  Katzoff, “‘Star Wars’ Fans Still Love to Hate Ewoks 30 Years Later;” O’Hara, “They Eat People.” 57  See Nardi, “Canonical Legends,” in this volume. 58  Dubuc, “Traps and Tribulations.” 59  King & Leonard, “Is Neo White?” 34. 60  Nama, Black Space, 33. 61  Howe, “Star Wars in Black and White,” 20. 62  King and Krzywinska, Science Fiction Cinema, 110. 55 56

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the narrative as objects of rescue and desire.”63 Meanwhile, all other female characters were pushed to margins.64 Simply put, the first three decades of Star Wars screen media offered little in the way of racial or gender diversity, nor did they do much to challenge hegemonic cultural stereotypes. Lucasfilm’s nostalgic style in the Ewok TV films meant that the franchise continued to fail to depict any real sense of diversity among the human characters. Compared even to the theatrical films, the Ewok TV films are shockingly white and male-centered. Neither TV film features nonwhite human characters, and both emphasize the actions and agency of male characters—Mace, Noa, and Jeremitt—while the only female protagonists—Catarine and Cindel—play passive roles, with young Cindel requiring constant assistance and care from Ewoks or adult humans. Even the witch Charal (played by Siân Phillips), by far the most powerful being in either film, remains subservient to the ignorant and domineering Terak. Some of the Ewoks are played by female actors, though most of the female Ewoks play nurturing roles at home, while the male Ewoks engage in quests and battles. In fact, Weechee Warrick was played by Debbie Lee Carrington, though she wasn’t even credited for playing the male Ewok role. Similarly, although African-American actor Tony Cox plays Willie the Ewok, ethnicity is not performed among the Ewoks. This failure to reflect the diversity of the audience is all the more unfortunate because television is the more influential form of media for children.65 Television attracts large audiences from within households as a “push medium,” and as such, the relationship between a television program’s content and its viewership are extremely different than those between a film and the “pull medium” theatrical audience. To watch a primetime network-aired television film in the 1980s, one need only be a member of the 98.1% of households with a television.66 While Star Wars films were widely released, children still needed adults to take them to the theater and pay for admission, partially explaining why audience patterns for film and television vary. Advanced education, high occupational status, and income correlate positively with film audiences, but negatively with television use, meaning lower-income children tend to be exposed to  Neighbors, “The Search,” 118.  Dominguez, “Feminism and the Force,” 109–133; Wilson, “Seduced by the Dark Side,” 134–154. 65  Lauer & Lauer, Marriage and Family. 66  Gorman, “US Television Households by Season.” 63 64

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much more television programming than their more affluent peers.67 Given that children draw cultural information and learn social values from television,68 including social stereotypes,69 moving Star Wars to television represented a distinct opportunity for Lucasfilm to engage with children. Because of those medium differences, it was unfortunate that television during the 1980s tended to be more conservative, particularly on matters of race, where minority characters were often presented in subordinate roles.70 Similarly, studies of Saturday morning programs contemporary to the Ewok films release show an overemphasis on males in dominant roles, with females serving in peripheral roles.71 This led to concerns that, because children model behaviors seen on television, they would perpetuate the gender stereotypes they saw in the cartoons.72 Those concerns match findings that children often internalize gender role stereotypes presented in books, television, and films73 because “mass media construct the social imaginary, the place where kids situate themselves in their emotional life, where the future appears as a narration of possibilities as well as limits.”74 Theatrical films and television programs typically assemble significantly different audiences, with different levels of media engagement (film requiring more active processing, broadcast more passive), different cognitive abilities of the audience and even a different set of media effects related to racial representation. And while it’s worth noting that African Americans on average watch more television than other demographic groups,75 the effects of racial representation in content also affects the ways in which white audiences imagine minority groups as part of the social community.76 As a result, moving Star Wars to television potentially makes the representations of gender and race much more important than in films. In fact, more children likely saw the two Ewok films when they  Condry, The Psychology of Television.  Huston, et.al., Big World, Small Screen. 69  Anderson and Collins, The Impact on Children’s Education. 70  Dennis, “Gazing at the Black Teen,” 179–195; Mastro & Greenberg, “The Portrayal of Racial Minorities,” 690–703. 71  Carter, “Children’s TV”; Thompson & Zerbinos, “Gender roles,” 651–673. 72  Basow, Gender Stereotypes; Strasburger, Adolescents. 73  Thorne, Gender Play. 74  Aronowitz, Politics of Identity, 195. 75  Garcia, “Nielsen Report Confirms.” 76  Entman and Rojecki, Black Image, 205. 67 68

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first aired on TV than saw the Ewoks’ theatrical appearance in theaters; in 1983, Return of the Jedi sold an estimated 80 million domestic tickets,77 including many repeat viewings, whereas 65 million viewers saw Caravan of Courage when it aired on ABC. As noted above, none of the production crew, writers or directors of the two Ewok television films had significant television experience prior to the airings, which offers a specific critique of Lucasfilm’s transmedia narrative strategy. The production of culture results from the emergence of new art forms from industry,78 but not all forms of production require the same knowledge or skills. The Ewok films received general critical praise for their unusually high level of technical effects, normally reserved for film, but the filmmakers’ role in producing television programming appears to have ignored how key understandings of the television medium differ from film. Instead, the television films largely reproduce the very racial and gendered stereotypes being critiqued in contemporary media criticism, while also reproducing the same lack of ethnic diversity or backgrounded female roles for which the Star Wars theatrical films had been criticized. Contrasting 1980s Star Wars television with the television programming produced decades later demonstrates how Lucasfilm’s subsequent evolution better positioned the company to leverage creativity and organizational culture in the extension of the Star franchise to television. In the 1980s, Lucasfilm was primarily a film production studio that licensed Star Wars properties to other companies. In time, it would diversify its divisions and structures to include teams of creators from multiple industries who could leverage their experience into different media narratives. Modern Lucasfilm animation is overseen by creators like Dave Fiolini, whose career included significant television experience before his involvement with Lucasfilm projects. The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Resistance all contained multiple examples of female and diverse ethnicities represented among the featured characters. In addition, the online micro-series like Forces of Destiny (2017–2018) and Galaxy of Adventures (2018) short films focus specifically on female and minority characters as integral parts of the Star Wars universe. Even the live-action Disney+ series The Mandalorian features a diverse cast of characters and significant female roles. The contrast between the Lucasfilm of 2019 and the Lucasfilm of  “Return of the Jedi,” Box Office Mojo.  Miége, The Capitalization of Cultural Production, 80.

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1984 displays a starkly different relationship between creativity and industry cultures. The difference shows up not only in what kinds of transmedia strategies Lucasfilm undertook in the two different eras of the company, but also how the shows produced performed culturally.

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Decker, Mark T. “They Want Unfreedom and One-Dimensional Thought? I’ll Give Them Unfreedom and One-Dimensional Thought: George Lucas, THX-1138, and the Persistence of Marcusian Social Critique in American Graffiti and the Star Wars Films.” Extrapolation 50, no. 3 (September 2009): 417–441. Dennis, Jeffery P. “Gazing at the Black Teen: Con Artists, Cyborgs and Sycophants.” Media, Culture & Society 31, no. 2 (2009): 179–195. Diamond, Stanley. In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974. Dominguez, Diana. “Feminism and the Force: Empowerment and Disillusionment in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.” In Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films, edited by Carl Silvio and Tony M. Vinci, 109–133. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007. Dubuc, Nicole. “Traps and Tribulations.” Star Wars Forces of Destiny season 2, episode 14, May 4, 2018. https://video.disney.com/watch/star-wars-forces-ofdestiny-traps-and-tribulations-disney-56b429afc002ee5e698e03fd. Entman, Robert M., and Andrew Rojecki. The Black Image in the White Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Ewoks: The Battle for Endor. Directed by Jim Wheat and Ken Wheat. ABC, November 24, 1985. Foster, Alan Dean. Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976. Garcia, Courtney. “Nielsen Report Confirms Blacks Watch more TV Than Any Other Group.” The Grio, September 27, 2013. https://thegrio. com/2013/09/27/nielsen-report-confirms-blacks-watchmore-tv-than-any-other-group/. Giles, David C. “Parasocial Interaction: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4, no. 3, (2002): 279–305. Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. “Global 500 2016.” BrandFinance. January 1, 2017. https://brandfinance.com/ press-releases/global-500-2016-star-wars-sends-disneysbrand-into-hyperdrive/. Goldberg, Lee. “John Korty: Director of the Ewok Adventure.” Starlog 90, January 1980, 27–29. Gorman, Bill. “US Television Households by Season.” TV By The Numbers, August 28, 2007. http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2007/08/28/ us-television-households-by-season/273/. Hall, Stuart. “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media.” In Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties, edited by George Bridges and Rosalind Brunt, 28–52. London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1981. “Hansel and Gretel in Space, An Embarrassment for Lucasfilm.” Cinefantastique 15, no. 2, May 1985.

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Hoffner, Cynthia. “Developmental Differences in Responses to a Television Character’s Appearance and Behavior.” Developmental Psychology 21, no. 6 (November 1985): 1065–1074. Hofstede, David. What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History. New York: Back Stage Books, 2004. Howe, Andrew. “Star Wars in Black and White: Race and Racism in a Galaxy Not So Far Away.” In Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars: An Anthology, edited by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka, 11–24. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012. Huston, Aletha C., Ed Donnerstein, Halford Fairchild, Norma D.  Feshbach, Phyllis A. Katz, John P. Murray, Eli A. Rebinstein, Brian L. Wilcox, and Diana Zuckerman. Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska. Science Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace. London: Wallflower Press, 2000. Kline, Sally. George Lucas: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Katzoff, Tami. “’Star Wars’ Fans Still Love to Hate Ewoks 30 Years Later.” MTV. com, May 23, 2013. http://www.mtv.com/news/1707918/star-warsreturn-of-jedi-30-years-ewoks/. King, C.  Richard, Walter R.  Echo-Hawk, and Paul Rosier. Media Images and Representations. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. King, C. Richard, and David J. Leonard. “Is Neo White? Reading Race, Watching the Trilogy.” In Jacking in to the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation, edited by Matthew Kapell and William G.  Doty, 32–47. New York: Continuum, 2004. Lauer, Robert H., and Jeanette C.  Lauer. Marriage and Family: The Quest for Intimacy. Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark, 1994. Lucas, George. “Commentary by George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, Ben Burtt, Dennis Muren, and Carrie Fisher.” Disc 2, Return of the Jedi. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2004, DVD. Margulies, Lee. “Ewoks Take Spotlight in Own Movie.” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1984, F12. Mastro, Dana E., and Bradley S. Greenberg. “The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 44, no. 4, (2000): 690–703. McVeigh, Stephen. “‘Do We Get To Win This Time?’ Movies, Mythology, and Political Culture in Reagan Country.” In The 1980s; A Critical and Transitional Decade, edited by Kimberly R.  Moffitt and Duncan A.  Campbell, 471–485. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.

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CHAPTER 5

“The circle is now complete”: Transmedia Storytelling and Nostalgia in Star Wars Television Adverts Lincoln Geraghty

Tom Engelhardt has argued that the popularity of Star Wars toys following the release of A New Hope in 1977 symbolized a return to the tradition of war “play” in American youth culture.1 This was in response to America’s own lack of self-security after defeat in Vietnam and the effects of the “end of victory culture.” Adverts run on television in the summer and fall of 1977 featuring children playing with Star Wars action figures depicted a “fictional world” created by Kenner that represented a redressed and revised form of reality in which the psychic wounds of Vietnam could be healed.2 While I don’t necessarily disagree with Engelhardt’s claim that Star Wars helped a nation overcome the trauma of conflict, I argue these adverts work double-time to directly target children as consumers, 1 2

 Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, 268–269.  Engelhardt, 268–269.

L. Geraghty (*) University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_5

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marking them as an audience for selling toys, merchandise, and other related spin-offs. How Lucasfilm and Kenner approached marketing Star Wars action figures on television is symptomatic of a cultural shift in post-­ World War II America, where industry transformed the notion of “children as innocents in need of protection to one of children as sovereign, playful, thinking consumers.”3 Indeed, the growth of the toy industry more generally is directly linked to the rise of television, where since the 1950s adverts and children’s programs were used to co-develop brands, market toys all year round, and create exciting and fantastic stories around characters then released as toys.4 However, away from the cultural contexts of late-twentieth-century American history and a changing toy industry, and turning to the global media culture of the early-twenty-first century, I argue that Star Wars television adverts retain much broader significance in terms of both transmedia storytelling and their multigenerational appeal. Stephen Kline argues the medium of television “has become the great storyteller of post-modern culture” and as such I want to analyze the importance of Star Wars advertising in presenting alternative transmedia storyworlds to both children and adults.5 As opportunities to present multiple versions of the text, toy, and merchandise, commercials build and expand the narrative universe of Star Wars—particularly when they are screened and watched alongside the animated series and films broadcast on television as part of what Raymond Williams described as “television flow.”6 In this chapter, I argue that, as paratexts, more recent Star Wars television adverts play a crucial role not just in the marketing of franchise products but also in the expansion of the story; they create a sense of nostalgia for the wider narrative universe. They have allowed George Lucas and now Disney to open up new ways of presenting familiar characters and scenarios to audiences, and should be read as texts in themselves that contain transmedia memories targeting both old and new fans. Chapters in this volume have discussed a range of Star Wars adverts used to sell toys and other tie-in products, particularly in relation to the first movie trilogy.7 As Lucas planned, filmed, and released the Prequel  Kapur, “Out of Control,” 125.  Kapur, 127. 5  Kline, “The Empire of Play,” 162. 6  Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 7  See Lundy, “The Enduring Force of Kenner Star Wars Toy Commercials,” in this volume. 3 4

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Trilogy, marketing intensified in the late 1990s and early 2000s; both fans and general audiences became familiar with new characters like Darth Maul and Jar Jar Binks, whose visages and figures were heavily promoted. Indeed, it was the prevalence of the latter across all forms of advertising and merchandising following the release of The Phantom Menace (1999) that divided many fans and reignited criticism that Lucas was merely looking to squeeze the franchise (and the fans) for more money. Matt Hills analyzed hatred of the Jar Jar character and argued that such vilification was emblematic of fans trying to claim ownership over the text: ‘Hating’ the ‘childish,’ ‘cartoonish,’ ‘commercial’ Jar Jar Binks, in this instance, is one tactic aimed at preserving the fans’ ‘good’ object of Star Wars as ‘serious’ and ‘culturally significant.’ The discourse of hate is taken up, however excessively, within fan struggles over cultural value.8

Agreeing with Hills, I would also add that the centrality of such a character to Star Wars’s advertising campaign across all toys, tie-ins, and merchandise is a clue to how media franchises operated at the turn of the century. As media conglomerates formed during the “merger movement” of the 1980s, due to the relaxing of laws that prevented large-scale corporate ownership, synergy became one way of utilizing new networks of production and dissemination.9 For Jennifer Holt, “integration” results in synergy which drives production, and thus we can see how promoting one character through integrated strategies was thought in those contexts to diversify potential markets, as well as to increase the dissemination and circulation of Star Wars as a media franchise.10 Kristin Thompson argues synergy is about “selling the same narrative over and over in different media.”11 Thus, Star Wars television advertising in the new millennium focused on the repetition, celebration, and even parodying of established characters and story from the six original blockbuster movies.

8  Hills, “Putting Away Childish Things: Jar Jar Binks and the ‘Virtual Star’ as an Object of Fan Loathing,” 89. 9  Balio, “‘A major presence in all the world’s important markets’: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s,” 61. 10  Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996, 3. 11  Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television, 82.

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Parody and Character Brand Endorsement in Star Wars TV Adverts Pre Disney In 2010, UK electrical retailer Dixons, owner of Currys PC World stores across the country, launched a campaign developed by ad agency M&C Saatchi in partnership with Lucasfilm. Adverts featuring C-3PO and R2-­ D2 were first aired during the highly rated ITV1 channel reality contest The X Factor. With Anthony Daniels reprising his role as C-3PO, the two characters can be seen exploring a Currys PC World Megastore in Greater London after hours.12 Both are amazed at the “brilliant” high-tech products on display and the sheer variety of items held under one roof. Playing up to their established personas, C-3PO is initially appalled at R2-D2’s cavalier approach to touching and breaking the stock. However, after playing with a Star Wars video game and watching animated Star Wars on a massive flat screen television, the pair start to enjoy themselves. As they leave, the advert ends and viewers are encouraged to “Discover the Greatest Electrical Store in Our Galaxy” by visiting Currys PC World Megastore. On one level, this advert resonates by exacerbating the tempestuous relationship the droids have with each other, but it also works as a parody of A New Hope (1977) as dialogue, actions, and music from early scenes of the movie are replicated in the store. The commercial recasts their traumatic arrival on Tatooine, their run-in with the Jawas, and meeting other kidnapped droids as an exploration of gadgets, tech, and appliances. It is well known that “Lucas wanted to tell his epic story from the point of view of two marginal and lowly characters,” with R2 as young child and 3PO as older sibling keeping watch over him.13 In this advert, that scenario is repeated, with the two protagonists acting not as witnesses to the story of Star Wars but rather as employees eager to show off unique selling points of the products. Dixons followed up this advert in 2011 with a pre-Christmas campaign again created by M&C Saatchi, this time based on a scene from Return of the Jedi (1983) in which Darth Vader arrives to inspect the newly re-­ constructed Death Star.14 Landing in the car park to the Megastore, Vader is escorted inside with hundreds of Currys PC World employees standing  Johnnys Amusements, “Currys & PC World Megastores TV Advert—Starwars.”  See Krämer, “‘It’s aimed at kids—the kid in everybody’: George Lucas, Star Wars and Children’s Entertainment.” 14  Conform ScarlVideo, “Currys PC World 2011 Official Ad Vader’s Visit Director’s Cut Darth Vader Star Wars.” 12 13

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to attention and looking nervous. Several try to interact with Vader, showing off products in vain hopes of getting acknowledged and avoid punishment. One dares to expound upon the virtues of a new HP laptop and is briefly threatened by Vader’s lightsaber; yet, instead of striking them down, Vader praises them for their knowledge and dedication. This advert was not necessarily about the products on sale, but was targeted to advertise the company’s new customer service message, with the line “we continually train all 14,000 staff to deliver great service” providing the last image on screen. In its battle with other retailers such as department store chain John Lewis—famed for producing multi-million-dollar Christmas campaigns based on original concepts—the Dixons advert relies on audience association with Vader and the scenario of him visiting his troops as they rebuild the Death Star to get across the message that service and training will create the perfect shopping experience at Christmas. Parodying the stressful moment when Imperial officers were surprised by Vader’s arrival, the Dixons advert subverts Vader’s persona as villain and instead pitches him as stern but supportive boss, willing to praise as much as punish. As film genres develop, according to Dan Harries, they are “constantly in need of redefinition,” and thus parody “typically emerges when the dynamic nature of the logonomic system”—that is, the tradition of previous texts and established conventions—becomes exhausted.15 Parodies not only serve to reinvigorate genres but also reaffirm them; they “reconstitute as they deflate their targets.”16 We see this in the examples discussed above as well as in a series of ads produced for UK mobile phone network Vodafone. In 2012, Yoda starred in a number of adverts promoting the network’s various new features: for example, 4G coverage in London, improved service and aftercare, phone insurance and replacement within 24 hours, automatic call-backs on inquiries, and in-store data transfers to new phones.17 In each advert, Yoda is seen following mobile phone users as they go about their daily business, expecting that he will be needed to help them overcome any technical hiccups. Just as he starts to use the Force and attempt to solve their perceived problem—like finding a lost phone or helping a man woo his date at a romantic restaurant—the phone user stops him and points out that Vodafone has it covered, either having  Harries, Film Parody, 37.  King, Film Comedy, 114. 17  EMI Production Music, “Vodafone RED Box Yoda Commercial.” 15 16

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already sent them a new phone or offering new levels of customer service. The Jedi Grand Master is left shrugging his shoulders and exits, looking quizzical if not a little put out. Again, these adverts rely on audience awareness of Yoda’s helpful but irascible manner as depicted in the Star Wars movies; the message appears to suggest that, while the Force is good for some things, Vodefone—not Yodafone—has mobile phones covered. Examples of adverts using Star Wars characters to market partnered brands in this section highlight the strategy of integration and synergy previously discussed. However, prior to Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, the adverts also demonstrate that famous characters were being used as brands in their own right, more akin to traditional celebrity endorsements, transferring meaning to the products advertised and helping to construct a sense of familiarity with the audience. For Grant McCracken, advertising is about transferring meaning from product to consumer: “Consumers must take possession of these meanings and put them to work in the construction of their notion of self and the world.”18 As icons of global popular culture, Darth Vader and Yoda are clearly being used in these adverts to instigate the process of helping consumers to not only associate commercial partners with positive feelings directed toward Star Wars but also reaffirm a sense of identity built on memories of the characters and the parodied scenarios. The film texts become a means through which the narrative contained within the adverts makes sense to watching audiences: Vader is not a Dixons executive, but his role of feared Sith Lord is used to establish the sincerity of the message: they take staff training and customer service seriously. Using celebrities in ads, or Star Wars characters in these examples, intensifies the process of meaning-making for consumers. McCracken argues that being a celebrity is the result of constructing a public sense of self that is easily identifiable. Being seen in an advert demonstrates to consumers that selfhood has been achieved, and thus for the process of creating their own sense of self the audience needs to consume the advertised product.19 While the Star Wars characters being used are fictional, they are fully formed in the minds of the audience through repeated viewings of the films and through consumption of other texts in the franchise, such as novels, comics, video games, and television series. Thus, Yoda and Vader have achieved something approximating celebrity selfhood and represent  McCracken, Culture and Consumption II, 105.  McCracken, 110–112.

18 19

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a tangible and attainable relationship to the product sold. Moreover, this process draws on the participatory workings of fandom, since fans seek closeness with the text through practices such as collecting, cosplay, and fanfic; possessing it, performing it, and writing it make the text, its scenarios, and its characters more real. The regular reuse and remediation of popular characters suggests that the Star Wars storyworld as an object of transmedia franchising and paratextual branding strategies is both flexible and self-reflexive. Characters become texts, standing in as synecdochal signifiers of the Star Wars universe and the franchise’s wider cultural impact. They have been transformed and reimagined to fit the narrative at different stages of its evolution over the last 40-plus years but can also act as catalysts for new marketing opportunities. Extracted from the story and used to advertise products, Star Wars becomes a brand in itself that can then be used to bring meaning and significance to products sold in connection to particular characters. Crucially, television is integral to the story of both advertising and the Star Wars franchise’s paratextual spread through adverts. The adverts discussed above are examples of the “content-promotion hybrid” explored by Jennifer Gillan. She argues that television is “a medium of branded storytelling” where advertising doesn’t simply appear between shows but often forms part of the dramatic content; she calls this “television brandcasting.”20 Since the 1950s, network television has worked with companies to integrate product with story, a means through which messages are reinforced using narrative. For example, sitcoms such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952–1966) worked with companies like Kodak, incorporating their cameras into stories and the show’s credit sequence, reaffirming the message that taking Kodak pictures is part of American family life.21 Clearly, the examples I have analyzed in this section are only adverts meant to be watched between television shows and not necessarily (or obviously) tied to the shows. However, as dramatic shorts they are also forms of content containing their own messages and promoting their own range of consumer products using self-­ contained stories. Therefore, the Dixons and Vodafone adverts demonstrate how Lucasfilm collaborated with advertisers to use Star Wars characters and scenarios to integrate story with product, creating not exactly “content-­promotion hybrids” but more “promotion-content hybrids.”  Gillan, Television Brandcasting, 2.  Gillan, 8–9.

20 21

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Nostalgia and the Multigenerational Audience in Star Wars TV Adverts Post Disney Upon purchasing Lucasfilm in October 2012, Disney’s CEO Roger Iger was quoted saying that the thousands of planets and characters mapped out over thousands years of narrative history would provide the company with myriad ways of continuing the Star Wars story.22 Following decades of Expanded Universe (EU) material across books, comics, and games, Disney announced in April 2014 that the canon was to be reset such that only the six original movies and The Clone Wars (2008–2014) were “immovable objects” in the narrative universe, while Disney would rebuild Star Wars wholesale for a new generation with new stories and texts.23 In anticipation of the 2015 release of The Force Awakens, this decision can be interpreted as a means to clear the slate and delete previously established characters, such as Luke and Leia’s Jedi offspring, so as to introduce the likes of Rey and Kylo Ren (Ben Solo). But where Disney was originally criticized for abandoning the EU, it has since incorporated fan-favorite EU characters in order to attract older fans and rebuild the universe for new audiences.24 As a corporate author of Star Wars after George Lucas, Disney is keenly aware that it has to extend the franchise for future storytelling while playfully engaging with its past. New toys, tie-in merchandise like novels and guides, and video games, in addition to the films and television series, all contribute to a complex industrial network of Star Wars texts and overlapping narrative network of the Star Wars storyworld. These texts work in tandem to underscore the preeminence of the new Disney strategy and recycle the mythic saga of the Force. Yet, at the heart of this textual network are well-established and new characters upon which Lucas and now Disney continually place(d) tremendous narrative importance. Characters old and new, when used strategically in marketing campaigns, in effect represent the “immovable objects” that were talked about when the canon was reset by Disney. As I argued in the previous section, characters are synecdochal signifiers of the Star Wars universe and their appearance in

22  Proctor and McCulloch, “Introduction: from the House That George Built to the House of Mouse,” 6–11. 23  Lucasfilm, “The Legendary Star Wars Expanded Universe Turns A New Page.” 24  See Nardi, “Canonical Legends,” in this volume.

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canonical texts as well as television adverts helps to spread story and promotional messages to a diverse, multimedia audience. The transference of characters and narrative across different media platforms and various formats—such as films, television shorts, and adverts— is emblematic of transmedia storytelling. Henry Jenkins defines this as “stories that unfold across multiple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world.”25 Each revisioning of the story adds another level of meaning, enhances the original, and makes a distinctive contribution to the Star Wars universe. For Jenkins, “the core aesthetic impulses behind good transmedia works are world building and seriality.”26 This statement can also apply to the Star Wars adverts I have analyzed. For example, the Yoda Vodafone adverts worked to build a narrative that saw him increasingly frustrated not being able to use the Force to help mobile phone users because Vodafone revealed across a series of short stories that they had solutions to every problem. What defines Disney’s transmedia strategy following the acquisition is how it rebranded and re-established movie canon in the lead-up to The Force Awakens through various television marketing campaigns. It recycled the world and characters built by Lucas and added to it through the addition of new characters and the promotion of new consumer products. Disney promoted this strategy as “Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” labeling new novels and comics with the tag. This helped direct both old and new fans to important stories and characters while also offering hints and clues about the future of the continuing narrative. William Proctor and Matthew Freeman described this as an example of the “transmedia economy” of Star Wars.27 Of course, even before Disney took over the franchise, Lucasfilm continually manipulated and added to the Star Wars narrative, offering the potential for transmedia storytelling through the continual retelling and reordering of characters’ histories. With Disney, however, it was about locking the transmedia story (films, novels, comics, etc.) into a unified canon. Of particular relevance to the adverts analyzed in this section is that merchandise and toys were integral components of the strategy to introduce old Star Wars to new audiences; continuing the “Journey” and  Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 334.  Jenkins, “The Aesthetics of Transmedia.” 27  Proctor and Freeman, “‘The first step into a smaller world,’” 223–245. 25 26

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preparing fans for the first new film after Disney’s takeover. Most fans seek out more content, wanting to read about the continuing adventures of Han, Luke, and Leia despite them not appearing in films together for a number of years. But the consumption of all kinds of physical objects and ephemera, such as toys and merchandise, also contributes to the expansion of the Star Wars story beyond film and television series. As discussed in previous chapters, television advertising kept Star Wars in the public imagination and on toy store shelves, but it also bridged the gap between preand post-Disney Star Wars and introduced the franchise to a whole new generation of children.28 Leading the way in promoting Disney’s first movie in 2015 were some of America’s largest toy retailers: Walmart, Target, and Toys “R” Us. Duracell, reminding parents and kids they might need batteries for all those new toys, also partnered with Lucasfilm to produce adverts using Star Wars music, characters, and vehicles. While information on story and plot from The Force Awakens was unsurprisingly kept secret, new characters such as Rey, Kylo Ren, Finn, and, of course, BB-8 were highly visible and used alongside more familiar characters such as R2-D2 and Leia (going from Princess to General). The latter were clearly used to introduce the former to older audiences, while at the same time bridging the gap between movies and story arc for younger audiences. We see this most acutely in the Toys “R” Us advert promoting the global toy superstore chain as the premier destination for all things Star Wars.29 In the ad, an excited dad tries to encourage his daughter to love the franchise from an early age: from putting a plush stuffed Yoda in her cot to dressing her up as Chewbacca for her first Halloween, finally trying to get her watching the Original Trilogy with him. These attempts fail and mom is regularly called upon to help rescue her from nerdy and annoying dad. However, dad’s first trip to see the new toys released for The Force Awakens at Toys “R” Us brings out an encouraging and heart-warming reaction from his daughter: she does love Star Wars. While he is enthralled by a talking Darth Vader doll, she has found Kylo Ren’s lightsaber and is seen recreating the famous Luke Skywalker movie poster pose in the aisle; she now takes Star Wars seriously. The final shot of the advert shows dad welling up and saying proudly, “I am your father,” as the music reaches an emotional 28  See Lundy, “The Enduring Force of Kenner Star Wars Toy Commercials” and Ferguson, “The Holiday Special and the Hole in the Archive,” in this volume. 29  Becerril Productions, “ToysRUs Star Wars Commercial Like Father, Like Daughter.”

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crescendo. The message is clear: Toys “R” Us is the place to get old Star Wars themed stuff for dad (a lifelong fan) and also a shopping destination for the younger generation (potential new fans) excited by new characters like Kylo Ren (who is heavily promoted in the store display). The store was the final stage in helping dad convert daughter; merchandise makes the fan. This conversion-through-merchandise narrative—the older Star Wars generation passing on their knowledge and enthusiasm for the franchise to the new generation, primarily through bought paratextual object—was also central to Walmart’s campaign. The megastore not only relied on intergenerational relationships to market toys for The Force Awakens but also used nostalgic memories of dad buying an action figure for his son from Walmart in the 1980s to help recreate the same emotional connection between a now-grown son and his own young daughter in the present day. The first series of adverts sees children introduced to Star Wars through themed life lessons: for example, a farmer tells his son that the best Jedi in the universe started out as a farmer; yoga-expert mom tells her daughter that the Force binds the universe together; and grandfather points out to grandson that Jedi robes are comfortable porch-sitting attire. One ad, entitled “Keeping with the Times,” sees roles reversed with a young daughter telling her mom the reason why the princess does not let the boys rescue her: “because she’s a modern, empowered woman unfettered by the antiquated gender roles of a bygone era.”30 As is the case with many television campaigns, advertisers make both long and short versions of their ads to lay the groundwork for any internal developing character or narrative arcs and to fill short spots available during scheduled broadcast programing. Longer form ads have become increasingly important since the rise of YouTube as they provide both story content to watch online and marketable content that earns advertising revenue. In this vein, Walmart released some ads in long and short forms, so audiences could get a sense of transmedia story and character development. For example, the farmer tells his son about Luke’s farmboy roots in the short version, and then follows this up in the longer version by teaching him that Han shot first—an important topic in fan discussions about Star Wars. While clearly marketing Walmart as the best place to buy merchandise, these adverts also play their part in the transmedia conversion narrative in the lead-up to The Force Awakens: different generations of  Joshua Hickey, “Walmart Star Wars Commercial 2015.”

30

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fan are brought together across interrelated family scenarios to learn about and celebrate Star Wars. Nostalgia for old, pre-Disney Star Wars is an important part of the multigenerational message and is the primary means through which Walmart promoted itself and the brand in their next advert. With a voiceover by James Earl Jones (no introduction necessary for audiences) we are introduced to a father bringing home the new Luke Skywalker Jedi action figure to his son from Walmart in 1983 (the year of The Return of the Jedi), instigating a new family ritual by way of the Ewok happy dance.31 In the present, the young boy is now the father of an enthusiastic daughter waiting for dad to bring home a new The Force Awakens Tie Fighter LEGO set; both do the happy dance while grandpa sits in his chair watching with pride. Jones narrates the passing on of Star Wars fandom between generations, concluding the story by quoting Darth Vader, “the circle is now complete.” Target shared a similar message of passing on the love of Star Wars in a campaign called “Share the Force,” in which selected old photos, home videos, and trailer reaction videos for The Force Awakens on YouTube were edited together for an advert that did not promote specific products but instead marketed nostalgia for the franchise.32 Again, the multigenerational fandom of Star Wars was emphasized, with relationships between whole families—fathers, sons, and daughters—brought to the forefront. The end credits affirm, “From generation to generation there’s one thing we all share: the Force,” before segueing into clips from The Force Awakens trailer and Luke’s voiceover reminding everyone, “The Force is strong in my family.” This advert brings the text alive for audiences by connecting it with notions of family, nostalgia, and anticipation for the new movie, with the (male) viewer able to imagine himself in Luke’s position—head of a family strong in the Force, a synecdoche for the franchise. Tom Phillips’s study of fan reaction videos to The Force Awakens teaser and trailers highlights the difference between those fans who performed for the camera when watching the teaser, aware of their representation on platforms like YouTube, and spontaneous reactions to the first trailer that confirmed Han Solo and Chewbacca would be in the film. Phillips argues that “the fan reactions on display appear to depict the raw emotion felt when being  JosephProductions, “Star Wars Walmart 1983 To Present Day Toy Commercial.”  intrepidclass Bugs, “Star Wars Share the Force Awakens target commercial spot Darth Vader Luke Skywalker Han Solo Leia.” 31 32

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reunited with beloved characters” where “the fans’ affective display coupled with the reaction video’s composition invites the spectator to identity with the fan and attend to their emotion.”33 Following this, I would argue that the repeated use of such reaction videos in the Target advert recycled the “raw emotion” to help create an emotional and nostalgic connection between their own brand and Star Wars. Duracell’s campaign, by contrast, in the run-up to The Force Awakens focused on the more traditional notion of Star Wars being the popular choice of toy at Christmas, with an advert called “Battle for Christmas Morning.”34 In it we see a young boy in his bedroom putting batteries into his new lightsaber, then starting on a dangerous mission to rescue his sister from First Order troops. R2-D2 and C-3PO appear in his room, warning him of danger as stormtroopers invade the hallway outside. Fighting them off, he runs into the living room where mum and dad are having their own fun playing with new toys under the Christmas tree. Mum hands him another lightsaber and tells him he is their only hope. Running outside, he throws the weapon to his sister, who Force throws the stormtroopers taking her to Kylo Ren’s shuttle and then comments, “What took you so long?” The battle begins as they both stand ready to fight the First Order. Meanwhile, mum and dad look adoringly out of the window with the voiceover saying, “Never underestimate the power of imagination,” just before we see a final shot of the new Duracell Quantum battery. In the transitions between home life, action sequences, and quotations from the films, Duracell is credited with bringing the fantasy to life. When the boy first puts batteries into his toy, the mission begins and the fictional characters appear; when he receives the second lightsaber with new batteries and runs outside, he goes from wearing normal clothes to Jedi robes, while his sister is dressed like Rey. The garden becomes the battlefield as First Order stormtroopers and snowtroopers appear from all directions, while AT-ATs and Star Destroyers loom over the house. For the children, the battle is real; for the parents watching, they see two children happily playing with their new battery-powered toys in the snow on Christmas morning. Duracell is branded as both an important part of the transmedia storyworld, where young Jedi can do their bit for the Resistance’s cause against the invading First Order, and as a product all

 Phillips, “Simultaneously Laughing, Screaming, and Crying,” 260–261.  That Junkman, “Duracell Star Wars Commercial ‘Battle for Christmas Morning.’”

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kids must have to be able to immerse themselves into the Star Wars transmedia franchise. Also integral to this message—as in the case of both the Walmart and Toys “R” Us examples—is that women are equal if not more important consumers in this new post-Disney transmedia narrative. The sister in the Duracell ad, although not the narrative focus, imagines herself as a powerful Jedi who does not really need her brother to rescue her; the girls in the Walmart adverts are seen either teaching their parents about the importance of strong female role models or are the target market for new Star Wars LEGO; and the daughter who makes her father cry in Toys “R” Us becomes a fan because of the new, more inclusive, characters. Of course, this array of examples, which depict women and young girls as Star Wars fans, pales in comparison to the long history of adverts that situate the toys and franchise firmly in the male domain. However, they do illustrate what Megen de Bruin-Molé describes, in her analysis of the animated series Forces of Destiny (2017–2018), as “the franchise’s fraught and often-­ contradictory attempts to market a commodified version of feminism that is palatable to all audiences.”35 In the adverts I’ve discussed, the task of passing on a love of Star Wars between the generations remains firmly within the privilege of fathers, and, like de Bruin-Molé demonstrates in her analysis of the Forces of Destiny action figures, there is still a distinction between what products are associated with boys and girls. Overall, the comedic nature of these adverts works to displace some of the problematic gender politics. Dads are seen as nerdy and overly emotional, crying when their kids learn to love Star Wars as much as they do. Being a “true” fan is affirmed through excessive consumption, immersion into the fictional world, and being able to prove long-term commitment to the franchise—boy or girl. These qualities are both celebrated and satirized, worn as a badge of honor, even commemorated as in the case of the fan reaction videos. Therefore, I would call Disney-era adverts examples of “pragmatic parody,” which Paul Booth argues “invocates both subculture and culture by commodifying and appropriating simultaneously.”36 As an appropriation strategy employed by advertisers, pragmatic parody follows in the “reproduction of specific fan practices.”37 As with fan videos and fan 35  de Bruin-Molé, “‘Does it Come with a Spear?’” See also Giannelli, “The Princesses Strikes Back,” in this volume. 36  Booth, Playing Fans, 102. 37  Booth, 21.

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fiction more generally, this appropriation is both mocking and subversive while also reveling in the characterization of fans as collectors, players, performers, devoted, lifelong, and nostalgic. Nostalgia is an important mode of storytelling in the ads discussed in this chapter. Henry Jenkins argues that in order “for nostalgia to operate, we must in fact forget aspects of the actual past and substitute a sentimental myth about how things might have been” or the “objects we never possessed.”38 However, Paul Grainge argues, “As a cultural style, nostalgia has developed in accordance with a series of political, cultural, and material factors that have made ‘pastness’ an expedient and marketable mode.”39 In this regard, we might understand the nostalgia fans feel for relaunched toylines, film franchises, or television series as being part of contemporary media culture’s marketing and remediation of the past. Unlike Jenkins’s definition of nostalgia, they do not necessarily represent a longing for which historical texts may or may not be brought back, but serve as a re-­ examination of the wider media history archive in which the Star Wars franchise provides lots of visual content. By extension, in the physical objects that the fans recollect, buy, and share with their children in the adverts discussed, we can see how notions of nostalgia and memory are bound up in the creation of a contemporary fan identity. Rather than a recreation of the past with a substituted history that never existed, these adverts claim that Star Wars has been a constant presence in the lives of fans; some people just need reminding. This is similar to what Colin B. Harvey terms “nostalgia-play[, …] a particular kind of playful remembering associated with videogames” and other transmedia works.40 For Svetlana Boym, “nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.”41 Therefore, buying toys and merchandise that form a visual and physical biography of the self is an act of improvement, not loss. It is not about mourning the past, but about creating a reflexive and tangible identity in the present: “Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective.”42 This is more so in the case of the post-Disney adverts I have analyzed since they 38  Jenkins, The WOW Climax, 157; Jenkins, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths,” 4. 39  Grainge, Monochrome Memories, 58. 40  Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia, 148. 41  Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvi. 42  Boym, xvi.

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use nostalgia leading up to the release of The Force Awakens to herald (and create) a new Star Wars for a new generation.

Conclusion While I have argued that in terms of message and target audience a distinction can be drawn between television adverts using Star Wars characters before and after Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, there are examples where we can see both character endorsement and brand nostalgia being employed simultaneously. Volkswagen’s 2011 Super Bowl effort to promote its new Passat car invokes nostalgia and the bonds between father and son.43 A young child dressed as Darth Vader tries his best to use the force to help mum do the laundry, tidy his room, play with the dog—but to no avail. As “The Imperial March” music follows him around the house, his patience clearly starts to wear thin. When dad arrives home in his new car, the child runs out to try and lock it using his imaginary Sith powers. Just as he is about to give up, the car revs and headlights flash; the boy can finally control the Force! In truth, dad used the remote-control ignition key to perform this small miracle, but for his son the fiction is made real. The appeal of Star Wars is shown as multigenerational and inspiration can be found in the new VW. A father and son pair is again used in a 2015 advert called “Can’t Play” for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.44 Dad brings his son into his Star Wars collection room, everything neatly displayed on shelves and in glass cabinets. After being told he can’t play with any of the toys, the boy picks up a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, one of a set of themed boxes featuring Star Wars characters, and asks why this is not in the kitchen. Dad responds by saying he collects them too and takes back the box to put it safely on the shelf. The son tries to understand: “so toys you can’t play with and mac & cheese you can’t eat?” and quickly concludes, “This is a room of lies.” The adult collector is rebuffed by his son in a parody of extreme Star Wars fandom. Throughout this chapter I have argued that while Star Wars television adverts help us understand the cultural and economic impact of the merchandise and products on sale, they should also be considered important transmedia extensions of the franchise that use the story, familiar  OldAndCrankyOne, “VW Commercial ‘The Force’ Extended Version.”  PumpingItUp1, “Star Wars Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ‘Can’t Play.’”

43 44

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characters, and parodic representations of fandom to convey important messages about family, intergenerational relationships, and fandom in a period of excitement and anticipation before a new film. In this, the role of television should not be dismissed or seen as diminished thanks to the increased use of online platforms such as YouTube. These ads all screened on TV first, followed the traditional long and short formats so they could be used in different spots and at different times of the day, and focused on notions of the home and family that are fundamental tropes we still associate with the medium. Television remains an important media platform for transmedia franchises to tell their stories and connect with audiences. That they can be shared and viewed in this streaming era when so many encounter ads online as well as on television only adds to the extent to which the Star Wars franchise permeates into consumer consciousness and fan memory. Those first adverts that sold toys to youngsters in the 1970s, as well as the licensed tie-ins with other brands, demonstrate that television has been a consistent media space in which Star Wars existed outside of the movie theater. There did not have to be a new film released for advertisers to use the iconic narrative and characters to tell their own stories and sell product to new audiences and new markets. Companies such as Walmart, Toys “R” Us, and Target advertised the new toys and other licensed merchandise by relying on feelings of nostalgia and brand affiliation for old Star Wars. This served to bridge the gap between old and new generations of fans in the runup to The Force Awakens. Traditional methods of using well-known and popular characters, such as Darth Vader and Yoda, to advertise unrelated products, such as washing machines and mobile phones, continue to link affection for Star Wars with commercial imperatives. But in television adverts for The Force Awakens toys we see how nostalgia is also employed to create a sense of personal attachment. In effect, the parents and children depicted in the adverts become participants in the wider transmedia story of Star Wars as it crosses between movies, television and other popular media forms. They and the memories of childhood invoked, like those of audiences watching at home, are important elements in Disney’s strategy of keeping Star Wars relevant for future generations. The adverts analyzed in this chapter remind us that Star Wars has been, and will continue to be for some time, a franchise also made for television.

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Bibliography Balio, Tino. “‘A major presence in all the world’s important markets’: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s.” In Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith, 58–73. London: Routledge, 1998. Becerril Productions. “ToysRUs Star Wars Commercial Like Father, Like Daughter.” November 23, 2015. YouTube Video, 1:00. https://youtu.be/ wz2HhahRhTo. Booth, Paul. Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Conform ScarlVideo. “Currys PC World 2011 Official Ad Vader’s Visit Director’s Cut Darth Vader Star Wars.” November 30, 2011. YouTube Video, 1:00. https://youtu.be/djgTvAGlKtY. de Bruin-Molé, Megan. “‘Does it Come with a Spear?’ Commodity Activism, Plastic Representation, and Transmedia Story Strategies in Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Destiny.” Film Criticism 42, no. 2 (2018). EMI Production Music. “Vodafone RED Box Yoda Commercial.” July 25, 2012. YouTube Video, 1:00. https://youtu.be/7Kbuo5XS-WE. Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Gillan, Jennifer. Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid. New York: Routledge, 2015. Grainge, Paul. Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America. Westport: Praeger, 2002. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Harries, Dan. Film Parody. London: BFI, 2000. Harvey, Colin B. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative Play and Memory Across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Holt, Jennifer. Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Hills, Matt. “Putting Away Childish Things: Jar Jar Binks and the ‘Virtual Star’ as an Object of Fan Loathing.” In Contemporary Hollywood Stardom, edited by Thomas Austin and Martin Barker, 74–89. London: Arnold, 2003. intrepidclass Bugs, “Star Wars Share the Force Awakens target commercial spot Darth Vader Luke Skywalker Han Solo Leia.” August 28, 2015. YouTube Video, 1:59. https://youtu.be/5JcCnMaymCY.

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Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths.” In The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins, 1–37. New York: New York University Press, 1998. ———. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New  York: New York University Press, 2006. ———. The WOW Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2007. ———. “The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Two).” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, September 13, 2009. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_ transmedia_i_1.html. Johnnys Amusements. “Currys & PC World Megastores TV Advert—Starwars.” October 23, 2010. YouTube Video, 1:11. https://youtu.be/8Pa6xOUku3E. JosephProductions. “Star Wars Walmart 1983 to Present Day Toy Commercial.” December 19, 2016. YouTube Video, 0:26. https://youtu.be/_By6yWkYMqs. Joshua Hickey. “Walmart Star Wars Commercial 2015.” December 8, 2018. YouTube Video, 1:56. https://youtu.be/g5oQCybYq_o. Kapur, Jyotsna. “Out of Control: Television and the Transformation of Childhood in Late Capitalism.” In Kid’s Media Culture, edited by Marsha Kinder, 122–136. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. King, Geoff. Film Comedy. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. Kline, Stephen. “The Empire of Play: Emergent Genres of Product-based Animations.” In In Front of the Children: Screen Entertainment and Young Audiences, edited by Cary Bazalgette and David Buckingham, 151–165. London: BFI, 1995. Krämer, Peter. “‘It’s aimed at kids—the kid in everybody’: George Lucas, Star Wars and Children’s Entertainment.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (December 2001). Lucasfilm Ltd. “The Legendary Star Wars Expanded Universe Turns A New Page.” April 25, 2014. http://www.starwars.com/news/the-legendary-starwars-expanded-universe-turns-a-new-page. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. OldAndCrankyOne. “VW Commercial ‘The Force’ Extended Version.” March 29, 2011. YouTube Video, 1:38. https://youtu.be/AePr-8n1STQ. Phillips, Tom. “Simultaneously Laughing, Screaming, and Crying: Reacting to the Force Awakens Trailer.” In Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception, edited by William Proctor and Richard McCulloch, 254–266. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. PumpingItUp1. “Star Wars Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ‘Can’t Play.’” February 17, 2016. YouTube Video, 0:42. https://youtu.be/tnRs2WbvWhg.

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Proctor, William and Matthew Freeman. “‘The first step into a smaller world’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars.” In Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf, 223–245. New York: Routledge, 2016. Proctor, William and Richard McCulloch. “Introduction: from the House That George Built to the House of Mouse.” In Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception, edited by William Proctor and Richard McCulloch, 1–19. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. That Junkman, “Duracell Star Wars Commercial ‘Battle for Christmas Morning.’” October 30, 2015. YouTube Video, 1:00. https://youtu.be/C5Wl_9i7YI8. Thompson, Kristen. Storytelling in Film and Television. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge, 2004.

CHAPTER 6

The Princess Strikes Back: Forces of Destiny and the Capitalization of the Disney Princess Federica Giannelli

The new Star Wars movies, which relaunched the franchise after Disney’s acquisition of the brand in 2012, seem to align with the company’s alleged commitment to depicting empowered female characters. In Disney movies such as Frozen (2013), Brave (2012), Tangled (2010), and The Princess and the Frog (2009), more rounded female characters challenge the myth of the passive Disney Princess through a feminist revamping that sees the modern Princess taking on the mantle of an action heroine. Rey, the Star Wars protagonist of The Force Awakens (2015) and its sequels, and Jyn Erso, the lead of Rogue One (2016), emerge as strong characters who fully embrace their leadership and fighting skills. However, as Kailash Koushik and Abigail Reed point out, Disney’s more inclusive character development is not a genuine effort toward diversity, but seems to “serve the primary purpose of selling goods to audiences” through a marketing strategy exploiting female audiences’ desire to recognize themselves in movie characters and products.1 1

 Koushik and Reed, “Disney’s Commodification of Feminism,” 5.

F. Giannelli (*) University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_6

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The new children-targeted Disney series Star Wars: Forces of Destiny (2017–2018) seems to follow this trend. Developed by Lucasfilm Animation and released first on Disney YouTube and then on the Disney Channel, the series mainly features Star Wars female characters and follows the incredibly profitable Disney Princess Line media franchise established in 2001 by producing themed dolls designed for younger consumers. The toys are marketed using the democratic messaging that children can be their own hero no matter what part of the galaxy they are from, or regardless of their social position—the dolls feature equally senators, smugglers, queens, and warriors, unlike the traditional Disney Princess Line which only includes the classic “Princess” brand. Forces of Destiny downplays the classic Disney Princess, but at the same time it never truly accomplishes that because it primarily features characters with royal heritage. When it portrays common women such as the “non-Princess” Rey, they are still engulfed within the Princess simulacrum by iterating the same traditional traits associated with royals like Leia and Padmé Amidala, even though they show superficial independence. Hence, the series develops a new Princess simulacrum that keeps repeating itself from the past. In this chapter, I analyze how Disney’s new “Princessification” trend problematically relates to Forces of Destiny. I explain how the new Star Wars Disney Princess oscillates between gender representations that reinforce and challenge women’s oppressed position within commercial franchises that support gender empowerment moves while benefiting capitalist accumulation. The series is framed through a narrative proclaiming that “the choices we make, the actions we take, […] shape us into forces of destiny,” as Maz Kanata solemnly recites at the beginning of each episode. The implicit message to children is that only by taking charge through their actions can they make a change in the world and be the real-life protagonists of their own stories. However, the short three-minute episodes raise concerns as to whether Forces of Destiny disguises an animated advertisement that encourages girls to buy the themed dolls. By analyzing characters and narrative elements in the series, I will refer to postmodern theories of image and mass cultural reproduction, including Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, to investigate how Forces of Destiny characters such as Rey, Leia, and Padmé simulate empowered role models, but still inhabit traditional, secondary roles. Even though the series legitimately belongs to the new official Star Wars franchise, its micro episodes fail to influence the larger narrative or character development of the canon, thus demonstrating that once again the Star Wars universe is a lonely place for a woman to be.

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Once Upon a Time… In our collective imaginary, a Princess is a young, beautiful damsel in distress who, in elegant robes, waits for a charming hero to save and woo her—the classic image of the Disney Princess since the 1930s. However, in A New Hope (1977), George Lucas’s new Princess started to wreck feminist havoc: Leia Organa. As “a new stage in the ongoing presentation of the fairy-tale princess in jeopardy,” Leia is abrasive, straight to the point, and not afraid of outsmarting and overpowering the male characters around her à la second-wave feminism, challenging the motif of the damsel in distress in fantasy stories.2 Conversely, in Empire Strikes Back (1980), Leia also presents the features of a classic Princess because her story centers on a traditional love-hate romance trope with Han Solo, a scruffy “bad boy” scoundrel. This motif catalyzes Leia’s narrative in the Original Trilogy— she is enslaved (possibly abused) by Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi (1983) only because she is trying to free Han from the carbonite. So, is Leia really a new Princess? Despite our desire for empowering female representations in popular culture, Leia shows how the modern, allegedly emancipated Princess character struggles with innovative gender representations. The core of the Star Wars Princess character (even pre-Disney) is an example of how commercial fantasy franchises have consistently revived old fairy-tale Princess’ tropes derived from traditional storytelling for the mass-scale commodification of this character through themed action figures, clothing and various merchandise, whose capitalist modes of production reinforce the oppressive feminine qualities traditionally associated with women. Vladimir Propp shows well the limitations and features of the traditional fairy tale Princess: she has a little “sphere of action,” and her role is not to “do,” but to endure events as a passive victim until an external narrative force is applied. Rather than leading the action, she is used as a catalyst for the male protagonist’s narrative development, such as being kidnapped and subsequently saved, or she may “demand that the hero conquers the dragon,” as Propp notes.3 The Princess’s exceptional beauty also fulfills the traditional feminine function of potential bride who attracts “a suitor [to achieve] marriage.”4 These aspects apply particularly to the  Merlock and Merlock Jackson, “Lightsabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages,” 77.  Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, 68. 4  Tatar, The Hard Facts of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 79. 2 3

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pre-Disney Star Wars movies. While adapted to a more emancipated modern context, both Leia and Padmé may seem familiar to the audience because of their similarity to Princesses from previous media forms. Saving Princess Leia from the Empire’s grip is the initial leitmotiv of A New Hope, and the trope continues with (Senator) Padmé’s saving from the Separatists’ assassinations in Attack of the Clones, which ends with the hero Anakin marrying the beautiful former Queen of Naboo. This process of image duplication from pre-modern Princess representations is systemic to capitalist modes of cultural production through transmedia storytelling practices. The classic Princess, who embodies traditional values of femininity and domesticity, has been co-opted in multiple media such as the Internet, cinema, and television in continuous conversation with each other by re-producing and fragmenting the gendered meanings associated with it. Jean Baudrillard writes that in this process of cultural production “the media carry meaning and countermeaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system.”5 While for Baudrillard this leads to a complete erasure of meanings, where “to simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t,”6 I draw on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to argue that this simulation enhances contradictions of the signified because of a rhizomatic branching media model that allows the simulations—Baudrellean simulacra—of the Princess character to be reproduced over space and time.7 This concept is well theorized in Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle, where “everything […] has moved away into a representation. The images which detached themselves from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream where the unity of life can no longer be reestablished.”8 Traditional media representations of women, especially Princesses, are particularly apt in the context of mass-produced culture where women are commodified and objectified through images created for the sake of the male gaze, becoming “an object of vision: a sight,” as John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing.9 Laura Mulvey expands this idea in her analysis of Hollywood female cinematic, hence referring to commercialized,  Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 84.  Baudrillard, 5. 7  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 6–7. 8  Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1–2. 9  Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47. 5 6

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mass-­produced representations of women, which reveal their fundamental Othered status in a patriarchal system where they are “bearers of meaning, not makers of meaning,” as they are used for pushing the sales of products to specific audiences.10 In the Star Wars franchise, Leia and Padmé were introduced to play “the ideal girlfriend” titillating the fantasies of the male audience, while in the new Disney movies Rey as a lead was a systematic move to make the franchise more “women-friendly”—even though the female Star Wars fan base is a well-documented phenomenon. This is “emblematic of [the company’s] growing tendency to commodify the core tenants of social movements and repackage them in a fashion better suited to their global market interests,” as Koushik and Reed point out.11 The re-packaging of the Princess simulacrum’s features reaches its peak with Disney movies, which capitalize on consumers’ need for modern escapist fairy tales. Between the two World Wars, Disney’s animated films, produced by men, replicated the Princess as the bearer of traditional, domestic (and domesticated) gender roles and nuclear family values to “restore [fairy tales’] conservative features” to counteract, for example, women’s social emancipation in the 1950s and 1960s.12 As Sam Higgs observes, Disney movies associated this new, self-determined woman with the villain—the jealous Evil Queen (Snow White, 1929), the evil stepmother Lady Tremaine (Cinderella, 1950), and heartless witch Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty, 1959).13 Instead, the Classic Princesses of these movies were reassuring feminine figures who embodied “romantic myths” of normalized subordination.14 As Higgs acknowledges, the 1990s third-wave-­ feminist Princess changed into more assertive active roles, albeit still reinforcing patriarchal, heteronormative values.15 For example, Ariel renounced her freedom for a barely-known Prince (The Little Mermaid, 1989), while smart Belle married the Beast who abused her (Beauty and the Beast, 1991).  Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 7.  Koushik and Reed, “Disney’s Commodification of Feminism,” 5. 12  Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 193. 13  Higgs, “Damsels,” 65. 14  Wilde, “Repackaging,” 134. 15  In addition to issues of gender representation, the Renaissance Princesses present flawed portrayals of race and misrepresent minorities through racial framing. For example, Pocahontas (1995) and Mulan (1998) offer racial stereotypes of Indigenous and Chinese people, and shamelessly appropriate Othered cultures—an issue not addressed in Higgs’ “Damsels.” 10 11

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Around the mid-2000s, Disney’s co-option of feminism to respond to audiences’ needs for recognition resulted in stronger female leads, a decision to remove “the word ‘Princess’ […] from the titles, and [that] the male love interest had to be given more to do,” after The Princess and the Frog’s Tiana (2009) flopped at the box office.16 Regardless, Higgs notes that the capable, independent Revival Princesses such as Tiana, Rapunzel in Tangled (2010), and Merida in Brave (2012) were weaker because their uniqueness was portrayed as a social exception.17 Conversely, Frozen’s Elsa (2013) and the character title of Moana (2016) extremize Disney’s “feminist” shift, abandoning for the first time any romantic happy endings for the Princesses, while carrying forward old gender representations—Moana as God Maui’s unwilling “mother,” and Elsa’s emasculating freezing powers excluding a heterosexual romance.18 As Sarah Wilde points out, Disney’s shift toward post-feminist positions has caused Princesses to be “repackaged with positive associations of bravery, compassion and loyalty that girls can adhere to, [as] self-acclaimed princesses in the form of everyday girls.”19 Despite the claim of refuting the concept of girls as “Princesses,” critics highlight how popular media, including Disney’s Princess Line and the Star Wars franchise, are still pervasively entrenched with sexist gender representations of women’s subordination. Although Rey is not officially a Princess—at least until she was revealed to be related to Emperor Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker (2019)—the features she embodies are very close to Star Wars’ royals Leia and Padmé and are at times akin to the classic fairy tale Princess character.

Forces of Destiny and the Disney Princess Simulacrum Influenced by Disney’s co-option of female audiences to meet globalized marketing strategies, Forces of Destiny, a series of nonviolent adventures featuring the female leads of the Star Wars official canon, tries to substitute the image of the traditional passive Princess with female characters who take action, but also associates them with traditional female functions as in Disney’s Frozen and Moana. As Valerie Estelle Frankel writes, “this  Higgs, “Damsels,” 68.  Higgs, 69. 18  Streiff and Dundes, “Frozen in Time,” 38. 19  Wilde, “Repackaging,” 133. 16 17

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cartoon is the girliest Star Wars ever… and also the most Disneyesque.”20 The series supposedly teaches lessons about teamwork, kindness and bravery to young (female) audiences, showing how easily the two franchises— Disney and Star Wars—overlap in their messaging. Thus, it was easy to mix the new Princess simulacrum around Star Wars tropes in Forces of Destiny, as “the themes—compassion, care for ‘all living things,’ lessons in humility, bravery in the face of overwhelming odds—are pretty much in the core of Star Wars.”21 However, while the Star Wars movies are targeted to adults, Forces of Destiny “stick[s] to simple messages, uncomplicated humor, and easily solvable problems” for a younger audience.22 Forces of Destiny mostly features Leia, Padmé, and Rey because, as the stars of the main movies, young girls are more likely to recognize them, which means easily increasing the number of online views of the episodes and a way of better promoting the sale of toys based on these three characters. Because the new Disney Princess simulacrum presupposes “normal” girls becoming heroines, the remaining characters featured are common women from movie spin-offs and other animated series, such as Jedi Padawan Ahsoka Tano (The Clone Wars), Jyn Erso (Rogue One), Rose Tico (The Last Jedi), Qi’ra (Solo), and Sabine Wren and Hera Syndulla (Rebels). Attempting to break the Princess mold, the episodes show how the Forces of Destiny women were not born in privilege, but are set on a path of making a change by standing up for justice and for helping people and friends across the galaxy, similar to modern Princess simulacra such as Disney’s Merida, Elsa, and Moana. The story pattern adopted in every episode reinforces capitalist modes of post-modern production that are based on the repetition of the same, unoriginal narrative nodes to “sell” a more or less feigned empowered story to young audiences: a problem comes up (usually involving Empire enemies and saving people), the main female characters use their wits or work together to solve it, and the episode concludes with the characters learning something about the meaning of heroism and friendship. While the narrative is unimaginative, it positively portrays heroines with skills usually associated with Star Wars male characters, such as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, thus making the point that the new Disney Princess simulacra are as capable as men: they fight

 Frankel, Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism, 261.  Kurka, “Review.” 22  Martinelli, “Disney’s Charming Series.” 20 21

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and use the Force, repair and operate vehicles, and plan on-the-spot successful rescue missions. The aspect that makes us question whether Forces of Destiny is a marketing strategy to advertise the themed dolls is its nature as an anthological, non-chronological collection of stand-alone moments within the Star Wars universe. For example, episodes such as “Padawan Path,”23 featuring Ahsoka as Anakin Skywalker’s Jedi student during the Clone Wars, is shown alongside “Beasts of Echo Base,”24 where Leia of Empire Strikes Back fights a big Wampa monster on the icy planet Hoth—20 years ahead of Ahsoka’s adventures in the Star Wars timeline. But what do these add to Leia and Ahsoka’s character development? While Forces of Destiny has been created to introduce young girls to the franchise, older fans are already familiar with most of the series’ stories and this diminishes the attempt at making Star Wars women stand up. In “Ewok Escape,”25 for example, Leia helps the Ewoks fight Imperial troops on the Forest Moon of Endor, a scene reminiscent of Return of the Jedi, while in “Happabore Hazard”26 Rey proves her scavenger abilities to despicable merchant Unkar Plutt, who scolds her in a similar scene in The Force Awakens. In particular, it is questionable how scenes such as these barely add to the complexity of the characters or their narrative development for the sake of future revenues—as per Disney’s current policy, tie-in media must not constrain Star Wars writers in future movies or TV series, which are the primary sources of canon and the big moneymakers. The Forces of Destiny scenes are rather a source for back-story details or show how some characters, who never met in the main Star Wars storylines, crossed paths as they helped each other fight the Empire or the First Order. As a self-contained product, Forces of Destiny indeed shows more proactive female leads. However, the repetition of the same narrative structures and images of the new Princess simulacrum illustrates how women’s emancipated representations in the media are a way of attracting the audience-­niche of female viewers previously ignored by mainstream cultural production. But these new representations fail to bring a true feminist-­oriented complexity to the Star Wars franchise. The practice of re-packaging old stories and characters through new lenses is Disney’s  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 4.  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 5. 25  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 3. 26  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 15. 23 24

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common modus operandi for attracting existing customers back to their products, an “old wine in a new bottle” strategy that problematically exploits the need of a marginalized group (women) to be recognized.27 Megen De Bruin-Molé notes that although Star Wars abounds with female leaders challenging male-centric systems, their ability to effectively oppose the oppressions of the patriarchy is limited because they “they rarely succeed in toppling the galaxy’s patriarchal customs and politics.”28

Princess Leia While the Forces of Destiny Leia is a Disney (Princess) product, her contradictions as a modern Princess simulacrum who is independent yet utterly tied to feminine roles are inherited from Lucas’s saga. As “a strong woman,” Leia is the narrative catalyst of the classic trilogy—she sends the plans to destroy the Death Star to Obi-Wan Kenobi through the droid R2-D2 in A New Hope.29 Leia signals a new era where princesses cannot not be “salvaged simply with a kiss.”30 Ray Merlock and Kathy Merlock Jackson see her as the end of the traditional Princess because she defiantly challenges Luke when she is rescued, although Diana Dominguez notes she “does step aside […] when it is wise to do so.”31 Also, unlike her brother-hero Force-user Luke, her greatest assets are her political skills, and she is concerned “with the larger chess game of Republic vs. Empire.”32 Leia has provided a model for subsequent sci-fi female characters as “the first feminist action hero” paving the way for characters such as Ellen Ripley in Alien (1979) and Sarah Connor in The Terminator (1984).33 However, she has been criticized for being an enabler for the male characters (Dominguez),34 and for failing to empower because of her infamous Return of the Jedi slave bikini, a blatant objectification according to Carrie Fisher.35 Scholars such as Cole Bowman argue that “Bikini” Leia embraces  Koushik and Reed, “Disney’s Commodification of Feminism,” 6.  De Bruin-Molé, “Space Bitches,” 230. 29  Bowman, “Pregnant Padmé,” 163. 30  Merlock and Merlock Jackson, “Lightsabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages,” 80. 31  Dominguez, “Feminism and the Force,” 116. 32  Merlock and Merlock Jackson, “Lightsabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages,” 85. 33  De Bruin-Molé, “Space Bitches,” 238. 34  Dominguez, “Feminism and the Force.” 35  In her memoir The Princess Diarist, with her usual humor, Fisher comments about the slave bikini and about being identified with her character ever since: “Never have been asked 27 28

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her sexual power by choking the patriarchy (Jabba the Hutt) with her slave chain,36 while others such as Frankel dismiss this scene, because Leia is shown as a sub-human and being “the galaxy’s only female, this definition extends from her to all women.”37 Even though Leia is clothed in Forces of Destiny, the series innovatively reworks the appropriation of her image as a Princess simulacrum for financial gain, thus showing how women “are separated from the control over their bodies” in a capitalist system.38 Like in the movies, Leia’s objectified simulacrum shows independence while being a traditional figure. In “Ewok Escape,” she frees Ewoks captured by Imperial soldiers with the Ewok Wickett’s help.39 Leia shows compassion for the defenseless creatures and tells Wickett that they need to help them. Her caring feminine attitude opposes the stormtroopers’ racism, which embraces the submission of alien “lesser” populations. One of the stormtroopers says: “They’re primitives. I’m surprised the Empire didn’t deal with them when we arrived.” Despite this, after the battle of Endor in “Imperial Feast,” Leia keeps a kind attitude with the stormtroopers, objecting to Han that they “must treat the enemy fairly,” and saves them from being cannibalized by the Ewoks.40 Like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, Leia repackages the image of Princesses as inherently good-hearted and helpers of lesser creatures—a messaging that shows how younger audiences keep being marketed traditional feminine images through more proactive roles. And like Cinderella, Leia gets a pretty dress from the Ewoks as a reward for being good. This series juxtaposes Star Wars Princesses with feminine clothing, showing Disney’s savvy marketing strategy: the “Endor” Leia doll includes the dress along with her soldier camouflage suit to add a “girlier” option to the doll line, which mainly features work suits, to attract more girl customers used to playing with traditional “feminine” toys. But Leia’s simulacrum also positively embraces an updated version of femininity, albeit for the sake of her capitalist exploitation in the global market. In “Bounty of Trouble,” she shows how the new Princess is one

if I thought I’d been objectified by silently wearing a gold bikini, while seated on a giant laughing cruel slug, while everyone chatted gaily around me?” (246). 36  Bowman, “Pregnant Padmé,” 166. 37  Frankel, Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism, 20. 38  Von Werlhof, “No Critique of Capitalism,” 16. 39  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 2. 40  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 14.

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of the people, like Disney’s Tiana.41 When she meets Sabine Wren on Tatooine to exchange Imperial data for the Rebellion, she refuses the hierarchy of titles because she thinks everyone is equal in fighting the Empire. Aligning with the “girl power” philosophy, the show is also the first in the Star Wars official canon to show Leia (finally) wielding a lightsaber in “Traps and Tribulation.”42 While it is empowering to see Leia at ease with the Jedi’s signature weapon, this again exemplifies the contradictions and limitations of the Princess simulacrum in the larger the male-centric Star Wars universe. In the episode, Luke throws his lightsaber at Leia, who capably cuts a rope making the giant monster Gorax fall into a trap built by the Ewoks. Seeing her enjoyment at using the weapon, Luke is quick to remind her in humorous tone to give it back. Wielding a lightsaber is a means to an end rather than representing an epiphany or turning point in Leia’s story: it fails to show her true potential as a Force sensitive, which would have posed her on the same level as Luke. In the Expanded Universe tie-in novels, made non-canon after Disney’s acquisition of the franchise, Leia was primarily portrayed as a politician, but she did complete her Jedi training under the guidance of Luke because, as shown in the Original Trilogy, she had the same powers as her brother. The Rise of Skywalker tries to re-integrate this storyline back into Leia’s character a posteriori but with unconvincing results that serve more to fulfill the fans’ longtime wish to see her a Jedi rather than to offer a real empowerment. As in Forces of Destiny, a brief flashback scene shows that Leia did her Jedi training and had her own lightsaber. However, in the name of familial (patriarchal?) bonds, Leia decides to renounce a role as an active Jedi because of a vision of her son Ben turning to the Dark side. She embraces her powers as a Jedi Master again not to fight like Luke in The Last Jedi (2017) but to briefly help others as a Princess would do—to help Rey finish her training and to call her son Ben/Kylo Ren through the Force before dying. The seemingly innocent lightsaber-wielding scene in Forces of Destiny summarizes Leia’s contradictory narrative arc in the franchise: it’s okay to be an emancipated (Disney) Princess, but not too much for the sake of the traditionally (male-centric) Jedi Order, which, as a new generation of Star Wars women, Rey seems to challenge.

 Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 8.  Forces of Destiny, season 2, episode 14.

41 42

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Padmé Amidala Padmé, who is Luke and Leia’s mother, Queen of Naboo and later senator of the Old Republic, further exemplifies the contradictory elements of the modern Princess simulacrum. While Frankel sees her as the positive epitome of the 1990s feminist “girl power,” a successful woman who can have both a career and love,43 according to Merlock and Merlock Jackson, Padmé loses all the strength she is imbued with in The Phantom Menace.44 From a woman who stands up against injustice, her narrative arc completely turns to her love story with Anakin Skywalker: “an abused, broken woman […]. Similar in type to Ophelia and Jocasta, facing pregnancy, betrayal, and defeat, perhaps she even represents the post-1970s backlash against feminism.”45 Bowman agrees, writing that “her importance […] can be seen as being reduced to the births.”46 Padmé’s intelligence is also undermined as the tragic, inconsistent heroine of a bad romance.47 This includes her denial of Anakin’s murderous tendencies despite the evidence that he slaughtered the Tusken Raiders and the children in the Jedi Temple, followed by her willingness to stay with him, her increasing passivity and reliance on Anakin’s (lack of) judgment which leads her to be almost strangled while heavily pregnant and, finally, her death after childbirth as a weak woman who “lost the will to live.”48 Padmé as a Princess simulacrum is the epitome victim of the effects of capitalism as “patriarchy’s latest expression,” through the expropriation from the “results of their labor, from their children, and from their vital powers.”49 Like Leia’s bikini, Padmé’s attire in the prequels has been deemed anti-­ feminist because it limits her movement, while marking her royalty, a symbol of passivity and womanly restraint. This further indicates the repackaging of the Princess simulacrum in the Star Wars saga—even though in The Clone Wars Padmé is often “seen fighting for the needs of those living without basic necessities.”50 In this series, she takes charge as  Frankel, Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism, 44.  Merlock and Merlock Jackson, “Lightsabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages,” 85–86. 45  Frankel, Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism, 85. 46  Bowman, “Pregnant Padmé,” 165. 47  See Cavelos, “Stop Her, She’s Got a Gun!” and Frankel, Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism. 48  This line is delivered by the medical droid which is helping Padmé deliver her twins in The Revenge of the Sith. 49  Von Werlhof, “No Critique of Capitalism,” 16 and 24. 50  Frankel, Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism, 89. 43 44

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a signature of the positive aspects of the modern Princess simulacrum and her more practical clothing reinforces to young audiences the alleged equality of women in the labor force in multinational capital systems. This is the Padmé appearing in Forces of Destiny. In “The Starfighter Stunt,” she pairs up with Ahsoka to learn space combat.51 In a typical Star Wars space scene, Padmé proactively saves the day by blowing up a malfunctioning droid which is about to destroy her and Ahsoka. Padmé is empowering in this episode. Abandoning her restraining senatorial dresses for a spacesuit, she is represented as a confident, capable fighter and pilot, resembling Disney’s Merida, who embraces her warrior spirit rather than being a passive Princess. The episode also shows the importance of selling the message to young audiences that women need to support one another, with Ahsoka complimenting Padmé for her good instincts—a vital battle skill for the Jedi. Forces of Destiny tries to depict Padmé as more than Anakin’s objectified love interest, a trope which is put on hold in “Unexpected Company.”52 While on a mission with Anakin and Ahsoka, Padmé’s ship is attacked by the separatist blockade. Padmé takes charge of the ship’s weapons while Ahsoka pilots, but the episode fails to be fully empowering because Padmé needs to be saved in the end by Anakin. As in other episodes of the series, she is again the passive damsel in distress who reinforces gender stereotypes, not dissimilar from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty or Snow White.53 “Monster Misunderstanding,” set around the time of The Phantom Menace, sees Padmé as Queen of Naboo in the most “Princessy” episode of the series.54 It shows her royalty and her alleged Princess qualities such as keeping justice and being kind to innocent creatures, like Leia in “Ewok Escape.” At the same time, she is positively seen fighting poachers who want to capture a Sando Aqua monster’s baby. When the mother attacks the storage where the baby is located, Padmé asks her guards how they usually handle these monsters, but they do not know. Symbolically indicating that the patriarchal system doesn’t have all the answers, this scene  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 13.  Forces of Destiny, season 2, episode 2. 53  The same “passive Princess” narrative is repeated in “The Imposter Inside” (Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 6), which shadows a scene in The Attack of the Clones where Anakin saves Padmé in her bedchambers from an assassination attempt, except that this time it is Ahsoka who saves her; unlike the movie, where she plays bait, Padmé contributes to fighting the killer back, actively cooperating with Ahsoka. 54  Forces of Destiny, season 3, episode 10. 51 52

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has Padmé take charge and save the baby. She asks the guards to arrest the poachers, saying “Sometimes the best solution isn’t the obvious one,” a clear lesson for younger children to think outside of the box. While Forces of Destiny reworks Padmé’s modern Princess simulacrum through positive teachings for young viewers, she is only featured in four episodes out of the 32 that aired over two seasons, making her a secondary character compared to Leia and Rey. This suggests that Padmé is not included in the series for offering a genuine alternative to the oppressed version of this character in the prequels. She is put simply in the background to highlight Disney-era characters like Rey through the Forces of Destiny doll sales.

Rey Rey is the first “Princess non-Princess” and marks Disney’s attempt to discard the elitist image associated with the lead Star Wars female characters. However, like her predecessors, a democratized repackaging does not resolve the contradictions of Star Wars’s gendered representations and relies again on a disguised Princess simulacrum as a paradigm. As Frankel puts it: “Rey is […] not the royal child brought up in secret like Luke and Leia or the Force-created child of prophecy like Anakin. For the first time in the films, the Force could belong to anyone.”55 This analysis may be in part questioned after the dramatic revelation that Rey is in fact Palpatine’s daughter via one of his imperfect clones in The Rise of Skywalker and its novelization. Ultimately, she is the legitimate heiress to the Imperial throne, thus revealing that Star Wars women never truly escape royalty. However, unlike Leia, who pretends to be an everywoman, Rey is still one of the people: an orphan on the sandy planet Jakku, a “completely self-­ sufficient” scavenger, she is a nobody for most of her life—as Kylo Ren harshly remarks in The Last Jedi.56 Rey is an “anti-chosen one” on a path to become a hero defined by her own choices rather than by her dark Sith heritage, as symbolically indicated by her decision to take on the title Skywalker at the end of The Rise of Skywalker. However, her story seems only a gender-swapped version of Luke’s as she unwittingly incurs the ire of a galactic (fascist) superpower, to then discover her Force sensitivity. While Disney’s re-telling of old stories is a well-known strategy for rebooting franchises, the problem with Rey is that she is too much, too soon: a  Frankel, Star Wars Meets the Eras of Feminism, 183.  Frankel, 163.

55 56

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street-smart Wonder Woman who knows how to pilot, fix things, and use the Force without training, while Luke realistically seems a lost boy caught up in galactic history. As Koushik and Reed comment: “One cannot expect [Rey] to function well when she has been copied and pasted into a story that was made for a man and has centuries of historical baggage associated with it regarding traditional gender roles.”57 Rey’s ambivalence in the movies duplicates in Forces of Destiny: her Princess simulacrum indicates the dichotomous contemporary media representations of “strong” women, which, according to Carolyn Byerly and Karen Ross, reveal “a still male-dominant society’s own contradictory responses to women’s demands for equal treatment, equal pay, and equal status.”58 In “Sands of Jakku,” Rey feeds scrap metal to a sand monster to save BB-8, and the desert beast shares a grateful look.59 This episode copies Leia and Padmé’s narratives in Forces of Destiny, repeating the leitmotif that a Princess’s core features must be kindness and selflessness. But as a post-feminist character reclaiming her place into a male-centric commercialized franchise, Rey possesses active skills to keep up with the men. In “BB-8 Bandits,” Rey shows an “Anakin-like” dexterity when winning a speeder race with the scavenger Teedo.60 In “Tracker Trouble,” Rey embodies the new Princess’s value of good teamwork, similar to Padmé in “Unexpected Company,” while proving herself as capable as Han Solo and Chewbacca.61 Rey finds a bomb on the Millennium Falcon, and she suggests to Chewie that the only way to survive is to throw the device into space. While teamwork is not anti-empowerment per se, Rey’s reaction may be problematic because instead of taking credit for saving the ship she attributes the success to her supportive role to the Wookie saying “We make a good team!” The new proactive role women want to claim in capitalist economies is seemingly denied; they are still confined to traditional roles as aiding male characters. However, not all is negative in Rey’s portrayal of the new Princess simulacrum. She paradoxically challenges the stance about teamwork in “Happabore Bazar.”62 She seems to fully embody again pro-feminist sentiments of self-reliance when Unkar bluntly tells her that she will never be  Koushik and Reed, “Disney’s Commodification of Feminism,” 7.  Byerly and Ross, Women and Media, 26. 59  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 1. 60  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 2. 61  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 10. 62  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 16. 57 58

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able to retrieve a ship for him “because it is no job for [a girl],” and because she has no friends to help her. A big alien animal is sitting on the ship, and this makes its retrieval even more complicated. Rey replies that she will prove him wrong and she does so as a real modern (Disney) Princess by helping the animal breathe better. In return, the beast helps her carry the ship back to the bazar, much to Unkar’s surprise. While Rey tells him sarcastically that she has found a new (animal) friend, the motivation behind Rey’s action is selfish: she wants to retrieve the ship in order to get rations from Unkar. This may be one of the few moments in Forces of Destiny where the mold of the Princess simulacrum as a perfect, utterly selfless woman is challenged to make way for a more realistic depiction of a woman who tries to survive on a hostile planet using the mechanics of contemporary capitalism to her advantage—the exploitation of biological life for personal gain through “the transformation of all labor, all life […] into capital.”63 Unlike Leia and Padmé, who are throughout represented as stoic versions of the Princess’ caretaker role, Rey more realistically depicts a fundamentally good character who helps others while helping herself in practical ways. She uses capitalist mechanics when she sees fit to fight the oppressions of the patriarchal system endured on Jakku and, therefore, she spreads the messaging to young audiences that if they are unable to defeat the system, they must use it for their own gain.

The Forces of Destiny Princess Dolls After analyzing the main “Princess non-Princess” characters’ contradictory gender representation in the series, it is clear that the messaging to younger audiences is equally complicated. Like Frozen and Moana, the series reinforces traditional female gender roles by disguising them behind updated models that should seem adequate to a time when women are more often seen in positions of leadership. This complicates the relationship between Disney products—the Star Wars re-branded ones in particular—with children’s understanding of ethics and gender roles. Previous scholarship has demonstrated that children’s beliefs are deeply influenced by cartoons, animation, and toys, which they identify with and see as reproductions of real-life social dynamics.64 This aspect, combined with  Von Werlhof, “No Critique of Capitalism,” 16.  For more information about the influence on children concerning the portrayal of gender in Disney movies see: England, Descartes, and Collier-Meek, “Gender Role Portrayal 63 64

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the format of Forces of Destiny as a series of short web sketches mostly irrelevant to the main storylines, proves how the show is an ad hoc packaged product for inducing younger female consumers to buy the related merchandise. Forces of Destiny capitalizes on the new “girl empowerment” movement that wants to see female audiences finally acknowledged in the Star Wars franchise, while at the same time responding to the bad publicity obtained in 2015 when there was limited merchandise of Rey available upon The Force Awakens release, despite the fact that she was the protagonist. The outrage of fans led to the #WheresRey social media movement asking for changes to the Star Wars-Disney products. This progressive form of commodification of the “strong woman” model to push capitalist accumulation contradicts Suzanne Scott’s definition of merchandise as stronghold for traditional values, “their overwhelmingly conservative and hegemonic functionality.”65 The Forces of Destiny dolls, produced by Hasbro, exploit the new image of Princesses as action-oriented heroines who mainly wear practical, active clothing rather than the complex, more feminine gowns seen in other Disney and Star Wars movies. The dolls show different versions of the most well-known characters to tickle girls’ imagination. As the franchise leads, there are three versions of Leia, three of Rey, and one of Padmé. Ahsoka Tano, Jyn Erso, and Sabine Wren—more niche characters featured in TV series and a spin-off movie—have only one version. Leia, for example, wears both the white Empire Strikes Back suit in “Beasts of Echo Base”66 and her iconic A New Hope white dress with “cinnamon bun-like” hairstyle in “Bounty of Trouble,”67 which is sold alongside R2-D2. As mentioned above, she also has a third “Endor” version accompanied by an Ewok Wicket doll. Padmé does not wear her signature white combat suit, but only her Naboo pilot dress, because this would have created two products of the line that looked too much like Leia in Empire Strikes Back and, therefore, would have jeopardized future sales—why produce or buy two dolls that are practically the same in clothing and physical features? Rey, the most well-known to young children because of the recent movies, comes with all the practical outfits of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. and the Disney Princesses;” Hine, Ivanovic, and England, “From the Sleeping Princess to the World-Saving Daughter of the Chief;” Coyne et al. “Pretty as a Princess,” and Kassay, “Barbie princesses and Star Wars clones.” 65  Scott, “#Wheresrey?” 139. 66  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 5. 67  Forces of Destiny, season 1, episode 8.

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The toys match the same clothes seen in the movies to help girls immediately recognize the characters and identify with them. As “feminist” dolls, the toys also make a point of not objectifying Star Wars women and positively encourage girls to wear practical clothing, finally rejecting the “Slave Leia” bikini era. These elements create a desire to buy the dolls using a well-known visual strategy that helps girls “be like Leia or Rey.” As Scott points out, “Paratexts serve a gatekeeping function, greeting certain audiences and deterring others, and toys serve this function more forcefully than others.”68 However, as expressions of a fundamentally male-centric franchise that capitalizes on the values of a patriarchal society, the dolls ultimately fail to be all-girl merchandise because the line includes a furry Chewbacca and a Luke Skywalker, who were featured in minor roles in the series, as well as Kylo Ren, the villain of the new Rey-centric movies, who did not appear at all. This strategy could be interpreted in two ways: these paratexts could be produced to introduce young girls to the Star Wars universe at large, but also to attract and not completely alienate younger male audiences from purchasing them, thereby co-opting them into the Forces of Destiny marketing. This raises again questions about the gendered nature of Star Wars toys, which are always targeted to boys even when designed for girls. Both instances reinforce how in merchandise production what is “female” is commodified while either being acknowledged as a target audience or not acknowledged at all. As Forces of Destiny and its merchandise teach us, the simulacrum of the (Disney) Princess survives in different, more or less modern embodiments, and expands and collapses trying to change obsolete representations of gender. Despite the contradictions, the Star Wars universe is on the frontier of this change.

Bibliography Abrams, J.J., dir. The Force Awakens. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios, 2015. DVD. ———, dir. The Rise of Skywalker. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios, 2019. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Byerly, Carolyn, and Karen Ross. Women and Media: A Critical Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.  Scott, “#Wheresrey?” 142.

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Johnson, Derek. “May the Force Be with Katie.” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 6 (2014): 895–911. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.882856. Johnson, Rian, dir. The Last Jedi. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios, 2017. DVD. Kassay, Réka. “Barbie Princesses and Star Wars Clones: Gender Stereotypes in the Representation of Children’s Favourite Heroes—A Participant Study in Urban and Rural Contexts, Among Hungarians from Romania.” Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 5 (2019): 684–701. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468077 7.2018.1508048. Kershner, Irvin, dir. The Empire Strikes Back. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1980. DVD. Koushik, Kailash, and Abigail Reed. “Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beauty and the Beast, and Disney’s Commodification of Feminism: A Political Economic Analysis.” Social Sciences 7, no. 11 (2018): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.3390/ socsci7110237. Kurka, Rostislay. “Forces of Destiny Review: What Is Its Value?” Scifi Fantasy Network, July 13, 2017. http://www.scififantasynetwork.com/ forces-destiny-reviewvalue. Lucas, George, dir. A New Hope. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1977. DVD. ———. The Attack of the Clones. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2002. DVD. ———. The Phantom Menace. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1999. DVD. ———. The Revenge of the Sith. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2005. DVD. Martinelli, Marissa. “Disney’s Charming Series of Animated Shorts Wants to Win Over a New Generation of Star Wars Fans.” Slate, July 13, 2017. http://www. slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/07/13/star_wars_forces_of_destiny_ reviewed.html. Marquand, Richard, dir. The Return of the Jedi. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1983. DVD. Merlock, Ray, and Kathy Merlock Jackson. “Lightsabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages for Princess Leia and Queen Amidala.” In Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars: An Anthology, edited by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka, 77–88. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Translated by Laurence Scott. Edited by Louis A. Wagner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Rebels. Season 1–4. Created by Simon Kinberg, Carrie Beck, and Dave Filoni. Produced by Dave Filoni and Simon Kinberg. Lucasfilm, 2014–2018. Scott, Suzanne. “#Wheresrey?: Toys, Spoilers, and the Gender Politics of Franchise Paratexts,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 2 (2017): 138–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1286023.

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PART II

Worldbuilding and Storytelling

CHAPTER 7

Several Decades Ago in Your Living Room: Ewoks, Droids, and Star Wars Saturday Morning Cartoons Joseph J. Darowski

Star Wars was born on the silver screen but quickly expanded to multiple media outlets. Blockbuster films remain an option for fans seeking out a Star Wars adventure, especially given that Disney—the new corporate owners of the franchise—have promised regular film installments. But, modern interactions with Star Wars are more likely to happen outside of the confines of movie theaters. In the broader cultural landscape of America, casual encounters with the brand are almost inescapable. Whether through logos on clothing, merchandise in the toy aisles, adventures on the printed page, or new TV shows, and video games, Star Wars products now permeate our culture. This is not a new phenomenon for the franchise. Even before George Lucas knew what exactly Star Wars was going to be, he clearly imagined the franchise as more than a film. While negotiating a deal with 20th Century Fox and still in the early stages of scripting The Star Wars—with a version of the script that had many ideas that would make the final film,

J. J. Darowski (*) Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_7

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but also many that would be jettisoned—Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) was released and became an unexpected hit. Finding himself in a much stronger bargaining position, Lucas knew that Fox thought he would renegotiate for millions of dollars up front and more gross points. Instead, Lucas negotiated for merchandising and sequel rights but kept the existing deal memo.1 Merchandising for films was not as highly prized at the time as merchandising for television series. After all, audiences might only watch a film once but watch a TV series every week, and studios believed that children would prefer the entertainment they saw more frequently. As such, 20th Century Fox allowed Lucas to keep the merchandising rights rather than pay millions more up front. As Lucas hoped, the Star Wars brand quickly became much more than a single film. Before The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was released, Star Wars toys were delivered to mailboxes, books were available for purchase, and the oft-maligned The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) aired on television. Star Wars is one of the most successful transmedia franchises in popular culture history, successfully navigating multiple interpretations in myriad mediums. As Star Wars grew beyond a cohesive narrative tightly controlled by filmmakers, the nature of Star Wars adapted to new mediums. Luke Skywalker as played by Mark Hamill in a big-budget film is different from Luke Skywalker as a toy or Luke Skywalker as drawn in Marvel Comics. It is even different than Mark Hamill playing Luke Skywalker on The Muppet Show.2 The very idea of Star Wars changed as Star Wars broadened into various media outlets. When Disney purchased Lucasfilm for a reported $4 billion, it was primarily in pursuit of the Star Wars franchise.3 But overall success as an enduring franchise does not mean every effort to maintain its cultural relevance has been successful. In understanding the expansion of Star Wars from a single film into a multibillion-dollar property with licensing that covers more products than can be listed, it can be enlightening to examine some of the less success attempts to expand the Star Wars storyworld. Some of these pop culture artifacts have become legendary among fans, such as the Holiday Special (1978), while others have become almost forgotten relics of the past. Audience expectations matter, both for what it means for a piece of entertainment to be “Star Wars” but also for the  Jones, George Lucas, 176.  “The Stars of Star Wars,” The Muppet Show, season 4, ep. 17. 3  Krantz, Snider, Della Cava, Alexander, “Disney Buys Lucasfilm.” 1 2

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medium and style of delivery. In the early late 1970s and early 1980s, non-­ film Star Wars productions were attempting to conform to audience expectations for new genres like holiday specials or kids’ cartoons, while attempting to remain identifiable as “Star Wars.” The results are mixed in terms of artistic quality, cultural impact, and fan engagement. Considering why some Star Wars stories are embraced while others are rejected can lead to insights about broader expectations for the franchise. Among the first attempts to establish Star Wars in new contexts are an almost forgotten pair of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1980s. Ewoks (1985–1986) and Droids (1985–1986) were the first ongoing television adaptations of Star Wars, and neither is recalled as particularly successful or as a definitive piece of Star Wars lore. How did these early adaptations come to be and why were they not successful? After all, Star Wars and Saturday morning entertainment undoubtedly seemed like a perfect match in the mid-1980s. As with most pop culture productions, Ewoks and Droids were not conceived of as merely artistic expressions. Commercial and corporate interests drove the creation of these two shows. As an expansion of Star Wars’s transmedia presence, one goal of both series was the continued existence of the Star Wars brand. The timing was deliberate; Tim Veerkhoven notes that the series were produced as “the frenzy around Star Wars was starting to fade.”4 Lucas was invested in keeping the idea of Star Wars alive for audiences and was personally involved in the plans for both series. Clive Smith, a co-founder of Nelvana, traveled between Toronto and California every couple of weeks to go over design elements with Lucas to ensure they aligned with the Star Wars brand.5 As he recalls: It was a huge responsibility, really, for us to follow up and make sure, because Star Wars already had such an incredible reputation and such a huge following. We really had to kind of make sure that we were as good as everything that’d gone before.6

In expanding Star Wars to Saturday mornings, Lucas wanted the new series to still feel like the Star Wars that fans had seen in theaters.

 Veekhoven, “From Wicket to the Dulocks.”  Granshaw, “Star Wars Saturday Mornings.” 6  Granshaw, “Star Wars Saturday Mornings.” 4 5

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Ewoks and Droids attempted to tell stories in the model of animated entertainment for kids while simultaneously giving fans a sense of what they loved in the live-action films. Packaged together, The Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour would air on ABC. The two series were scheduled back-to-back for one, 13-episode season that aired original weekly from September 7 through November 3, 1985. The series aired from 9–10 a.m. on the ABC network, sandwiched between The Bugs Bunny Show and The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians. Aesthetically, it made sense to transition from Bugs Bunny to Ewoks, as they both feature anthropomorphized animals as protagonists. While the Star Wars brand served as a bridge from Ewoks to Droids, Droids provided a smooth transition to Galactic Guardians—the newest iteration of the Super Friends franchise based on the DC Comics’s Justice League team. In theory, the marketing strategy made sense, but the results led to major shake-ups in ABC’s Saturday morning lineup during the next season. Droids was canceled after just one season and a one-hour special that serves as a series finale aired on June 7, 1986. Galactic Guardians was also canceled, ending the Super Friends franchise that first began airing on ABC in 1973. Ewoks carried on for one additional 13-episode season that aired between September 13 and December 13, 1986. Its new timeslot was at 11:30 a.m., where it aired between The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show and the ABC Weekend Special. As the short life-spans of the Ewoks and Droids indicate, these early efforts to transition Star Wars into animation were not as successful as producers or consumers would have hoped. There is nothing about animation that is antithetical to the world of Star Wars. In recent years, The Clone Wars (2008–2014) and Rebels (2014–2018) have proven very successful as animated Star Wars properties. In the end, what might have doomed these first two animated series is that the stories told in each focused on distinct genres that had been unified into a cohesive whole in the Star Wars films. Whereas the Original Trilogy successfully blended elements of both science fiction and fantasy, Ewoks was a fantasy tale, while Droids leaned much more into science fiction tropes. These Saturday morning cartoons diverged on two different narrative paths and attempted to utilize one genre at a time, consequently losing part of the core identity of Star Wars.

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Creation Producing a popular culture property for new mediums and audiences inevitably involves transformation and negotiation. At times, this can be rewarding and result in successful adaptations that broaden the appeal of a property while also deepening audience enjoyment. Media scholar Henry Jenkins explains: In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best—so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa.7

The transmedia storyworld of Star Wars saw an expansion of medium, mode, and genre with the 1985 release of Ewoks and Droids. Though produced and released simultaneously, they represented distinct explorations of the genre boundaries of Star Wars. Ewoks and Droids attempted to take the already genre-mashed universe of Star Wars—sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, western, etc.—and bend the aesthetics of the films to Saturday morning cartoons. Ewoks featured child-friendly creatures in relatively safe adventures, similar to other Saturday morning fare such as Shirt Tales (1982–1983), The Smurfs (1981–1989), or Snorks (1984–1988). While there are recurring external threats such as Morag (similar to Gargamel in Smurfs), many episodes are driven more by social interactions than adventure. Conversely, Droids is a much more adventure-based series driven by a quest, similar to Saturday morning cartoons such as Thundarr the Barbarian (1980–1981) or the Dungeons and Dragons series (1983–1985). While familiarity with the film trilogy would enhance interest in the series, it is evident that efforts were made for both Ewoks and Droids to stand alone as self-contained series that could be enjoyed by children, whether or not they had seen the theatrical films. Outside of the titular Ewoks and Droids, there are very few direct acknowledgments of the films. These cartoons are entirely separate from the Skywalker saga that played out in the Original Trilogy (to which Lucas would return in the prequels). Wicket W. Warrick, the most recognizable Ewok in Return of the Jedi (1983), returns as the main character in the cartoon series, while 7

 Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling.”

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C-3P0 and R2-D2 were prominently featured in all the films and starred in Droids. ABC had aired made-for-tv films featuring the Ewoks, so there may have been some hope for overlap of familiarity with the cuddly creatures. Ideally, the series could either serve as an introduction to the world of Star Wars or as new tales with familiar characters—depending on the viewer’s previous experience. Production of these new adventures in the Star Wars galaxy was handed over to the company responsible for the animated sequence in Star Wars Holiday Special. In 1977, a Canadian animation studio named Nelvana produced a half-hour holiday special called Cosmic Christmas (1977). The fledgling studio was a new company trying to create a product that would establish it more securely in the animation industry. Impressed with Cosmic Christmas, George Lucas asked Nelvana to animate a sequence in the Star Wars Holiday Special.8 John Celestri, an animator who worked on the projects, recalls: A Cosmic Christmas dealt with characters from outer space seeking answers. The show was complete before Star Wars had been released. It showed that Nelvana and George Lucas were on the same page intuitively. It was a traditional theme in a non-traditional manner and I think that had something to do with convincing Lucas to go with our studio.9

Whether it was a thematic similarity, an appreciation of the animation style, or some other business connection that inspired the collaboration between Lucasfilm and Nelvana, the Holiday Special marked an important step for Nelvana. The animated sequence in the Holiday Special was of high enough quality that Lucas was pleased with their work, even if he has largely disowned the Holiday Special as a whole. While the Holiday Special has been derided for its incoherent plotting and sub-par production quality, the animated sequence is often cited as a high point. Jon Favreau, who serves as showrunner on The Mandalorian (2019–), remarked, “That animated piece still holds up. It’s pretty cool. I still draw inspiration from that.”10 The sequence famously revealed the iconic design of Boba Fett to wide audiences (the costume had been worn previously in a 1978 parade that would not have been seen by large  Fitzgerald, “Nelvana 30th Anniversary Profile.”  Seastrom, “Animator John Celestri’s Road.” 10  Anderton, “Jon Favreau.” 8 9

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audiences).11 Favreau even carried over some aspects from the animated sequence, such as Boba Fett’s tuning-fork style weapon, into The Mandalorian. Although the Holiday Special was not an enormous success, it impacted Star Wars lore and television networks were still interested in producing content based on the popular films. After Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, ABC aired two made-forTV movies set in the Star Wars universe: Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985).12 These were essentially “fairy tales in a science fiction setting,”13 in essence striving for that almost alchemical blending of science fiction and fantasy that somehow resulted in a cohesive storyworld of Star Wars. These live-action films garnered enough viewers for ABC to order two animated series for Saturday mornings. Lucasfilm would again work with Nelvana to animate these Star Wars adventures. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Saturday morning animation was dominated by Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears. The house-style of Nelvana was different from those studios, which potentially could have been an advantage. As Timothy and Kevin Burke note, Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears had become “complacent” and the new animated shows coming from Nelvana (and other studios like Marvel and Disney) “were significantly more exacting than the lazy, limited animation that had become standard fare.”14 However, despite having higher quality animation than many of its contemporary competitors, Ewoks and Droids struggled to find an engaged audience. In transitioning Star Wars to animated television, the main sources of familiarity that established the new series as “Star Wars” were the cuddly anthropomorphic teddy bears for Ewoks and the familiar faces (and voices) of C-3P0 and R2-D2 for Droids. The two series were conceived of and produced by the same studio, but had very different tones and styles. While some behind-the-scenes talent was shared across the two series, on the whole different creative voices guided the series. Ewoks was primarily written by Paul Dini and Bob Carrau, while Droids was largely penned by Peter Sauder (with Ben Burtt working on the final story arc and the hour-­ long special).  Ricca, “Boba Fett.”  See Stevens, “The Battle for Endor,” in this volume. 13  Charles, “The Jedi Network,” 128–129. 14  Burke and Burke, Saturday Morning Fever, 64. 11 12

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Ewoks highlights and expands on the fantastical and mystical side of Star Wars. While the Force is the most apparent fantasy element of the franchise, other aspects are also coded as fantasy. Mary Henderson identifies Endor as containing a “certain sorcery” and analogous to a “magical forest” in which the Ewoks function as a stand in for “elves, fairies, and other inhabitants of fairy-tale forests [who] may be either dangerous or helpful.”15 In Ewoks, the greatest threat is Morag the Tulgah Witch, a being on Endor who has magical powers. One of Morag’s goals is to unite the Sunstar and the Shadowstone, basically mystical MacGuffins that drive the plot of a handful of episodes. Aiding the Ewoks is their shaman, Master Logray, a recognizable character from Return of the Jedi. The series borrows sprite-like creatures called Wisties from the movie Caravan of Courage, adding to the fairy-tale atmosphere of Endor. Other magical foes include the Stranger, Jadru, Odra, and the Totem Master.16 Paul Dini recalls that, while developing Ewoks, George Lucas was “heavily into fantasy” because Lucasfilm was producing Labyrinth and Willow.17 Lucas took inspiration from those films and funneled it into Ewoks. On the other hand, Droids, as the name implies, is firmly entrenched in the science fiction aspects of Star Wars. In the films, R2-D2 and C3PO served as heralds of adventure for Luke Skywalker; in the cartoon, the two droids become protagonists of their own stories. However, like in the films, they still function as the property of other characters. In the 13 episodes of Droids, C-3P0 and R2-D2 pass between several masters on desert planets in stories set before A New Hope (1977). The series was divided into three arcs. The typical pattern was that at the beginning of an arc the droids would get a new master, have an adventure that spanned several episodes, and then leave that situation at the end of the arc. C-3P0 and R2-D2 are easily identifiable visual markers of Star Wars, iconic in the films and merchandise from A New Hope onward. Throughout their adventures, they meet up with speeder bike racers, stop the space pirate Kybo Ren, steal fuel, get involved with smugglers, and thwart General Koong and the Empire. Unlike the forest setting of Ewoks, characters in Droids regularly traveled to outer space and multiple planets. The tall, oblivious humanoid robot and his short, spunky friend were a natural pairing as comic sidekicks, but proved less capable of carrying an entire series.  Mary Henderson, The Magic of Myth, 102.  Veekhoven, “From Wicket to the Dulocks.” 17  Alter, “‘Ewoks’ and ‘Droids.’” 15 16

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Reception The Star Wars projects that came to television shortly after Return of the Jedi were, as Henry Jenkins notes, “almost always targeted at children.”18 In expanding the Star Wars franchise through the made-for-TV Ewok films and the Ewoks and Droids cartoons, the target audience was clearly younger than for the films. This is not a criticism; targeting children is a legitimate business plan and not every Star Wars product can or should cast as wide a demographic net as possible. But, particularly in the case of the Ewoks cartoon, targeting a young audience through the established conventions of Saturday morning cartoons resulted in a product that deviated significantly from the storyworld presented in the theatrical films. This narrative disconnect likely contributed to Ewoks being something of a last gasp for Star Wars productions in the mid-1980s. Designed to appeal to a slightly older audience, Droids was less-­ successful than Ewoks, only lasting one season rather than two. Stephen Harbor calls Droids a “relic from the younger days of a rapidly growing multimedia franchise that didn’t know what to do with itself.”19 When reflecting on why Ewoks lasted a season longer, Ethan Alter notes, “Ewoks fit the paradigm of what ABC was looking for as a Saturday morning cartoon. The characters were softer and more child-appealing.”20 Ewoks fits into the mold of animated cartoons from the 1980s that featured cute, child-friendly characters, such as The Smurfs—which solidly bested Ewoks in the ratings. There are, of course, other popular series from the time that starred adorable creatures while also selling toys, including Care Bears (1985–1988), another Nelvana production. Timothy and Kevin Burke describe these types of series as “Furry, fuzzy, cute or otherwise unpleasantly wholesome.”21 With the kid-friendly Ewoks, ABC hoped to combine the world of Star Wars with this prevalent style of Saturday morning entertainment. In the 1980s, there was an “extremely self-conscious division of cartoon audiences by gender, driven by the marketing logic of the toy industry”22 and these fuzzy, friendly cartoons were marketed to girls much more so than boys. For boys, networks produced action adventure  Jenkins and Hassler-Forest, Transmedia Storytelling, 24.  Harber, “Droids Animated Series.” 20  Alter, “‘Ewoks’ and ‘Droids.’” 21  Burke and Burke, Saturday Morning Fever, 163. 22  Burke and Burke, 164. 18 19

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c­ artoons, which is where the other half of the Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour drew its inspiration. Dini recalls that “George [Lucas] looked at Droids as being the series that would interest older boys, and Ewoks was going to appeal to younger kids.”23 Whether or not there was any validity to this assumption, it is reflected in the two shows. Ewoks is a friendly world with social interactions and external threats to be overcome through teamwork and trust. In contrast, Droids is an action-adventure series, with out-of-control space vehicles and narrow escapes. In this case, the differing styles made the hour-long block of Star Wars programming on ABC aired feel somewhat discordant, even though both shows were produced by the same animation house and shared the same storyworld (though the two series never overlapped narratively). There were outside factors that made adapting Star Wars for Saturday mornings particularly appealing to ABC in the mid-1980s. Television was a logical place for fans to find more of the franchise they had supported across a trilogy of films. Changes to broadcast regulations made licensed products much more common than at any previous point in television history. As Donna Mitroff and Rebecca Herr Stephenson explain, “In 1984, the FCC voted to allow unrestricted commercial airtime, a decision that left the number of commercials shown in any given program to the discretion of the broadcaster.”24 Because children’s programming did not sell as many ads as adult-targeted programming, networks looked for other ways to monetize time slots that aired children’s programming and found it through licensed products. With programs like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983–1985) or the Strawberry Shortcake specials (1980–1985), networks brought in cheap content that essentially acted as a “program-length commercial” for toy products.25 By 1985, the year Ewoks and Droids aired, there were at least 40 television shows that featured licensed characters airing on the major networks.26 With toy companies often sharing in the production costs of these programs, networks and manufacturers saw an economic model that benefited corporate interests, but produced entertainment of questionable educational value for kids. In ensuring the mass reach of transmedia franchises, penetration into new segments of society is the goal. Translating Star Wars from the silver  Alter, “‘Ewoks’ and ‘Droids.’”  Mitroff and Stephenson, “Tug-of-War,” 17. 25  Mitroff and Stephenson, 18. 26  Mitroff and Stephenson, 18. 23 24

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screen to the television screen helped achieve this, but could the new series continue extending the reach of Star Wars? Both cartoon series spawned new lines of Marvel comic books and toy lines from Kenner. Like the TV shows, neither the comic books nor the toy lines were very successful. The Ewoks comic book ran for 14 issues and the Droids comic book ran for eight. The toy company Kenner had licensed Star Wars, and from 1978–1985 sold over 300 million toys related to the franchise.27 As Tim Veekhoven notes, Kenner had as much interest in the popularity of Star Wars after the films concluded as Lucasfilm. The two companies “hoped that these cartoons would keep Star Wars in the public’s consciousness— at least with the more avid fans—so Kenner decided to create two additional lines of toys: Droids and Ewoks.”28 The Droids line included 20 characters and three ships. The Ewoks toy line featured six characters. Second waves for both series were planned, but never released. Veekhoven concludes, “Both the Droids and Ewoks lines had plenty of potential, but like the cartoons, the toys never attained the appeal of the regular Star Wars figures.”29 Despite this, the existence of Ewoks and Droids comics and toys serves as a reminder that branding for a massive intellectual property like Star Wars will often feature multi-pronged attempts to monetize the product and ensure its omnipresence in the cultural landscape.

Reputation Within Star Wars fandom, Ewoks and Droids have become mere footnotes of Star Wars storytelling history rather than key components of the mythology. Even before Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm and the official decision to designate many existing Star Wars tales—collectively known as the Expanded Universe—as non-canonical “Legends” in April 2014,30 Ewoks and Droids were not considered core texts. Writing for starwars.com about Ewoks’s odd place in Star Wars lore, Tim Veekhoven, acknowledges, “The cartoon may have become part of Legends, but most stories always had to be taken with a large grain of salt.”31 Some character names, like Kybo Ren, share similarities with later characters in Star Wars, but otherwise  Veekhoven, “Vintage Vault.”  Veekhoven, “Vintage Vault.” 29  Veekhoven, “Vintage Vault.” 30  See Nardi, “Canonical Legends,” in this volume. 31  Veekhoven, “From Wicket to the Dulocks.” 27 28

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very little from either series has been carried forward into the Star Wars canon. Paul Dini, an animator who worked on Ewoks and would later develop series such Tiny Toon Adventures (1990–1992) and Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995), said the series is “remembered as a fond experiment of that time. There were some elements of their world that made it into other books and things, but other than that, I don’t think it endured.”32 Star Wars has successfully engendered a dedicated fandom that pursues many products associated with the franchise, but there has been so much material produced that inevitably some texts become unessential. The relegation of Ewoks and Droids to a lower priority in fandom likely stems from several factors. The original films were live-action crowd-pleasers targeting all ages from children to adults, whereas these animated series primarily targeted children. The Original Trilogy, with its PG-rating, was intended to be for all-ages, encompassing children and adults. However, cartoons, particularly Saturday morning cartoons, connote expectations of simple entertainment meant exclusively for kids. Additionally, issues of access also limited exposure to these series. In the VHS era, only a handful of episodes received video distribution. Four episodes of both series were edited together and released as direct-to-video movies; neither series was released in its entirety. For a few years, both series aired as part of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Cartoon Quest block of animated programming in the early 1990s. However, the shows have curiously been curiously unavailable through legal means for decades (although episodes can be found on YouTube and synopses are readily available on websites such as Wookieepedia). Even with multiple streaming services— including Disney+, which is home to many Star Wars products—neither is available for licensed streaming. This lack of availability is all the more puzzling given Disney’s willingness to sell noncanonical Star Wars novels, comics, and video games under the “Legends” banner. Additional factors also distanced these productions from the established Star Wars storyworld. Wicket and C-3P0 and R2-D2 did appear the theatrical films, but otherwise the heroes of the Original Trilogy were deliberately kept out of the cartoon narratives. As the Empire is mostly absent from both shows, the best-known protagonists and antagonists of Star Wars are missing. Although the Empire does appear in the penultimate episode of Ewoks, Emperor Palpatine is only mentioned and Darth Vader  Alter, “‘Ewoks’ and ‘Droids.’”

32

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never appears on screen. Rather, the evil Empire is embodied by Dr. Raygar, an Imperial archaeologist obsessed with finding ancient artifacts or weapons for the Emperor.33 Other iconic aspects of the Star Wars mythos—Jedi, lightsabers, and the Force—are also absent. In addition, although Ewoks featured Wicket, the most identifiable Ewok from Return of the Jedi and the made-for-TV movies, the show’s depiction of Ewoks differs from what had come before. All of the Ewoks speak English, while some of creatures on Endor feel antithetical to the world as seen in Return of the Jedi. Although undeniably a continuation of the Star Wars brand, the two series also represent a divergence of previously blended genres. In transmedia storytelling, engaging with new and different mediums offers the opportunity to focus on aspects of the core text that were once peripheral. Side characters can become protagonists in novels, locations can be explored more fully in video games, and implied flavors and smells from food can be recreated in theme parks. In the case of Ewoks and Droids, each series highlighted one of the blended genres found in the films. As a space opera, Star Wars is neither sci-fi nor fantasy. Jedi Knights use mystical powers, but have swords born of an imagined advanced technology. Droids are commonplace, but Luke Skywalker closes his eyes and trusts “an energy field created by all living things [that] surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together” in order to destroy a massive technological threat to the natural world.34 Moving from films to television, the Ewoks series and the Droids series would air back-to-back, but highlight different aspects of the Star Wars storyworld. When A New Hope was released, it was, as Eric Charles puts it, an “amalgamation of all things cool and adventurous” and blended “science fiction with old time serials and fairy tales.”35 In Ewoks and Droids, some of the blending is undone, separating the science fiction and fantasy into two different series. The addition of the narrative styles of 1980s Saturday morning cartoons resulted in products that feel like Star Wars in some ways but also fail to fully inhabit the tone and story elements that the most successful expansions of the Star Wars storyworld embrace. Dini argues that the demands of Saturday morning cartoons won out over the tradition of Star Wars. After working on the 2008 The Clone Wars series, he felt  “Battle for the Sunstar,” Ewoks, season 2, episode 12.  Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope, 1977. 35  Charles, “The Jedi Network,” 128–129. 33 34

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he’d finally worked on Star Wars; in an interview, he declared, “Yes, I worked […] for nearly four years on Ewoks & Droids, but it wasn’t the same. Those shows fell under the control of the very restrictive network broadcast standards at the time, and they could never be anything than basic Saturday Morning cartoons.”36 There is no shortage of examples of successful Star Wars storytelling and product placement, and Droids and Ewoks could have become part of that tradition. James Newman and Iain Simmons contend that “Star Wars, in its broadest sense is, and always has been, richly transmedial. Collectible cards, licensed novels, themed LEGO sets, and the Expanded Universe of characters and stories reach out, extend, and sometimes run parallel to the purely cinematic experience of Star Wars.”37 In understanding why some products fail to resonate with fans, we can better understand what fans are looking for in this sprawling franchise. For example, the Holiday Special had many of the same core elements of the original film: it starred the same cast, was live action, and had familiar antagonists. But, in adding in the trappings of a variety show and a holiday special, it deviated too far from audience expectations for Star Wars.38 Ewoks and Droids were more loosely tethered to the familiar Star Wars narratives, but diverged in theme and style. While not mocked to the same degree as Holiday Special, Ewoks and Droids ended up as forgotten chapters in Star Wars storytelling. Subsequent efforts have proven that animation clearly is not a limiting factor in adopting Star Wars tales into the canon. Later animated stories would deviate significantly in many ways from what audiences saw in Ewoks and Droids. The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Resistance (2018–2020) would have different animation styles, long-form storytelling, and target older audiences. The tongue-in-cheek animated series based on Lego toy products are much more self-aware and post-modern than most other Star Wars productions. These styles are different, yet work in ways that have been more readily embraced by Star Wars fans than the Ewoks and Droids cartoons ever were. Every production has creative individuals behind it hoping for success. Finding that success is never guaranteed. From Ewoks and Droids, we can gather lessons in what did not work. While both series have some charm and even some defenders to the present day, neither had an immediate or  Granshaw, “Star Wars Saturday Mornings.”  Newman and Simons. “Lego Star Wars,” 239. 38  See Ferguson, “The Holiday Special and the Hole in the Archive,” in this volume. 36 37

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a long-term impact on the Star Wars brand. Both series diverged too far from the films in tone. Ewoks expands on the mystical side of Star Wars, while largely abandoning any technological presence. Droids, conversely, jettisoned the fantasy side of Star Wars and became a sci-fi show with robot protagonists. Moreover, in attempting to meet the expectations of broadcasters and audiences at the time, they left behind much of what had made Star Wars special to its fans. The balance between the demands of the new television medium, the Saturday morning cartoon tropes of the 1980s, and the existing Star Wars storyworld never came together into a product that resonated with audiences.

Bibliography Alter, Ethan. “‘Star Wars’: How ‘Ewoks’ and ‘Droids’ Arrived on Saturday Mornings.” Yahoo! Entertainment, December 18, 2015. https://www.yahoo. com/entertainment/paul-dini-ewoks-droids-star-wars-175933375.html. Anderton, Ethan. “Jon Favreau Wants to Make a New ‘Star Wars Holiday Special.’” Slashfilm, September 18, 2019. https://www.slashfilm.com/new-starwars-holiday-special/. Burke, Timothy, and Kevin Burke. Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up with Cartoon Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999. Charles, Eric. “The Jedi Network: Star Wars Portrayal and Inspirations on the Small Screen.” In Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology, edited by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka, 127–139. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012. Dini, Paul. Ewoks. Season 2, episode 12, “Battle for the Sunstar.” Ewoks. Directed by Ken Stephenson and Dale Schott. Aired December 6, 1986. ABC. Fitzgerald, James. “Nelvana 30th Anniversary Profile.” Kidscreen, May 1, 2001. http://kidscreen.com/2001/05/01/30888-20010501/?print=yes. Granshaw, Lisa. “Star Wars Saturday Mornings: Droids and Ewoks 30 Years Later.” SyFy Wire, December 2, 2015. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/star-warssaturday-mornings-droids-and-ewoks-30-years-later. Harber, Steven. “Star Wars: The Droids Series that Time Forgot.” Den of Geek, December 9, 2019. https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-wars-droidsanimated-series/. Henderson, Mary. Star Wars: The Magic of Myth. New York: Bantam Books, 1997. Jenkins, Henry, “Transmedia Storytelling: Moving Characters from Books to Film to Video Games can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling.” MIT Technology Review, January 15, 2003. https://www.technologyreview. com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/.

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Jenkins, Henry, and Dan Hassler-Forest. “Foreward: ‘I Have a Bad Feeling About This.” In Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, edited by Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest, 15–34. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Jones, Brian Jay. George Lucas: A Life. New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 2016. Krantz, Matt, Mike Snider, Marco Della Cava, and Bryan Alexander. “Disney Buys Lucasfilm for $4 Billion,” USAToday, October 30, 2012. Lucas, George, dir. A New Hope. Century City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 1977. Newman, James, and Iaian Simons. “Using the Force: Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, Intertextuality, and Play.” In New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age, edited by Ruth E.  Page and Bronwen Thomas, 239–253. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Ricca, Brad. “The Real First Appearance of Boba Fett.” StarWars.com, July 8, 2014. https://www.starwars.com/news/the-real-first-appearance-ofboba-fett. Seastrom, Lucas O. “Animator John Celestri’s Road to The Star Wars Holiday Special and the First Appearance of Boba Fett.” StarWars.com, July 29, 2019. https://www.starwars.com/news/the-star-wars-holiday-special-boba-fett. Veekhoven, Tim. “From Wicket to the Dulocks: Revisiting the Star Wars: Ewoks Animated Series.” StarWars.com, September 3, 2015a. https://www.starwars. c o m / n e w s / f r o m - w i c k e t - t o - t h e - d u l o k s - r e v i s i t i n g - t h e - s t a r- w a r s ewoks-animated-series. ———. “The Vintage Vault: Exploring Kenner’s Droids and Ewoks Toys.” StarWars.com, September 18, 2015b. https://www.starwars.com/news/ the-vintage-vault-exploring-kenners-droids-and-ewoks-toys.

CHAPTER 8

From Monk to Superhero: Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars and the Transformation of the Jedi Tiffany L. Knoell

Kit Fisto becomes the King of the Sea on Mon Calamari. Mace Windu takes to the air and makes the very earth submit to his will on Dantooine. Shaak Ti defies gravity and superior numbers in her bid to protect a threatened Supreme Chancellor. Asajj Ventress levels an entire arena full of opponents to be Count Dooku’s apprentice. With characters and scenarios such as these, series developer, writer, and lead animator Genndy Tartakovsky brought Jedi to the TV screen in Clone Wars (2003–2005) and endowed them with powers and abilities beyond those of their live-­ action counterparts. The Clone Wars micro-series gave us Jedi who were, just like Superman, faster than a speeding blaster bolt, more powerful than a seismic tank, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Debuting on Cartoon Network at the beginning of the superhero cycle that exploded in the 2000s, this transformation in the Jedi’s powers also meant that they could stand toe to toe with the network’s superheroes, including the

T. L. Knoell (*) Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_8

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Justice League (2001–2004), Justice League Unlimited (2004–2006), and Teen Titans (2003–2006). Tartakovsky’s blending of superhero and space fantasy in Clone Wars is made all the more intriguing by the show’s initial format: 3- to 5-minute episodes that feed our soundbite nation with the idea of “higher, faster, stronger,” while being marketed on everything from sleeping bags to replica lightsabers. This evolution from monks to superheroes in the years between the final two prequel trilogy films placed the Jedi on a more level playing field with their cartoon counterparts, enhancing their potential as commodity, even as this shift redefined what it meant to be a Jedi. Animation allowed the Jedi to eclipse the bonds of live-action special effects. While Star Wars had proven by the Prequel Trilogy-era (1999–2005) to be a remarkably successful transmedia property, nurtured in the public eye for more than 25 years, new marketing plans were necessary to keep the property relevant and accessible to a wide array of consumers. Going back to animation, comic-book and cartoon superheroes provided, then as now, the majority of Star Wars’s competition for the eyes of audiences and dollars of shoppers, so it is little surprise that Lucasfilm enlisted a series developer with superhero credentials to make over the Jedi, to transform them from peacekeepers into generals and super-soldiers. The first two seasons of Clone Wars consist of 20 three-minute “episodes,” which acted as not only an exercise in animation but also as an extended advertising campaign for Star Wars toys and the then-upcoming Revenge of the Sith (2005). The third and final season stepped away from the three-minute format, expanding to 12- to 15-minute episodes that allowed for a shift from an experimental form to a more traditional, serialized format.

From Monks to Mutants In their respective works, both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell pointed to “society’s need for heroes,” concluding that the archetypes fulfill our need for vicarious heroism or connection to heroes of myth and legend while also appealing to the “inner hero.”1 As people change, so too must their heroes in response to the hopes and needs of each generation. Jedi come close to fitting in with the “superhero formula” as outlined by Robert 1  Misiroglu and Roach, The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes, xiii.

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C.  Harvey in that they: (1) “have an altruistic mission,” (2) “possess superpowers or advanced mental or physical skills,” (3) “wear an iconic costume” or something that marks them out as being different, and (4) “have a dual identity.”2 This formula stands up fairly well when applied to Jedi, as the only point on which they truly fail is the matter of dual identity. Their altruism is (mostly) undoubtable, as their lives are dedicated to service to the galaxy. Their advanced mental and physical skills set them apart from most non-Jedi, as do their tunics, robes, and choice of weapon. According to this measure, Jedi have become superheroes for a new age, more aligned with their comic book and cartoon superfriends. It simply took a cartoon setting to take them from mere movie heroes constrained by the limits of stunt work and special effects at the time to the more super variety, whose powers were limited only by the imaginations of the artists. In their earliest screen incarnations, the Jedi and Sith were either old men, cyborgs, inexperienced naïfs, or small green beings. They were not only constrained by the special effects of the time but also by the story as presented by George Lucas: in the Original Trilogy, the Jedi had been hunted to near-extinction by Darth Vader under the order of his master, Emperor Palpatine. Beginning in the late 1990s, the Jedi transformed from earthbound monks to genetically gifted superbeings that dominated all manner of environments and situations. Between the intensive combat and acrobatics of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda in The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack of the Clones (2002), audiences were introduced to an entirely new conception of what it meant to be a Jedi. This transition can largely be attributed to George Lucas, as it was his introduction of the concept of midi-chlorians in The Phantom Menace that differentiated the Old Republic Jedi from the Rebel Alliance Jedi and recast Luke Skywalker from a farm boy who discovered and grew toward his potential to a hero fated to succeed by his very genetic code. In Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars, the Jedi and Sith more fully embraced this legacy of genetic exceptionalism, becoming not only brilliant military tacticians, but also full-on superheroes. This development illustrates part two of Harvey’s “superhero formula”: a superhero must “possess superpowers or advanced mental or physical skills.”3 As such, it is fortunate that the micro-series came complete with a pedigree: equal parts Star Wars, Samurai Jack (2001–2004), and Justice League. 2 3

 Harvey qtd. in Misiroglu and Roach, xiv.  Harvey qtd. in Misiroglu and Roach, xiv.

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Attempts at earlier animated series failed to continue the franchise on television during the 1980s as the series Droids (1985–1986) and Ewoks (1985–1986) each ran no longer than a year.4 Fortunately, the evolution of Star Wars and Jedi in particular in the late 1990s meant that animation could be a better fit for the Star Wars universe. Of his new animation ambitions George Lucas remarked, “The thing that attracted me to it is that it has a slight anime feel to it and I’m very interested in anime and I was really interested in moving into a kind of animation that was very different from anything we’d done in the past.”5 George Lucas and Lucasfilm actively pursued a director who knew how to deliver an almost-anime style that benefited from prior development of the closest cartoon relatives of the hyperadrenalized Jedi. According to in interview in the documentary “Clone Wars: Bridging the Saga,” Lucas credits Tartakovsky with being able to bring this style to the screen.6 Producer/director of the Clone Wars micro-series, Genndy Tartakovsky, recalled that Lucas was “interested in doing some animated projects but they even told us, they said that George wanted our interpretation of it to a degree.”7 Tartakovsky, creator of Samurai Jack, employed a spare, yet rich style that was punctuated by stories that were “light on dialogue but heavy on action.”8 As such, he and his animation team took the lessons learned with Samurai Jack and delivered a product that lived up to Lucas’s expectations. In a 2003 interview, Tartakovsky explained, “An important key for him was that we put our own signature, in a way, on it and we were like ‘Wow! We get to write and come up with our own stories.’ So I think that was really understood and the more we pushed things, the more he liked it.”9 Given the emotional and inspirational connections of both Lucas and Tartakovsky with the works of director Akira Kurosawa—best known for the film The Seven Samurai (1954)—this comes as little surprise. Lucas became well-known during the production and filming of the Star Wars  See Darowski, “Several Decades Ago in Your Living Room,” in this volume.  Bushman, Clone Wars: Bridging the Saga. 6  Bushman, Clone Wars: Bridging the Saga. 7  Bushman. 8  Neuwirth, Makin’ Toons: Inside the Most Popular Animated TV Shows and Movies, 81. Tartakovsky also produced Dexter’s Laboratory and was heavily involved with Powerpuff Girls, placing him at the vanguard of the Cartoon Network in-house development and production team in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 9  Bushman, Clone Wars: Bridging the Saga. 4 5

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films for wanting the actors to perform “faster” and “more intense.”10 In the micro-series, George Lucas’s wish was granted, as the characters, freed from the physics of live-action performance, delivered every element from combat to space dogfights faster and with much more intensity. The advantages of the animated format are numerous, but computer-assisted animation also served this series well, helping to preserve Tartakovsky’s unique style. Tartakovsky’s stamp was firmly pressed upon every frame, creating a product that was recognizably Star Wars, but with an obvious nod toward Samurai Jack design elements. Tartakovsky’s main objectives for Samurai Jack could easily describe his goals for the Clone Wars micro-series; he is quoted as saying that Samurai Jack was to be “a show with very little dialogue, [being more] about the action, simple stories, and the character.”11 This sensibility extended to the design aesthetic used in Jack’s world—and later that of the Jedi—would be “…flat and highly stylized.”12 This reliance on simple yet elegant design allowed the Samurai Jack universe to flourish and provided what was likely one of the most important influences in the Clone Wars micro-series. Tartakovsky didn’t just bring his style and sensibilities to bear on Clone Wars; he also brought some of his Samurai Jack staff. Scott Wills and Paul Rudish, the two men responsible for the look and feel of many of the Samurai Jack backgrounds, signed on to the Clone Wars project, bringing their expertise and a certain amount of fanboy glee with them. Clone Wars art director Paul Rudish related how his boyhood play with action figures is informing his professional life: It’s been really cool to actually explore the Clone Wars. Me and my friend, Mike Tweed, would be playing with our action figures and down in the basement and just dreaming about what were the Clone Wars all about. Then having an opportunity to make some of that gel is really awesome … Just on nerd level it will be cool to go ‘Yeah, my cartoon connects to that movie, now you have to see the movie to find out how my cartoon ended.’ It’s pretty amazing.13

This evolution from hero to superhero took place during a period of Cartoon Network history when superheroes were all the rage; among the  “George Lucas at 70: The Star Wars Creator on Filmmaking—Telegraph.”  Neuwirth, Makin’ Toons: Inside the Most Popular Animated TV Shows and Movies, 79. 12  Neuwirth, 79. 13  Bushman, Clone Wars: Bridging the Saga. 10 11

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properties in production or development were Justice League and Teen Titans, while the Toonami action programming block (1997–present) kept series such as Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995) and Batman Beyond (1999–2001) in regular rotation.14 This already densely populated segment of the animated world constantly sought new territories, making Clone Wars a natural fit. Cartoon Network’s approach seemed to embrace an ethic of “the more, the merrier,” which was likewise embraced by Lucasfilm when it came to the revenue that might be at stake if such a corner of the market were explored. Lucasfilm was aware of the potential of a weekly animated series as a marketing device. According to Darrick Bachman, Clone Wars production coordinator/writer: Initially, with the first series, they were originally supposed to be commercials. Lucasfilm, themselves, they decided that they wanted them to be a little longer, so they became longer episodes. But we weren’t able to tell a lot of story—it was mostly just action. With the advent of the second series, we actually were able to tell an actual fairly long story, more like a movie, like an animated movie.15

While the transition to a longer running time allowed the show to tell more complex story, the animated advertisement style remained largely intact, leading to even more opportunities for consumers to see themselves reflected on the screen and to embrace the action figures, lightsabers, and other tie-in materials ready for purchase.

“The Clone Wars Have Begun” In the first season of Clone Wars, the evolution from Jedi to superhero Jedi took primacy over almost any other sort of development. If the series was searching for any inspiration, there were numerous examples available, both in animated form and within the annals of superhero history. This awareness of history and several not-so subtle homages helped ground these cartoons within the superhero canon. However, there are several points at which this series diverges from the other superhero series on Cartoon Network in 2003. For a start, individual origin stories were  “Cartoon Network Announces New Programming Initiatives For 2003.”  Connecting the Dots.

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jettisoned as the series assumed viewer familiarity with the basic tenants of the Star Wars universe. The stories were simple and the plots straightforward in order to reach the broadest possible audience. These two elements allowed creators to avoid a complex, heavily serialized format, making it possible to keep the series accessible, brief, and memorable; all of which are hallmarks of good advertising. Clone Wars merged two well-established marketing practices: retconning familiar comic book superhero tropes and the widespread, popular appeal of the Star Wars megatext. The characters featured in the micro-­ series are almost all members of the Jedi Council, a group with which most viewers would be familiar. Those who are not council members are still main characters in the Star Wars prequels, including Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala. The featured players, in addition to their three- to five-­ minutes in the spotlight, were often transformed into action figures as well, enabling viewers (and consumers of all ages) to first see the cartoon and then recreate the scenes with their own tiny actors. While care was taken to create a sense of gender balance on screen, the same cannot be said of the promotional items. Of the female characters, only Asajj Ventress was brought to consumers as an action figure. The other women in the series—Padmé Amidala, Shaaki Ti, Barriss Offee, Luminara Unduli, and Aayla Secura—were largely ignored in the marketing and toy lines of the Clone Wars series, except for high-end maquettes, which would not have appealed to the average viewer.16 While the series depicts each Jedi as uniquely gifted, several receive starring roles in the micro-series: Mace Windu, Master Yoda, Kit Fisto, Saesee Tiin, Ki Adi Mundi, Shaaki Ti, Barriss Offee, and Luminara Unduli. Other Jedi are shown, of course, but, again, those featured most often share an affiliation through the Council. Formidable villains—General Grievous, the bounty hunter Durge, Count Dooku, Asajj Ventress, and thousands of battle droids—populate the opposite side of the Star Wars narrative coin. The Clone Wars Jedi not only gained the types of powers associated with Golden Age comic superheroes but also started to resemble the 16  Furthermore, of the lightsabers featured in the Clone Wars toy line, only those of male Jedi/Sith were made available. There was no concession made for girls whatsoever, leaving them to find their own means through which they could connect with their heroes (or heroines) and recreate their adventures either with or without the benefit of gender-designated Star Wars toys. While this matter of gender inequity in the action figure market deserves a much closer examination, but for the purposes of this paper it suffices to say that it is a question whose answer likely lies elsewhere.

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specific powers, visual language, and iconography of specific superhero characters. Although it is not clear if such parallels were deliberate, they suggest Tartakovsky’s take on Star Wars might have been influenced by other works in the medium, such as Justice League and his previous series, Samurai Jack.17 If the Jedi stars were to be arranged in a Justice League configuration, Mace Windu would arguably fit the bill as Superman. He is described in the StarWars.com character database as being a brave and brilliant leader, but what receives special attention is his incredible prowess as both a lightsaber duelist and a highly skilled practitioner in hand-tohand combat.18 His star turn involves no dialogue, adhering to Tartakovsky’s mandate that the action speak for itself. Set on the planet Dantooine, the vignette has only one real star, despite Windu’s battalion of clone troopers and the veritable legion of battle droids who stand in opposition to his forces. These supporting characters bolster Windu’s image as leader, but the moment his lightsaber is drawn, even the least experienced viewer would recognize him as Jedi. His cloak is largely configured as a cape, aping Superman’s iconic image as it becomes increasingly tattered and yet remains a part of his costume. Seismic tanks appear to even or, in this case, level the playing field. His troops devastated, his lightsaber lost, Mace demonstrates his superhero abilities, Force-shoving an entire line of battle droids out of the way before engaging in Forceenhanced hand-to-hand combat as he decimates droids left and right. Again, in imitation of an earlier incarnation of Superman, Mace does not fly, but leaps over his opponents in a single, powerful bound. Running at superspeed, Mace twists and dodges enemy fire before the seismic cannon strikes again, kicking up debris and unearthing his lightsaber. Once the lightsaber is back in his hands, Mace mounts an assault on the seismic tank, wreaking havoc and single-handedly bringing it crashing to the ground.19 The end of this short pays homage to a 1979 Coke commercial in which football player “Mean” Joe Green was offered a Coke by a small boy.20 In this instance, a small boy, who had watched the entire battle from a distance, offers Mace his canteen following Windu’s landing near him on  Sedano, “Cartoon Network Animator Traces His Path to the Top.”  “Mace Windu.” 19  Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” March 29, 2004; Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” March 30, 2004. 20  Coca-Cola, “Have a Coke and a Mean Joe Greene” (Commercial, 1980). 17 18

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a hill. Mace takes a drink and, thirst quenched, literally launches himself back into the fray, again taking flight. This “commercial within a commercial” might not connect with younger viewers, but, for those consumers old enough to recall the original ad campaign, it would serve as a reminder and a further reinforcement of the original function of this series: to connect with consumers, not just viewers.21 Kit Fisto, the Jedi’s Aquaman analogue, takes a turn in the spotlight for a segment that highlights his mastery of water through the Force. Even the Jedi Council recognized his unique skills in this situation, deferring to his judgment in the matter of warring factions on the ocean planet Mon Calamari. Alone, the Mon Cal are no match for their opponents, the Quarren, so the Jedi and the Army of the Republic must intervene. The amphibious Kit Fisto takes the battle to the water, lightsaber blazing and backed up by a battalion of scuba-equipped clone troopers. Mon Cal warriors join the fray as well, but the hero’s forces are soon outgunned by a large Quarren blaster cannon. However, the troops rally around Fisto, who marshals the Force to control large, lethal globes of water and energy. Once the enemy weapon is disabled, the troops are again revitalized and push the weapon into a crevasse, effectively neutralizing the threat.22 This short is likewise devoid of dialogue apart from Yoda’s initial voiceover, which sets the scene. Again, the focus on the action serves to make the most of the three minutes allotted for the short, keeping the story concise and easy to grasp. This cartoon also allows those long-time fans to see that the lightsaber, long thought to be an exclusively land-­ based weapon, was much more versatile than previously imagined.23 The Clone Wars series and the evolution of the Jedi within allow for new ideas to be advanced and preconceptions to be re-examined, thus engaging the viewer in a closer reading of the animated text and also opening new venues through which they can connect to the mega-text as a whole.

21  Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” March 29, 2004; Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” March 30, 2004. 22  Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” November 13, 2003. 23  For some fans, the functionality of the lightsaber underwater was a foregone conclusion. In a scene from Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster (1978), Luke Skywalker successfully uses his lightsaber underwater. However, as the book was published immediately following the release of Star Wars and then released again on a roughly ten-year cycle to little fanfare, it is not surprising that it has not received as much attention as other novels in the Star Wars universe.

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Shaak Ti might best be suited as a Wonder Woman for this series, as she employs battle strategy and skill that would be the envy of any Amazon. During an invasion of the capital planet Coruscant by Separatist troops and the dreaded General Grievous, Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is threatened. Three Jedi, including Shaak Ti, come to his aid in a bid to protect him. While the other two Jedi accompany Palpatine to a hidden bunker, Shaak Ti stands her ground, aiding their escape by defending against a large group of General Grievous’s Magna Guards. Her willingness to sacrifice herself so that the others might escape fulfills Harvey’s first requirement of the “superhero formula”: the candidate must have an “altruistic mission.”24 The guards mysteriously withdraw, prompting Shaak Ti to realize that the attack against which she was defending was a feint. Literally racing against time to confront Grievous, she finds that her mission, while altruistic, has failed; the chancellor has been taken and her fellow Jedi have been killed. While her bravery was indubitable, her defeat does not make her any less of a superhero; it simply makes her a superhero whose time, perhaps, has not yet arrived.25 As the Force is about balance, the chief supervillain of Season 1 of Clone Wars should also be examined. Having won the favor of Count Dooku, Asajj Ventress spends the entirety of the season tracking Anakin Skywalker at his behest. She is firmly of the belief that killing him will secure her place with Dooku and earn her a chance to become a Sith. She has the same physical and mental acuity of the Jedi seen in the series, but she breaks with Harvey’s formula for superheroes: she is plainly a villain. She is visually marked out for the viewer as dressing in black, white, and red and by wielding dual red-bladed lightsabers. In a showdown on Yavin 4, Asajj Ventress uses the Force to eliminate an entire cadre of clone troopers dispatched to guard Anakin Skywalker. Once Skywalker’s protectors have been destroyed, a battle commences and Asajj and Anakin fly through the trees, lightsabers blazing. This is no place for mere mortals, as the Jedi and Dark Jedi battle like titans, devastating the landscape to destroy each other. The two mirror each other: Asajj was originally trained as a Jedi, but gave in to the dark side when her teacher was killed, while Anakin’s descent into the dark side would begin shortly. Ventress’s claim that Skywalker’s 24  Harvey qtd. in Misiroglu and Roach, The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes, xiv. 25  Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” March 24, 2005; Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” March 25, 2005.

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death would lead to her “ascension” to Sith status might also be answered in kind as her defeat would signify yet another step in his eventual break with the Jedi Order.26 In this instance, Asajj could provide a cautionary tale, demonstrating the misuse of superpowers and where such paths might lead. It is unfortunate that Anakin, who still might be counted as a superhero, does not have enough insight to recognize the similarities between them. Anakin’s arrogance, a trait that is quite often the undoing of many a superhero, remains unchallenged. He isn’t a villain yet, but the seeds are planted. The evolution of Jedi from monks to mutants—thanks to midi-­chlorians and animation—means that the objects connected to them and sold to consumers are familiar, but also endowed with new possibilities. Jedi have their lightsabers and their robes; superheroes have their capes. Genndy Tartakovsky merged those ideas and gave audiences Jedi and Sith who can fly and inspire viewers to see these characters as a little more “super” than they did before 2003.

Playing with Identity: And Toys While the discussion regarding Jedi as superheroes could be viewed through any number of theoretical lenses—Freud’s fetishes, Marx’s commodities, or Fernbach’s transformative and transgressive objects—Charles de Brosse’s definition of anthropological fetishism is the most useful. For de Brosse, the fetish object is: endowed with supernatural powers and worshipped or used as such. The object [was] familiar, but because of its endowment of supernatural [or] “superhero” qualities, the object could become, “in the hands of one who knew how to use it,” an aid, “[giving] the wielder tremendous power and abilities.”27

Within the Star Wars megatext, the lightsaber, for example, is a tool and a symbol rather than a magical talisman that endows Jedi with power. For consumers, ownership of this symbol allows them to connect to the Force and the Jedi in their own way. As more interpretations of the Jedi hit not 26  Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” April 5, 2004; Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” April 6, 2004; Tartakovsky, “Clone Wars,” April 7, 2004. 27  de Brosse qtd. in Wetmore, “Your Father’s Lightsaber: The Fetishization of Objects Between the Trilogies,” 176.

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only the screen but the shelves, how people relate to these characters might evolve, too. This can affect (cos)play, what tie-ins consumers gravitate toward, and how they see their relationships with Star Wars storytelling. As Tartakovsky’s interpretation echoed the superhero trend of the early 2000s, it meant that our imaginary Jedi could go higher, further, and faster than the slow duel between old Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader in A New Hope (1977) or even Original Trilogy Luke. Shifting the Jedi of the prequels and, specifically, the micro-series Jedi to superheroes opens new possibilities. Most Star Wars toys from the Original Trilogy focused on the 3.75-in. figures and the accoutrements that fleshed out their world: TIE fighters, X-wings, and Tauntauns, although the first toy lightsaber was released in 1978.28 Action figures have been such a draw that Hasbro has been producing Star Wars action figures continuously since 1995 and has produced thousands of figures, including minor background characters.29 Among the lines produced by Hasbro, the primary producer of action figures, are Power of the Force 2 (1995–2000) and the Legacy Collection (2008–2010) series, and the tie-ins for each of the films and animated series, including Clone Wars. This constant push for reinvention allowed for continued viability in the marketplace, as well as a change in the consumer, may also explain the reinvigoration of the Jedi. If one is to play at being a Jedi, they need to be able to dress the part as well as carry the right tools. For many children (and a good number of adults), the trappings of a Jedi have taken on similar significance to that of Superman’s cape, which is in keeping with part three of Harvey’s “superhero formula”: an iconic costume is a requirement and not just for the hero, but for those who wish to emulate them. Just as a bath towel, tied around a small child’s neck, can transform little Jonathan into SuperJonathan, a bathrobe and flashlight can transform Alexandra into a mysterious Jedi Knight—or, at least that was where the fantasy often stopped prior to the release of the Star Wars Special Editions in 1997. The 1997 releases were the last theatrical release of the Original Trilogy before the prequels debuted in 1999, unleashing a glut of tie-in merchandise for The Phantom Menace and the films that followed. Whereas the Original Trilogy product lines focused more on action figures than dress-up play,

 Waterhouse, “Playing Jedi.”  “Rebelscum.Com: Hasbro Star Wars Photo Archive.”

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the more modern lines expanded to include costumes and cosplay accessories, as well as several lines of premium collectibles. The Jedi identity shift, accomplished with almost as much subtlety as a Jedi mind trick, could be considered part of what Bill Brown described as “part of an uncanny transmutation between identities—the animate and the inanimate, object and subject, person and thing.”30 One such instantly recognizable signifier in the evolution of the Jedi is the lightsaber. From the release of the original Star Wars in 1977, the lightsaber has been recognized as “…the formal weapon of a Jedi Knight … an elegant weapon” that was “a symbol as well.”31 The Clone Wars micro-series is not the first Star Wars animated series to launch a lightsaber into the marketplace. The first lightsaber on the market was an inflatable lightsaber (complete with patch kit), issued by Kenner in 1978.32 With The Empire Strikes Back (1980) making waves at the box office, Kenner moved away from the inflatable saber and released The Force Lightsaber, a “more than 3-foot long plastic tube, available in either yellow or red.”33 Kenner’s final attempt at a lightsaber during the 1980s came out as part of the merchandising for the Saturday morning series, Droids (1985).34 This follow-up lightsaber fell as short as a lightsaber as the Droids animated series did with audiences. “Fully extended, the blade would end up being substantially smaller in scale to the ones we know and love. It looked as if it might be better served chopping veggies in Aunt Beru’s kitchen,” Waterhouse remarked.35 In 1996, Hasbro, which purchased Kenner, brought lightsabers back to the shelves with two options: “Darth Vader red and Luke Skywalker green.”36 These lightsabers also set the standard for features: “extendable blade, a light-up feature, and authentic movie sounds.”37 With the introduction of more superhero elements, diversity has come to the lightsaber, filling the films and store shelves with lightsabers in a multitude of hues. While green, blue, and red remain the standard colors, others have entered the marketplace. Mace Windu’s purple lightsaber, Adi Galia’s magenta saber, and even a yellow lightsaber debuted on store  Brown, “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” 941.  Lucas, Star Wars, 79. 32  Waterhouse, “Playing Jedi.” 33  Waterhouse. 34  Waterhouse. 35  Waterhouse. 36  Waterhouse. 37  Waterhouse. 30 31

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shelves in the mad marketing rush surrounding release of the prequels. In the years since the release of Revenge of the Sith, even more options have appeared, although this time in the size and shape most desired by Padawans everywhere: a “life-size” lightsaber that allows them to reenact lightsaber duels or construct their own custom lightsaber. The latter option is intriguing as it allows the consumer to choose. Rather than accepting a lightsaber that is a replica of a prop carried on-screen, the consumer can assemble their choice of hilt with choice of blade color (provided by a small colored disk). This allows today’s fans to connect with the material world of Star Wars on a completely different level than kids in the late 1970s armed with inflatable lightsabers, wrapping paper tubes, and flashlights.

Conclusion In order to do battle with the marketing minds contracted by their cartoon and comic book rivals, Genndy Tartakovsky, took the fight to them, creating a new identity for the Jedi as superheroes and bringing their consumer base along for the ride.38 This willingness to rethink an iconic figure echoes the willingness (and the need) of cartoon writers and artists to recognize the changing demands of their audiences, again situating the Jedi on the same level as the superheroes with whom they could now associate. Clone Wars relied on novelty and connection to a pre-existing juggernaut to continue their dominance of the toy aisle.39 As such, innovation was required. While many have tried to follow the Star Wars model by engaging in imitation, Lucasfilm partnered with Cartoon Network and adapted, bringing an anime sensibility to what was, essentially, an extended advertising campaign. This success fueled the franchise for almost 20 years after, with the The Clone Wars animated series, Rebels (2014–2018), Resistance (2018–2020), and the most recent Star Wars trilogy with Rey and Kylo Ren taking up the torch of the Jedi and the Sith. Thanks to the evolution of special effects, Rey can reach some of the same heights experienced by her animated forebearers. Under the hand of Genndy Tartakovsky and his team, the Jedi became the new superheroes for a new age and, in doing so, took their fans along with them in their search for a renovated identity. And sold a bunch of merchandise in the process.  Sedano, “Cartoon Network Animator Traces His Path to the Top.”  Sedano.

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Bibliography “501st Legion: Frequently Asked Questions”. Accessed May 12, 2009. http:// www.501stlegion.org/faqs.php. Brown, Bill. “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story).” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (1998): 935–64. Bushman, Tippy. Clone Wars: Bridging the Saga. DVD.  Star Wars: Clone Wars, Volume One. Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005. Connecting the Dots. DVD.  Star Wars: Clone Wars, Volume Two. Twentieth-­ Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005. Lucas, George. Star Wars. New York: Del Rey, 1976. “Mace Windu.” StarWars.com. Accessed August 6, 2019. https://www.starwars. com/databank/mace-windu. Misiroglu, Gina, and David A.  Roach, eds. The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes. Detroit: Visible Ink, 2004. Neuwirth, Allan. Makin’ Toons: Inside the Most Popular Animated TV Shows and Movies. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. “Rebelscum.Com: Hasbro Star Wars Photo Archive.” RebelScum.com. Accessed August 15, 2019. http://www.rebelscum.com/hasbro.asp. Clone Wars. Chapters 1–25. Supervising Director Genndy Tartakovsky. Cartoon Network, 2003–2005. Waterhouse, Jon. “Playing Jedi: The History of Toy Lightsabers.” StarWars.com, May 24, 2016. https://www.starwars.com/news/playing-jedi-the-historyof-toy-lightsabers. Wetmore, Kevin J. “Your Father’s Lightsaber: The Fetishization of Objects Between the Trilogies.” In Culture, Identities, and Technology in the Star Wars Films, edited by Carl Silvio and Tony M.  Vinci. Jefferson NC and London: McFarland & Co, 2007.

CHAPTER 9

Of War, Peace, and Art: Mandalorian Culture in Star Wars Television Lena Richter

Mandalorians are among the most popular creations to come out of the Star Wars franchise, and yet, as Dave Filoni, Supervising Director of The Clone Wars and Rebels, states, “The word Mandalorian never appears in a Star Wars film.”1 Despite this, the stories about Mandalore and the Mandalorians have been present in Star Wars for more than 40 years. The first appearance of Mandalorians in the Star Wars megatext is a faceless bounty hunter who wears Mandalorian armor, whereas the most recent major Mandalorian character—at least before the TV show The Mandalorian aired in November 2019—is a young Rebel finding herself through art. The depiction of Mandalorians—and even the meaning of the term—has undergone radical changes during the past 40 years. At different points in the franchise’s history, Mandalorians have been both a warrior culture and a nation of pacifists, both a distinct alien species and a culture open to all species, both heroes and villains. The evolution of Mandalorians by different creators across the Star Wars megatext shows 1

 “Creating Mandalore Featurette.”

L. Richter (*) Hamburg, Germany © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_9

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the dynamism—as well as the occasional risks—of transmedia storytelling in a franchise as big as Star Wars. In current Disney-era canon, the planet Mandalore has featured most prominently in The Clone Wars and Rebels animated TV shows. In The Clone Wars, the Mandalorians are avowed pacifists, in stark contrast to their earlier depictions as a warrior culture. Duchess Satine Kryze, the leader of the Mandalorian people, is appalled by the Clone Wars and refuses to join either side in the conflict. However, the militant group Death Watch seeks to overthrow her government and revive Mandalore’s warrior culture. By the end of the series, Mandalore is taken over by Maul’s crime syndicate and conquered by the Republic. In Rebels, which takes place decades later, Mandalore is governed by the Empire. One of the main characters of the show, Sabine Wren, is a Mandalorian from Clan Wren, which is loyal to the Empire. Sabine joins the Rebel Alliance and later returns to her homeworld to help launch a rebellion against the Empire. The newest Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian, set ten years after the Rebels finale, does not (yet) feature Mandalore as a planet, but states that the Empire killed many of the Mandalorians in its final days; the survivors were driven into hiding. Given the significant developments presented on both the large and small screen, this chapter explores the evolution of the Mandalorians in the Star Wars franchise, primarily through the animated TV shows. After providing an overview of the history of Mandalorians in the Star Wars megatext, it focuses on the characters of Satine Kryze and Sabine Wren. These two characters offer case studies in how transmedia storytelling challenges cultural expectations of characters and audience alike.

Mandalore’s Evolution Through Star Wars Storytelling The Mandalorians stand as a notable example of how franchise storytelling produced different ideas and approaches that at times conflicted with each other, but also influenced the current canon. In a sense, Mandalorians owe their very existence and popularity to the transmediated nature of Star Wars storytelling. As noted above, the word “Mandalorian” does not appear in any of the live-action films, but Mandalorians have appeared in the associated novels, comics, video games, visual guides, art books, and even more obscure publications like drawing books and cookbooks. Much

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of the information about Mandalorian culture initially came from the Expanded Universe (rechristened Legends), which was removed from the Star Wars canon in April 2014. The word “Mandalore” first appeared not in a story, but in a reference book, namely the The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook. The book explained that Boba Fett’s armor was derived from an “armored suit” worn by “a squad of supercommandos, troops from the Mandalore system.”2 Two years later, the planet of Mandalore was introduced in the (now Legends) Marvel comic The Search Begins, which tells the story of Leia and C-3PO searching for a bounty hunter who seems to be working with Boba Fett on the planet of Mandalore.3 The comic also introduces a Mandalorian fighter named Fenn Shysa, who made additional appearances in other Legends comics and novels. Notably, his armor in the comics looks very much like Boba Fett’s, which was only later described as a unique set made up of spare parts. Boba Fett first appeared on the Star Wars scene in the (in)famous Holiday Special (1978), which is no longer considered part of the current canon.4 When the Millennium Falcon crashes on a moon in the Panna system, Boba pretends to help to Han, Luke, and Chewie while secretly contacting Darth Vader. Boba Fett made his first canonical appearances in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983). Despite having few lines and little screen time, he became a popular character in the fandom. His popularity inspired more stories about the people that made his iconic armor. During the mid-1990s, between the Original Trilogy and the Prequel films, more stories about Mandalorians appeared in other media. One is a story of war, the other is, ultimately, one of art. In 1995, the Legends comic book series Tales of the Jedi started a new story arc: The Sith War.5 Set 3996 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin), the story details a conflict between the Jedi and Sith that also involves Mandalorian warriors under their leader Mandalore the Indomitable. In this series, the Mandalorians are not humans, but rather an entirely different species collectively called “Mandalorians.” These Mandalorians—humanoid, tall, and  Johnston and Rodis-Jamero, The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook, 70–71.  Michelinie, The Search Begins. 4  The Star Wars Holiday Special, directed by Steve Binder, David Acomba, 1978; see also Ferguson, “The Holiday Special and the Hole in the Archive,” in this volume. 5  Veitch and Anderson, The Sith War. 2 3

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grey-skinned—were described as formidable warriors who took pride and honor in warfare and fighting. While this early stage of storytelling about Mandalorian culture focused on warfare, honor, and violence, art also features prominently. In 1996, Lucasfilm released a new original Star Wars soundtrack composed by Joel McNeely as part the now non-canonical Shadows of the Empire multimedia project.6 The final track, “The Destruction of Xizor’s Palace,” features a choir singing a harsh, guttural, Germanic inspired chant.7 According to the liner notes, this song is Dha Werda Verda, an ancient warrior chant and epic poem from the Taung culture (Taung would later become the name of the aforementioned Mandalorian species). The chant appears out of context in the soundtrack, and Shadows of the Empire does not feature Mandalorians. Still, the soundtrack is a significant moment as it represents the first time the Star Wars franchise explored Mandalorian culture beyond the noble warrior archetype. The fandom love for Mandalorian armor reignited in 2002 with Attack of the Clones, in which Jango Fett, father of Boba, was introduced as a bounty hunter and genetic template for the clone army. There are conflicting stories about the Fetts in Legends stories, from their history as a Mandalorian clan since the Old Republic era (according to the Knights of the Old Republic game and comics)8 to Jango becoming a Mandalorian only after being chosen as the clone template (according to the Open Seasons comic).9 No matter his backstory, Jango’s presence in the film, as well as the fact that fans finally got to see someone in Mandalorian armor fight a Jedi, sparked a renewed interest in Mandalorians. Another piece to the puzzle is the 2003 video game Knights of the Old Republic. Set 3956 years before the Battle of Yavin, this game is not part of the Disney canon. It features a companion character called Canderous Ordo, a human Mandalorian warrior who later becomes the Mandalore, leader of all the clans. The game retcons what it means to be a Mandalorian when Canderous tells the player character that anybody who follows the Mandalorian warrior way could become a Mandalorian. This is in stark contrast to the depiction of Mandalorians as a tall, grey-skinned alien  McNeely, Shadows of the Empire Soundtrack.  McNeely, Shadows of the Empire Soundtrack; according to the Shadows of the Empire liner notes, Ben Burtt—sound designer for the films—wrote the poem. 8  BioWare, Knights of the Old Republic. 9  Blackman, Jango Fett: Open Seasons. 6 7

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species in the Tales of the Jedi comics, which was set a generation before the game. Those aliens were later renamed the Taung in a 2005 article published in Star Wars Insider.10 The last significant evolution of Mandalorian culture before Mandalorians finally returned to the TV screen was the Republic Commando multimedia project (also Legends material), which included a series of novels written by Karen Traviss and a video game released in 2005. The game follows the adventures of Delta Squad, a group of clone soldiers, during the Clone Wars. It features Mandalorian warriors who serve as mercenaries and train the clone squads—an idea that might have come from the depiction of Mandalorians as supercommandos in The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook. Republic Commando also brought back the Dha Werda Verda, this time with lyrics by Jesse Harlin. In fact, the soundtrack to the game contains four different Mandalorian battle songs: “Vode An,” “Gra’tua Cuun,” “Ka’rta Tor,” and “Dha Werda Verda.”11 Published between 2004 and 2009, the Republic Commando novels centered on clone troopers and Mandalorians. According to Ben Wahrman, a regular contributor to the Star Wars Eleven-ThirtyEight blog, Traviss’s Mandalorians were “a rustic, rugged culture of tough men and women who strove to be self-sufficient and self-governing, placing far more importance on their clan and family than the governments that happened to be ruling at the time.”12 Traviss even used the lyrics to Harlin’s soundtrack to develop Mando’a into a full working language. The Dha Werda Verda chant is also quoted in the novel Hard Contact,13 complemented with the description of an accompanying ritual dance in the subsequent book Triple Zero.14 Some fans did not like the depiction of Mandalorian culture in Republic Commando.15 Some had already made up their own stories about Mandalorians based on previous Expanded Universe content.16 Others opposed the idea of fleshing out Mandalorian culture at all because they preferred the mystery. Some also perceived Traviss to be hostile toward the Jedi. Despite these complaints, the novels were generally well-received  Peña, “The History of the Mandalorians.”  Harlin, Republic Commando Soundtrack. 12  Wahrman, “Mandalorians in Rebels—From Traviss to TCW and Back Again.” 13  Traviss, Republic Commando: Hard Contact, 18. 14  Traviss, Republic Commando: Triple Zero, 141. 15  Blanton, Blanton, and Hurliman, “Travissty in the EU.” 16  Pranks, Kuhl, and Morgan-Black, “Dr. Ro-Book-Nik’s Mean Sabine Machine.” 10 11

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and Mandalorians as a culture of independent, colorful, and self-reliant mercenaries soon took hold within the fandom. The Mandalorian Mercs Costume Club, a group of Star Wars fans that celebrates Mandalorian armor and culture, was founded in 2007. Members build their own Mandalorian armor and cosplay. The group is one of the cosplay groups officially recognized by Lucasfilm (along with the 501st Legion and the Rebel Legion) and regularly appears at conventions and major Star Wars events. Finally, approximately 30 years after Boba Fett first appeared on screen, George Lucas decided to make Mandalorians a part of The Clone Wars animated series (2008–2014). This also marks the beginning of new material about Mandalorians that remains canon to this day. In the show, the Mandalorians are all human. They are known for their iconic beskar armor, a metal that can withstand blaster shots or even the blow of a lightsaber. The planet Mandalore, which first appears in Season 2 of the show, is located in the Outer Rim Territories and orbited by Concordia, an inhabitable moon. In the featurette “Creating Mandalore,” Dave Filoni explains that Mandalore was a huge, wealthy, and influential system, so much so that it could not be left out of the conflict between the Republic and the Separatists. However, Lucas’s vision of the Mandalorians dated back to the supercommandos mentioned in The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook. If the Mandalorians were a force that the Republic could not easily ignore, the vagabond mercenaries described in the Republic Commando novels and some of the comics had to change into something more militaristic and organized. After reviewing the history of the Mandalorians in the Star Wars megatext, Lucas and Filoni established that the war between Mandalorians and Jedi led to a cataclysm on Mandalore, leaving the surface of the planet a wasteland. Because of this, the current rulers of Mandalore, the New Mandalorians led by Duchess Satine Kryze, favor neutrality and non-violence (as discussed in the next section). The portrayal of Mandalorian culture in The Clone Wars differs significantly from Traviss’s books. The show associates the warrior aspect of Mandalorian culture with the villains, Death Watch. The show also confirms that Jango Fett—and by implication, Boba—is not a Mandalorian, but only a bounty hunter who acquired Mandalorian armor. These decisions proved controversial. Some fans of Traviss’s work thought the show ruined the Mandalorians. Traviss herself exited the franchise, leaving a final book in her Imperial Commando series unfinished.

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As of this writing, the story of Mandalore remains unfinished because, despite being planned for seven or eight seasons, The Clone Wars was canceled after Season 5 (an additional 12 episodes  were later released on Netflix as “The Lost Missions”). Season 5 left the battle for Mandalore on a cliffhanger, with Maul having taken over the government, killing Satine in the process. Lucasfilm announced that the final arc of the story, “Siege of Mandalore,” would be released on the Disney+ streaming service in February 2020 (during the writing of this essay, these episodes were not available).17 The next animated Star Wars TV show, Rebels (2014–2018), which takes place 14 years after the end of The Clone Wars, provides more insights into Mandalore and Mandalorian culture. As the series unfolds, viewers encounter a Mandalore governed by the Galactic Empire. The state of Mandalore in Rebels is that of a soft occupation; instead of putting an Imperial ruler in charge of the system, the Empire installed Gar Saxon of Clan Vizsla as viceroy. Although most of the clans are loyal to Gar Saxon, the Protectors, a group formerly loyal to Duchess Satine Kryze, left the planet and relocated to the Concord Dawn system. While The Clone Wars focused on the fight between the New Mandalorians and Death Watch, Rebels tells a more personal story about family, clans, and honor. One of the main protagonists of the show, a young woman named Sabine Wren, is caught between her warrior mother and her artist father, between her own beliefs and her family’s honor (discussed below). At the end of Rebels, there is hope for a Mandalorian uprising against the Empire, but the story of this uprising remains untold. Rebels does bring in some ideas from Traviss’s novels. For example, Rebels established that some of the Protectors helped train the clone troopers and also fought for the Republic during the Clone Wars. There is some Mando’a spoken between Sabine and her family, and the painted armor worn by Clan Wren bears more resemblance to the colorful mercenaries than to the grey and blue Death Watch armor seen in The Clone Wars. There is also a scene that involves a game of Cubikahd, a Mandalorian game invented by Traviss in her novel Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice.18 Combining these different elements of Mandalorian culture into the canon complicates the Mandalorians and moves them beyond the warrior culture archetypes seen in the early Expanded Universe stories. As  Robinson, “The First Disney+ Star Wars Series.”  Traviss, Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice.

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Wahrman concludes, “The fact that the two different facets of the culture now exist side-by-side actually adds a new layer of depth to the Mandalorians as a whole that makes the story that much more interesting.”19 The newest addition to Star Wars on the TV screen, The Mandalorian, premiered in November 2019 on Disney+, and provided some information on what happened on Mandalore during the last years of Imperial rule. During the Great Purge, an unexplained event that occurred after the events of Rebels and before the fall of the Empire, a great number of Mandalorians were killed and the valuable beskar metal was taken off planet by the Imperials. Season 1 portrays the Mandalorians as a secretive group that hides underground, follows a code centered on fighting and honor, and, as a new element, never removes their helmets. Taking in “foundlings” (or orphans) and raising them as their own is also an important part of their culture. The show’s main character, Din Djarin, is not from Mandalore. Orphaned by Separatist battle droids and rescued by Mandalorian warriors, Din Djarin enters Mandalorian culture as a Clone Wars foundling. At this point, it is still unclear if there are other survivors of the Purge, and if the rule about the helmet applies to all Mandalorians (which would mean another retcon) or just the small group shown in Season 1. As is common in Star Wars, the story of the Mandalorians reuses old designs and ideas from unused concept art or the Expanded Universe and reworks them into the new canon. There is, for example, no current canon source that tells the story of the ancient fight between the Mandalorians and the Jedi, but it is mentioned in The Clone Wars. Also, the planet Malachor, which was devastated during the war in the Legends stories, appeared in the Season 2 finale of Rebels. Even designs that never made it to the screen have been reused. The outfit and headdress Duchess Satine wears during her first story arc is taken from an unused design for Padmé Amidala, while the sigil of the Mandalorian Protectors was based on concept art for Boba Fett. The version of Mandalorian culture as shown in Rebels contains elements from many of the previous depictions of Mandalorians: the iconic armor and cool gadgets from Boba Fett; the supercommandos mentioned in the 1980 Sketchbook; the language developed from a poem written for the 1995 Shadow of the Empire soundtrack; the aftermath of the conflict shown in The Clone Wars; and the themes of family, honor, and violence woven through all of Mandalorian history.  Wahrman, “Mandalorians in Rebels.”

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War Is Intolerable: Satine Kryze and the Jedi Order One of the most compelling storylines in The Clone Wars is the corruption of the Jedi Order by Palpatine and his war, a process which is skipped over almost completely in the live-action films. The final episode of The Lost Missions, “Sacrifice,” shows how Yoda is beginning to grasp the fact that war might have no winners at all.20 The Jedi, who are supposed to be peacekeepers, become generals and lead countless clone troopers into battle. The episodes that question the war by illustrating the consequences for soldiers and civilians, as well as the diplomatic struggle to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict, are among the most thought-­provoking of the show. Several episodes, for example, showcase Padmé Amidala’s abilities as a diplomat and her unyielding efforts to search for a way to restore peace. But the character who really questions the path the Jedi have taken is Satine Kryze, Duchess of Mandalore. Duchess Satine represents the New Mandalorians who, after thousands of years, abandon the old ways of fighting and violence. Under Duchess Satine, Mandalorian politics are strictly pacifistic; the Mandalore system maintains a position of neutrality during the Clone War and counts itself a member of the Council of Neutral Systems, a political coalition of 1500 star systems. But Satine is no stranger to war and violence. Her pacifistic reforms led to a civil war when she was a young woman. The uprising was defeated in the end, leaving her on the throne, but countless people died. That conflict fortified her belief in pacifism as she tried to rebuild her homeworld. In addition to the Mandalorian narratives, The Clone Wars also uses visual designs to further the story and establish a setting. In the featurette “Creating Mandalore,” lead designer Kilian Plunkett explains how the look of Mandalore was designed by reverse-engineering Boba Fett’s armor.21 The diamond-shaped hexagonal pattern at the center of the chest piece became a central design aesthetic for Mandalorian architecture. Even the design of the Mandalorian characters reflects that architecture, with sharp, angular facial features. The Mandalorians shown in The Clone Wars are very tall, blond, and pale and have a Nordic look to them. Such ethnic coding could be a result of the Dha Werda Verda’s Germanic style. Plunkett also states that they wanted Pre Vizsla, the leader of Death Watch,  “Sacrifice,” The Clone Wars:The Lost Missions, ep. 13.  “Creating Mandalore Featurette.”

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to look like someone who might have been a hero, despite being a villain in the story. Duchess Satine has a particularly engaging design. She looks Mandalorian, yet stands out. Her face has the same sharp angles and pale skin, but her outfits are flowy and complicated, with muted colors and elaborate headgear. She wears an outfit that, according to Plunkett, is inspired by noble equestrian riding gear and meant to look aristocratic even when fighting or moving around. Satine never wears a piece of armor, which makes her immediately appear unique and vulnerable among the Mandalorian warriors that often do not even show their faces. Her most iconic outfit, developed from a sketch for a Padmé Amidala dress, features a halo of white flowers around her head. It is no coincidence that those flowers, representing peace and purity, are part of her ensemble in her first appearance on the show. They are, interestingly, also featured in the drawing of Satine in the book Women of the Galaxy, which shows her alone on her throne, wearing the clothes from her death scene, clutching her neck with one hand, a bouquet of white peace lilies trailing down from the other.22 As Dave Filoni states, in the episode “The Academy” Satine “has a lot of similarities to what it means to be a Jedi, fighting for her cause, although she is doing it through completely pacifistic means. You can see Satine is trying to not make the same mistake the Jedi frankly are making, which is they are fighting this war.”23 This conflict is not only represented by the Senate politics and Satine’s struggle to keep the Council of Neutral Systems out of the war, but also in her personal relationship with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Obi-Wan and Satine are, in a way, what Padme and Anakin could have been, if things had been different. Two people, both deeply and firmly rooted in their beliefs, who care deeply for each other and yet never act on their feelings in more than a platonic way. They would rush to each other’s rescue in a heartbeat, yet know they can never be together without sacrificing their beliefs—and they respect each other too much to ask that. It is also notable that Satine is shown as the kind of woman often flagged as shrill or problematic or exhausting, because she is determined and strong-willed. But these very qualities are obviously part of the reason Obi-Wan loves and respects Satine so much.

 Ratcliffe, Women of the Galaxy, 197.  “The Academy Featurette.”

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While Obi-Wan is portrayed as coming close to the ideal of a Jedi, he is still tainted by the Clone War. Whenever Obi-Wan and Satine are together in The Clone Wars, they discuss the issues of war and peace in a heated manner. It sometimes comes across as delightful banter between two people attracted to each other, delivered in hasty one-liners between fired shots and swirling lightsabers. But underneath lies one of the central conflicts of both the Jedi Order and The Clone Wars: how long can people call themselves peacekeepers while fighting a war? Satine’s opinions on this question are clear, as this dialogue from her very first appearance on the show illustrates: Obi-Wan: A peacekeeper belongs on the front lines of conflict. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to do his job. Satine: The work of a peacekeeper is to make sure that conflict does not arise. Obi-Wan: Yes, a noble description, but not a realistic one. Satine: Is reality what makes a Jedi abandon his ideals? Or is it simply a response to political convenience?24 It is also interesting that the ancient conflict between Mandalorians and Jedi is repeated in this ongoing argument, but with reversed roles. After thousands of years of violence and war, the New Mandalorians represented by Satine are the first in their history to attempt living a different way, a peaceful way. At the same time, the Jedi, known and respected as peacekeepers, are drawn into a war that nearly destroys the Galaxy and ultimately allows Palpatine to become emperor. The Clone Wars shows, in an almost painful way, how both sides in this argument come from their own history, their own point of view, and cannot appreciate the benefits of the other perspective. For Satine, war is always evil, always to be avoided, which is not surprising seeing that she comes from a culture that rendered its homeworld uninhabitable through war. From Obi-Wan’s perspective, the Jedi have kept the peace in the Galaxy for so long that he cannot imagine them failing. That he believes so deeply in the rules and virtues of the Jedi Order makes him close to a perfect Jedi, but also blinds him to Palpatine’s dark path. He cannot believe the Jedi might ever be corrupted, even while it is already happening.

 “The Mandalore Plot,” The Clone Wars, season 2, ep. 12.

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Ultimately, war wins and Satine becomes its victim. In Season 5 of The Clone Wars, Maul and his brother Savage Opress ally with Death Watch to overthrow the New Mandalorians, gain authority over the planet, and kill Obi-Wan Kenobi. At this point in the war, the galaxy is so destabilized that no one stands in the way as Maul, Savage, and Death Watch form the Shadow Collective and recruit an army of criminals. At the same time, Mandalore’s neutrality in the war prevents it from seeking help from either the Republic or the Separatists. Despite its short-term victory, Death Watch’s attempt to revive Mandalore’s traditional warrior culture does not ultimately succeed. Pre Vizsla does overthrow Satine, but has to fight alongside criminals and Sith to achieve his goals. Maul then betrays him, challenges him to a duel, and violently beheads him in the throne room. By contrast, Satine, who is also killed by Maul, remains graceful and kind to her last breath. The way she meets death resembles Obi-Wan’s calm decision to join the Force when Darth Vader strikes him down in A New Hope (1977). Before she dies, Satine tells Obi-Wan, “Remember, my dear Obi-Wan, I loved you always… I always will.”25 This line focuses attention on the love story, with little hint of a life after death, be it with the Force or something else. In the novelization of the Shadow Conspiracy arc by Jason Fry (which is not included in the current Star Wars canon), Satine’s last words are changed to: “Remember, my dear Obi-Wan. No matter what, don’t let go of what you believe in. I never did.”26 According to Fry, he wrote the novelization based on the scripts for the episodes, but Satine’s words were later changed to make the scene more emotional.27 The original lines are interesting because, while it is evident that Satine loves Obi-Wan, her original last words say much more about their relationship. Not only does she reassure him that she was willing to die for her cause and holds no anger over her fate, she also is full of forgiveness. Her decisions as leader of Mandalore and Obi-Wan’s loyalty to the Jedi Order lead to him not being able to save her, and she accepts that. She tells him never to give up his beliefs. When we see Obi-Wan in subsequent stories, when we see him cradle the dying Maul in his arms in Rebels or calmly face Darth Vader on the Death Star, we know he took her advice. In essence, the story of Satine and Obi-Wan is more about respect for beliefs than about romantic love.  “The Lawless,” The Clone Wars, season 5, ep.16.  Fry, The Clone Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy, 174. 27  Fry, “Shining a light on Shadow Conspiracy.” 25 26

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Both believe firmly in their ideals and respect each other for that, even if their beliefs stand in opposition to each other.

Both New and Legacy: Sabine Wren and the Art of Change With Satine’s death, Mandalore’s days of peace and neutrality are over. Mandalore descends into war again and the Republic sends an army to occupy the planet. While the Rebels episodes focusing on Mandalore only begin in Season 2, Mandalorian culture is present from the start through the character Sabine Wren. Sabine comes from the Mandalorian Clan Wren, which is led by her mother Ursa and has been loyal to Viceroy Gar Saxon. Sabine herself attended the Imperial Academy on Mandalore until she realized one of her inventions could be used as a weapon of mass destruction against her own people. She tried voicing her concerns to her family and Imperial officials, but her mother cast her out of the family. Sabine fled the academy and destroyed her invention. In Season 3, after Sabine reclaimed the Darksaber, a legendary weapon from the days of the Jedi-Mandalore-War, from Maul’s lair on Dathomir and faced the ghosts of her past, she returns to Mandalore and reunites with her family.28 She duels Gar Saxon and in Season 4 sparks a possible rebellion by presenting the Darksaber to Bo-Katan Kryze, Duchess Satine’s sister, who becomes the leader of those Mandalorians opposing the Empire. At first glance Sabine is very different from the Mandalorians shown in The Clone Wars. She wears some kind of Mandalorian armor, but a much lighter version, painted with vivid colors. She has colorful hair, which changes several times throughout the show. She tends to rely on tricks, explosives, and fireworks rather than direct confrontation with opponents, even though she is a skilled fighter. Sabine is a woman of color, a stark contrast to the pale blond Mandalorians from The Clone War. She is also much younger than the Mandalorian protagonists in The Clone Wars. After years of stories depicting Mandalorian culture centered almost exclusively on war and honor—or the attempt to get rid of these things— Rebels takes a different approach with Sabine. As a full-time resident on the Ghost, Sabine primarily lives outside the structure of families, clans, or 28  A February 11, 2020 StarWars.com article, “What is the Darksaber,” offers a brief history of the legendary weapon. See https://www.starwars.com/news/ what-is-the-darksaber.

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other allegiances that have traditionally defined Mandalorian culture. Instead, the first thing viewers learn about Sabine is that she is an artist. In Season 1, we see her paintings all over the Ghost, she covers an entire TIE Fighter in bright orange-yellow colors, and she uses her graffiti not only as a way to conceal explosives, but also to leave a symbol of hope for those suffering under the Empire. Sabine’s art is also featured in other Star Wars media. The reference book Propaganda: A History of Persuasive Art in the Galaxy contains a poster drawn by Sabine, showing Hera Syndulla, the leader of the Ghost crew.29 The novel Aftermath by Chuck Wendig mentions an art installation made of painted Stormtrooper helmets marked with flowers, starbursts and Alliance signs; although the name of the artist is not mentioned in the novel, the style of the artwork fits Sabine’s.30 Even if previous stories had not focused on it, art has always been a part of Mandalorian culture and depictions of it. The previously mentioned war poem, Dha Werda Verda, is one of the most important texts in Mandalorian history, along with various other poems and war dances. There are other examples of Mandalorian artwork throughout the saga. For example, there were two murals shown in The Clone Wars, one in the Sundari Royal Palace Plaza on Mandalore and another in Pre Vizsla’s home on Concordia, both depicting the Jedi-Mandalorian War. Interestingly, Filoni notes that they were inspired by the style of Picasso’s “Massacre in Korea” and “Guernica,” two prominent anti-war pieces.31 The Clone Wars also contains a cubist-styled painting of Duchess Satine and some architectural artwork, like the Peace Park in Sundari.32 More art is seen in the Clan Wren house on Krownest, where the art of Sabine’s father—the design of which was inspired by the work of Gustav Klimt—is displayed.33 What is particularly interesting about these depictions of Mandalorian artwork is that they are more abstract and stylized than one might expect of a warrior culture. They perhaps suggest that Sabine’s passion for art does not make her an outlier from Mandalorian society, but rather a true heir to its cultural legacy. However, the most salient art for Sabine, both for her character and for viewers, is the canvas she herself becomes by frequently changing her hair  Hidalgo, Propaganda—A History of Persuasive Art in the Galaxy, 82.  Wendig, Aftermath, 43. 31  “The Mandalore Plot Featurette.” 32  “Duchess of Mandalore,” The Clone Wars, season 2, ep. 14. 33  “Legacy of Mandalore Trivia Gallery.” 29 30

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color and armor. As noted by costumer and cosplayer Alexina Duncan, “Sabine’s design is the very essence of wearable narrative.”34 Even without considering the artwork on it, Sabine’s armor is a statement in itself. It bears a clear resemblance to the classic Mandalorian armor, while at the same time looking different enough to stand out. Sabine has stripped down the armor to something that is fitting and useful, while maintaining the essence of Mandalorian design. The hexagonal shape in the center of the chest piece, present on Boba Fett’s armor and used to design the entire look and architecture of Mandalore in The Clone Wars, is still there. But the way her armor differs from its original design is a symbol of Sabine’s struggle with her identity. She was stripped of her identity as a Mandalorian when her family cast her out. Now she has to find out what she is outside of the culture in which she grew up. In her essay about Sabine, Duncan explains that the concept of “taking a garment or fashion of tradition and twisting it, reinventing it and owning it has been a key foundation of a number of youth-led movements in the twentieth century, in particular the miniskirt revolution of the 1960′s which politicized skirt length and challenged gender norms and expectations.”35 The part about reinventing traditional fashion as an act of rebellion against cultural norms applies to Sabine’s armor perfectly. When Sabine is first introduced in Rebels, her armor would hardly be recognizable as Mandalorian if it weren’t for the center piece. It is very light, consisting of various small pieces, giving her lots of freedom to move around and a less warrior-like look. As her character arc leads her back to Mandalore and to her family, Sabine’s outfit becomes increasingly Mandalorian. In Season 3, she finds the Darksaber, the ultimate symbol of Mandalorian leadership, and also gains a jetpack and a pair of vambraces. By the time she finally masters the Darksaber and is ready to face her family again, her whole appearance has grown more Mandalorian as, piece by piece, she reclaims more of her heritage. The way Sabine paints her armor adds another layer to her self-­ expression. She paints and re-paints it constantly in a way that reflects the events of the past and the way she views herself. While her right shoulder pauldron shows creatures the Ghost crew faced or witnessed, including a fyrnock, convor, and purrgil, her left shoulder patch reflects her identity. In Season 1, it shows a black-and-white pattern that resembles the colors  Duncan, “The Explosive Aesthetic of Sabine Wren.”  Duncan.

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of an Imperial uniform, possibly meant to reflect her past as a student at the Academy. Alternatively, the pattern resembles a dejarik board (the Star Wars version of chess), which could represent the fact that she feels like a pawn in a game. A third interpretation is that she misses her parents and the pattern references her father’s black and white cubist painting of her mother.36 Although she lives on the Ghost and is working for the Rebels, she does not completely trust Hera and Kanan. That changes during the first season, and by Season 2 her left shoulder pauldron shows the Aurebesh letter for “S” in bright colors—S for Sabine, but also for Spectre, the callsign of the Ghost crew. On her chest piece, Sabine always wears a drawing of a starbird. According to the Sabine My Rebel Sketchbook, Sabine designed the starbird as a personal symbol based on a mythological creature that never dies and renews itself in the heart of a nova.37 The starbird bears remarkable resemblance to the phoenix symbol of the Rebel Alliance, although it is not confirmed if one was based on the other. Throughout Rebels, this sign stays on Sabine’s chest piece, right over her heart, a telling sign of where her loyalty lies. While it could have been possible to imagine that Sabine herself would become the leader of the Mandalorian rebellion against the Empire, the artwork on her armor implicitly told the audience where she would end up. This only changes in the epilogue to Rebels, set several years after the Liberation of Lothal, when the starbird moves to her left shoulder, while her chest piece is only painted with colorful stripes not depicting any particular motif—a blank slate showing that she is ready for new adventures.38 Sabine’s art is used to show both her personal conflicts and development, as well as a foundation that allows her to challenge her own cultural heritage. It provides something that defines her as a person, apart from everything else that her culture and her family have defined for her. Sabine is a Mandalorian, a Wren, and a Rebel, but she is also an artist, and her art is the one thing that belongs to her entirely. It becomes her tool to challenge and redefine what it means to her to be a Mandalorian. When she first encounters other Mandalorians on Concord Dawn in Season 2, she is confronted with her past and her family legacy. She is recognized as a 36  As seen in “Legacy of Mandalore,” Rebels, season 3, ep.16. Also see “Intrigued by Mandalorian Art,” Star Wars Maven, 2017. 37  Wallace, Sabine My Rebel Sketchbook. 38  “Family Reunion—and Farewell,” Rebels, season 4, ep. 15–16.

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member of Clan Wren, and the Protectors distrust her because of her clan’s past loyalty to Clan Vizsla and Death Watch. In the same encounter, she makes use of her identity and her cultural background by invoking the right to single combat against the leader of the Protectors, Fenn Rau, but only uses it to trigger explosives she hid on the Protectors’ starfighters, not to kill him. This demonstrates that she has already grown to accept her Mandalorian identity as something that is a part of her, but not something that limits or dictates her behavior. Sabine later earns Rau’s respect by demonstrating that she still upholds the values of her culture without accepting her family’s loyalty to Gar Saxon and the Empire.39 Rau realizes Sabine’s decision to stand up to the Empire and her family required more bravery than staying within the old structures of Mandalorian politics. As Wahrmann notes, Sabine “is not so loyal as to blindly accept the rule of the Empire just because they are in control of her planet.”40 Sabine Wren challenges what it means to be Mandalorian on several occasions in Rebels. She shows that she has deep knowledge of the culture and history of her people. She immediately recognizes the Darksaber in Maul’s lair and she stuns the supercommandos by knowing a frequency that will broadcast a disturbing noise into their helmets. The invention that made her defect from the Academy is finally revealed to be an Arc Pulse Generator targeting the beskar alloy in Mandalorian armor, making it the perfect superweapon to threaten Mandalore into submission. Although Sabine later expressed regret for it, she nicknamed it “The Duchess.” A weapon that turns the armor of Mandalorians against them, making them unable to fight, named after Satine Kryze, the woman who wanted the fighting to end—it points to a mockery so cruel that it could only have been invented by someone who knows and understands the values and history of Mandalore. But Sabine’s artistic self also enables her to look closely at the Mandalorian way, to value some parts of it and reject others, and to find a way to embrace her culture in her own way. As Duncan notes, “Sabine is both new and a product of legacy.”41 After Sabine finally returns to her family, she engages Gar Saxon in a duel that ends with his defeat.42 This is another example of Sabine  “Imperial Super Commandos,” Rebels, season 3, ep. 7.  Wahrmann, “You Have Stayed True to Our Ideals.” 41  Duncan, “The Explosive Aesthetic of Sabine Wren.” 42  “Legacy of Mandalore,” Rebels, season 3, ep. 16. 39 40

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rejecting the needless violence of the Mandalorian way; she willingly engages in single combat with her opponent, but refuses to behead him after she is victorious. When Saxon tries to shoot her as she walks away, her mother decides to shoot him with her blaster, fully aware that the death of the viceroy will throw Mandalore back into chaos and civil war. In doing so, she accepts Sabine’s attempts to find a new way between Mandalorian tradition and hope for the future. Ultimately, Rebels ends with Sabine focusing on her art over her inventions, on protecting people over fighting. She resolves the conflict with her family and proves herself worthy of wielding the Darksaber, but then hands it over to Bo-Katan, whom she believes to be the right leader for Mandalore’s rebellion against the Empire. She returns to her found family on Lothal, joins Ezra’s fight to liberate the planet, and even stays behind after the conflict to protect it. She becomes a protector, not of Mandalore, but of Lothal. And she stays true to being an artist: the last image of Sabine—and the entire show—is her stepping away from a giant mural she painted depicting the Ghost crew as a happy family.43 Sabine is a warrior like her mother and an artist like her father; she is a Mandalorian and a Rebel. She is proud of her heritage and her armor, yet still resents what Mandalore has become under the Empire. She loves both her families, the one she was born into and the one she found in the Ghost crew. Her journey through Rebels shows that cultural heritage needs challenge and change, and that the search for an own identity can lead to the desire to overthrow cultural expectations.

Conclusion Without ever being mentioned in a Star Wars movie, stories of Mandalore and Mandalorian culture have been told for over 40 years. How they have been shaped and recurrently re-shaped illustrates both the potential and the difficulties of transmedia storytelling in a franchise as big as Star Wars. The Mandalorians shown in current Disney canon come from various ideas, designs and stories from the Legends era, proving that old concepts often work their way back into the stories told today. The various new approaches to the concept of the Mandalorians—from a distinct species to a culture that welcomes new members openly, from honorable warriors to idealistic pacifists—also shows how a central concept of a culture can  “Family Reunion—and Farewell,” Rebels, season 4, ep. 15–16.

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prevail even if certain elements of it are altered. The importance of clans and families, of honoring their own values, remain present in every reincarnation of Mandalorians, much like the central chest piece forms the foundation of all of their visual designs. Both characters examined in this paper, Satine Kryze and Sabine Wren, challenge and question their own culture and provide an opportunity for others to question their own behavior as well. In Satine’s case, her role as a pacifist who ended Mandalore’s violent warrior culture holds a mirror to the Jedi falling from peacekeepers to generals in a galactic war. For Sabine, being exiled from her family is a chance to question what it means to be a Mandalorian and what parts of her culture she needs to remove from herself. Ultimately, her family and clan benefit from her decision to stand up against the Mandalorian leaders and the Empire, understanding that unconditional loyalty can be used as a tool for oppression. The next chapter for the Mandalorians has begun with Season 1 of The Mandalorian. It remains to be seen how the new informations about Mandalorian culture, such as the rule of never removing the helmet, fit into established canon about Mandalorians and how many of them are actually left. There is already speculation as to whether or not The Mandalorian retcons what audiences knew previously about the culture. For example, Laura Hurley wonders if this new custom of not taking the helmet off contradicts the Mandalorians in Rebels, who always showed their faces.44 Others argue that there could always have been Mandalorians who did not remove their helmets and that they just never appeared on screen before. There are some other new aspects to the Mandalorians in the show, like the very ritualistic forging of armor, the way they take care of foundlings, and how they hide their numbers and skills even after the Empire is gone. Since Season 1 ended with the reveal that the Darksaber ended up in the hands of Moff Gideon, one of the officers responsible for the Great Purge, it seems likely that the show will return to what happened on Mandalore, and possibly even explore what the future might hold for the Mandalorians.45

 Hurley, “Did The Mandalorian Already Contradict A Major Star Wars Rebels Plot Point?”  “Redemption,” The Mandalorian, season 1, ep. 8.

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Bibliography “The Academy Episode Featurette.” The Clone Wars Episode Guides. Accessed August 27, 2019. https://www.starwars.com/video/the-academy-episodefeaturette. Blackman, Haden. Jango Fett: Open Seasons. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 2002. Blanton, Riley, Bethany Blanton, and Mark Hurliman. “Travissty in the EU.” Star Wars Report Podcast. July 2, 2012. “Creating Mandalore Featurette.” The Clone Wars: The Complete Season 2. Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD. Duncan, Alexina. “The Explosive Aesthetic of Sabine Wren.” Poetry in Costume (blog). April 5, 2017. https://poetryincostume.com/2017/04/05/ the-explosive-aesthetic-of-sabine-wren-2/. Fry, Jason. The Clone Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy. New York: Scholastic Inc., 2013a. ———. “Shining a Light on Shadow Conspiracy.” StarWars.com. February 4, 2013b. https://www.starwars.com/news/ shining-a-light-on-shadow-conspiracy. Harlin, Jesse. Republic Commando Soundtrack. San Francisco: Lucas Arts, 2005. Digital Download. Hidalgo, Pablo. Propaganda: A History of Persuasive Art in the Galaxy. New York: HarperCollins Design, 2016. Hurley, Laura. “Did the Mandalorian Already Contradict A Major Star Wars Rebels Plot Point?” CinemaBlend. November 2019. https://www.cinemablend.com/television/2484554/did-the-mandalorian-alreadycontradict-a-major-star-wars-rebels-plot-point. “Intrigued by Mandalorian Art.” Star Wars Maven. Accessed January 3, 2020. http://starwarsmaven.info/appreciating-mandalorian-art/. Johnston, Joe, and Nilo Rodis-Jamero. The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. Knights of the Old Republic. Developed by BioWare and Aspyr Media. LucasArts, 2003. Knox, Kelly. “What is the Darksaber?” Starwars.com. February 11, 2020. https:// www.starwars.com/news/what-is-the-darksaber. “Legacy of Mandalore Trivia Gallery.” Rebels Episode Guides. Accessed August 27, 2019. https://www.starwars.com/tv-shows/star-wars-rebels/legacy-ofmandalore-trivia-gallery. “The Mandalore Plot Featurette.” The Clone Wars Episode Guides. Accessed August 27, 2019. https://www.starwars.com/video/the-mandalore-plotepisode-featurette. McNeely, Joel. Shadows of the Empire Soundtrack. Beverly Hills: Varèse Sarabande, 1996. CD.

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Peña, Abel G. “The History of the Mandalorians.” Star Wars Insider, January 2005. Pranks, Paul, Kat Kuhl, and Beka Morgan-Black. “Dr. Ro-Book-Nik’s Mean Sabine Machine.” Never Tell Me the Pods. July 28, 2017. Podcast, MP3 audio, 00:54:35. Ratcliffe, Amy. Women of the Galaxy. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2018. Robinson, Joanna. “The First Disney+ Star Wars Series Finally Reveals Itself at D23.” Vanity Fair. August 24, 2019. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/08/star-wars-disney-plus-mandalorian-trailer-obi-wan-show. Republic Commando. Developed by LucasArts. LucasArts, 2005. “The Search Begins.” Written by David Michelinie, penciled by Gene Day, lettered by Joe Rosen, and Colored by Glynis Wein. Star Wars no. 68. New  York, Marvel Comics, February 1983. Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Seasons 1–5. Supervising Director Dave Filoni. Cartoon Network, 2008–2013. Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Season 6. Supervising Director Dave Filoni. Netflix, 2008. The Star Wars Holiday Special. Directed by Steve Binder and David Acomba. Aired November 17, 1978. CBS. Star Wars: The Mandalorian. Season 1. Executive Producer Jon Favreau. Disney+, 2019. Star Wars: Rebels. Seasons 1–4. Supervising Director Dave Filoni. Disney XD, 2014–2018. Traviss, Karen. Republic Commando: Hard Contact. New York: Del Rey, 2004. ———. Republic Commando: Triple Zero. New York: Del Rey, 2006. ———. Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice. New York: Del Rey, 2007. Veitch, Tom, and Kevin J.  Anderson. Tales of the Jedi. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 1993–1998. ———. Tales of the Jedi: The Sith War. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 1995–1996. Wahrman, Ben. “Mandalorians in Rebels—From Traviss to TCW and Back Again.” Eleven-ThirtyEight (blog). February 20, 2017. http://eleven-thirtyeight. com/2017/02/mandalorians-in-rebels-from-traviss-to-tcw-and-back-again/. ———. “Rebels Revisited: ‘You Have Stayed True to Our Ideals’—Sabine and Mandalorian Culture.” Eleventy Thirty-Eight (blog). November 7, 2016. http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/2016/11/rebels-revisited-you-havestayed-true-to-our-ideals-sabine-and-mandalorian-culture/. Wallace, Daniel. Sabine My Rebel Sketchbook. San Diego: Studio Fun International, 2015. Wendig, Chuck. Aftermath. New York: Del Rey, 2015.

CHAPTER 10

Canonical Legends: How the Expanded Universe (Selectively) Lives on TV Dominic J. Nardi

Other contributors to this volume have mentioned George Lucas, Dave Filoni, and Lucasfilm’s stable of talented writers and artists as the creative geniuses behind the animated Star Wars TV shows. Although they undoubtedly deserve much of the credit, Star Wars TV also bears the influence of countless authors and artists behind the tie-in novels, comics, video games, and other material known collectively as the Expanded Universe (EU), and later rechristened as “Legends.” The EU is no longer considered an official part of the Star Wars canon, but many of the names, story elements, and even characters in the canonical TV shows originated in content produced by Dark Horse Comics, BioWare, and other EU licensees. The extent to which noncanonical tie-in products have influenced core parts of the Star Wars megatext is perhaps unprecedented in the history of transmedia storytelling. In this chapter, I explore and quantify the influence that EU tie-in material had on the canonical animated TV shows: The Clone Wars (TCW)

D. J. Nardi (*) Department of Political Science, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1_10

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(2008–2014, 2020), Rebels (2014–2018), and Resistance (2018–2020). I begin by providing a brief overview of the Expanded Universe and its relationship to the Star Wars megatext. Next, I present my methodology for coding the 189 unique EU references in the three TV shows. I use this dataset to examine when and how the TV shows have incorporated EU material. I first discuss the types of EU content and storyworld elements that appear in the shows, breaking the results down into specific categories. I continue by explaining the role those EU references have played in each of the TV shows. Then, I discuss which EU sources the TV shows most frequently drew upon. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the prospects of EU references in future Star Wars TV content. Most of the EU references in TCW, Rebels, and Resistance consist of “easter eggs,” small background details designed to elicit recognition among fans familiar with the source material, but that otherwise have little impact on the story. The shows adapted surprisingly few EU stories wholesale, tending instead to selectively incorporate narrow storyworld elements, such as characters, concepts, or vehicles. Some of these, such as the Nightsisters of Dathomir and Grand Admiral Thrawn, end up playing a major role in the Star Wars megatext. The canon versions might differ in important ways from their EU counterparts, but—with a few exceptions— they are still recognizably influenced by the tie-in material. Ultimately, EU content primarily influences the canonical TV shows by providing worldbuilding ingredients for future stories, rather than acting as a blueprint for stories.

Expanding the Star Wars Universe The Expanded Universe began with Marvel Comics’s Star Wars first run, just months after the original Star Wars film was released in theaters. The first major EU novel, Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, came out a year later. Lucas authorized the novel in part to serve as a low-­ budget sequel should the first Star Wars movie fail at the box office.1 After Star Wars (1977) broke box office records, Lucas made The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, both of which ignored and even contradicted parts of Foster’s novel. In the early years of the franchise’s success, Lucasfilm commissioned additional novels and comics, two animated TV shows (Droids and Ewoks), and two live-action TV movies (Caravan of 1

 Freer, “The Secret History Of Star Wars.”

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Courage and Battle for Endor). Much of this material consisted of standalone stories that were at best loosely connected to each other and never referenced in the films. As Sean Guynes notes, “Star Wars developed not as a set of predetermined, interrelated convergent narratives, but as a hodgepodge storyworld built up through a series of punctuated media extensions licensed by the newly created Lucasfilm company.”2 By 1987, Marvel had stopped producing Star Wars comics and Star Wars storytelling went dormant. The rebirth of the EU and the later rapid expansion of Star Wars as a truly transmedia franchise can be traced to three licensees: West End Games (WEG), Bantam Spectra, and Dark Horse Comics. Starting in the late 1980s, WEG produced a series of Star Wars roleplaying game (RPG) sourcebooks. The company persuaded Lucasfilm to let it flesh out details of the Star Wars storyworld, which included naming many of the alien species, vehicles, and pieces of technology that appeared in the Star Wars films. However, while the sourcebooks added much to the worldbuilding, their reach was initially limited to the subset of Star Wars fans who also played RPGs. The publication of Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire novel through the science fiction publisher Bantam Spectra and Tom Veitch’s Dark Empire through Dark Horse Comics, both in 1991, showed there was still a sizeable mainstream market for Star Wars stories. Heir to the Empire reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a rare feat for a tie-in novel at the time. The success of these works led to a boom in Star Wars novels, comics, and video games. From the late 1990s until 2014, there was never a year in which fewer than ten Star Wars novels were published.3 Unlike earlier tie-in material, these newer stories were designed to be relatively consistent with each other and to form an overarching Star Wars continuity that largely continued the stories of characters from the original films. Licensees engaged in increasingly complex worldbuilding, often requiring collaboration between Lucasfilm and several different licensees. Lucasfilm advised licensees to draw upon WEG’s work and even provided authors with copies of the RPG sourcebooks.4 Several licensees were given considerable creative freedom to create original characters and to tell 2  Guynes, “Publishing the New Jedi Order: Media Industries Collaboration and the Franchise Novel,” 145. 3  Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 290. 4  Slavicsek, Defining a Galaxy, 124.

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stories set in unexplored parts of the Star Wars chronology—although Lucasfilm Licensing ultimately had to approve all content. For example, the 2003 BioWare video game Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) was set almost 4000 years before the films and featured entirely new characters, some of which like Darth Revan have since become iconic in their own right. George Lucas himself approved of the EU, but treated it as secondary to his films. In an interview, he explained, “But there’s three worlds: There’s my world that I made up. There’s the licensing world that’s the books, the comics, all that kind of stuff—the games—which is their world. And then there’s the fans’ world.”5 According to Bill Slavicsek, an editor of several West End Games RPG sourcebooks, Lucasfilm repeatedly told licensees that Lucas was not beholden to any Star Wars content they created.6 Despite this, Lucas did reportedly enjoy and commend some of the tie-in material, particularly the comics, and even incorporated EU characters into the Prequel Trilogy and TCW (discussed below).7 On several occasions, he personally provided suggestions to EU storytellers or vetoed certain ideas.8 By the late 1990s, the EU was an increasingly important avenue for fan engagement with the Star Wars franchise. Before the Prequel Trilogy, the EU was the only source of new Star Wars story content. Several prominent fan blogs and podcasts, such as Club Jade and Star Wars Beyond the Films, started by engaging primarily with the EU texts. The toy company Hasbro has produced dozens of action figures based on EU characters, many of which proved popular with collectors. Fanfiction writers have written hundreds of stories about Mara Jade and Jaina Solo, sometimes because they disagreed with the direction of the officially licensed Star Wars novels. Although relatively few Star Wars fans delved deeply into the tie-in material, an increasingly large and active segment of the fanbase saw the EU as integral to the Star Wars megatext. As more Star Wars story content was produced, it became harder for Lucasfilm to maintain internal consistency and continuity. During the  Douglas, “Exclusive: A Rare Sit-Down with Mr. George Lucas.”  Slavicsek, Defining a Galaxy, 144. 7  Lucas even gave copies of Dark Empire to Lucasfilm employees as Christmas gifts. Kogge, “Death to the Dark Side!” 42–43. 8  For example, Lucas would occasionally meet with LucasArts employees to discuss story pitches for video games and provide input. Blackman and Rector, The Art and Making of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, 46–47. 5 6

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1990s, Lucasfilm denied licensees permission to tell stories set immediately before the Original Trilogy because Lucas wanted to keep open the possibility of one day making Episodes I–III.  Despite this, the prequels still ended up contradicting parts of the EU. When it seemed that Lucas had finished telling Star Wars stories, Lucasfilm started to approve more EU content set during the Clone Wars, most notably Dark Horse Comics’s Republic line. However, Lucas was not done; in 2008, he released The Clone Wars movie in theaters and the TV show on Cartoon Network. As discussed later in this chapter, the show frequently incorporated characters or concepts from the EU, but also sometimes contradicted the EU. Some fans criticized the show for losing sight of continuity and consistency.9 Despite such concerns, the Expanded Universe seemed set to continue indefinitely until October 30, 2012, when Disney acquired Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion and announced that the company would produce Episode VII, as well as other feature films. The accompanying press release implicitly acknowledged the importance of the Expanded Universe, noting that the Star Wars megatext contained “more than 17,000 characters inhabiting several thousand planets spanning 20,000 years offers infinite inspiration and opportunities.”10 Lucasfilm continued to publish new EU content, but the prospect of films set after the Original Trilogy seemed to make contradictions with the EU inevitable. Indeed, on April 25, 2014, Lucasfilm announced that future Star Wars stories would no longer follow the EU.11 It also announced the creation of a Story Group that would oversee consistency and continuity within the Star Wars megatext.12 In its announcement, Lucasfilm said that it would continue to draw upon the EU—rechristened (and remarketed) as “Legends”—as inspiration for future stories. Pablo Hidalgo, a member of the Story Group, has explicitly stated that Lucasfilm would continue to rely on the foundational worldbuilding material created by WEG, including the planets, technologies, alien species, ships, and orders of battle.13 The new films contain numerous references to the EU and licensees continue to sell collectibles  Butler, The Star Wars Timeline Gold 56, 1–2.  Disney, “Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm.” 11  Lucasfilm, “The Legendary Star Wars Expanded Universe.” 12  Some fans have raised questions the extent to which future tie-in materials would be treated as canonical, especially given contradictions between the films and several of the novels. For example, Miller, “Disney, Galaxy’s Edge, and the End of ‘Canon’ Being Relevant in Star Wars.” 13  Slavicsek, Defining a Galaxy, 151. 9

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based on EU content. As Alex Kane notes of KotOR, “If you know what to look for, Revan’s influence is everywhere, and that includes the so-­ called ‘new canon’ established by the Disney-era Lucasfilm Story Group.”14 In the Rebels Season 2 finale, Ahsoka Tano seemed to break the fourth wall when she said, “There’s always some truth in legends.”15

Measuring EU Influences Lucasfilm has been open about the extent to which The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Resistance borrowed content from the Expanded Universe, even noting many such references in episode guides posted on the official Star Wars website. Fans regularly discuss the significance of such references and, at times, their faithfulness to the EU source material. However, such discussions have generally focused on a handful of the most prominent crossovers between canon and non-canon, potentially overlooking the role of the hundreds of EU references in the shows that form the basis of much of the worldbuilding—as well as a key part of the creative process influencing the Star Wars canon. To account for this, in this chapter, I code and quantify all known EU references in all three canon animated TV shows in order to identify broader patterns in how the EU influences the canon. Because of the extent to which the Expanded Universe was previously interconnected with the Star Wars megatext, it is important to define what I count as an EU reference. For the purposes of this chapter, the EU consists of all Star Wars storyworld material created before April 25, 2014 by official licensees of Lucasfilm or Lucasfilm subsidiaries, but not directly overseen by George Lucas (I use the terms “Expanded Universe” and “Legends” interchangeably). I count as an EU reference any plot event, character, alien species, technology, location, design aesthetic, or other story element first introduced to the Star Wars megatext through EU tie­in material. In order to avoid counting examples of coincidental similarities between EU and canon story elements, if there is any ambiguity as to the source of the inspiration I checked official Lucasfilm sources for confirmation. Importantly, I do not include in this definition concepts or ideas that originated in one of the canonical movies or TV shows that was later mentioned in an EU text. This includes instances in which a character or  Kane, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.  “Twilight of The Apprentice,” Rebels, Season 2, ep. 21.

14 15

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concept was created for one of the films, but included in tie-in material before the film’s release date. For example, Lucas created General Grievous for Revenge of the Sith, but the character first appeared in Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars micro-series a year before the film came out.16 I also do not include terms and concepts developed by Lucas as backstory for the films, but ultimately dropped from the final cut, such as Darth Bane or the Mandalorians.17 However, I do include concepts or ideas that originated in the EU, then appeared in one of the canonical movies, and subsequently appeared in the TV shows. This latter category includes the planet Coruscant, which Zahn created for Heir to the Empire and was later canonized in the 1997 Special Edition release of Return of the Jedi. For each EU reference, I attempt to determine its first appearance in the megatext. Of course, it is possible the first appearance of a particular concept is not the EU story that exposed Lucasfilm Animation writers to that concept. By the mid-2000s, some concepts had become so prevalent throughout the EU that they could have reached audiences through a variety of sources. For example, the Interdictor Cruiser first appeared in the West End Games RPG sourcebooks, but many fans—including Lucasfilm creatives—first encountered those vehicles in Heir to the Empire. As such, when discussing the first appearance of an EU concept, I do not claim that any particular appearance directly influenced Lucasfilm creators, unless stated as such by George Lucas, Dave Filoni, or other individuals involved with the animated TV shows. With this definition, I created a dataset of all EU references in The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Resistance. In addition to TCW episodes, I included the 2008 The Clone Wars movie, as well as the novel Dark Disciple by Christie Golden and Son of Dathomir comic by Jeremy Barlow, both which were based on unproduced TCW scripts.18 I used information from  “Chapter 20,” Clone Wars, Season 2, ep. 10.  Darth Bane was first mentioned in Terry Brooks’ novelization of The Phantom Menace, but Brooks has said the character came directly from his discussions with George Lucas. Source. Bane was featured in several EU novels and comics before appearing in Season 6 of The Clone Wars. The canonical design of the character does not resemble his depiction in EU sources. 18  Filoni, “Happy New Year!” and Lucas, “Forward,” xiii-xiv. In addition, Lucasfilm released unfinished story reels for TCW episodes that did not air before the show was canceled. Some of these will likely be included in the upcoming seventh season, and might differ from the story reel version, so they are not included in the dataset. Whitbrook, “Everything We Know About the Untold Stories of The Clone Wars.” 16 17

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the texts, episode guides from StarWars.com, and fan-created references such as Wookieepedia and the Star Wars Explained YouTube channel. This yielded 189 unique EU references, many of which appeared in multiple episodes and across several of the shows.19 TCW had by far the highest number of unique references (139), even accounting for the fact that the show ran for 121 episodes, compared to 65 for Rebels (75 episodes) and just 15 for Resistance (40 episodes). The raw numbers probably understate the influence of the EU because several important EU concepts, such as Asajj Ventress, appeared in multiple episodes, but were only counted as one entry each in the dataset.

Characters, Planets, and Worldbuilding Figure 10.1 shows what type of content each animated TV show borrowed from the Expanded Universe, such as alien species, characters, or Force powers. The “costume” category refers to outfit designs from the EU that were worn by characters who had already been introduced elsewhere in the canon. For example, although Darth Maul first appeared in The Phantom Menace, his cyborg appearance in Season 4 of TCW was clearly based on the 2005 Visionaries comic.20 “Organizations” refers to both independent groups like the Black Sun criminal syndicate (from Shadows of the Empire) and specialized units within larger organizations, such as the Imperial Inquisitors (from the West End Game sourcebooks). The “names” category refers to proper nouns that first appeared in the EU for story elements that had previously appeared in a canon source. This is particularly important because during the filming of the Original Trilogy Lucasfilm used informal nicknames for most of the background aliens, vehicles, and props. West End Games requested and received permission to confer more formal names (for example, “hammerhead” became “Ithorian”).21 For the Prequel Trilogy and later projects, Lucasfilm itself invented names for anything that appeared on screen.

19  There were four known EU story elements—Darth Revan, Darth Bane’s Orbalisk armor, Jungle Felucian, and Yuuzhan Vong—that were seriously considered for inclusion in TCW, but ultimately dropped. These are not included in the dataset. See Lucasfilm, “Ghosts of Mortis Episode Featurette”; Lucasfilm, “The Lost One Episode Guide”; and StarWars. com, “Untold Clone Wars Panel.” 20  Lucasfilm, “Revenge Trivia Gallery.” 21  Slavicsek, Defining a Galaxy, 77.

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Number of EU References

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

A

th er O

lie n

sp

ec ie s Ch ar ac te rs Co stu m Fo es rc La ep ng ow ua er ge s s/s m yb ol s N am O es rg an i z Lo at io ca ns tio ns /p la ne ts St or y/ pl ot Te ch no lo gy V eh ic le s

0

The Clone Wars

Rebels

Resistance

Fig. 10.1  Type of EU Content Referenced in Canon SW TV Shows. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/Legends story elements in each show associated with each category. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive

Even accounting for the fact that The Clone Wars had more episodes than Rebels and Resistance, it was significantly more likely than the other two shows to use EU material for alien species, characters, planets or locations, and groups. This is partly because the show originally aired while the EU was still part of the official Star Wars continuity. Because of Lucas’s involvement in TCW, the show could and sometimes did override EU material, but even then Lucasfilm attempted to keep the EU and TCW within the same continuity and retcon any contradictions. Indeed, in between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, Lucasfilm launched the Clone Wars multimedia project to depict the events of the Clone Wars in novels, comics, and video games. By contrast, Rebels and Resistance aired after the 2014 canon reset and were therefore under no expectation of striving to maintain consistency with the EU. In addition, TCW’s heavy reliance on the EU for worldbuilding stems from the galaxy-spanning nature of the conflict, which involved several factions and massive armies. A single episode might feature an ensemble of

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primary and supporting characters and take place on several different planets, especially in later seasons. By contrast, both Rebels and Resistance focused on a core ensemble of characters who spent much of the show on a single planet (Lothal and Castilon, respectively). The characters simply did not travel to as many planets or encounter as many alien species. Rebels did spend considerable time with Imperial and Rebel fleets, which helps explain why it incorporated so many vehicles and pieces of technology from the RPG sourcebooks. Thus, TCW simply had a higher demand for worldbuilding elements, some of which could be fulfilled by EU material. As seen in Fig. 10.1, the TV shows adapted notably few stories, events, or plot points from EU stories. The shows would sometimes adopt EU backstory for a particular character or alien race, such as the longstanding animosity between Quarren and Mon Calamari as established in the WEG sourcebooks.22 In a handful of cases, the shows actually depicted events from the comics—and only from the comics—on screen, albeit with significant alterations from the source material. For example, issue number 60 of the Republic comics includes a flashback to the death of Asajj Ventress’s master, Ky Narec, at the hands of raiders on the planet Rattatak.23 In TCW’s “Nightsisters,” Ventress experienced a flashback of essentially the same event,24 but she was much younger than she appeared in the comic and the raider who shot Narec was a Weequay. TCW’s Ventress underwent a very different character arc than the Republic version of the character, but the show nevertheless incorporated Narec’s death as part of her backstory. The next section provides a more rigorous framework for analyzing the relationship between EU story content and the canon TV shows.

Adapting Story Elements, Not Stories The number of EU references in the TV shows does not necessarily indicate the impact those references have had on the Star Wars canon. Some references were simply easter eggs in the background of an episode noticed by only the most observant fans, whereas others introduced important characters or events that fundamentally changed the direction of the Star Wars megatext. In this section, I attempt to understand why and how EU  Slavicsek, Defining a Galaxy, 82–84.  Blackman, Republic 60, 12. 24  “Nightsisters,” The Clone Wars, Season 3, ep. 12. 22 23

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material is incorporated. To do so, I propose an analytical framework that groups transmedia adaptations as either: (1) a direct adaptation; (2) an important influence; (3) an easter egg; or (4) a loose inspiration. The results from the data are plotted in Fig. 10.2. A “direct adaptation” occurs when a story in one medium essentially retells a story from another medium while preserving the core of the characters, plot, and themes. Any story elements in a direct adaptation serve the same function that they did in the original source material. As with any adaptation, there will be differences between the two stories, sometimes because of the differing natures of the media, and other times because the creators involved take artistic license with the source material. Only ten of the story elements in the dataset were part of a direct adaptation of an EU story. Surprisingly, the only instance in which any of the canon TV shows adapted a story wholesale from the EU is TCW Season 4’s “Slaves of the Republic” arc, in which Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka Tano confront the

70

Number of EU References

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Direct Adaptation

Important Influence The Clone Wars

Easter Eggs Rebels

Loose Inspiration

Resistance

Fig. 10.2  How Canon SW TV Shows Adapt EU Content. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/Legends story elements in each show by the role played in the story. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive

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Zygerrian slave empire.25 The TCW episodes faithfully followed the major plot beats from the Slaves of the Republic comic, used the same characters, kept the design choices for the Zygerrian homeworld, and even occasionally used the same lines of dialogue and framing for key shots (most notably Anakin’s two-fingered salute before the slave auction battle). The show did change the story in a few ways, most notably by removing Asajj Ventress because by that point she had already abandoned the Separatists (the comic was published before TCW Season 3 aired). Story elements from the Slaves of the Republic comic account for nearly all ten of the direct adaptations (the only other two are from Ky Narec’s death scene). Moreover, the circumstances behind the “Slaves of the Republic” arc were unique in that the author of that comic, Henry Gilroy, concurrently worked as a writer for TCW (and cowrote the episodes). An “important influence” refers to plot events, character arcs, concepts, or designs that originated in the EU and had a significant effect on the canon, but differ substantially from the original EU source. This often involves taking ideas from one era in the EU chronology and using them in a different era in the canon chronology (see next section). Unlike direct adaptations, which imply at least partial incorporation of the original EU source story, important influences do not necessarily canonize the original story material. This allows storytellers to pick only those EU story elements they find useful, while still sparking recognition among audience members and fans familiar with the EU source material. Grand Admiral Thrawn, originally from the Heir to the Empire trilogy, is perhaps the best-known example of an important EU influence in the canonical TV shows. Rebels featured Thrawn as the primary antagonist during its latter two seasons, but notably did not adapt any of the EU stories featuring Thrawn. In fact, in Legends, Thrawn had such little direct contact with the Rebellion that the New Republic leadership knew nothing about him when he reemerged five years after the Battle of Endor. The use of Thrawn in Rebels contradicts Thrawn’s story arc in the EU. Nevertheless, Thrawn’s key character traits—his deductive skills, cool demeanor, and ability to analyze a culture through its artwork—remained

25  “Kidnapped,” “Slaves of the Republic,” and Escape from Kadavo,” The Clone Wars, Season 4, ep. 11–13.

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largely intact. The show clearly tried to preserve and even build upon much of what Expanded Universe fans had enjoyed about the character.26 Unlike the previous two categories, “easter eggs” from EU sources do not substantially affect the canonical story and are typically only briefly glimpsed or mentioned in an episode. Easter eggs can elicit recognition in viewers familiar with the EU, but might just as easily be overlooked, especially when from an obscure EU source. Viewers unfamiliar with the EU might not even realize that the easter egg had any significance beyond its immediate role in the story. Despite their common use as background filler, EU easter eggs nonetheless play a critical role in Star Wars worldbuilding; writers for the Star Wars TV shows will often exploit EU material for planet names, alien species, vehicle designs, and other story elements rather than reinventing the worldbuilding. Easter eggs are the most common way in which EU content is referenced in the canonical TV shows; more than half of all EU references (88 out of 189) are easter eggs, mostly in the form of worldbuilding details. Finally, in a few instances, EU content has served as the basis of “loose inspiration” for story elements or designs in the TV shows. Often, the source of inspiration is not immediately recognizable. Unlike the previous categories, loose inspirations seldom elicit recognition from viewers, even those familiar with the original EU source. Rather, they function as creative shortcuts for storytellers in the Star Wars franchise to develop new ideas while acknowledging the broad roots of the transmedia franchise’s creative history. For example, according to StarWars.com, the design of the ore crawler in Season 4 of Rebels was inspired by the World Devastators in the Dark Empire comics.27 The similarities between the two vehicles are superficial; the ore crawler was a mining vessel, whereas the World Devastators were superweapons. Nevertheless, an EU design shaped canon content, even if indirectly. Of all the EU references in the dataset, only eight serve as loose inspirations. Given the plethora of EU content, this is surprisingly low. One possible explanation is that identifying loose inspirations is simply more 26  Complicating Thrawn’s return, the Story Group invited Timothy Zahn to write novels in the current canon about Thrawn. The novels treat the canon version of Thrawn as largely the same character as the EU version. The first chapter of the novel Thrawn even retells the EU short story “Mist Encounter,” which had served as an origin story for the character. However, Zahn’s subsequent novels wrote Thrawn into the Clone Wars era, which never happened in the EU. 27  Lucasfilm, “Crawler Commanders Trivia Gallery.”

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difficult because they differ so significantly from their EU sources—unless explicitly mentioned on StarWars.com or interviews with the creative teams behind the shows. In some cases, fans have speculated about a relationship between EU and canon content, only for Lucasfilm to deny any direct connection regardless of what might seem like obvious similarities to fans. For example, when Lucasfilm revealed the design for the Rebels character Kanan Jarrus, many fans compared him to Rahm Kota from the video game The Force Unleashed.28 The similarities appeared even less coincidental when—like Kota—Jarrus was blinded by a Dark Side villain at the end of Season 2. However, Pablo Hidalgo of the Lucasfilm Story Group denied a direct connection, stating that instead both Kota and Jarrus were inspired by  Zatoichi, a blind swordsman  from a popular Japanese film and TV franchise.29

EU References by Media The Star Wars animated TV shows are truly transmedia phenomena, drawing upon material from a variety of Star Wars media, including comics, novels, video games, RPG sourcebooks, and even licensed merchandise. In Fig. 10.3, I break down the source of EU references in each show by type of medium. The results partly validate Slavicsek’s claim that while “George Lucas created three movies […] West End Games built the Star Wars universe.”30 The Clone Wars and Rebels each  contain at least 25 unique references to concepts or ideas that originated in the WEG RPG sourcebooks. Most of these are worldbuilding details, such as the names of alien species or planets, mentioned briefly in an episode, although a few have a significant impact on the story. Proportionately, Rebels borrows from the sourcebooks at a much higher rate than either TCW or Resistance, likely because it was set close to or during the Original Trilogy era, the same era the WEG sourcebooks covered. Resistance contains few references to the RPGs, perhaps suggesting that current Lucasfilm Animation writers are not using the books as extensively for worldbuilding in the Sequel Trilogy era. TCW relied far more heavily on EU comics and TV shows than either Rebels or Resistance. As noted above, TCW aired before the 2014 canon  Keane, “‘Star Wars Rebels’ Season 2 finale Recap.”  Hidalgo, “Is Kanan now a reference to Rahm Kota?” 30  Slavicsek, Defining a Galaxy, 159. 28 29

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45

Number of EU References

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

RPG

Comic

Novel

The Clone Wars

Video TV show Game Rebels

Short Reference Star story book Tours

Resistance

Fig. 10.3  Type of EU Sources Referenced in Canon SW TV Shows. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/Legends story elements in each show from each type of medium. The data are drawn from the first appearance of each particular story element in the EU. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive

reset and so did attempt to maintain some continuity and consistency with the EU. However, that fact alone cannot explain the importance of EU comics to TCW because the show largely ignored the seven novels and two video games that were part of the Clone Wars multimedia project. Moreover, Dark Horse published several EU comic lines set during the Original and Sequel Trilogy eras, such as Dark Times and Rogue Squadron, that could have provided story material for Rebels and Resistance, but for whatever reason did not. Table 10.1 breaks down the top ten specific sources for EU references. It shows that the high numbers for EU comics and TV shows referenced in TCW stem from a deep engagement with a limited number of EU sources. Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars micro-series—the success of which convinced Lucas to launch his own animated Clone Wars show—contributed nine elements to TCW, including the design of Anakin Skywalker

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and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s costumes. The popular Republic comic line accounted for 11 of the EU comic references in TCW, while the Slaves of the Republic comic arc accounted for an additional ten. Moreover, Lucas’s fondness for visual media, particularly comics—he even incorporated Aayla Secura from Republic into Attack of the Clones—likely led to TCW drawing more on that particular medium.31 Table 10.1 also makes clear that the canonical TV shows have not drawn evenly across the Expanded Universe, but rather focused on a handful of high-profile or popular stories. Of the 42 unique story elements referenced from EU novels, 14 came from Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy.32 Part of this stems from the decision to include Thrawn in Rebels, which also led the show to draw upon story elements associated with the character, such as the names of his ship, Chimera, and bodyguard, Rukh. However, even accounting for Thrawn, the Heir to the Empire books Table 10.1  Top EU sources referenced in Canon SW TV shows Expanded Universe Source West End Games RPGs Heir to the Empire trilogy (novel) Republic (comic) Knights of the Old Republic (game) Slaves of the Republic (comic) Shadows of the Empire (game/comic) Republic Commando (game/novel) Clone Wars micro-series (TV show) Tales of the Jedi (comic) Jango Fett: Open Seasons (comic)

TCW

Rebels

Resistance

29 5 12 8 10 7 8 9 5 3

25 10 1 3 0 2 1 0 2 3

3 3 0 3 0 1 0 0 0 0

The table shows the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/Legends story elements in each show from source. The sources chosen are the ten with the most story elements in all canon animated TV shows combined. The data are drawn from the first appearance of each particular story element in the EU. Some story elements appear in multiple shows 31  Lucas was even briefly a co-owner of a comic book shop in New  York City. Rinzler, “George Lucas and Comic Books: An Early Link.” 32  This likely understates Zahn’s influence. The Heir to the Empire novels introduced the worldbuilding established in the West End Games RPG sourcebooks to a much wider audience. Lucasfilm creators have cited Zahn’s novels as a source for ideas like the Interdictor Cruiser, which originally appeared in WEG’s Imperial Sourcebook.

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clearly had a disproportionate impact compared to the hundreds of other Star Wars novels published before 2014. By contrast, there are few references to the novels published after 1999, with just two from the 19-book New Jedi Order series and none from the nearly two dozen novels set later in the chronology. The canonical TV shows referenced few story elements from the Star Wars video games, with the exception of the Knights of the Old Republic and Republic Commando. Republic Commando focused on a group of Clone soldiers, making it a natural source of easter eggs and references for TCW. KotOR is set thousands of years before the films, so the reason for its prominence in Table 10.1 is perhaps less apparent. The game’s general popularity is at least part of the reason why Lucasfilm creators have drawn upon it so heavily. While previous Star Wars video games focused on either recreating scenes from the movies or providing exciting combat experiences, KotOR was one of the first to tell a compelling original story, along with rich lore and detailed worldbuilding. For publishing purposes, the EU chronology was divided into the following eras: Before the Republic (30,000–5000 BBY); Old Republic (5000–100 BBY); Rise of the Empire (100–1 BBY); Rebellion (0–4 ABY); New Republic (5–24 ABY); New Jedi Order (24–36 ABY); Legacy (40–140 ABY); and the noncanonical Infinities. Over a third of EU references in TCW come from stories set during the Rise of the Empire era (see Fig. 10.4). This is not surprising given that this is the same era in which TCW is set. By contrast, although Rebels is also set in between Episodes III and IV—known as the Dark Times—almost half of its references to EU material first appeared during the Rebellion era, after A New Hope. Filoni publicly discussed his intent to imbue Rebels with the aesthetic and storytelling sensibility of the Original Trilogy, frequently citing concept artist Ralph McQuarrie as a major source of inspiration.33 This helps explain why the show borrowed so much from that era of the franchise, but not the complete absence of any references to EU story material also set during the Dark Times, such as The Force Unleashed video games. Even more surprising is that over a third of EU references in Rebels came from the New Republic era. As noted above, this is partly due to the effect of incorporating Thrawn into the canon (ten references came directly from Heir to the Empire). Ironically, Rebels drew far more upon the post-Return of the Jedi EU than Resistance, which is set during that  Brown, “A Long Time Ago.”

33

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60

Number of EU References

50 40 30 20 10 0

Dawn of the Old Rise of the Rebellion New New Jedi Jedi Republic Empire Republic Order The Clone Wars

Rebels

Legacy

Infinities

Resistance

Fig. 10.4  Era of EU References in Canon SW TV Shows. The histogram plots the number of unique references to Expanded Universe/Legends story elements in each show from each era of the chronology. The data are drawn from the first appearance of each particular story element in the EU. Some story elements appear in multiple shows. Categories are mutually exclusive

time period. The only story elements that Resistance uses from the New Republic era of the EU are Coruscant, the planet Rishi, and the term “New Republic” itself, all of which came from the Heir to the Empire trilogy.34 One implication of these results is that the influence of Legends on the Star Wars canon is atemporal; creators affiliated with the TV shows treat the EU as a source of ideas regardless of their place in the Star Wars chronology. To the extent that EU references in the canon function as familiar narrative signposts for fans, that sense of recognition is tied more to specific story elements and less to the EU stories from which they came. Given the vastness of the Star Wars transmedia phenomenon, the origin of many storyworld elements has  likely become blurred for creators and fans alike. 34  Some fans speculated that a background character in Resistance known only as “unidentified antiques vendor” was a Bothan based on the EU design, but Lucasfilm has not yet confirmed this. “Secrets and Holograms,” Resistance, Season 1, ep. 10.

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Overall, the results suggest that there was a powerful first-mover advantage for worldbuilding in the Star Wars megatext. The WEG sourcebooks and Heir to the Empire trilogy were published at the dawn of the Expanded Universe, while Shadows of the Empire and Tales of the Jedi were released a few years later.35 The Republic comics and Tartakovsky’s micro-series were two of the first depictions of the Clone Wars, a seminal event in the Star Wars chronology. The writers of these works had greater freedom to tell stories and define the worldbuilding for what would come afterward. Later EU authors had to conform to this earlier content. Perhaps just as important, these earlier works arrived in a less-crowded Star Wars media environment. With less overall Star Wars story content available, these earlier works were able to make a greater impression on fans and reach a wider audience, some of whom would later go on to work at Lucasfilm.

The Risks and Rewards of EU References In quantifying EU references in the Star Wars animated TV shows, this chapter shows that the Expanded Universe has had a real and significant impact on the Star Wars canon. Licensees and their creative artists, in other words, have in turn influenced the licensor and its creative teams. As promised, Lucasfilm has indeed continued to draw upon Legends, even after the 2014 canon reset. However, there are also several limits on the EU’s influence. The TV shows have primarily drawn upon EU sources to flesh out the worldbuilding in the Star Wars megatext rather than using it as a potential source for story ideas. With the exception of the Slaves of the Republic comic, the shows never attempted to directly adapt an EU story. Moreover, no other writers have made the transition Henry Gilroy did from working on EU tie-in material to one of the canon TV shows. In fact, with the exception of Timothy Zahn, most of the writers involved with the EU no longer work in the Star Wars franchise. Unless this situation changes, any decisions made about incorporating Legends material into the canon will be made by writers with no direct connection to EU stories. Future Star Wars creators will need to weigh the risks and rewards that come from relying on EU content. As noted above, the EU can be a helpful shortcut for creating story elements. EU references can also be used to 35  Although the Dark Empire comics do not make the top ten list, they would make the top 15.

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elicit a sense of recognition among fans. The focus on a few popular, high-­ profile EU sources (Table 10.1) and the lack of EU material that serves as loose inspiration (Fig. 10.2) both suggest that Star Wars creators generally incorporate EU material because of—not despite—their origins in the EU. According to Lincoln Geraghty, “Crossover characters act as catalysts for new stories and new marketing opportunities, while also functioning as familiar narrative signposts directing fans to important moments and events within the transmedia universe of Star Wars.”36 EU references function in a similar manner. Lucasfilm publicly notes even minor references to the EU in episode guides posted on StarWars.com. The introduction of high-profile EU elements into the canon, such as Thrawn, have received a full marketing blitz, including promotional videos, tie-in novels, and announcements at the annual Star Wars Celebration convention.37 However, adapting EU material could also create confusion about the canonicity of a particular EU story if it is unclear how much adapting one part of the story implicitly canonizes the rest of the story. For example, the Rebels Season 2 finale “Twilight of the Apprentice” takes place in a Sith temple on the planet Malachor. The name of the planet comes from the Knights of the Old Republic 2 video game.38 Both versions of the planet suffered a great calamity during an ancient war (Jedi versus Sith in canon; Jedi versus Mandalorians in the EU). In the Rebels episode, a female voice—only identified as “Presence” in the credits—speaks from a Sith holocron. Filoni has refused to divulge her name, but some fans have speculated that it was Darth Traya, the head of the Sith academy on Malachor V in KotOR 2. This in turn led some to proclaim—incorrectly— that Rebels had reintegrated KotOR 2 into the Star Wars canon.39 Until the canon megatext fills out its timeline—and there are unconfirmed reports of a KotOR movie in development—some fans might continue to assume that EU references incorporate more of the source material than actually intended by the writers. Likewise, incorporating EU material into the canon invites comparisons with the source material that fans might not consider flattering. If the canon version differs significantly from the EU source, any sense of  Geraghty, “Transmedia Character Building,” 128.  For example, StarWars.com Team, “Enter Thrawn.” 38  Whitbrook, “Star Wars: Rebels Offers Another Big Knights of the Old Republic Connection.” 39  For example, Comicbook Staff. “Did Star Wars Rebels.” 36 37

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recognition fans experience might spark a sense of cognitive dissonance between the two versions. In some cases, this might even spark backlash and decrease enjoyment among viewers who prefer the EU version. The most infamous example of this was Quinlan Vos, a character first introduced into Republic comics who later made a cameo in TCW and featured in the novel Dark Disciple. In the comics, Vos was a brooding, sensual character who eventually fell to the Dark Side, but was redeemed before Order 66. Vos quickly became a fan favorite, and Hasbro made several action figures based on him. However, the TCW episode “The Hunt for Ziro” depicted Vos as more comedic than his comics counterpart,40 which some fans of the Republic comics thought did the character an injustice.41 Recognition of these risks will likely play a more prominent role in future Lucasfilm decisions about incorporating EU content in the wake of the backlash to The Last Jedi. Some fans criticized the depiction of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, arguing that his becoming embittered and abandoning his friends amounted to a “betrayal” of the character.42 At least part of this reaction came from fans who compared Luke in the Sequel Trilogy unfavorably to Luke as depicted in the post-Return of the Jedi EU novels. Developing original stories with new characters, while keeping EU references confined to easter eggs and worldbuilding details, would seem less likely to risk provoking backlash or controversy. As the current Star Wars canon builds its own library of tie-in novels, comics, and games, future TV shows will have less need for EU material and will more likely draw upon canonical sources for worldbuilding and story elements.43 Unlike the Expanded Universe, which began as a hodgepodge with limited crossover events, the new canon has started off telling an interconnected story across various media. The EU only had a handful of true multimedia events, most notably Shadows of the Empire and the Clone Wars, each of which came with associated novels, comics, video games, and action figures. By contrast, multimedia events have become the norm under Disney. Each new film or TV show comes with tie-in novels and comics to provide background on key characters and expand upon  “The Hunt for Ziro,” The Clone Wars, Season 3, ep. 9.  For example, Butler, “Dark Disciple.” 42  VanDerWerff, “The “backlash” against Star Wars: The Last Jedi, explained.” 43  This started to happen during Season 2 of Resistance. According to art director Amy Beth Christenson, the design of the hyperdrive hangar seen in the series finale “Escape” was based on a similar setting in the canon video game Battlefront II. StarWars.com Team, “Bucket’s List Extra.” 40 41

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the lore. Since the canon reset, the Star Wars canon already has more than 30 novels and hundreds of comic issues—not counting adaptations of the films—as well as two video games with story content. Ultimately, the sharp decrease in EU references from TCW to Rebels to Resistance likely hints at the future of EU references in Star Wars animated TV shows, especially now that the canon no longer strives for consistency with the Expanded Universe. The Sequel Trilogy era is especially bereft of references to EU stories set after Return of the Jedi. Indeed, the newer generation of fans who entered Star Wars through the Sequel Trilogy or other content produced under Disney might not even recognize EU references. However, even if future Star Wars TV shows do not draw upon EU sources to the same extent as TCW, the shows have already inextricably linked the Expanded Universe with the canon. Much of the worldbuilding, and several major characters, in the canonical Star Wars megatext came from the numerous writers, artists, and programmers who played in George Lucas’s sandbox.44

Bibliography Barlow, Jeremy. Star Wars: Darth Maul—Son of Dathomir. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 2014. Blackman, Haden, and Brett Rector. The Art and Making of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. San Rafael: Insight Editions, 2008. Blackman, W.  Haden. Republic 60: Hate and Fear. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Comics, 2004. Brown, Ross. “A Long Time Ago: The Original Trilogy’s Influence on Star Wars Rebels.” StarWars.com, July 21, 2016. https://www.starwars.com/news/ original-trilogy-star-wars-rebels. Butler, Nathan P. The Star Wars Timeline Gold 56: Legends Clone Wars Supplement. August 2018. http://www.starwarsfanworks.com/timeline/. Butler, Nathan P. and Mark Hurliman. “Dark Disciple—SWBTF #185.” Star Wars Beyond the Films podcast, October 10, 2015. http://www.starwarsreport. com/2015/10/10/dark-disiple/.

44  I would like to acknowledge and provide my thank to Ethan Evans, who helped with compiling information for the dataset; the Star Wars Explained YouTube channel for its informative “Did You Know” series; attendees at Mythmoot VI for providing feedback on an earlier version of this chapter; and various commenters in the “True Fans of the Star Wars EU” and “Star Wars: Books/Comics Fanatics” Facebook groups, pointed out various EU references I had missed.

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Clone Wars. Seasons 1–3. Supervising director Genndy Tartakovsky. Cartoon Network, 2003–2005. The Clone Wars. Seasons 1–5. Supervising director Dave Filoni. Cartoon Network, 2008–2013. Comicbook Staff. “Did Star Wars Rebels Just Make Part of Knights of the Old Republic Canon?” ComicBook.com, September 5, 2017. https://comicbook. com/2017/01/22/did-star-wars-rebels-just-makepart-of-knights-of-the-old-republ/. Douglas, Edward. “Exclusive: A Rare Sit-Down with Mr. George Lucas.” ComingSoon.net, March 17, 2008. https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/ features/42983-exclusive-a-rare-sit-down-with-mr-george-lucas. Filoni, Dave. “Happy New Year!” Facebook, January 10, 2014. https://www. facebook.com/DaveFiloni/posts/10152103755565053. Freer, Ian, Steve O’Hagan, Olly Richards, and William Thomas. “The Secret History Of Star Wars.” Empire, May 25, 2017. https://www.empireonline. com/movies/features/secret-history-star-wars/. Geraghty, Lincoln. “Transmedia Character Building: Textual Crossovers in the Star Wars Universe.” In Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, edited by Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest, 117–128. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Golden, Christie. Dark Disciple. New York: Del Rey, 2015. Guynes, Sean. “Publishing the New Jedi Order: Media Industries Collaboration and the Franchise Novel.” In Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, edited by Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest, 143–154. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. Hidalgo, Pablo. “Is Kanan now a reference to Rahm Kota?” Twitter, March 30, 2016. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/File:Tweet_pablohidalgo_kanankotazatoichi.jpg. Kane, Alex. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Los Angeles: Boss Fight Books, 2019. Kindle. Keane, Seth. “‘Star Wars Rebels’ Season 2 finale Recap: ‘Twilight of the Apprentice’ brings us deep into the dark side.” New York Daily News, March 30, 2016. h t t p s : / / w w w. n y d a i l y n e w s . c o m / e n t e r t a i n m e n t / t v / star-wars-rebels-s2-ep-19-twilight-apprentice-article-1.2582536. Kogge, Michael. “Death to the Dark Side! The Making of Dark Empire—Part III.” Star Wars Insider, August–September 2015. Lucas, Katie. “Forward.” In Dark Disciple. New York: Del Rey, 2015. Lucasfilm Ltd. “Crawler Commanders Trivia Gallery.” Rebels Episode Guides. April 18, 2018a. https://www.starwars.com/tv-shows/episodes/twilight-ofthe-apprentice-trivia-gallery.

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Lucasfilm Ltd. “The Lost One Episode Guide.” The Clone Wars Episode Guides. April 17, 2018b. https://www.starwars.com/tv-shows/clone-wars/the-lostone-episode-guide#!/about. Lucasfilm Ltd. “Revenge Trivia Gallery.” The Clone Wars Episode Guides. July 4, 2014a. https://www.starwars.com/tv-shows/clone-wars/revenge-triviagallery. Lucasfilm Ltd. “The Legendary Star Wars Expanded Universe Turns A New Page.” April 25, 2014b. http://www.starwars.com/news/the-legendary-starwars-expanded-universe-turns-a-new-page. Lucasfilm Ltd. “Ghosts of Mortis Featurette.” The Clone Wars Episode Guides. October 25, 2011. https://www.starwars.com/video/ghosts-of-mortisepisode-featurette. Miller, Michael J. “Disney, Galaxy’s Edge, and the End of ‘Canon’ Being Relevant in Star Wars.” My Comic Relief, June 29, 2019. https://mycomicrelief.wordpress.com/2019/06/29/disney-galaxys-edge-and-theend-of-canon-being-relevant-in-star-wars/. Rebels. Seasons 1–4. Supervising directors Dave Filoni & Justin Ridge. Disney XD, 2014–2018. Resistance. Season 1. Executive producers Brandon Auman, Athena Portillo, & Justin Ridge. Disney XD, 2014–2018. Rinzler, J.W. “George Lucas and Comic Books: An Early Link.” StarWars.com, February 21, 2013. https://www.starwars.com/news/george-lucas-andcomic-books-an-early-link. Slavicsek, Bill. Defining a Galaxy: Celebrating 30 Years of Roleplaying in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Washington: Rogue Genius Games, 2018. StarWars.com Team. “Bucket’s List Extra: 5 Fun Facts from “The Escape—Part 2”—Star Wars Resistance.” StarWars.com, January 27, 2020. https://www. starwars.com/news/buckets-list-extra-the-escape-part-2-star-wars-resistance. StarWars.com Team. “Enter Thrawn: A Q&A With Timothy Zahn.” StarWars. com, July 18, 2016. https://www.starwars.com/news/qa-withtimothy-zahn. StarWars.com Team. “SWCA: The Untold Clone Wars Panel Liveblog.” StarWars. com, April 15, 2015. https://www.starwars.com/news/swca-the-untoldclone-wars-panel-liveblog. Taylor, Chris. How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. London: Head of Zeus, 2016. VanDerWerff, Emily Todd. “The “backlash” against Star Wars: The Last Jedi, explained.” Vox, December 19, 2017. https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/18/16791844/star-wars-last-jedi-backlash-controversy. The Walt Disney Company. “Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm, Ltd.” October 30, 2012. http://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-to-acquire-lucasfilm-ltd/.

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Whitbrook, James. “Everything We Know About the Untold Stories of The Clone Wars.” io9, July 30, 2018. https://io9.gizmodo.com/everything-we-knowabout-the-untold-stories-of-the-clon-1827908786. Whitbrook, James. “Star Wars: Rebels Offers Another Big Knights of the Old Republic Connection.” io9, January 23, 2017. https://io9.gizmodo.com/ star-wars-rebels-offers-another-big-knights-of-the-old-1791509397. Zahn, Timothy. Thrawn. New York, NY: Del Rey, 2017. Zahn, Timothy. “Mist Encounter.” Reprinted in Outbound Flight. New York, NY: Del Rey, 2006. Zahn, Timothy. Heir to the Empire. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1991.

Index1

A ABC, 40, 42, 55, 59, 71, 83, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130 Action figures, 2, 12–17, 19–22, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 49, 59, 77, 78, 87, 88, 90, 99, 141–143, 148, 178, 195 Advertising, 4, 7, 15, 18, 21, 23–25, 33, 37, 50, 51, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 138, 143, 150 Animation, 3, 32, 71, 112, 124, 126, 127, 130, 134, 138, 140, 141, 147 Arthur, Bea, 43, 44 B The Battle for Endor, 2, 6, 53–72, 127, 177 Baudrillard, Jean, 98, 100 Branding, 83, 131 Brezhnev, Leonid, 46

Brimley, Wilford, 65, 66 Briqualon, Noa, 65 C Caravan of Courage, 2, 54, 55, 60–66, 71, 127, 128, 176–177 Cartoon, 4, 17, 22, 48, 49, 59, 70, 103, 112, 121–135, 138–143, 145, 150 Cartoon Network, 4, 137, 141, 142, 150, 179 Cartoon series, 23, 59, 125, 131 Chukha-Trok, 63, 66 The Clone Wars, 2–6, 28, 53, 71, 84, 103, 108, 124, 133, 134, 137–150, 153, 154, 158–161, 163–167, 175, 179–181, 181n17, 183, 188, 189 Collect, 30, 31, 33, 92 Comics, 2, 20, 25, 29, 53, 58, 82, 84, 85, 125, 128, 131, 132, 139,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 D. J. Nardi, D. R. Sweet (eds.), The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52958-1

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202 

INDEX

143, 150, 154–158, 175–178, 181–184, 181n17, 186–190, 193, 195, 196 C-3P0, 126–128, 132 D Dark Empire, 177, 187 Dark Horse Comics, 175, 177, 179 Darth Vader, 20, 40, 43, 48, 57, 68, 80, 86, 88, 92, 93, 132, 139, 148, 149, 155, 164 Debord, Guy, 100 Deleuze, Gilles, 100 Dha Werda Verda, 156, 157, 161, 166 Disney, 3, 4, 23, 25, 30, 78, 80–93, 97–114, 121, 122, 127, 131, 132, 156, 170, 179, 195, 196 Dixons, 80–83 Djarin, Din, 160 Dolls, 16, 24, 32, 58, 86, 98, 104, 106, 110, 112–114 Droids, 2, 4, 17, 18, 22, 68, 121–135, 140, 149, 176 Duracell, 86, 89, 90 E Endor, 19, 20, 53–72, 104, 106, 113, 128, 133 Ewoks, 2, 4, 17, 18, 21, 22, 48, 54, 56–65, 67–69, 71, 104, 106, 107, 121–135, 140, 176 Expanded Universe (EU), 6, 84, 107, 131, 134, 155, 157, 159, 160, 175–196 F Fandom, 12, 25, 27, 30, 31, 83, 88, 92, 93, 131, 132, 155, 156, 158

Fantasy, 1, 6, 55, 56, 89, 99, 101, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 135, 138, 148 Fett, Boba, 3, 19, 27–29, 48, 126, 127, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 167 Filoni, Dave, 3, 153, 158, 162, 166, 175, 181, 191, 194 G Gender, 5, 6, 15, 19, 54, 69, 70, 87, 90, 98, 99, 101, 102, 109, 111, 112, 114, 129, 143, 167 General Motors (GM), 43, 45, 46 Genre, 6, 12, 15, 16, 18, 39, 57, 60–64, 81, 123–125, 133 Guattari, Félix, 100 H Heir to the Empire, 177, 181, 186, 190–193, 190n32 I International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, 45 J Jedi, 6, 40, 84, 87, 89, 90, 104, 107, 109, 133, 137–150, 155–158, 160–165, 171, 194 Jefferson Starship, 43 Jones, James Earl, 88 Jonestown, 48 K Kanata, Maz, 98

 INDEX 

Kenner, 5, 11–33, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47–50, 58, 59, 77, 78, 131, 149 Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR), 156, 178, 180, 191, 194 Kraft, 92 Kryze, Satine, 154, 158, 159, 161–165, 169, 171 L Labelslapping, 39 Legends, 13, 131, 132, 138, 155–157, 160, 170, 175–196 LEGO, 88, 90, 134 Leia, 15, 21, 40, 46, 47, 61, 68, 84, 86, 98–113, 155 Life Day, 43, 44, 47, 49 Lightsaber, 15, 17, 20, 28, 40, 48, 81, 86, 89, 107, 133, 138, 142–150, 158, 163 The Love Boat, 42 M Mandalore, 153–161, 164–167, 169–171 The Mandalorian, 3, 4, 6, 7, 29, 50, 53, 67, 71, 126, 127, 153–171, 181, 194 Material, 5, 12, 13, 25, 29, 30, 38, 43, 53, 56, 84, 91, 132, 142, 150, 157, 158, 175–181, 179n12, 183–189, 191, 193–195 Moebius, 48 N Nostalgia, 5, 6, 33, 66, 77–93 O Osmond, Donny and Marie, 40

203

P Padmé, 98, 100–103, 108–113, 162 Palitoy, 17, 31 Paratexts, 14, 25, 27, 38, 65, 67, 78, 114 Parody, 11, 12, 80–83, 90, 92 Princess, 6, 86, 87, 97–114 Propp, Vladimir, 99 R Rebels, 3, 4, 6, 29, 30, 53, 71, 103, 124, 134, 150, 153, 154, 159, 160, 164, 165, 167–171, 176, 180–184, 186–191, 194, 196 Resistance, 6, 53, 71, 134, 150, 176, 180–184, 188, 189, 191, 192, 192n34, 195n43, 196 Rey, 4, 84, 86, 89, 97, 98, 101–104, 107, 110–114, 150 RiffTrax, 42 R2-D2, 15, 21, 40, 43, 48, 80, 86, 89, 105, 113, 127, 128, 132 S Samurai Jack, 139–141, 144 Sanyassan Marauder, 65, 67 Sci-fi, 105, 125, 132, 133, 135 Simulacrum, 98, 101–112, 114 Snaggletooth, 28–30 The Star Wars Holiday Special, 38, 42, 44, 51, 55, 126 Super Bowl, 44, 92 Superhero, 6, 42, 137–150 T Tano, Ahsoka, 3, 103, 113, 180, 185 Target, 4, 19, 21, 24, 61, 77, 81, 86, 88–90, 92, 93, 114, 129, 134

204 

INDEX

Tartakovsky, Genndy, 2, 3, 6, 137–150, 181, 189, 193 Teek, 59, 65 Terak, 65–67, 69 Thrawn, Grand Admiral, 176, 186, 187n26, 190, 191, 194 Tie-in media, 6, 104 Tobor, 45, 47 Towani, Cindal, 61, 63 Towani, Mace, 61, 63 Toyesis, 29 Toyetic, 13, 14, 25–29, 32, 50 Toys “R” Us, 33, 86, 87, 90, 93 Transmedia, 5, 12, 25–30, 33, 38, 49, 51, 53–72, 77–93, 100, 122, 123, 125, 130, 133, 138, 154, 170, 175, 177, 185, 187, 188, 192, 194 V Ventress, Asajj, 137, 143, 146, 182, 184, 186 Video games, 25, 80, 82, 84, 121, 132, 133, 154, 156, 157, 175, 177, 178, 178n8,

183, 188, 189, 191, 194–196, 195n43 Vodafone, 81, 83, 85 Volkswagen, 92 W Walmart, 86–88, 90, 93 Warrick, Wicket W., 125 West End Games (WEG), 177–179, 181, 182, 184, 188, 190n32, 193 Wicket, 20, 61, 62, 65, 67, 106, 113, 132, 133 Williams, Raymond, 45, 78 Wren, Sabine, 103, 107, 113, 154, 159, 165–171 Y Yoda, 81, 82, 85, 86, 93, 139, 145, 161 Z Zahn, Timothy, 181, 187n26, 193 Zygerrian, 186