TRANSMEDIA

Edited by Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest

STAR WARS and the Historyof Transmedia Storytelling

Star Wars and the History of Transmedia StorytellingTransmedia: Participatory Culture andMedia Convergence
The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence
provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, witha strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The
series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptionaledited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices
surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term ‘media
convergence’ relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution,and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while‘participatory culture’ refers to the changing relationship between media
producers and their audiences.
Interdisciplinary by its very definition, the series will provide a publishingplatform for international scholars doing new and critical research in relevant
fields. While the main focus will be on contemporary media culture, theseries is also open to research that focuses on the historical forebears of digitalconvergence culture, including histories of fandom, cross- and transmedia
franchises, reception studies and audience ethnographies, and critical
approaches to the culture industry and commodity culture.
Series editors
Dan Hassler-Forest, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom
Editorial Board– Mark Bould, University of West of England, United Kingdom– Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, United States– Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California, United States– Julia Knight, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom– Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia– Roberta Pearson, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom– John Storey, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom– William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States– Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside, United States– Eckart Voigts, Braunschweig Institute of Technology, Germany

Star Wars and the History ofTransmedia Storytelling

Edited by Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book has been made possible by the Utrecht University Open Accessfund.

Cover illustration: Zachariah Scott
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
isbn
e-isbndoi
nur

978 94 6298 621 3
978 90 4853 743 3
10.5117/9789462986213
670

Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0)-vignet S. Guynes and D. Hassler-Forest/ Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam, 2018
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part ofthis book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).

Table of Contents“I Am Fluent in over Six Million Forms of Communication”

9Introduction: “What Is This Strange World We’ve Come to?”

11

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

15

A Few Notes on Terminology

A Conversation about Star Wars and the History of Transmedia
Henry Jenkins and Dan Hassler-Forest

Part I “First Steps Into A Larger World”:
Establishing the Star Wars Storyworld
1. “Thank the Maker!”

35

2. Han Leia Shot First

49

3. From Sequel to Quasi-Novelization

61

4. Another Canon, Another Time

73

5. Franchising Empire87

George Lucas, Lucasfilm, and the Legends of Transtextual
Authorship across the Star Wars FranchiseTara Lomax

Transmedia Storytelling and the National Public Radio
Dramatization of Star Wars
Jeremy W. Webster

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and the 1970s Culture of Transmedia
Contingency
Matthew Freeman

The Novelizations of the Star Wars Films
Thomas Van Parys

Parker Brothers, Atari, and the Rise of LucasArts
Stefan Hall

6. “You must feel the Force around you!”

Transmedia Play and the Death Star Trench Run in Star Wars VideoGames
Drew Morton

101

Part II “Never Tell Me the Odds!”:
Expanding the Star Wars Universe
7. Transmedia Character Building

Textual Crossovers in the Star Wars Universe
Lincoln Geraghty

117

8. The Digitizing Force of Decipher’s Star Wars Customizable Card
Game 129
Jonathan Rey Lee

9. Publishing the New Jedi Order

143

10. How Star Wars Became Museological

155

11. Adapting the Death Star into LEGO

169

12. Invoking the Holy Trilogy

187

13. Chasing Wild Space

199

Media Industries Collaboration and the Franchise Novel
Sean Guynes

Transmedia Storytelling in the Exhibition Space
Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera and Philipp Dominik Keidl

The Case of LEGO Set #10188
Mark J.P. Wolf

Star Wars in the Askewniverse
Andrew M. Butler

Narrative Outsides and World-Building Frontiers in Knights of the Old
Republic and The Old Republic
Cody Mejeur

Part III “More Powerful Than You Can Possibly
Imagine”: Consolidating the Star Wars
Franchise
14. From Transmedia Storytelling to Transmedia Experience

213

15. Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses

225

16. Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy

241

17. The Kiss Goodnight from a Galaxy Far, Far Away

253

18. Formatting Nostalgia

265

19. Fandom Edits

277Star Wars Celebration as a Crossover/Hierarchical Space
Matt Hills

Star Wars and Popular Feminism
Megen de Bruin-MoléKanan Jarrus, Outer Rim Justice, and the Legitimization of the
Obama Doctrine
Derek R. Sweet

Experiencing Star Wars as a Fan-Scholar on Disney Property
Heather Urbanski

IMAX Expansions of the Star Wars Franchise
Allison Whitney

Rogue One and the New Star Wars
Gerry Canavan

Afterword: “You’ll Find I’m Full of Surprises”
The Future of Star Wars
Will Brooker and Dan Hassler-Forest

289

Bibliography 297
About the Contributors

317

Index 321

“I Am Fluent in over Six Million Formsof Communication”
A Few Notes on Terminology
Given the notoriously baroque organization of the Star Wars franchise as afilm saga, a brand, a licensing franchise, and a transmedia storyworld, establishing a clear and minimally cluttered terminology represents a uniquechallenge. In order to provide a readable yet precise and consistent way ofreferencing the many different key Star Wars texts, we have maintained
the following editorial guidelines:– The term “Star Wars” is used (without italics) to refer to the franchise,
the brand, and/or the storyworld. To avoid unnecessary clutter, the term
has been elided from the (many!) transmedia texts that include it as partof the title, unless otherwise noted. Thus, the TV series Star Wars Rebels
is referred to simply as Rebels, and the original arcade game is cited as
Star Wars. We have used this strategy with other media franchises as
well, such as Star Trek or Harry Potter.
– The numbered saga f ilms, which, at the time of writing, run from
Episode I through (the as-yet unproduced and untitled) Episode IX, arereferenced using the film’s individual subtitle, broken down chronologically as follows: A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Returnof the Jedi (1983), The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002),
Revenge of the Sith (2005), The Force Awakens (2015), and The Last Jedi
(2017). While we have our reservations about the historical revisionism
concerning the first film, which was released as Star Wars and retitledStar Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope in 1981, these have become the titles
with which these installments are most commonly referenced, andultimately proved to be the least confusing way of indicating the film
episodes clearly in spite of this minor inaccuracy.
– The Star Wars Expanded Universe is abbreviated to EU throughout.

Introduction: “What Is This Strange
World We’ve Come to?”“Excuse me, master Luke, but what is this strange world we’ve come to?”“Beats me, 3PO. Seems like we’ve landed on some sort of … comedy-variety
show planet.” Having just burst through a dressing room wall during the cold
open of the February 29, 1980 episode of The Muppet Show, the “stars fromStar Wars” maintained their in-character performances throughout thisunusual episode, performing a comedic narrative that could—in theory,at least—be considered a legitimate part of the Star Wars canon.1 Watching
this episode almost 40 years later, one is struck, first of all, by the factthat both the Muppets and the Star Wars franchise are now owned by The
Disney Company—a realization made all the more uncanny when all thecharacters join in a climactic rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star”
to close down the show. But the episode also illustrates that the means bywhich Star Wars reached across media to draw upon audiences’ familiarity
with the franchise mostly happened in ways that were provisional, selfreflexive, and firmly located within familiar media-industrial practices.
Starting as a film that almost single-handedly transformed the American
film industry, expanding into a merchandising and branding juggernaut,and resulting in one of the world’s most profitable entertainment franchises, Star Wars has, over the past 40 years, redefined the popular media
landscape. Its multiple transformations make it not only a vivid case studyof media-industrial history, but also constitute a unique, widely shared,
and constantly evolving storyworld that has developed across every available media platform. Without exaggerating the novelty or uniqueness of afranchise and storyworld that has been so consistently disparaged for its
magpie sensibility, the sheer scale and cultural impact of Star Wars clearlysets it apart from its many precursors as well as from its multiple successors.
In part, this is again a question of scale: the first film’s blockbuster successin 1977 instantly launched an uncontrolled wave of merchandising andcross-media spin-offs that were incrementally developed into an elaborate
storyworld with its own mythology, its own aesthetic, and its own fan
culture.
The result of this decades-long negotiation between storytelling, participatory fan culture, and shifting media-industrial practices has been
1

“Shooting Gonzo into the Canon,” Star Wars Insider 55, August 7, 2001.

12 

Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

four decades of transmedia storytelling. From disavowed experiments
like 1978’s infamous Holiday Special to the lasting impact of the EU acrossnovels, games, comics, and TV series, the franchise has pioneered ways of
expanding storytelling that reach across media boundaries. Therefore, as
the current age of media conglomeration and consolidation continues tointensify, Star Wars’s transmedia history can help us understand both theopportunities and the tensions that arise when commercial entertainment
properties expand across multiple media platforms while engaging withdifferent audiences.
This book approaches the transmedia history of Star Wars as an opportunity to gain new insight from these complex interactions across media.
Understanding the franchise not as a unified and cohesive storyworld, but
as the product of constantly shifting creative, industrial, and reception
practices, the authors in this volume dissect individual moments of crisis,of discovery, and of inspiration that collectively inform the developmentof transmedia storytelling as a media-industrial practice. In other words,
these essays illustrate that “Star Wars” and “transmedia storytelling” must
be understood as complex and contradictory terms that are undergoing
constant redefinition.
In order to impose some order upon the almost overwhelmingly complicated history of the Star Wars franchise, we have identified four key
phases in its history as a transmedia phenomenon. While the chapters inthe book are not strictly chronological, as many essays discuss transmedia
phenomena that reach beyond the period in which they were first explored,
we have organized the volume into three larger sections—a trilogy, if
you will—that foreground specif ic transmedia expansions that typify
the media-industrial practices of particular eras. The book’s first section
brings together essays that are firmly grounded in the period in which
the now-classic original trilogy was produced, from 1977 to 1983. In thisinitial phase, the Star Wars mythology was laboriously created—not justthrough the films developed in those years, but especially in the many
expansions that experimented ambitiously with transmedia storytelling,such as tie-in comics, film novelizations and franchise novels, television
films and animated cartoons, a radio adaptation, and developing video
game platforms.
The second key phase occurs in the period between the first three films
and the prequel trilogy—roughly from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s—asboth fans and media industries converge in the development of the EU,
incorporating every medium but film. The third phase follows from theprequel trilogy (1999-2005) and continues until Disney’s purchase of theIntroduc tion: “What Is This Str ange World We’ve Come to?”

13

Star Wars franchise in 2012. In this period, at the same time that Star Wars
faced new branding challenges as a result of the negative reception by older
fans of the prequel films and also of George Lucas’s edits and re-edits of theoriginal trilogy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the franchise expanded
incrementally across media, intensifying its transmedia world-building
strategy through hundreds of novels, comics, games (board, card, computer,video), action figures, animated television series, and licensed adaptive
and paratextual materials, such as storybooks, LEGO sets, and museum
exhibitions. The second section tackles the second and third phases inStar Wars’s history simultaneously, since many of the world-building andfranchising strategies that have come to define Star Wars as we know it
evolved together across these periods. As the chapters in this section illustrate, the periods between the mid-1980s and 2012 not only solidified
the fan culture surrounding the franchise, but also resulted in structured
collaborative practices between media licensors, developers, and creative
personnel that rendered a complicated landscape of Star Wars media.
The fourth phase and current era begins with the franchise’s return tomainstream cultural presence in the Disney era. Chapters in the third section address franchise, fan, licensee, and broader cultural responses to the
new strategies and intensified industrial production proffered by Star Warsin the post-2012 age. The three main sections are bookended by interviews
with two renowned “aca-fans” who are known for their previous work on
world-building and transmedia storytelling: Henry Jenkins provides anintroductory reflection on the franchise’s past and Will Brooker speculates
provocatively about its transmedia future.
As tempting as it has been to dismiss Star Wars as the top-down expression of cultural and economic power, the many chapters in this bookillustrate above all that its rich history results neither from some capitalist
master plan nor from the creative genius of any one creative figure. While
it may seem as though transmedia franchises such as Star Wars have become all-powerful entertainment empires, these analyses of key moments
show how precarious, unpredictable, and strangely unstable the Star Wars
storyworld has truly been.

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling AboutThis”
A Conversation about Star Wars and the History ofTransmedia
Henry Jenkins and Dan Hassler-Forest
Dan Hassler-Forest: You’re probably one of the world’s best-known Star Trek
fans—certainly within academia. Since you have always reflected on popular
franchises from the dual perspective of the “aca-fan,” it seems most appropriate
to start with a question about your own relationship with Star Wars. What’s
your own history with this franchise?
Henry Jenkins: I grew up on Star Trek, the original series. It was a formative influence on my identity and my understanding of the world. On theother hand, I was an undergraduate when A New Hope first appeared, so
I necessarily have a different relationship to it. It took a while for Star
Wars to win me over. When I saw the first preview in the movie theaters,
I laughed it off the screen. From the highly generic and on-the-nose title
to the dorky robots, it seemed to embody everything that I thought waswrong about Hollywood’s relationship to science fiction as a genre. It justlooked laughably bad. Keep in mind though that that first trailer didn’t haveJohn Williams’s musical score, so the tone would have felt very different
for those of us seeing it for the first time. And keep in mind that it followed
trailers for Logan’s Run and Damnation Alley, which were both releasing at
the same time. What I really wanted was a new Planet of the Apes movie!
So it took me a while to even go see the movie. By that point, it had started
to build up some buzz. And when I saw the film, I fell hard. It totally excited
my imagination. It had such a strong sense of fun and adventure; its relianceon the Hero’s Journey would have been particularly resonant with me at
the time since I was undergoing a period of undergraduate infatuation withthe writings of Joseph Campbell.
I’ve gone out and seen every subsequent film on opening day with mywife. She loves to tell the story of how we first met: she arrived for her firstundergraduate film class and saw this undergraduate standing aroundtalking to anyone who would listen about the social significance of Star
Wars. She rolled her eyes, and later in that afternoon wrote a letter to her16 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

best friend talking about this “pretentious ass” she’d seen in the class who
had embodied everything that she was afraid a film class would be like. Twoyears later, by the time The Empire Strikes Back came out, this “pretentiousass” was hers, and she never ceases to remind me of her first impression.
But the story from my point of view suggests just how deeply I was, atthat point, engaging with the mythology around Star Wars. Subsequently,
my fandom of Star Wars would wax and wane. I’ll talk about some of thetwists and turns along the way, but I think that I, like many fans of mygeneration, was cranky when Star Wars became too much of a children’s
franchise, and engaged when there was material there that works at amore mature level.
DHF: So as a highly engaged witness to the Star Wars phenomenon as it took
shape, how would you place it within the larger framework of science-fiction
fandom?
HJ: In some ways, I see it as a crucial turning point for the kind of mediacentered fans, the mostly female fans that I wrote about in Textual Poachers.
Up until that point, most of fandom had been organized around Star Trek,
which had been a defining text for a generation of fans. Suddenly, you wereseeing forms of fan expression that were taking shape around Star Trek
expanded to incorporate new texts, including Star Wars. We can see this asa move from a fandom centered around individual stories to a multi-media
fandom, which would continue to expand across genres, across franchises,
to the present day.
So if we think about the texts that defined fandom over time, Star Trek
is certainly one of those, Star Wars is another, Harry Potter is another,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another, maybe Xena—these are the fandoms
that represent a profound shift in the way fandom operates. It’s easy tounderstand, then, why some Star Trek fans saw Star Wars as a threat orcompetition. Star Trek was seen as true science fiction—science fiction
about ideas, about the future, about utopian and dystopian alternatives.
Star Wars was seen as space opera, fantasy, bound up with spectacularspecial effects. But I never understood why you had to pick one over theother. Different tastes, different moments in our lives, but both representing
exciting contributions to the larger development of science fiction.
DHF: Unlike most previous fantastic storyworlds, Star Wars was, in many
ways, a transmedia experience from the very start: the comic books, thenovelizations, the arcade games, the action figures, the soundtrack albums,

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

17and so on. While all the merchandising and transmedia spin-offs clearly
contributed to the franchise’s phenomenal financial success and its cultural
impact, they also made the storyworld appear more childish, more frivolous,and more obviously commercial than other science fiction. But at the sametime, its ubiquity helped make it a gateway drug for millions of young fans who
felt inspired to look beyond Lucas’s space opera and discover a whole universeof fantastic fiction. What is your take on the way Star Wars’s commercial
success has colored its perception among fans of the genre? Is it less of a “culttext” because of its sheer scale?
HJ: There’s no question that George Lucas was a founding figure in theevolution of modern transmedia storytelling. A lot of this has to do withthe deal he cut with Twentieth Century Fox around the production of thefilm, waiving his normal fees as director in favor of a percentage of the grossfrom ancillary products. Because the ancillary products became so central
to his revenues, they also became central to his interest in the stories. This
arrangement created a strong incentive for those pieces—the comics, thetoys, the novelizations, and so forth—to be more fully incorporated into
the story system of Star Wars.
Such experiences became central to Star Wars’s commercial success, andmeant the experience of Star Wars extended off the screen and throughout
the intervals between the releases of individual films. No other sciencefiction property had so totally saturated a generation’s media experiences.
No previous science-fiction film had gained this kind of blockbuster status.
The summer blockbuster had only really been established as a category in
Hollywood through the success of Jaws (1975) just a couple of years earlier.
Star Trek: The Original Series barely survived on television, limping along
through its three seasons, and only really regained the impact it had on
the culture through reruns in syndication. As Star Wars achieves this kindof instant mass success, you could make the argument that science fiction
was no longer a marker of subcultural identity, but something that could
be a mass phenomenon.
It’s hard therefore to talk about anyone who came of age in the 1970s and1980s for whom Star Wars and subsequent science-fiction franchises weren’ta central influence on their lives. We could look toward Harry Potter as asimilar mainstream niche success, a seemingly contradictory category, but
one that seems earned in both cases. It’s a mass success because almost
everyone in the culture would have gone to see these films, or read the booksin the case of Harry Potter, as they were released; but at the same time, it’salso a niche success because there were so many subcultural practices that

18 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellinggrew up around them. So each person’s experience of these mass hits would
have had slightly different inflections and would have brought them into
contact with like-minded communities. Liking Star Wars was no longer
enough to gain fan street cred, and various forms of fan involvement could
still be seen as being too geeky. There’s not just one Star Wars but many
“Star Warses,” which is why I think the ancillary properties or transmedia
extensions become so interesting to study.
DHF: While the narratively self-contained original trilogy clearly wasn’t orga­
nized as a form of transmedia storytelling, the popularity of the early toys andvideo games gave audiences at the time unprecedented ways of engaging withthe storyworld outside the actual films. How did this affect the development of
fan culture in the early years of the franchise, and how would you describe thisconstant interaction between immersion (in the films’ spectacularly visualized
and richly detailed storyworld) and extraction (of toys, games, and other items
into audience members’ lived experience)?
HJ: There’s a tendency to underestimate how central the toys were to theStar Wars transmedia system. Academics are primed to dismiss toys as
simple commodities that are ways of exploiting the markets opened up
by individual franchises. In the case of Star Wars, as with many othercontemporary media franchises, they play a much larger role. They are
evocative objects that shape the imagination in particular ways. They areauthoring tools that grant to the purchaser the right to retell and extend
the story that they saw on the screen. The action figures suggest that there
is more going on than can be captured in an individual movie, and that thebackground details of a fictional world can be as important as the saga of thecentral protagonist. Indeed, it hints at a place where any given character’s
story could be of central interest to us, and so, in that sense, we can see theaction figures as paving the way for the kind of stand-alone films that arepart of the new Star Wars transmedia plan.
In many cases, the action figures that mattered were not those of the
big protagonists but those of secondary characters, background figures. In
some cases, characters that barely count as extras are given new emphasisand new life as they become part of the personal mythology of the fan. We
often tell the story through the example of Boba Fett, who developed afascination off-screen that far exceeded the amount of screen time grantedin the films, and paved the way for him to become a much more central
character in the prequels. But I think you could tell the same kinds of stories
around characters like Admiral Ackbar, Mon Mothma, or Hammerhead, allForeword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

19of whom gained greater resonance through their extension in playrooms
and playgrounds across the country.
I think this results in several different ways that one might read Star
Wars. One is to see Star Wars as the Skywalker saga, which is grounded in the
Hero’s Journey and which has a singular focus even as it expands outward
over time and space. But the second would be to read Star Wars as a world,in which many different parts can be explored, and in which backgrounddetails can be as rich and meaningful as anything that goes on in the livesof the protagonists. This logic of world-building, of extension, expansion,
extraction, shapes all the other elements that would emerge around theStar Wars constellation. Each new extension of the Star Wars text adds
potentially more depth or appreciation of the world depicted on screen.
I don’t know that there’s necessarily a friction between immersion andextraction. I know I originally described this as a kind of paradoxical relationship, one drawing us into the film, one drawing us out of the film. But, inthe case of Star Wars, the mastery built up through the extracted elements
can result in greater attention or a greater sense of immersion into theworld when we return to the film. Immersion involves kinds of recognition,
mastery, built-up investments in certain series’ elements that pop off thescreen, the more we know about them and the more we appreciate themfrom the world off-screen. This is a sense of making Tatooine and otherfictional spaces our own by making them the sites of our collective fantasies.
DHF: In the many years between the original trilogy and the release of theprequel films, Star Wars moved away somewhat from the cultural mainstream
and became something that was more of a “cult text,” maintaining its coreaudience of fans through the production of novels, video games, tabletop
RPGs, comics, and collectables. At the same time, the growing popularity offantastic franchises and the arrival of the internet contributed to fan culture’s
dramatic growth in that period. How do you look back at this era from themid-1980s to the late 1990s, and how would you describe Star Wars’s position
within science-fiction fandom at that time?
HJ: Around the time that The Empire Strikes Back was released, Lucas did
what is now a notorious interview with Time where he described his vision
for the possible future of the Star Wars franchise. He spoke about three trilogies as adding up to the full Star Wars saga. The first was the one initiatedby A New Hope. Once that was completed, he had announced that he wasgoing to go back and do a series of prequels that told the events surrounding
the collapse of the Jedi knights, the Clone Wars, the corruption of Anakin20 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Skywalker, and the breakdown of his relationship with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
After those were completed, and after the actors had a chance to naturally
age a bit over time, he planned to go back for a third trilogy, which suggests
what happened to these ruling families as they were forced to hold thegalaxy together.
As fans, we knew then what to expect from the prequels. They would be
Arthurian, operatic, mythic—pick the word of your choice—but shapedby Lucas’s particular reading of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory. Allof this pointed towards a more mature, darker conception of the series thatwould require strong performances to achieve the emotional intensity wewanted to see on the screen. Part of what cemented that sense of a sharedconception of the prequels was the beginnings of the internet fandom,
certainly by the 1990s. Early internet fandom was marked by sharp divides,
flame wars between different factions who had very different sets of expectations about what Star Wars, or any other media property, was supposed
to do. But over time, online fan communities tended to develop very strong
senses of consensus about a particular media franchise, and that consensus
becomes more entitled and empowered over time, so that, by the time theprequels came out, Lucas was facing a very intense and embedded sense of
fan expectations, expectations that had been building over almost 20 years
during the gap between the films.
You mention here that this fan interest is kept alive by the secondary
production by the corporation, but it has also been kept alive by fan-cultural
production. Over the 1980s and 1990s, you see the extension of the timelineof Star Wars as fan writers flesh out incidents earlier and earlier and later andlater in the life of the characters, and then move beyond them to tell the backstory of the Sith or the Jedi, often in ways that extend across centuries. Fanssort through these, debate them, some become semi-canonical in the fans’imagination, and these become central forces shaping what fans want Star
Wars to become. During the same time period, we see both the increased
visibility of fan-cultural production, and the first rounds of skirmishes with
Lucas and the other producers over what the rules of our participation aregoing to be. And so Star Wars became one of the central battlegrounds bywhich fan relations to intellectual property would take place.
DHF: The prequel films were ambitious attempts to flesh out an existing
storyworld, but they also seemed to place a very strong emphasis on aspectsof the franchise that strengthened two common negative conceptions of Star
Wars: first, that it was primarily about visual spectacle and groundbreaking
technological effects, and second, that it was targeted at children and therefore

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

21

fundamentally childish. The CG-character Jar Jar Binks became the focus offans’ criticism in relation to both these points. How did you respond to thereception of the prequel films, and how do you look back on them today?
HJ: With the release of The Phantom Menace, Lucas seemed to seek to further
expand Star Wars fandom to a new generation by doubling down on thechild-friendly elements that had been prefigured by the Ewoks. It’s not
simply Jar Jar Binks who generated such intense controversy, but focusing
the film around young Anakin Skywalker, who becomes a kind of maleequivalent of a Mary Sue, not only someone who can do anything andeverything well beyond their age, but also someone on whom the entire
future of their universe seems to come to rest. I think from the first, Lucassaw Star Wars as a children’s franchise, and in particular as a series of boys’
adventure stories aimed at young men as they came of age.
This focus on the child consumer ran smack in the face of the consensus
view of what those prequels were supposed to be. These were not the droids
we were looking for and, as a result, it would be difficult to describe theresounding cries of disappointment many of us felt when we saw The Phantom Menace for the first time; such a sense of letdown, after the high hopes
many fans had going into that film. It’s not simply the shift of focus fromadult storylines to a children’s narrative, but it’s also the lack of emotional
depth in performances. It was very clear from the beginning that these
actors with this director were never going to achieve the mythic resonancemany of us had expected from the fall of Anakin Skywalker.
The second issue was a tendency to overexplain, which is sort of thecore contradiction in transmedia storytelling. Fans often love and desirebackstory, and yet a transmedia franchise, as Geoffrey Long has pointed
out, requires negative capability. There must be gaps and holes that fans
can fill with their own imagination. So, one of those gaps had been how theForce works: many read the Force as an extension of various kinds of Eastern
spiritualism, but, with The Phantom Menace, we were suddenly given abiological explanation—the notorious midi-chlorians—that becomes soelaborate it shuts down so many of the possibilities that fans had beendeveloping through their own speculation across the decades. This is simply
one example of a number of ways in which Lucas’s imaginings—whichwere clearly also retrospective imaginings—are supposed to override fan
investment, and often result in fans having to let go of ideas that were muchricher and more fully developed in their own grassroots extensions.
We also have to factor in the re-release of the enhanced and expanded
versions of the original Star Wars trilogy. By this point, I had royally screwed22 

Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingup my own son’s chance to be of a generation that grew up with Star Wars.
My wife and I had set very few rules as parents with regards to media. One
was that we said he shouldn’t see The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1978) for
the first time with his parents in the room, and the second was that heshould see Star Wars on the big screen. We couldn’t have predicted that
more than a decade would pass before Lucas would show the films on the
big screen again, and that his generation would have the experience ofgrowing up watching them on VHS. So it was only with the release of thespecial editions that my son became a Star Wars fan.
What frustrated fans about the release of the digitally enhanced versions
was precisely this notion of the author’s privilege to rewrite his own work,and Lucas’s refusal to continue to provide access to the originals. It’s atension between author’s rights and the public’s rights: the public’s rightto access culturally resonant work, to see stories that had been a central
part of their cultural identity since childhood. Many of us felt that thiswas a kind of vandalism, something in the order of colorization, which had
been a central controversy during that period of time, and we would havedrawn comparisons with other director’s cuts, which were always released
alongside the original. So, there’s an increased sense in first-generation Star
Wars fans that something was taken away from them, that the new films
were a threat to their fannish investment.
My personal disappointment was so strong that I saw the prequel films
only once. My memories of them grow fuzzier with each passing year,
and I lost interest in most subsequent Star Wars extensions. So, for me,
it’s a period in which Star Wars simply faded from being a central text in
my canon as a fan to something I used to be interested in. I could still beoutraged by some of the further treatment of Lucas by his fans. I ended up
being one of the major talking heads, a voice for the prosecution, in the
documentary The People vs. George Lucas (2010), which is a long indictment
of Lucas for the kinds of offenses against fandom that I’ve just summed up.
But Star Wars itself held little appeal to me leading up to the release of The
Force Awakens.
DHF: The prequels arrived just as media corporations’ once-popular term“synergy” was beginning to go out of fashion, soon to be replaced by otherconcepts, including “media convergence” and “transmedia storytelling.” So,in ways that were different from the earlier trilogy, Lucasfilm, LucasArts, andmany of their licensees developed elaborate transmedia extensions that filled
in some of the gaps between the films. How important do you think this phaseof the Star Wars franchise was for the development of transmedia storytelling

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

23

forms in the early 21st century? And what do you think were some of the mostinteresting shapes it took?
HJ: The animated series The Clone Wars and games such as Knights of the
Old Republic and Galaxies were very important for shaping the next phaseof Star Wars transmedia extension. These narratives would have been
especially important for a generation of fans who had come of age withthe prequels, who were looking for more sophisticated versions of the Star
Wars stories, a more elaborate mythology, a more fully built-up world, andmore interesting plays with the timeline of the story. All of these are classic
functions of transmedia extensions.
I think there’s a missing chapter in the story that begins slightly earlier
with the strategies that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg developedaround the Indiana Jones franchise. It’s largely forgotten today, but the
television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1993) was a serioustransmedia extension of that franchise, and one that carefully negotiatedbetween the interests of children, young adults, and adults. Beginning with
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), we got a glimpse of young Indiana
Jones that was built into the film itself. The TV show then went back andtold stories of the character at various ages. Each story introduced a different
chapter in world history, each included cameos by historical figures but
also recurring characters that helped us to build up a sense of a larger
mythology around the Indiana Jones storyworld. The focus on different agesof the character meant that different segments of the audience could findthemselves and their interests within this larger transmedia extension. Thisis so different from the kind of early experiments in transmedia extension
surrounding Star Wars, which were almost always targeted at children,whether we’re talking about the Holiday Special or the Ewoks Saturday
morning cartoon series, which suggests perhaps the difference in the ways
in which Lucas thought about the fan bases for the two franchises.
DHF: You have written extensively about fans’ complex negotiation (and contestation) of Lucasfilm’s claims to intellectual ownership of the storyworld. One
well-known chapter in your book Convergence Culture memorably describes
the production company’s various responses to fans’ own creative storyworldextensions and transformations, shifting from a generally “prohibitionist”
position to one that has been at times more “collaborationist.” How do you
think these developments in the industry’s responses to fandom have affecteda more general change in the way fans are perceived and treated by powerfulcorporate IP owners?

24 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

HJ: By the time The Phantom Menace was released, a strong tradition ofamateur Star Wars fan filmmakers had taken root. Around that time, you
could find hundreds of amateur Star Wars films, often assembled on web
pages celebrating fan contributions to the saga. Some of those films wereattempts to replicate Star Wars’s digital effects, using the resources of homecomputers; others parodied Star Wars and expressed, in various ways, fandissatisfactions or simply playful irreverence towards beloved characters.
Some of this might be understood as the working-through of the transition
from childhood to adulthood, as might be expressed by the large numberof fan films that bashed, abused, slaughtered, or kicked Jar Jar Binks in thegroin, who came to stand for the childish elements in the new Star Wars
franchise.
One set of those films celebrates fan mastery, the sense that, with thegrowth of home computing, fans now had access to the tools by which
they could create works that would stand alongside more professional
Hollywood productions. Others made a virtue of limited resources, a kindof grassroots equivalent of what was dubbed “imperfect cinema” when
we’re talking about Third World film. Star Wars and Lucas got a lot of credit
during this period of time for their celebration of these fan filmmakers,
running competitions online and, in some cases, recruiting the best of the
fan filmmakers to work on one or another of the transmedia extensions of
the Star Wars franchise. Looked at more closely, though, they were carefully
policing the activities of the fan community, embracing those forms of fancreativity, such as parody, which enjoyed the greatest protection under
US copyright law, and trying to shut down those forms that would have
involved a much deeper degree of fan creativity.
Parody certainly has always been popular with male fans, and malefans produced the bulk of these amateur Star Wars films, at least the ones
visible through the official competitions. Some have argued that male fan
preference for parody suggests an attempt to downplay their emotional investment in the media properties, to hold it at arm’s length, to demonstrate
their emotional superiority over the media that fuels their creative response.
But these fan parodies also took shape precisely because it was a legallypermitted space in which fan filmmakers could work. If we look carefully,
though, the rules of the Star Wars fan competition rejected other emerging
forms of fan media production, which might make their own claims on
the character or narrative development, something like the ’shipping thatemerges from female-centered fandom, and in particular the kinds of re-use
of found footage and the exploration of the emotional lives of charactersthat characterizes vidding as a particularly female response to Star Wars.

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

25Here’s Jim Ward, a vice-president of marketing for Lucasfilm, talking to
the New York Times in 2002: “We’ve been very clear all along on where we
draw the line. We love our fans, we want them to have fun, but if in factsomeone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in
the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating
the story the way it is.” So there’s a sense that Lucas’s own creativity was tobe celebrated and that fan creativity had to be shut down when it seemed
to offer an alternative path forward for the franchise.
Star Wars seems particularly precarious to a new round of policing ofintellectual property, because Disney as a studio has historically been highly
hostile to any vision of a more open or transformative use of their materials, to the point that they have notoriously sued daycare centers that put
pictures of Mickey Mouse on the wall. I know from my own dealings with
Disney that the company is in transition, that there are many within thecompany, especially tied to Marvel and Star Wars, who want to see a moregenerous and open policy towards transformative production, but the fanpolicies have not been fully resolved. This is troubling when we consider
the sheer range of cult media franchises that Disney now controls, between
Pixar films, Disney originals, the Star Wars films, the Marvel films, andthe Muppet movies, Disney now owns and controls an incredible chunk of
the fantasy life of people all over the planet. And so, if they develop moreprohibitionist policies, it’s likely to have a chilling effect on fan creativity
across the board.
DHF: Speaking of Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, we’ve seen two remarkablechanges since the Star Wars franchise has entered a new phase in its history:
firstly, George Lucas is no longer attached to the franchise as its sole “authorgod” figure, and second, we are seeing a lot more diversity in terms of the films’
representation of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Do you think the changes in
the makeup of the new films’ cast reflect a changing perspective on fandom,or on science-fiction audiences more widely? Why do you think Star Wars was
associated for so long with fandom that was strictly white and strictly male? Is
it mostly a question of the films’ own representation of gender and ethnicity?
HJ: Frankly, Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars franchise and the news
that George Lucas was giving up control over the saga was the best setof developments one could possibly have imagined. Suddenly, Star Wars
seemed full of possibility again, in part because it was freeing itself fromthe increasingly embattled relationship between George Lucas—a cranky
old white guy—and his more diverse fan base. As became clear with the26 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingprequels, Lucas had a particularly narrow conception of Star Wars’s audience that reflected his own white, male worldview, and he drew on a setof genre conventions, largely without reflection, that dated back to thelate-nineteenth/early-twentieth century, and which smacked of the cultural
logic of colonialism. Lucas had been clear all along that his desire to makeStar Wars was a desire to keep alive the traditions of the movie serials
from the 1930s and 1940s, but it seems that he was unable to separate thelarger-than-life adventure elements from the exoticization of various races
around the world and the kinds of racist depictions of non-white populations
that had fueled film series like Fu Manchu and Tarzan.
The new Star Wars films reflect a fundamental shift in that conceptionof the audience. For once, Star Wars is ahead of, rather than behind, thecurve, in terms of the developments demographically in who is going to themovies in the 21st century. Both of the Star Wars films released so far havestrong female protagonists cut from the models developed by YA fiction,
especially The Hunger Games. Katniss Everdeen could easily have been a
prototype for Rey or Jyn Erso. These characters represent a reimagining of
the Hero’s Journey, no longer about a young man’s move into adulthood butnow, increasingly, about a young woman empowered and forcing her way
into acceptance by a world that still remains somewhat skeptical of female
accomplishments. This seems to value the contributions that female fanshave made to Star Wars from the very beginning.
Secondly, the new Star Wars shows a recognition of the growing demographic diversity in the United States. Over the last couple of decades,
we’ve seen a shift away from a white majority toward a minority-majority
population, and therefore an increased pressure at the box office for representations that speak to Latino and African-American viewers, as well
as Arab-American and Asian-American viewers. Hollywood is increasingly
encountering this diversity, when it takes its stars and directors on theroad to San Diego for Comic-Con. Comic-Con is noteworthy for the highnumber of female attendees and the visibility of people of color, and there
has been a growing number of panels at Comic-Con that become spaces
where fans articulate the value they place on diversity and inclusion in
genre entertainment. So, in some ways, Comic-Con puts pressure on theentertainment system to provide a different kind of story, a different set ofcharacters that we might not otherwise have seen.
Finally, the third pressure here is the recognition that Star Wars has
a global market. We see it in the kind of transnational casting of Rogue
One in particular, but a simple flip on the internet shows the ways thatcountries around the world are not only embracing Star Wars but pulling

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

27

it towards their own cultural practices. So, in Malaysia and Indonesia,
you’ll find shadow puppet performances of the Star Wars films; in Russia,
it’s nesting dolls; in Mexico and much of Latin America, it’s piñatas; inBrazil, it’s sand sculpture; and, in the Arab world, it’s forms of cosplay thatincorporate the hijab into the performance of Princess Leia and the othercharacters. All of this suggests the world wants to participate in Star Wars,
and wants to remake it in its own image, and I think we’re seeing Hollywood,
which increasingly relies on global revenue, becoming more open to theinclusion of characters that represent key markets in the contemporary
entertainment system.
All of this creates multiple points of identification within the Star Wars
text. Both of the recent films are, in many ways, ensemble stories, no longer
simply bound up with the Luke and Anakin Skywalker saga but expanding
outward and building on the rich world-building that has shaped Star Warsfrom the very beginning. The portrayal of these characters of color andthese female characters are full of contradictions, not the least of which
has been the failure of the Disney marketing wing to fully incorporate themin its strategies.
DHF: Exactly! This reminds me of how other key industries, like toy companies
and fashion designers, have been slow on the uptake, still producing Star Wars
figures as a “boys only” genre. When The Force Awakens was released, manyfans were disappointed about the extent to which toys and other merchandising were focused on the male characters, while the movie itself had a female
hero!
HJ: I think Disney’s failure to produce the Rey toys may reflect something of
their own limited understanding of what Star Wars brought to the company.
I know when Disney first started acquiring Star Wars and Marvel Studios,many people said that Disney had cornered the market for “princesses,” andthat it was looking towards these other franchises to provide them with“princes.” That’s a very gendered understanding of the market, and one that
doesn’t necessarily reflect where the current generation of consumers are,where we’ve seen more women and girls embrace superheroes and space
opera, and it doesn’t reflect the direction taken by more recent Disney films
in which women are being given incrementally more active and heroic roles.
During this period of transition, the news media has been preoccupied
with the narrative of white male backlash, especially the complaints about
having a black stormtrooper in The Force Awakens. The news coverage ofwhite male backlash serves the interests of producers, because it allows

28 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingthem to go slow for fear of alienating the core market segment. But if you
look beyond the backlash, we see many signs that fans are actually impatient with the slow process that is being made, in ways that media accounts
simply don’t document. We can look at the phenomenon of race bendingin fan art and fan fiction; we can look at race casting, where fans try to
identify what actors of color might play the leads in various popular genre
franchises; we might see it in terms of competitions run by fan fiction and
fan art sites, which encourage people to develop the secondary characters,
particularly characters of color, in new ways.
Certainly, the fan conversations about these diverse characters are
sometimes problematic. Many fans of color complain that white fan fiction
writers map essentialist narratives onto the bodies of characters of color.
More troubling still is that, even with the presence of resources to support
a more diverse storytelling, fans, in some cases, are backing away fromwriting the characters of color. The fan podcast Fansplaining recently ran
an episode flagging that the Kylo Ren/General Hux pairing had become
the dominant one for many fan fiction writers, displacing the more raciallydiverse pairing of Finn and Poe. Here, we heard fans of color and white fansdebate what this displacement might have to tell us about the persistence ofvarious forms of racism within fandom. This is an important conversation
about race in contemporary society, one that has far more at stake thanwhite boys pissing and moaning about black stormtroopers. But so far, thesedebates have gained little attention from mass media and do not seem tobe part of the dominant conversation about Star Wars’s turn toward a morediverse casting.
DHF: Star Wars was huge from the moment it opened in 1977. But until recently,
it was also—paradoxically—one of the only entertainment franchises thatwas owned and operated more or less independently from the major Hollywood
studios. Now that it’s the property of the Disney conglomerate, it has become
another pillar within an increasingly monopolistic corporate entertainment
industry that now seems focused on fan-pleasing transmedia storyworldsthat operate as serialized narratives, as stand-alone blockbusters, and as
the “mothership” for endless transmedia extensions and offshoots. Now that
producers and marketers seem to have become so good at making fans feel
involved and included, where do you see fan culture moving from here? Now
that Star Wars movies are being made by self-described Star Wars fans, does
fan culture still embody an alternative to corporate-produced mainstream
entertainment? As much as I enjoy the stuff that’s being made, there’s also
something depressing and even a little frightening about how well theseForeword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

29

corporations know what we want and, of course, they’re glad to keep giving it
to us as long as we’re paying for it.
HJL: George Lucas may have been technically independent from the Hollywood establishment as he took control of the Star Wars franchise, but theirony was that he was running the franchise in a more autocratic and reactionary way than the media conglomerates ever would. His independence
meant that he was cut off, in some cases, from trends within Hollywood that
increasingly valued fan engagement, which were pushing studio properties
to be more responsive to the tastes and interests of their consumers. And
he was cut off from critical voices that might have questioned some of
his creative choices around the prequels and might have challenged theresidual racism they masked. Disney has adopted a more enlightened, moreprogressive, more responsive version of the franchise in its relationship tomedia audiences.
So this suggests to us that the models of resistance that come out of
Cultural Studies in the 1980s may not really be the best way to account for
why fandom matters today. For one thing, what fans historically advocatedfor has increasingly been incorporated into the core text. In the 1980s and1990s, we celebrated slash’s same-sex romances as a resistance to patriarchal
constructions of gender and sexuality. We’re now getting hints of same-sex
couples within the series proper, with many people reading Chirrut andBaze in Rogue One as an old gay couple. Slash fandom, though, was a way
of working through how to tell stories of same-sex relationships within
the inherited vocabulary of genre fiction, and what needs to happen rightnow is a working through of the nineteenth-century legacy of these genres
to embrace greater racial and ethnic diversity and new configurations ofgender and sexuality.
In that sense, fan fiction writers may be doing the work of the studios, butthey’re also doing work that matters politically, that will have a progressive
outcome. Fan fiction writers are going to create many more narratives
than will be generated by the studios themselves, all representing a rangeof different approaches that could be taken in telling the stories of thecharacters of color. Fans are going to explore the tropes and conventions
that are the residue of those earlier historical moments in the evolutionof the genre. They’re going to rethink and reimagine what constitutes thealien in the space opera tradition, for example.
We’re also seeing fans tap in to Star Wars as part of a larger trend ofyoung activists using popular culture as a shared vocabulary for socialand political change. In my own research, I’m increasingly talking about30 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingthe functions of the civic imagination and the sense that we need sharedstories in order for us to imagine what a better world looks like and towork towards its achievement. What we see when we look at Star Wars as
a resource for the civic imagination is that the series has been ideologicallyup for grabs for a long time. We could go back to Ronald Reagan’s use of Star
Wars to describe his defense system, down to Ted Cruz’s embrace of theJedi Knights to describe his own struggles against the concentrated powerof the federal government. For every fan who is outraged by the colonialist
fantasies driving Jar Jar Binks, there may be other fans for whom this is aperfect realization of their own reactionary conception of contemporarysociety.
These two forces came to a head during the last presidential campaign,
when fan activist Andrew Slack went to a Cruz rally and gave him alightsaber, which the candidate took great pleasure in waving about andacknowledging his enthusiasm for the franchise. Then the fan activist asked
him, “What kind of Senator are you? Are you Senator Palpatine or are you
Senator Organa?” asking questions about ethics, particularly ethics tied tothe corrupt campaign finance system. This became the perfect photo op,
the perfect clip to circulate on YouTube, to dramatize the ways in whichfans were using Star Wars to critique current conditions in their society.
The same group of Star Wars activists also have turned May the Fourth, Star
Wars day, into a celebration of teachers and public education, a message
not out of line with the emphasis on mentorship in the original series, but
definitely with a progressive edge at a time when the right is advocating
for school vouchers rather than supporting public education.
So we can definitely see the new Star Wars films as demonstrating ashift in the industry’s understanding of its fans, a strategy of incorporationand collaboration rather than of prohibition. We’re seeing an increased
number of research firms working around the entertainment industry who
are trying to understand, in more and more complexity, the dynamics of
fan investment in media properties and how to maximize the value of fan
appreciation. We’re seeing mass media accommodate fan culture more andmore, and we’re seeing more signs of fan service, for better or worse, within
the texts themselves. This focus on the diverse audience also reflects arecognition that transmedia allows media producers to serve multiple fanaudiences through different kinds of extensions. All of this provides reasonsfor folks focused on the structure of media industries, the monopoly powerof mass media and transnational conglomerates, to provide very cogent
critiques about what’s happening to Star Wars and other media franchises
at the current moment.

Foreword: “I Have a Bad Feeling About This”

31

But in so far as the Star Wars producers seem determined to serve fans,there is an opportunity for fans to push Hollywood toward more inclusiveand diverse forms of representation and to critique and challenge thepersistence of colonialist narratives and white supremacist narratives in
the ways their genres operate. I’ve argued for some time now that fandom isborn of a mixture of fascination and frustration. If fans did not see potential
in the original material, they wouldn’t be fans to begin with. But, if thetext fully satisfied their demands, there would be no reason to rework it
and rewrite it continually in the generative ways that we now associatewith media fandom. We do not need to see what fans produce as radicallyresistant to media narratives; we can see it as in fact actively expanding
those media narratives. We can see it as innovative on a grassroots level,
testing the waters for future versions of media franchises.

Part I“First Steps Into A Larger World”:
Establishing the Star Wars Storyworld

1.

“Thank the Maker!”
George Lucas, Lucasfilm, and the Legends of Transtextual
Authorship across the Star Wars FranchiseTara Lomax

The history of the Star Wars franchise is strongly intertwined with thecreative and industrial legacy of its creator George Lucas. Beyond establishing the Star Wars mythos, Lucas has had a transformative impact oncontemporary Hollywood entertainment through the foundation and management of his production company, Lucasfilm, which includes multiple
subsidiaries that have innovated filmmaking and cinema technologies,
such as Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, THX, LucasArts, andLucasfilm Animation. His significant role in the creative vision of each ofthese ventures demonstrates that the nature of Lucas’s authorship cannot be contained by one creative practice or role: over his career, Lucashas been director, screenwriter, story developer, producer, editor, andpost-production supervisor. This multifaceted creative influence worked
toward his “legendary” insistence on authorial control.1 As a creative andproprietary pursuit, the desire for control has often worked in tension withthe transmedial expression and reception of the Star Wars franchise acrossits long and rich history. For this reason, my objective here is to examine
the function of Lucas’s singular authorship in the context of the Star Wars
franchise’s history of transmedia storytelling. I conceptualize his presence
as transtextual authorship, in which the singular author is both in control ofand subject to the multifarious and dynamic textual relations of transmedia
storytelling.
Working in tandem with Lucas’s creative goals are the multiple creative
media, personae, and practices that constitute an expansive and longrunning transmedia franchise such as Star Wars. This includes various
directors, screenwriters, and producers, as well as practical and visual effects creators, technological innovators in sound and exhibition, corporate
owners and licensees, alongside fan creators and cultural commentators.
While this attests to the collaborative and collective potential of authorshipin transmedia storytelling, Henry Jenkins draws on Star Wars and George
1 Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas (New York: Da Capo Press,
1999), 202.

36 

Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Lucas to acknowledge that “the most successful transmedia franchises haveemerged when a single creator or creative unit maintains control.”2 Similarly,
Toby Miller recognizes that, in the production of transmedia storytelling,“intertextuality is everywhere and paratextuality a norm, even as intellectual property [IP] is constantly seeking to secure territory.”3 Transmedia
storytelling, therefore, facilitates a relationship between authorship andtextuality that is continually variable and shifting in line with industrial
priorities, such as IP and licensing. For these reasons, understanding authorship across the history of the Star Wars franchise necessitates a nuanced
view of authorship and textuality, which accounts for the dialogical relations that occur between singular authorship and creative collaborationin the context of a transmedia franchise.
In examining the relationship between Lucas’s authorship and the Star
Wars franchise’s transmediality, this chapter consolidates two distinct
critical frameworks: first, poststructuralist understandings of the text as
multiple, subjective, and decentered, and second, auteur criticism, which
has typically been concerned with the subjective control and consistentcreative vision of a singular director. This critical convergence provides
a means to address the presence of the singular author in the context ofa complex transtextual structure like transmedia storytelling. Gérard
Genette conceptualizes “transtextuality” and its various typologies, suchas para-, inter-, and metatextuality, as a textual system that addresses
the “across-ness” of textuality: that is, the “relations between texts, [and]the ways they reread and rewrite one another.”4 This view endows thetranstextual system with the subjective agency that would traditionally beafforded to the singular auteur.
Revisionist understandings of auteur criticism, however, dismiss theauteur-as-subject approach in favor of a text-as-subject perspective tosingular authorship. In the 1972 postscript to his seminal treatise on thesemiotics of auteur theory, Peter Wollen revised his earlier thoughts toaccount for the poststructuralist dynamics of textuality: he contends thatthe text “is open rather than closed; multiple rather than single; productive
rather than exhaustive. Although [a text] is produced by an individual, the2 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006), 106.
3 Toby Miller, “Foreword: Transmedia Storytelling and Free Labour,” in The Rise of Transtexts:
Challenges and Opportunities, eds. Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa (New York:
Routledge, 2016), vii.
4 Gerald Prince, foreword to Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, by Gérard Genette(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1997), ix.

“ Thank the Maker!”

37

author, it does not simply represent or express the author’s ideas, but exists
in its own right.”5 The premise of Wollen’s revision is supported by more
recent interrogations of auteurism, like Dudley Andrew’s argument that“an auteur may be surrounded by the images for which it is claimed he is
responsible, while not directing their reading.”6 Singular authorship, according to this framework, is not a super-presence that controls from above,
but a transtextual presence that is propelled into a dynamic relationshipwith multiple texts and other authors. Following this approach, Lucas’stranstextual singular authorship has functioned in dialogical relationshipwith the creative, industrial, and textual forces that have constituted theStar Wars franchise over the last four decades.

“Thank the Maker!”: Lucas as Maker
I invoke C-3PO’s rhapsodic cry “Thank the Maker!” from A New Hope toframe this chapter, because it functions as a metatextual expression thatrecognizes the congruity between droid-maker and filmmaker. In Star
Wars, the notion of the Maker is analogical to the role of creator in droid
vernacular. This association resonates with Star Wars fans, who extended
similar adulations to Lucas himself as ultimate Maker of the franchise
mythos. Moreover, in echoing the everyday idiom “thank God,” C-3PO’s
expression incidentally recalls romanticized conceptions of the author as
divine presence. This is another status previously granted to Lucas himself,
who for the first two decades in the history of Star Wars was elevated tothe position of “latter-day god”7 by fans. Both these understandings of theMaker draw on notions of authorship that privilege the vision of a single
creator. In consequence, this also places expectations on Lucas that haveoften put him at odds with Star Wars fans.
Indeed, such praise for Lucas was rescinded by many fans in 1997 with thespecial edition re-release of the original trilogy and with more intensity in1999 with the release of The Phantom Menace. The special edition, released
for the franchise’s twentieth anniversary, not only remastered the image
5 Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: Secker & Warburg; London: BFI,1972), 163.
6 Dudley Andrew, “The Unauthorized Auteur Today,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds.
Jim Collins and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 83.
7 Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, “Conclusion: Finding Myth in the History of Your Own Time,”
in Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics, eds. Matthew
Wilhelm Kapell and John Shelton Lawrence (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 283.

38 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

quality and visual effects, but it added and altered key scenes in ways thatchanged character traits and plot elements that were deemed sacred bylong-time fans. Furthermore, many found the prequel trilogy’s focus on
digital innovation and computer-generated imagery to have diverged fromthe aesthetic, technological, and thematic principles of the original trilogy.
Will Brooker explains that, for this reason, fans expressed a “harsh voiceof criticism directed personally at George Lucas as director, and a general
sense of distrust about his ability to handle the mythos.”8 This was mostclearly expressed in the documentary The People vs. George Lucas (2010),
which highlights the tensions that can result between creators and fans ofa long-running transmedia franchise. Moreover, the relationship between
Lucas and the fans has in many ways provoked, measured, and contended
with Lucas’s creative journey through authorial control, then disruption,and finally redemption.

“I don’t remember ever owning a droid”: The Peculiar Case of“George Lucas,” Property of Lucasfilm
The nature of Lucas’s authorial control is most officially and intriguingly
inscribed in his legal dealings with Twentieth Century Fox, during the initialdevelopment of what was then, in the early 1970s, titled The Star Wars. Most
accounts of Lucas’s early legal and economic negotiations with Fox refer tohis control-oriented decision to refuse an increase in his salary as writerand director in favor of retaining the rights to sequels and merchandise.9
However, a lesser-known circumstance is how Lucas secured ownershipof his IP through a legal dissociation of self. In The Making of Star Wars,
J.W. Rinzler reveals that “On January 10, 1974, Lucas signed a necessary ifsomewhat surreal legal agreement with himself, whereby Lucasfilm loaned
out ‘George Lucas’ as director to ‘The Star Wars Corporation,’ a subsidiary
formed to facilitate the upcoming budget and legal dealings with Fox.”10
This peculiar legal procedure constructs Lucas as an authorial double—asGeorge Lucas, owner of Lucasfilm, and as “George Lucas,” employee of
The Star Wars Corporation. This renders him both owner and property of

8 Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York: Continuum, 2002), 90.
9 Marcus Hearn, The Cinema of George Lucas (New York: Abrams, 2005), 81-82.
10 J.W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 15.

“ Thank the Maker!”

39

Lucasfilm, thus inscribing his authorial presence with a dialogical dynamic
between his role as creator and proprietor.
As a production company, Lucasfilm occupies a position between these
two authorial articulations: Lucas and “Lucas.” This duality correspondswith Wollen’s nominal separation of the auteur identity—distinguishing
between with and without inverted commas—in which he argues that
“Fuller or Hawks or Hitchcock, the directors, are quite separate from ‘Fuller’or ‘Hawks’ or ‘Hitchcock,’ the structures named after them.”11 Therefore,“Lucas” is a legal-industrial structure that represents Lucas’s commitment
to securing control of his IP and creative license. This legal agreement might
not have immediate transtextual substance. For Genette, however, thepractice of naming the author has paratextual significance, whereby “theauthor’s name fulfills a contractual function” between audience, reader, andtext.12 In Lucas’s case, part of what makes the legal expression of his nameso significant is that the Lucasfilm trademark simultaneously represents
multiple Lucas-oriented roles: Lucas the creator, “George Lucas” the legal
entity, and Lucasfilm the corporate brand. Jonathan Gray considers how
the author as brand becomes “an inter- or paratextual framing device,”
thereby rendering the author’s name “a paratext that manages a broader
textual system.”13 If the idiosyncrasy of this legal procedure comes out ofthe doubling of Lucas’s authorial identity, as argued above, it also relates
to the practice of attaching a nominal signature to the text because, as
Gray explains, “we can only approach texts through paratexts.”14 Therefore,
the glistening green Lucasfilm trademark 15 that precedes each Star Wars
text represents the paratextual function of Lucas’s name, marking theentry point through which one approaches the text while also serving as amediating device between author, text, and audience.

11 Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 168.
12 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 41.
13 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NewYork: New York University Press, 2010), 127.
14 Gray, Show Sold Separately, 25.
15 It should be noted that, although the Lucasfilm trademark has, until recently, been a variantof green in each Star Wars appearance, it did not glisten until it was remastered for the 1997
special edition.

40 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling“Join me and together we will rule the galaxy!”: Lucas as Vader
and the Empire of Irony
Lucas’s long-lasting aversion to the structures and conventions of the Hollywood establishment is critical to any understanding of the industrial
lore that surrounds the Star Wars franchise. Since graduating from film
school, Lucas has openly expressed distrust and cynicism towards theunchecked authority of the Hollywood studio system, especially due to theway it unjustly controlled the creative process. The experiences with his
first two studio productions, THX-1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973),“turned Lucas’s mistrust of corporate Hollywood into resentment”16 andheightened his determination to secure creative control of Star Wars. This
provoked his progression from a young experimental f ilmmaker, whovalued the communal environment of Francis Ford Coppola’s independentstudio American Zoetrope at the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s, to a
producer of blockbuster movies, who independently owned and managed
Lucasfilm from 1971 until 2012. Moreover, extending from this unrelenting
commitment to securing creative control is his tendency towards thematic
contradiction. Brooker characterizes Lucas’s autobiographical and auteurist
sensibilities as “dealing with his own conflicting desires for human community and solitude, order and creativity, discipline and play.”17 This creative
exploration of the paradoxes of humanity parallels Lucas’s progression froman independent-minded young filmmaker to a corporate Hollywood mogul.
The irony of Lucas’s movement from being against the Hollywood
establishment to reinventing the contemporary entertainment industry
has been acknowledged by Lucas himself. In the documentary Empire ofDreams, he reveals:
What I was trying to do was stay independent so I could make the movies
I wanted to make, but at the same time I was fighting the corporate
system. […] But now I’ve found myself being the head of a corporation,
so there’s a certain irony there, that I’ve become the very thing that I wastrying to avoid. Which basically is what part of Star Wars is about—that
is, Darth Vader.18

16 Hearn, The Cinema of George Lucas, 43.
17 Will Brooker, Star Wars (London: BFI Classics, 2009), 83.
18 Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy, dir. Kevin Burns (Los Angeles: Prometheus Entertainment, 2004).

“ Thank the Maker!”

41

This expresses many of the concerns that shaped Lucas’s journey as auteur, including the resistance against industrial structures and the ironyof becoming the very thing he fought against. It also highlights Lucas’s
continuing commitment to securing creative independence and control.
What is most significant about this confession is how Lucas self-reflexively
identifies with Vader, as they both must manage the consequences, implications, and resistances to their galactic creations.
Lucas’s inadvertent association with Vader has also not been lost on scholars and critics. As Karina Longworth suggests, “Lucas’s experimental filmmaking ambitions may have remained unrealized, but a more sympathetic
read suggests that for Lucas, as for Vader, this was not a choice at all: instead,he has become trapped by his own creation, a rebel whose phenomenal
success turned him, unwillingly, into an impenetrable power.”19 This notionof being trapped by his own creation expresses how the Star Wars franchisehas taken on a transtextual momentum of its own, one that unconsciously
inscribes its author into its textual system and which Lucas could neither
have predicted nor controlled. Similarly, Wollen considers how “a text can
produce spaces within meaning, within the otherwise rigid straitjacketof the message, to produce a meaning of a new kind, generated within the
text itself.”20 Privileging the subjective agency of the text, Wollen argues, istherefore essential to a revisionist approach to auteur criticism.

“I am C-3PO, Human-Cyborg Relations”: Intertextualizing C-3PO
C-3PO and his counterpart R2-D2 are the most consistent characters acrossthe Star Wars franchise, appearing in every canonical film and televisionseries to date, as well as multiple comic books, novels, and video games.
C-3PO and R2-D2 are the first characters to be introduced, driving theplot forward in the first act of A New Hope. Therefore, the two droids areimportant f igures for representing and maintaining textual cohesion
and stability (as well as humor) across the transmedia franchise. Morespecifically, as a protocol droid who is programmed for “human-cyborg
relations” and is “fluent in over six million forms of communication,” C-3PO
frequently functions as mediator between characters. As oral narrator by
the campfire in Return of the Jedi, C-3PO’s role even extends to playing thepart of storyteller, where he uses diegetic sound recordings to reenact a
19 Karina Longworth, Masters of Cinema: George Lucas (London: Phaidon Press, 2012), 96-97.
20 Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 162.

42 

Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

truncated version of the original trilogy to the Ewoks. Like Lucas’s authorial presence, therefore, C-3PO and R2-D2 are, to draw on Julia Kristeva’s
explication of intertextuality, an “inescapable link between texts.”21 Thisnot only makes C-3PO a diegetic mediator, but also an intertextual anchor
across the franchise’s multiple texts and media forms.
Intertextuality conceptualizes the relationship across and between
texts as a relational dialogism. For Kristeva, this dynamic is instrumental
in propelling the author from a position that operates and controls fromoutside of the text, to one where the author is “transformed by his having
included himself within the narrative system.”22 Wollen conveys a similar
idea when he describes the auteur as “an unconscious catalyst” of a dynamic
textual system,23 while Timothy Corrigan also considers how the auteur
becomes “absorbed as a phantom presence” within the text.24 C-3PO cantherefore be read as a presence that unwittingly mirrors some of the ways
in which Lucas exists as an “unconscious catalyst” and “phantom presence”
across the transtextual system of the Star Wars franchise. In The Phantom
Menace, the revelation that Anakin Skywalker—and therefore Vader—is
C-3PO’s Maker further affirms a connection between C-3PO and Lucas.
Indeed, when C-3PO exclaims “Thank the Maker!” in A New Hope, he inadvertently invokes both Lucas and Anakin, thus conveniently establishinga dialogism not only between author and text, but also between multiple
texts. In this way, C-3PO becomes an intertextual anchor reflecting Lucas’s
contradictory authorial presence: his consistent presence throughout the
franchise projecting coherence even as his transformations betray Lucas’s
own contested and ambiguous authorial role.

“My parts are showing!”: When the Maker Comes Undone
Across the history of the Star Wars franchise, C-3PO experiences many
instances of physical dismemberment, instability, and incompleteness,thereby illustrating how the character also functions as a phantom presence of Lucas’s contradictory role as author figure. On one hand, C-3PO
represents consistence, cohesion, and communication across the Star Wars
21 Gray, Show Sold Separately, 31.
22 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1980), 74.
23 Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 168.
24 Timothy Corrigan, “Auteurs and the New Hollywood,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon
Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 42.

“ Thank the Maker!”

43

franchise’s transmedia articulations—as an interpreter, but also as anintertextual anchor. However, on the other hand—well, the other hand,
like his other parts, has unfortunately been dismembered. I contend that
C-3PO’s dismemberment playfully expresses how Lucas’s attempt to achievecomplete authorial control has been shaped, regulated, and undermined byvarious surrounding forces, like other executives and creators, technologicallimitations, fans and commentators, and the inevitable contradictions andtransformations that arise across any author’s career.
In A New Hope, C-3PO is attacked by Tusken Raiders and his arm is shot
off. In The Empire Strikes Back his entire body is disassembled into parts.
In Return of the Jedi, his eye is gouged out by the Kowakian monkey-lizard
Salacious B. Crumb at Jabba the Hutt’s palace. Then, in the prequel The
Phantom Menace, he appears as a mechanical skeleton, his cables and gears
markedly exposed. By Attack of the Clones he has been provided with makeshift silver coverings, but finds himself on a factory conveyer belt where hishead and body are pulled apart and switched with a battle droid. Finally, atthe end of Revenge of the Sith, C-3PO’s memory is completely erased. These
constant disruptions to C-3PO’s body and mind intersect with his function
as an “unconscious catalyst” of Lucas’s unstable authorial presence. C-3PO’s
susceptibility to physical dismemberment and his ongoing need for repair
and reconditioning can be read as an inadvertent expression of Lucas’s
continuous process of authorial revision.
Of special significance in this reading of Lucas’s authorial disruption
and reconditioning is C-3PO’s stripped-down and exposed form in The
Phantom Menace, which signifies the attempt to reformulate (that is tosay, re-“make”) Lucas’s authorial presence, but also to expose its inherent
vulnerability. First, as discussed above, the revelation that Vader is C-3PO’s
Maker conveniently affirms a potential authorial connection between
Lucas and C-3PO via Anakin/Vader. Second, this revelation is accompanied
by C-3PO’s humiliation when R2-D2 teases him for being naked, thus suggesting a subtext for realizing that achieving ultimate creative control canalso make one vulnerable.25 As Longworth recognizes, “the prequels are,for better and for worse, pure Lucas. They were built so independently
that there was no one to tell him ‘no.’”26 In this way, C-3PO’s incomplete
body symbolizes how the prequel trilogy was an opportunity for Lucas to25 In making the prequel trilogy, Lucas took on the roles of director, screenwriter, editingsupervisor, and executive producer, despite his repeatedly expressed distaste for directing andwriting.
26 Longworth, Masters of Cinema, 92.

44 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingcomplete his unfinished work without restriction, because the “difference
between Star Wars and other franchises … is that Lucas cannot seem to leave
his ostensibly completed series alone.”27 However, the prequel logic throughwhich C-3PO’s “origin” is realized further characterizes Lucas’s authorial
control of the franchise as something that can never be truly completed.
When C-3PO bids farewell to Anakin in The Phantom Menace, he admits that“you are my Maker and I wish you well; however, I should prefer I were a little
more completed.” C-3PO’s incomplete body, therefore, might be thought ofas visualizing authorial anxieties about how to maintain authorship overa franchise that will perpetually remain unfinished.
While Vader never acknowledges that he is C-3PO’s Maker in the films,
the licensed comic-book series Star Wars Tales provides a “What if?” scenario with the short story aptly titled “Thank the Maker.”28 In this story, set
during the events on Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader sharesa moment with a disassembled C-3PO, decades after their last parting in
Revenge of the Sith. As Vader grasps C-3PO’s head, the reader is transported
to Vader’s childhood memory of finding discarded droid parts in Watto’s
junkyard on Tatooine. The comic book juxtaposes two panels (figure 1.1)
that are similar in framing, composition, and layout, but which present a
spatiotemporal crossover between young Anakin and Vader, both holding
C-3PO’s head in the same pose. Then, in a later panel (figure 1.2), Vader
holds C-3PO’s head up for an iconic meeting between Maker and creation.
Therefore, this story (intra)textually intervenes into the plot of The Empire
Strikes Back during the events in Cloud City, and recalls memories inspiredby The Phantom Menace that harken back to a young Anakin on Tatooine.
As a licensed comic now classified under the Legends banner,29 “Thankthe Maker” explores the relationship between Lucas’s storyworld andlicensed content. In one way, it participates in the transtextual disruptionof Lucas’s authorial presence, because it intervenes in the plot involving
C-3PO’s dismembered body. Furthermore, C-3PO is deactivated during
this encounter with Vader and therefore has no capacity to engage with his
Maker. Similarly, Lucas claims to have intentionally divorced himself from27 Longworth, Masters of Cinema, 93.
28 “Thank the Maker,” written by Ryder Windham, penciled by Killian Plunkett, lettered by
Steve Dutro, and colored by Dave McCaig, in Star Wars Tales, no. 6 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse
Comics, December 2000).
29 In 2014, all licensed Star Wars content across multiple media platforms and outside theofficial films and television series, was retroactively classified under a new continuity banner,
Star Wars Legends. This content was previously organized using the multi-tiered system of theEU.

“ Thank the Maker!”

45

Fig. 1.1: Vader recalls a memory of making C-3PO when he was a boy

Fig. 1.2: Vader and C-3PO reunite in “Thank the Maker”

licensed texts. Although he had a varied degree of involvement, he admitted,“I don’t read that stuff … That’s a different world than my world.”30 In anotherway, this comic-book story works to resolve this division through a metatextual dialogue across media and authors. Published after The Phantom
Menace, it is creatively inspired by canonical plot, imagery, and character
development as it responds to the retroactive revelation that Anakin is
C-3PO’s Maker. In this way, the integration of multiple texts—both Lucas’s
30 Ian Spelling. “New Hopes,” Starlog 337 (August 2005), 48.

46 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

own and the licensed content of the transmedia franchise—complicates
Lucas’s deliberate separation of his own world from the licensed works heperceives as ancillary.

“You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm”:
Introducing New Makers
In 2012, The Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm, its subsidiaries, and
its IP, initiating a new era for the Star Wars franchise. For Lucas, this signaled
his retirement from Star Wars and a departure from the empire he created;for Lucasfilm, this introduced a new authorial dynamic with new Makers:
including Kathleen Kennedy as president, the Lucasfilm Story Group as
development team, new directors for each film, and many diverse creativeroles across multiple media. Therefore, in the current era of the Star Wars
franchise’s transmedia history, “the auteur gives way to the team player.”31
This suggests an authorial structure that ostensibly supersedes the singularauthor role. However, a more practical critical account should recognizethat this new authorial structure still facilitates the authorial presence ofa singular auteur brand. This is demonstrated by the appointment of J.J.
Abrams as director of The Force Awakens, the first installment released under this new ownership and authorial structure, and the strategic assigningof auteur-type figures who have a background in independent filmmaking,like Gareth Edwards, Rian Johnson, and Colin Trevorrow.32
For C-3PO, this new authorial structure is represented by yet anotherphysical transformation: a new dismemberment and a red limb replacement. When C-3PO appears in The Force Awakens, he interrupts Han andLeia’s reunion and declares, “It is I, C-3PO—you probably don’t recognize me
because of the red arm.” The comically exaggerated risk of misrecognition
causes C-3PO anxiety as his function as protocol droid now extends to themediation of multiple authors: Lucas and Abrams, but also other authorial
roles held at Lucasfilm. Regarding C-3PO’s discernible red arm, Abrams
unequivocally concedes that he “wanted to mark him.”33 Anthony Daniels,
31 Adam Rogers, “You Won’t Live to See the Final Star Wars Movie,” Wired, December 2015,
accessed February 28, 2017, http://www.wired.com/2015/11/building-the-star-wars-universe/.
32 Directors of Rogue One (2016) and the forthcoming movies The Last Jedi (2017) and the as-yet
untitled ninth “saga” film (2019), respectively.
33 Qtd. in Laurent Bouzereau, Secrets of The Force Awakens: A Cinematic Journey, disc 3, Star
Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens, Blu-Ray, directed by J.J. Abrams (San Francisco, CA:
Lucasfilm, 2016).

“ Thank the Maker!”

47

who has performed the role of C-3PO in every episode to date, also reveals
that “the one thing that J.J. and I argued about was the fact that … C-3PO
doesn’t like the red arm!”34 Nonetheless, Abrams unwaveringly insistedon this new physical transformation, which emphasizes his influence as a
new Maker in the Star Wars franchise by explicitly harnessing C-3PO as acatalyst for authorial presence.
The Force Awakens never explains C-3PO’s obtrusive limb replacement,
but the Marvel Comics one-shot “The Phantom Limb”35 reveals how C-3PO
loses it on a mission for the Resistance, adopting the red replacement as atribute to a fallen droid comrade. In usual C-3PO fashion, however, he worries that the red limb will tarnish his personal style: “this arm offends myaesthetic sensibilities.”36 Continuing the interpretation of C-3PO developedin this chapter, this offense to his aesthetic sensibilities can be construed
as a metatextual disapproval of being continually harnessed as a symbolic
representation of transtextual authorship.

“You are my Maker and I wish you well”: Recognizing the
Legend(s)As Lucasfilm continues to shape the future of its transmedia franchise,
Lucas has once again returned to his long-held intention to continue theexperimental work of his earlier filmmaking days,37 before the Star Wars
franchise and the entertainment empire he inadvertently created. Nonetheless, Lucas’s authorial significance remains in perpetual dialogue withthe shifting creative contributions across the past, present, and future of
the Star War franchise. While team-structured collaborative authorshipis an important aspect of transmedia storytelling, this does not preclude
the potential to identify a transtextual presence of singular authorship.
Therefore, the expansive transmedia history of the Star Wars franchisedemonstrates the need and potential to conceive of transmedia texts not
34 George Simpson, “Star Wars: Anthony Daniels Disliked C-3PO’s New Red Arm,” Screenrant,
March 20, 2016, accessed February 26, 2016, http://screenrant.com/star-wars-force-awakens​-c3po-arm/.
35 James Robinson, et al., Star Wars Special: C-3PO 1: The Phantom Limb, Marvel Comics, April
2016.
36 Robinson, et al., Phantom Limb, 30.
37 Steven Zeitchik, “Tribeca 2015: George Lucas Just Wants to Make Experimental Films,” Los
Angeles Times, April 18, 2015, accessed April 4, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/
movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-george-lucas-tribeca-star-wars-celebration-20150418-story.html.

48 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingas either entirely auteur-driven or team-based, but as a site of dialogicalrelations between singular notions of authorship and collaborative creative
practices. And so, despite the transmedial shifts and mutations that takeplace across Star Wars, Lucas will forever be “imagined to stand at thethreshold between creativity, innovation, wonder, and magic, and us”38 as
multiple authors continue to shape the Star Wars franchise.

38 Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray, “Introduction: The Problem of Media Authorship,”in A Companion to Media Authorship, ed. Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 3.

2.

Han Leia Shot First
Transmedia Storytelling and the National Public Radio
Dramatization of Star Wars
Jeremy W. Webster

Shortly after the premiere of A New Hope, Richard Toscan, head of thetheater department at the University of Southern California, conceived ofproducing the film as a radio play. George Lucas liked the idea of supporting
his alma mater through such a project, especially “[a]t a time when Star Wars
tie-in rights were like a license to print money, and various commercial
broadcast and recording interests were pursuing radio licensing.”1 In March
1979, he announced a deal that gave KUSC-FM, USC’s public radio affiliate,
the rights to produce a radio adaptation for $1. Star Wars: The Radio Drama(TRD) premiered on March 2, 1981 to massive audiences and immediately“became NPR’s most popular dramatic series.”2
In spite of this initial popularity, TRD is now familiar to only the mostardent of fans, has largely been neglected by scholars, and has since been
overwritten in the canon by the Lucasfilm Story Group’s new continuity
system. Radio more generally has all but disappeared as a platform for transmedia storytelling, replaced by digital media such as games and audiobooks.
Matthew Freeman argues “that it is the strategies behind the production oftransmedia storytelling—rather than the specifically converged structuresof contemporary media industries and technologies—that ultimately holdtransmedia story worlds together and point their audiences across media.”3
This chapter takes Freeman’s argument as its starting point and explicatesthe aural strategies of TRD to suggest that this radio play successfully builds
its world by drawing upon the familiar sounds of A New Hope while simultaneously exciting its listeners’ imaginations with new sounds centered on theprocess of character-building. This can best be demonstrated by focusing
on the radio play’s depiction of Princess Leia Organa within the context ofthe larger Star Wars transmedia franchise as it developed in the late 1970s.
1 Brian Daley, introduction to Star Wars: The National Public Radio Dramatization (New York:Del Rey, 1994), 4.
2 Daley, Radio Dramatization, 11.
3 Matthew Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2016), 4.

50 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

TRD’s premiere represents the endpoint of what could be described as
the initial flowering of Star Wars as a transmedia empire between 1976 and1981. Throughout this period, the basic story of Star Wars was presented toconsumers in multiple media platforms—film, novel, comic books, arcade
games, and radio—with each platform “exploring different aspects of theshared world.”4 According to Freeman, one of the most important elements of this shared world is character building, since “character is one
way of holding a transmedia world story together.”5 Take, for example, A
New Hope’s depiction of Leia’s capture by stormtroopers, which begins six
minutes into the movie. Four troopers search a corridor. The camera cuts
to Leia with her trademark hairdo peeking out from around a corner. Her
blaster is clearly visible; she holds it with both hands at chest level. The
barrel is pointing up. She appears to be alert and resolved. The camera thencuts back to the stormtroopers. The first trooper notices her movement andturns towards her. He sees her down the passageway as she moves backslightly. The trooper informs the other soldiers: “There’s one; set for stun.”
As the first stormtrooper raises his pistol, Leia shoots and kills him. She
attempts to run away, but the next nearest trooper moves forward and stuns
her, causing Leia to fall to the floor. That stormtrooper then says to the othersoldiers, “She’ll be all right. Inform Lord Vader we have a prisoner.” As istypical in the film, this 23-second scene emphasizes action and adventure
through its quick cuts and musical score over character development or
exposition of theme, but it is the representation of Leia as a character insubsequent transmedia presentations of this scene that holds the Star Wars
story together.
Fans could also read the novel of the film, originally titled Star Wars:
From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, which was published five months
before the film’s premiere. Attributed to Lucas but written by Alan Dean
Foster, the novel, which sold out its initial run of 125,000 copies by February
1977, is perhaps most notable for allowing its readers to experience theinteriority of characters from the film. Surprisingly, its depiction of Leia’s
capture emphasizes the stormtrooper’s point of view over hers and begins by
describing his movements: “He was about to turn and call for those behind
to follow him forward when he noticed something moving off to one side.
It appeared to be crouching back in a small, dark alcove. Holding his pistol

4 Paolo Bertetti, “Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters,” International Journal ofCommunications 8 (2014): 2346.
5 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling, 24.

HAN LEIA SHOT FIRST

51

ready, he moved cautiously forward and peered into the recess.”6 A “small,shivering figure clad in flowing white” stares up at him. He recognizes her
as “the one individual the Dark Lord was most interested in,” and the novel
allows the reader to enter his thoughts: “A lucky encounter for him. He
would be commended.” As the trooper contemplates his reward, however,Leia’s demeanor changes:
Within the armor his head turned slightly, directing his voice to the tinycondenser microphone. “Here she is,” he called to those behind him. “Setfor stun forc—”
He never finished the sentence, just as he would never receive thehoped-for commendation. Once his attention turned from the girl to his
communicator the shivering vanished with startling speed. The energy
pistol she had held out of sight behind her came up and around as she
burst from her hiding place.
The trooper who had been unlucky enough to find her fell first, hishead a mass of melted bone and metal. The same fate met the second
armored form coming up fast behind him. Then a bright green energy
pole touched the woman’s side and she slumped instantly to the deck,
the pistol still locked in her small palm.7

Although the film establishes Leia’s willingness to shoot the stormtroopers,
the novelization allows its readers to imagine the consequences of her act
more vividly by narrating the stormtrooper’s thoughts and aspirations.
She leaves the trooper’s “head a mass of melted bone and metal,” a much
more brutal image than the film’s bloodless violence and, in doing so, she
has killed a man, not just a nameless, replaceable stormtrooper. Within
the transmedia story, this association of violence with Leia begins to accrue around her character and is later passed on to subsequent platforms’
representations of her.
In the weeks leading up to the premiere of A New Hope, consumers could
also experience the “Greatest Space-Fantasy Film of All!” in comic-bookform via the first three issues of a six-issue series published by Marvel
Comics, scripted by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Howard Chaykin.8 The
comic depicts Leia’s capture across four panels. The first presents her inthe foreground, her blaster visible by her side, while a stormtrooper enters6
7
8George Lucas, Star Wars: A New Hope (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), 12.
Lucas, Star Wars, 12.
Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago, Volume 1 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2010), 4.

52 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingthrough a passageway. The trooper sees her and exclaims, “There’s oneof them! Set weapons for stun!” The second panel reverses the perspective—Leia is now in the background, and the stormtroopers are in theforeground—as Leia calls out, “I’ve set mine to kill!” Her blaster discharges
and two of the troopers fall to the ground. The third panel depicts her
being stunned and the fourth shows Leia on the ground at the troopers’feet. One of the troopers states, “She’ll be all right. Report to Lord Vader!”Despite its brevity, the comic departs from the previous versions in two
significant ways. First, the conventions of mid-1970s mainstream comics art
portray Leia in a much more sexualized way than any of the other texts. Her
white dress is tighter and more revealing. Two of the four frames depicting
her capture emphasize her femininity by foregrounding her breasts. The
third frame particularly presents her in a pose reminiscent of pin-ups: herbreasts are prominent and the contours of her torso are visible as she falls
backwards. The final frame illustrates her on the floor, surrounded by theboots of stormtroopers, indicating her complete vulnerability. This imageemphasizes the physical threat they pose to her as one straddles her legs
while the other straddles her head and shoulders. Second, Leia explicitly
reveals her intent to kill the stormtroopers even though they have made it
clear that their weapons are set to stun. Because the troopers are depicted
only as dehumanized physical threats to her in the comic books, Leia’s
aggressiveness, militaristic ability, and heroic fortitude in the comic adds
to her character in the larger transmedia universe.
TRD tells the same basic story as the other media but requires its listeners
to imagine the visuals of the film. Radio has often been called “the theaterof the mind,” since it “evokes scenes through speech, reverb, filter, segue,and other devices.”9 Frank Brady suggests that TRD’s success was due tothe fact that “the listener becomes the set designer, the costumer, the casting director,” which creates “more impact, more personal involvement”
than watching a theater screen. Because listeners take on an active role inimagining the world of the radio play, Brady argues, “the tactical warfare
between the Falcon and the Death Star can become more real, more vital,
than they were in the film.”10 While this is probably true, TRD’s worldbuilding is nevertheless productively augmented by a listener’s preexisting
familiarity with A New Hope (as well as potentially the novel and comics).

9 Neil Verma, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 9.
10 Frank Brady, “Star Wars Comes to Radio,” Fantastic Films 24 (June 1981): 50.

HAN LEIA SHOT FIRST53

The radio play’s version of Leia’s capture illustrates this vividly. Similar
to the novel’s incorporation of the stormtrooper’s perspective, only thetroopers have dialogue in the radio play’s scene. One stormtrooper instructs
his soldiers to “Search every passageway and compartment! You two, checkover there behind those power conduits!” A second trooper notices Leia:“Wait! I thought I saw something!” After a brief pause during which he hears
a female’s breathing, the second trooper continues, “There she is! Set yourweapons to stun!” Unlike the comic book version of this scene, Leia does
not say anything to the troopers; we only hear her blaster being fired andthe sound of a trooper crying out followed by the thud of his body hitting
the floor. The second trooper calls out, “Watch it! She’s armed! Fire!” Theaudience then hears more blaster fire. Leia moans and we hear her body fallto the deck. The scene ends with the trooper commending his men: “Goodshooting. She’ll be all right. Inform Lord Vader that we have a prisoner.”
Apart from Leia’s breathing and the sound of her firing her pistol, we haveno sense of her in this scene. TRD leaves all of the details—her look, posture,and state of mind, as well as the number of stormtroopers, the length ofthe passageway, the colors of the décor, etc.—to the listener’s imagination.
Listeners who have previously seen A New Hope easily fill in these details
by recalling them from the film.
Consequently, TRD’s world-building is partially assisted by fans of thefilm remembering what they have previously seen or read—they alreadyknow the basic details of Leia’s capture and can fill in gaps in the soundscapewith appropriate details. But its world-building is also partially original due
to slight changes to dialogue (the stormtrooper’s lines are different) andthe reliance on sound alone (we hear Leia breathe rather than seeing her).
The radio play’s voice performers further this same, yet different effect.
Only two of the actors, Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels, reprise theirroles, while new performers voice all of the other characters. Most notably,
unknown actress Ann Sachs replaces Carrie Fisher as Leia, Perry King
performs as Han Solo, and Brock Peters voices Darth Vader instead of James
Earl Jones. The latter casting especially changes the audience’s response to
the character, since, as Daley notes, Jones’s “resonant, powerful voice waseven more definitive of the Dark Lord of the Sith than that black armor,
cloak, and helmet were.”11 Peters’s voice is noticeably less deep than Jones’s,
making his Darth Vader sound more mechanical than the character in thefilm. As a result of the radio play’s use of new sounds, listeners actively
build the world of TRD by combining elements that explicitly remind them
11

Daley, Radio Dramatization, 10.

54 

Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingof the film—Hamill’s and Daniels’s voices, for example—with elementsthat are entirely unique to this medium, creating an especially interactive
version of the story.
These latter elements include a number of new plot developments resulting from TRD’s expanded running time. While there is less than a half-hourof dialogue in the 121-minute film, the radio play runs for 351 minutes. This
substantially longer length allows it to introduce new characters, include
scenes from earlier drafts of George Lucas’s screenplay and the novel, andexpand plot points only mentioned in the film. As Daley sums up:
Leia Organa’s life on Alderaan and her early Rebel Alliance heroism;
Luke’s frictions and adventures with his Toschi Station buddies; how Han
Solo gets an offer from Big Bunji and almost backs out of that charter with
Luke and Ben; Darth Vader’s malevolent dark side inquisition of Leia, andher courageous resistance—the radio production gave us the opportunity
to look into these matters and many more.12

The effect of these scenes on the listener goes beyond simply filling in plot
points in the film. Rather, they also suggest that the fundamental strategy
behind the production of TRD’s transmedia storytelling is an emphasison character building by giving familiar characters, such as Leia, Luke
Skywalker, and even Darth Vader, new and original dimensionality. Daley’sradio dramatization presents seven scenes not contained in the film. While
Luke, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Han Solo, the droids, and Darth Vader feature inmany of these scenes, three of them feature Leia as the primary character
without Luke or Han, which is more than those featuring either of themwithout her.
By 1981, Leia had already become a subject of film criticism. Dan Rubey,
for example, argued in 1978 that “despite her attractive spunkiness andtoughness,” Leia “is the traditional damsel in distress—her capture by
Darth Vader begins the film and provides the motivation for Ben Kenobi’s
return and Luke’s rescue mission.” Although she “does grab a laser gun at
one point and fires a few shots,” Rubey maintains that Leia “is dependent on
her male rescuers, and the only action she initiates during the rescue almost
gets them killed in a garbage crusher.”13 Consumers of the larger Star Warstransmedia universe know that Leia generally has an even more significant
role in it than she does in the 1977 film, and, as we have already seen, the
12 Daley, Radio Dramatization, 4.
13 Dan Rubey, “Star Wars: Not so Long Ago, Not so Far Away,” Jump Cut 18 (August 1978): 12.

HAN LEIA SHOT FIRST

55

novel and comics place greater emphasis on the preemptive violence that
she is willing to use against her enemies, a violence seemingly at odds with
her assertion to the Grand Moff Tarkin in A New Hope that “Alderaan ispeaceful; we have no weapons.”
TRD continues and expands upon the association of Leia with violence,casting her as the focal point of a debate on the ethics of violent resistance to oppression, a debate that adds significant weight to her decision
to “grab a laser gun” and “fire a few shots.” It does this in three ways. First,
the radio play emphasizes that, before her capture, Leia is independentand strategic. Her story is larger than just being captured by Darth Vader.
Second, it explores her transition from believing in pacifism to embracing
violence, providing her with reasons to take up arms and “showing” herstruggle to reconcile her home world’s pacifism with the universe’s needfor militarized heroes. Finally, it expands her role after she is captured andvalorizes her resistance to Imperial efforts to force her to reveal the localeof the Rebel base.
Two of Leia’s new scenes take place before she is captured. Throughout
these scenes, she is portrayed as a capable leader who easily outwits Imperial efforts to reveal her connection to the Rebellion. The first of these scenes
is in “Episode Two: Points of Origin,” which begins with the narrator, voiced
by Ken Hiller, describing the situation:
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there came a time of revolution,
when Rebels united to challenge a tyrannical Empire. The Rebellion had
its origins on many worlds, at many levels of society.
One of the leaders of the Rebellion is the Princess Leia Organa ofAlderaan, but neither her high birth nor her status as an Imperial Senator
will protect her should her Rebel affiliations be discovered.14

Leia’s ship, Tantive IV, has been intercepted and forced to land on Ralltiir, aplanet occupied by the Imperial army. As the Tantive lands, Lord Tion, theImperial officer in charge, asks his men, “Do we have our heavy weapons
trained on that ship?” A commander responds, “We do, Lord Tion, but theship appears to be just what she claims, a consular ship on a diplomatic
mission.” Tion admonishes the commander to follow protocol: “I have no
doubt that she is. Princess Leia of Alderaan is a veritable angel of mercy.
Still, we mustn’t become lax.” Tion’s description of Leia as “a veritable angel
14 Star Wars: The Radio Drama, HighBridge Audio, 2007, CD. All subsequent quotations of theradio drama are from this unabridged CD version.

56 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingof mercy” solicits a laugh from his inferior officer, implying that Imperial
forces do not see her as a threat: training their weapons on her ship is merely
standard procedure, even a comical one—especially given her association
with what Darth Vader calls a “mercy mission” in A New Hope.
Leia, however, is just as feisty in the radio series as she is in the movie, as
she immediately demands to speak to Tion by comlink. After identifying
herself as “the Princess Leia Organa,” she asks, “Who is responsible for thisoutrage?” When Tion flirtatiously replies, “A delight to hear your voice
again, Your Highness,” Leia ignores his personal overtures and exclaims, “Idemand an explanation for this, Lord Tion.” She will be neither flatterednor distracted by his efforts to court her. Tion insists that he would behonored to explain; he patronizingly offers to send his personal landspeeder
for her. But Leia rejects it, asserting, “My own is being lowered now.” Leia’sassertiveness during this conversation unsettles Tion’s subordinate officer,
who insists that she “has no grounds for objection; our mission on Ralltiir
has been sanctioned by the Emperor himself.” Tion replies, “I’m not worried
about legalities. I shall now have the privilege of placating a most attractive
and influential young woman.” Tion ignores Leia’s moral outrage, reducing
her to her age, looks, and social position; to him, she is just a young, beautiful, marriageable heiress. The idea that he will placate her suggests that hesees her as little more than a pampered princess, someone he subsequently
calls “the shining jewel in the Organa crown,” and one who can be easilysoothed and manipulated.
Leia’s assertiveness, however, only goes so far in extricating her from
Imperial hands. Doubting her assertion that she is delivering “medical
supplies and spare parts” to Ralltiir, first Tion and then Darth Vader threaten
to search her ship. Since the Tantive is actually carrying “combat-type medipacks and three surgical field stations” along with “spare parts and power
units suitable for military equipment,” Leia must outwit her adversaries
to prevent discovery. When Tion is called away in response to a nearby
rebel attack, Leia reminds Vader that legally only Tion, and not Vader, has
the authority to search the Tantive. Vader agrees and leaves to find him sothat they can discover what she is concealing. When Leia learns that Tion
has installed a surveillance system that will be operational momentarily,
she uses the system to allow him to overhear her tell Antilles, the Tantive’s
captain, that she is interested in Tion but doubts his sincerity. She will only
know that he is a true gentleman, and therefore worthy of her interest, if
he allows her to leave without searching her vessel. He falls for it. Leia’sassertive interactions with Tion and Vader along with her successful manipulation of the former demonstrates that she is much more than Rubey’s

HAN LEIA SHOT FIRST

57

damsel in distress. TRD suggests that, when confronted by Imperial forces,
she is able to think quickly to avoid discovery and capture.
Throughout this initial scene, Leia uses wits rather than violence against
the Empire, but the scene also initiates her shift from a philosophy of rebellion as a primarily pacifist humanitarianism to one that embraces violent
resistance. During her conversation with Tion, Leia asks why the Empire
has suspended the rule of law. Tion explains, “When peace and stability
are threatened, it is the Emperor’s duty to intervene, to secure his subjects’
security and well-being.” Leia is incredulous: “Well-being? They’re the ones
you’re arresting!” She specifically objects to the Empire’s use of “impressment
gangs and interrogation centers” and nearly exposes her alignment with theRebellion during her argument over the Empire’s injustice. Rather thanmeekly accept Tion’s assumption that the entire planet must be purified of
its Rebel sympathies, she questions the ethics of imprisoning and torturing
innocent bystanders. She pushes the boundaries of what one can say with
impunity, but she does not act to transgress those boundaries publicly. She
is still a pacifist, but the experience on Ralltiir has a profound effect on her.
When Leia returns to Alderaan, she does not report immediately to herfather, named Prestor in the radio play. Instead, she walks from the spaceportto the palace, a full day’s journey, since, as she tells him, “I had some thinking
to do.” Leia’s walk through the countryside leads her to a political epiphany.
When her father asks why she’s been “doing all this soul-searching,” Leia
explains: “Father, people on Ralltiir have been chased from their homes,
penned up like animals, executed without trial. Torture chambers are set
up everywhere; they call them interrogation centers.” When Prestor notesthat this is the “usual Imperial procedure” and that “you’re lucky to get off
with your life,” Leia relates the conclusion of her soul-searching: “It’s time
Alderaan stopped resisting the Empire and started fighting it!”This assertion marks Leia’s transition from a pacifist to someone willingto kill in the name of freedom. It horrifies her father, who insists, “Violence
and warfare nearly destroyed us during the Clone Wars.” But Leia now
questions “what good [does] … Alderaan’s not having a single weapon” doand she suggests that she is prepared to kill: “I didn’t start this—the Empire
did. I want only to stop it, Father!” While the Alderaanian government,
represented by its monarch, does not sanction violence and has banned
the use of weapons, Leia’s firsthand observation of the Empire’s cruelty has
convinced her that she must move from the passive resistance of merely
providing humanitarian and military support, of standing by while others
risk their lives, to a consideration of whether to take up arms and fightviolence with violence. In short: she is now willing to shoot first.

58 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

The opportunity to fight—and kill, if necessary—quickly presents itself.
Lord Tion soon appears at her father’s court and attempts to press his suitof marriage by bragging about his military experience and status within
the Imperial Army. The audience hears him enter the next scene whilelaughing as he continues a conversation begun offstage:
Now I’ll tell you something about these traitors and terrorists who callthemselves rebels and freedom fighters. They don’t truly understandwar. The fools on that particular planet actually thought that the Empire
would negotiate with a pack of fanatics. So when these so-called resistance leaders showed up to parley, we locked the doors from the outside
and torched the building!

This speech is delivered as if it were a funny anecdote. Tion laughs at the
tale’s end and Prestor plays along and also pretends to find it humorous.
But Leia does not. She becomes increasingly angry. In her disgust at Tion’s
vision of “an Empire wallowing in blood and death” and “a galaxy of slaves,”
Leia accidentally betrays knowledge of the Death Star. Tion immediately
catches her mistake and realizes that this finally proves her connection to
the Rebellion. When he pulls out his blaster, Leia wrestles him for control
over the weapon, which discharges, killing Tion. In contrast to Tion’s earlier
image of her as a pampered princess, Leia acts decisively when confronted
with danger. Although she admits, “I hadn’t meant for the blaster to hit
him,” Leia’s decision to fight stands out. She is now willing to risk her life
to support the Rebellion and to oppose the Empire’s immoral oppression.
She boards the Tantive once again and leaves to intercept the Death Star’splans, find Obi-Wan Kenobi, and return both to the Rebel base. These scenes
in the radio play thus do more than add to the storyworld’s establishednarrative; they expand Leia’s character, reinforcing the image of Leia as astrong, independent woman who embodies the radio play’s theme of thenecessity of using violence to end the Empire’s oppression.
As we have seen, Leia is subsequently captured, which leads to the third
new scene featuring Leia: her torture by Vader aboard the Death Star. This
scene also contributes to the way in which TRD casts Leia at the center of
its exploration of when one is justified in using violence. While the film
stops short of showing her interrogation, TRD’s eighth episode explicitly
portrays it. The scene begins with Leia’s usual tactic of appearing in control,
demanding that she “be released from this cell and given access to formal
legal proceedings!” As the “interrogation device,” as Vader calls it, is heard
entering the room, Leia insists that the “torture robot … violates every rule of

HAN LEIA SHOT FIRST59

law,” but Vader cuts her off, declaring “The law no longer applies to you! You’rea Rebel, and you’ve refused your one chance for mercy.” As in past scenes,
Leia’s initial impulse is to challenge the legality of the Empire’s actions. Whenrhetoric does not work, she physically resists. In this instance, Vader must
hold her still so the device can inject her with a serum. But both forms ofresistance—rhetorical and physical—fail. Leia cannot escape. Nevertheless,she persists in refusing to provide Vader with the location of the Rebel base.
He tries to convince her that he, too, is a rebel. He appeals to her sense ofduty, insisting that her father “commands you to tell us” and asking, “Don’t
you wish to please your father?” But this also fails to persuade her, so Vader
uses the Force to make her feel “great pain, excruciating pain, … a universeof it!” Suggesting that her heart is about to burst and that she cannot breathe,
Vader takes her almost to the point of death before relenting. But even while
screaming in pain, Leia would rather die than reveal the location of the rebel
base. When Tarkin subsequently expresses incredulity that Leia, “that slip ofa girl,” has defied Vader’s interrogation methods, Vader responds, “I believethat she still holds hope that the stolen plans will eventually be delivered
into Rebel hands. Futile, of course, but it sustains her.” Tarkin rejects this
explanation, noting that Vader has broken “hardened, resolute men withrelative ease.” Tarkin is right to doubt Vader’s justification. Leia’s development in TRD provides the better explanation for her successful resistance:
she is now ready to kill and to die to defeat the Empire. It is her clarityof purpose, her belief that violent resistance is an ethical response to the
Empire’s oppression, that has transformed her from the woman of high birth
who uses her privilege to hide her pacifist support for the Rebellion into astalwart rebel ready to die or even kill to save the galaxy.
NPR’s Star Wars: The Radio Drama tells its audience the story of how this“slip of a girl” transforms into a Rebel leader willing to shoot first. It casts
her as much more than a damsel in distress. She is a dynamic character
who undertakes her own moral journey when she sees that passive resis­
tance will not stop the Empire’s totalitarian oppression of the galaxy. She
matures into an adult who must make moral choices concerning life anddeath. Ultimately, Leia embraces violence as an ethical response to the evil
perpetrated by the Emperor and his totalitarian military machine. TRD
achieves this expansion of Leia’s character using only sound. By framing
Leia’s transformation from pacifist to revolutionary, however, in a characterbuilding plot unique to the radio drama, with the familiar soundscape of
A New Hope, TRD demonstrates that radio can add incredible depth andcomplexity to a transmedia franchise.

3.

From Sequel to Quasi-Novelization
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and the 1970s Culture ofTransmedia Contingency
Matthew Freeman

The transmedia phenomenon is a common and perhaps all-too-familiar
strategy in Hollywood’s contemporary blockbuster fiction factory, so oftentied up with corporate notions of brand-building, “cash nexuses,”1 and theuse of intellectual property as a “marketing assault.”2 Yet, the history of theStar Wars franchise paints a slightly different picture, one that points to a far
more independent model of what is now deemed transmedia storytelling.
Though the industrial history of transmedia storytelling has been traced tothe dawn of the twentieth century,3 the early construction and expansionof the Star Wars storyworld in the late 1970s encapsulates a number of thedevelopments and—notably—challenges now associated with the tellingof stories across multiple media.
This chapter uses Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye—ararely discussed novel commissioned by George Lucas as a low-budget,“Plan B” sequel to 1977’s A New Hope should that film have struggled commercially—as a lens through which to theorize the challenges faced byindependent transmedia storytellers working on the New Hollywood sceneof the late 1970s. This was a very different period to the conglomeratefronted transmedia franchises that are so often privileged in transmedia
scholarship. 4 The chapter builds on the work of Kristin Fast and HenrikÖrnebring by emphasizing “the many disjunctions and contradictions
that almost inevitably follow when extending transmedia worlds across/
1 Jay Lemke, “Critical Analysis across Media: Games, Franchises, and the New Cultural Order.”Paper presented at the First International Conference on Critical Discourse Analysis, Valencia,
University of Valencia, May 12-14 2004.
2 David Alpert and Rick Jacobs, “Videogames and Licensing in the Hollywood Film Market.”Paper presented at the Korea Games Conferences, Korea, October 16, 2004.
3 Matthew Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2016).
4 See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NewYork University Press, 2006); Carlos A. Scolari, “Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers,
Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production,” International Journalof Communication 3 (2009): 586-606; Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New
Media, and Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 2011).

62 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

between media.”5 I argue for a similarly “contingent” understanding oftransmedia storytelling by pointing to the unstable culture of contingency
that characterized Lucas’s transmedia world-building of the era. Establishing Splinter of the Mind Eye as a precedent for many of the key questions
surrounding transmedia storytelling today, this chapter will delve into thecentral contextual factors of the 1970s Hollywood film industry, highlighting
the importance of seemingly contradictory versions of filmmaking on thedevelopment of Star Wars as a transmedia storyworld. I also analyze the narrative and paratextual features of Splinter of the Mind Eye as a transmedia
Star Wars text, teasing out relationships between levels of profitability andthe conflicting transmedia potentials that those levels engendered in thelate 1970s.

Characterizing Transmedia Production
Since its cinematic debut in 1977, Star Wars has grown into a vast transmedial
franchise, spread out across multiple platforms including novels, magazines,
comic books, video games, radio plays, and more. Luke Skywalker’s heroic
journey may have reached a natural conclusion upon defeating the Empire
at the end of Return of the Jedi, but the world of Star Wars lived on for a newwave of future adventures. Industrially speaking, the models, strategies, andmechanics by which this storyworld expanded across media have also been
diverse. It is therefore important to characterize the general tendencies oftransmedia production. Elsewhere I have argued that different industrial
configurations have characterized transmedia storytelling practices overtime, emphasizing that emerging practices in modern advertising, licensing,and cross-sector industry partnerships amidst times of social change andconflict presented varied ways of building storyworlds across media.6 Media
industries are defined by ever-changing conditions and, as these conditions shifted over time, the models of transmedia storytelling have beenreconfigured accordingly. Transmedia storytelling was initially theorized as“a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically

5 Kristin Fast and Henrik Örnebring, “Transmedia World-building: The Shadow (1931-present)
and Transformers (1984-present),” The International Journal of Cultural Studies (2015): 2, accessed
March 25, 2017, doi: 10.1177/1367877915605887.
6 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling.

From Sequel to Quasi-Novelization

63

across multiple delivery channels,”7 and, in turn, understood for the mostpart as a coordinated system of convergence-driven media production that
establishes a “new synergy amongst media companies and industries.”8 It
is indeed true that modern convergences have fortified transmedia story­
telling to gain greater urgency in the present moment, as media producers
now make use of a host of internal corporate interconnections and digitalplatforms.
However, this urgency has not necessarily resulted in a media landscapewherein stories always unfold fluently as continuities “across multiple
platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world.”9 Instead, transmedia storytelling is often a messy
system of contingencies, alternatives, and reboots. Fast and Örnebringargue that, rather than limiting conceptions of transmedia storytelling to“planned, strategic aspects of creation,” it is equally important to “emphasize
the many disjunctions and contradictions that almost inevitably follow
when extending transmedia worlds across/between media.”10 Here, the focus
is on “the emergent (as opposed to planned) nature of the narrative aspectsof transmediality.”11 The rationale behind Fast and Örnebring’s thinking andthis push to understanding transmedia storytelling in terms of the accrued
characteristics that are more ad hoc/contingent than planned is based on
the fact that transmedia storyworlds are often created over many years bymultiple parties and with a lack of certainty over future production plans.
Although this chapter emphasizes the media-industrial period of thelate 1970s, even today’s industrial convergences arguably facilitate narrative expansions of storyworlds that are indeed based on more ad-hoc
developments. That is to say: today’s industrial convergences often breeda model of transmediality that is based on multiplicity. As Henry Jenkins
puts it, a model of transmediality based on multiplicity “routinely uses
alternate versions of characters or parallel universe versions of their stories
to reward mastery over the source material.”12 While Jenkins is right to7 “‘We Had So Many Stories to Tell’: The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling,” Confessionsof an Aca-Fan, accessed April 14, 2016, http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html.
8 James Hay and Nick Couldry, “Rethinking Convergence/Culture: An Introduction,” Cultural
Studies 25:4 (2011): 473.
9 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006), 336.
10 Fast and Örnebring, “Transmedia World-building,” 2.
11 Fast and Örnebring, “Transmedia World-building,” 2.
12 Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, accessed
December 21, 2016, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html.

64 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingclassify transmedia storytelling as “entertainment for the age of media
convergence,”13 it is also fair to say that under this contemporary system
of industrial convergence, transmedia storyworlds are now in the handsof so many different stakeholders, working across multiple subdivisions
and subsidiaries (and farmed out to different consultancy companies andmarketing agencies) that their transmedial constructions (e.g. their worldbuilding directions, character developments, or use of given platforms)
come with a sense of contingency that is dependent on profitability.
Indeed, because of the highly collaborative and hierarchical structures
under which today’s fast-moving media conglomerates must operate—without guaranteeing substantial profits from expensive productions—industrial convergence does not always work to extend fictional
storyworlds across media as systematic story continuities so much as thismodel sometimes works to start and end various continuities over andover again. Jenkins acknowledges this multiplicity himself, noting thattransmedia storytelling’s “high level of coordination and creative control[…] is hard enough to achieve [even] across the multiple divisions of thesame production team.”14 Even when today’s media conglomerates revivea storyworld with great fanfare—as Time Warner did with Superman inSuperman Returns (2006) and then again in Man of Steel (2013)—they areoften loose echoes of older iterations.
My point, then, is a simple one. This chapter will show how differencesin outlook and strategy for building transmedia worlds—either as planned
creations wherein a story is systematically dispersed or as ad-hoc narrative
additions based on contingency—were shaped by the industrial logics oflate-1970s Hollywood, a situation that has now come full circle.

New Hollywood in the 1970s
Geoff King, in his characterization of the New Hollywood circa the late1960s and 1970s, identifies two versions of the Hollywood film at that time.15
The first version, the Hollywood Renaissance film, denotes a time in theAmerican film industry’s history best exemplified by the appearance andsuccess of films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), andEasy Rider (1969). As King explains, “it is remembered as an era in which
13 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 97.
14 Jenkins, “Transmedia 202.”
15 Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002.

From Sequel to Quasi-Novelization

65

Hollywood produced a relatively high number of innovative films that
seemed to go beyond the confines of conventional studio fare in terms of
their content and style and their existence as products of a purely commercial or corporate system.”16 It was a time when the “exploitation” filmsof the 1950s (biker films, youth pictures, horror, etc.) crossed over into
the Hollywood mainstream as critically and commercially successful “artfilms, or something very like it.”17 Importantly, these Renaissance films
were often characterized by initially short or limited theatrical releases,
with a sense of almost uncalculated contingency over how successful sucha film could become.
King’s second version of the New Hollywood film is the blockbuster, aform of cinema exemplified by Jaws (1975) and characterized by pre-soldproperties, big-budget productions, and tentpole pictures based on mass
appeal.18 The rise of the blockbuster opened up Hollywood to a “world ofcorporate cross-media control” and the “intensive multimedia and merchandising exploitation favored by the corporate giants that took shapein the 1980s,”19 a mediascape from which Star Wars is often understood tohave emerged.20
Nevertheless, rather than assessing the era of New Hollywood filmmaking
as purely polarized extremes, we can understand the history of transmedia
storytelling during this time, at least in the case of Star Wars, as being acomplex combination of both the Renaissance and the blockbuster models.
Fundamentally, both of these seemingly opposite styles transformed what
was once deemed lesser or more exploitative genre fare into somethingelse. By this, I mean the transformation of previously “independent” or“underground” genres such as the biker f ilm into Easy Rider (1969), a
countercultural production for a major studio, or the transformation of
low-budget horror works into glossy, high-budget blockbusters such as
The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). The 1970s also introduced a shift
towards directorial authorship as a brand or pronounced mark of quality,
as the first generation of film school-educated directors like Francis Ford
Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas rose to prominence. Both of
16 King, New Hollywood Cinema, 13.
17 King, New Hollywood Cinema, 13.
18 King, New Hollywood Cinema, 49-84.
19 King, New Hollywood Cinema, 81.
20 See Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York:
Continuum, 2002); William Proctor and Matthew Freeman, “‘The First Step into a Smaller World’:
The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars,” in Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies
Anthology, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2016).

66 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingthese factors became important to Star Wars and its transmedial sprawl in
different ways, both in terms of the importance of Lucas’s authorship over
how the storyworld expanded across media and in terms of the growing
mass appetite for science fiction in the mainstream multiplexes. Additionally, nostalgic returns to the past were culturally prominent throughout the
New Hollywood era—and, as Variety observed in its review, A New Hopedrew on and revived older forms of Hollywood entertainment, “includingFlash Gordon serials, Errol Flynn adventures, and the family-oriented
entertainment of Walt Disney.”21
Moreover, it was the aforementioned trait of producing low-budget, wordof-mouth-driven films with limited releases—that is, a culture of contingency and uncertainty—that was as important to Star Wars’s transmedial
evolution as the more apparent influence of the rise of the blockbuster andits culture of planned cross-media strategization. Indeed, the early days of
the Star Wars universe demonstrate a complex dialectic between these two
versions of Hollywood. This understanding of transmedia storytelling as an
intricate and murky dialectic between corporate strategy and low-budget
contingency is exemplified by the Star Wars novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.

A Product of the Times
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (hereafter Splinter), written by Alan Dean Foster,
was published in 1978, shortly after the release of A New Hope a year prior.
The story sees Luke and Leia crash on a swampy, foggy planet and, aftera few scrapes with the locals, they end up on a quest to find the crimson
Kaiburr crystal, a mysterious artifact that can focus the Force and that is
also being hunted by Darth Vader. Chris Taylor asserts that Splinter was
intended to be adapted as a low-budget sequel if the original film flopped
at the box office.22 The novel thus might be understood as a kind of fallback
option if Lucas’s plan for a bigger-budget sequel proved impossible to realize.
In other words, Splinter was something of a world-building contingency,
existing neither as an entirely strategic expansion of the storyworld nor as apurely ad-hoc development. Rather, it fell somewhere in between these twomodels, a combination of the two—either a parallel universe with alternate
versions of the characters’ stories or a systematic dispersal of the characters
21 Frank James, “Film Review: Star Wars.” Variety, May 29, 1977.
22 Chris Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of aMultibillion Dollar Franchise (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

From Sequel to Quasi-Novelization

67

and their stories across media, depending on the ultimate profitability of theoriginal film. Its conception can be understood as emerging partly from the“practice of generating highly successful big-budget sequels” that ascended
during the rise of blockbuster cinema in the late 1970s and, simultaneously,
partly out of that same era’s low-budget, artful genre storytelling that alsocharacterized publishing.23
Consider, for example, the tension between artful genre storytellingand commercial cross-media strategy that pervades The English Journal’s
review of Splinter in 1979. As was discussed in this publication’s “Books For
Young Adults Book Pool” article, “science fiction books have become popular
for the first time in several years,” a change that is credited to the New
Hollywood: “Due to the stimulation of film, we feel more readers are trying
science fiction for the first time to discover that they not only understandthe language, they also enjoy the action.”24 Notable in this publication’s
positive response to Splinter is the way in which its readers were said tobe “pleased with the film-book continuity” (“because many students hadenjoyed Star Wars, they were eager to follow further adventures of Luke
Skywalker, Artoo Detoo and See Threepio”) in a discourse that is highly
typical of the logic of transmedia storytelling, but equally of the novel’s
more artful reflection on social and scientific issues: “Some readers feltthat ‘sooner or later Earth is going to deteriorate and we’ll have to live
elsewhere—in that type of world.’”25 The novel was reviewed and indeed
often praised on account of its integration of both the Renaissance and theblockbuster models of New Hollywood cinema, suggesting that the workingsof transmedia storytelling at the time revolved around an amalgamationof the New Hollywood’s two seemingly opposite faces.

Sequel or Quasi-Novelization?
Of course, the novel’s industrial positioning as a product of low-budget
contingencies, corporate blockbusters, and cross-media strategy raises
problems in terms of how one categorizes and conceptualizes its status as atransmedia extension. In some ways, Splinter offers a systematic dispersal of
23 Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower
Press, 2005), 92.
24 Michael Carlsen, et al., “Books For Young Adults Book Pool,” The English Journal 3:2 (1979):
77.
25 Carlsen, et al., “Books for Young Adults,” 77.

68 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingcharacters, stories, and a world across film and literature. Such an intention
was emphasized on the book’s cover: “From the further adventures of Luke
Skywalker, based on the characters and situations created by George Lucas.”
As its author Alan Dean Foster also declares, the book’s plot—revolving as
it does around Luke and Leia heading for a planet that they want to recruitfor the Rebel Alliance—“could have been filmed cheaply and then you stick
it between Episode IV and V.”26 Splinter can therefore be categorized as atransmedia sequel in that sense—that is, telling the further adventuresof the film’s characters via another medium. Foster partly reinforces thisintention himself in interview:
My contract was originally for a novelization of the f irst f ilm andthen a sequel book, because George—being a student of Disney, I’msure—wanted more material in case the movie was a success. He wanted
something out there that the hoped-for fans would be able to enjoy while
he was busy making the second film.27

However, as much as Foster suggests here that Splinter was to work as akind of transmedia sequel between the first film and the hoped-for second
film, he also hints at both the novel’s ad-hoc status as a contingency planand, in other ways, as a kind of quasi-novelization. Examined through thisparticular lens, Splinter can be understood as expanding the Star Wars
storyworld across media by way of transmedia adaptation. Moving awayfrom Jenkins’s, Elizabeth Evans’s, and indeed Mark J.P. Wolf’s assumptions that adaptation and transmedia storytelling are binaries—with theformer being about “translation” and the latter about “growth”28—Christy
Dena’s argument that adaptation is a process that can be transmedial innature is useful for our purposes. Linda Hutcheon argues that “fans of films
enjoy their novelizations because they provide insights into the characters’
thought processes and more details about their background.”29 Building on
this idea, Dena—in reference to Powell and Pressburger’s novelization of
The Red Shoes (1948)—argues that,

26 Paul Kerr, “Star Wars Author Alan Dean Foster on Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, The SequelThat Might Have Been” Yahoo Movies, March 16, 2015, accessed January 1, 2017, https://www.
yahoo.com/movies/star-wars-splinter-of-the-minds-eye-alan-dean-113794483282.html/.
27 Kerr, “The Sequel That Might Have Been.”
28 Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (NewYork: Routledge, 2012), 245-246.
29 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 118.

From Sequel to Quasi-Novelization

69

While the novel closely follows the film, it also provided Powell and Pressburger with the opportunity to add new narrative threads and to expand
upon the film’s original themes and characters. They paid particularattention to the impresario Boris Lermontov, and to the developmentof the doomed relationship between Victoria Page and Julian Craster.30

Though it is certainly not the case that Splinter adds new narrative, world,
or character development to the original film and thus does not work inthe same way as Dena proposes of the relationship between films and theirnovelizations here, it is possible to think of Foster’s novel as a novelization of
the Star Wars world, if not of the film itself. In doing so, Splinter becomes anovelization that imagines the future of what the Star Wars story could be.
In other words, the creative choices made by Lucas and by Foster whendeveloping Splinter afforded a variety of world-building possibilities. Thosevarious possibilities were designed according to levels of profitability andthe conflicting transmedia potentials that those levels engendered. For
instance, Foster explains that “the only restriction placed on me was thatthe novel had to be filmable on a low budget. That’s why I set it on a fogshrouded planet. A lot of the action takes place in the fog or underground,which facilitates shooting with cheap backgrounds.”31 There is the sense of
the “ad-hoc adaptation” about Splinter’s creative choices—its narrative focus
driven by its suitability as a low-budget picture for the New Hollywood’s
Renaissance era rather than its suitability for the pages of a novel. Similarly,
the character of Han Solo is notably omitted from the story for Splinter, adecision that was enforced upon Foster by Lucas because, as Foster explainshimself, “At the time I was writing Splinter, Harrison Ford had not committed to any further participation in Star Wars. Hence I was specifically told
not to use the Han Solo character. And without Han, it didn’t seem logicalto have Chewie in the book, either.”32 It is also noteworthy that Splinteroriginally opened with a fairly complex space battle that forces Luke andLeia down onto the planet of Mimban, but this was one of the revisions
made on the basis that such a scene would have been expensive to film.
In some ways, then, Splinter was both a transmedia sequel and a quasinovelization of a film that had not been made. However, in a narrative
sense, Splinter worked to lay the groundwork for the architecture of the
30 Christy Dena, “Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World
across Distinct Media and Environments” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2009), 153.
31 Kerr, “The Sequel That Might Have Been.”
32 Kerr, “The Sequel That Might Have Been.”70 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

alternatively imagined blockbuster film sequel. While Foster claims to“have no idea” whether Lucas borrowed from his novel the idea for theiconic, imagined lightsaber confrontation between Luke and Darth Vader
on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back,33 there is the sense that the way inwhich Luke fights off Vader and severs his arm in the pages of that novel hada kind of reverse impact on the film that followed it. Indeed, Foster’s bookalso presents Darth Vader leaping up in the air and shooting energy fromhis hands—abilities that the character and his Sith master, the Emperor,
showed in later film sequels. Importantly, too, the novel’s swampy, fogshrouded planet of Mimban might have inspired the production designfor Dagobah.

Conclusion
The transmediality of the Star Wars universe paints a particularly complex
picture. Of course, by the time Splinter hit shelves in March 1978, the first
Star Wars film was a phenomenon and Lucas therefore opted to take thestory in a different direction for the next film. But Foster’s book remains
an intriguing hint at where the Star Wars franchise could have gone, had
Lucas adapted the book. More to the point, Splinter becomes a highly useful lens through which to consider the history of transmedia storytelling.
Elsewhere, I have shown how transmedia storytelling during the early- to
mid-twentieth century occupied the emergent (as opposed to planned) aspect of transmediality.34 The reason for this ad-hoc formation of transmedia
storytelling between 1900 and 1950 was quite simply because many of thestrategies that underpinned how stories were told across media in the past
were themselves emergent, with the likes of L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, and DC Comics constantly reacting to new media-industrial
developments.35 In turn, I have shown in this chapter that the messinessthat surrounds understandings of Foster’s Star Wars novel as a transmedia
product of the late 1970s emerged directly out of the dialectical relationships
between two models of New Hollywood filmmaking.
In effect, the equal dominance of both the low-budget genre film with adegree of contingency over its continued success and the emerging blockbuster film with its turn towards cross-media strategy worked together
33 Kerr, “The Sequel That Might Have Been.”
34 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling.
35 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling.

From Sequel to Quasi-Novelization

71

to inform the making of a Star Wars novel that encapsulated neither of
those models entirely but rather parts of both. As part blockbuster strategy,
Splinter re-engaged the Star Wars audience, strategically telling the next
chapter of the story via another medium. As part low-budget contingency,
it was a quasi-novelization for the future of a possible franchise, adding
new ideas to a story or storyworld based on Renaissance picture budget
necessities that, in this case, perhaps even worked to inform Star Wars’s
world-building alternatives going forward.
That being said, the progression of time did little to uncomplicate thestatus of Star Wars in terms of its continued transmedial organization. In theyears that followed the release of both Splinter and the original trilogy, thefilms were supported by other novels, comic books, and cartoons—transmedial additions that became part of the EU. Occupying a position within
this EU, for example, was Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, a series of novels
set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi. But despite working to
expand the storyworld and build its core characters, Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy
was not always promoted as a transmedia story in the planned and strategic
sense. A discourse of separation between film and novel was even reinforcedby Lucas himself in interviews. For Cinescape, Lucas once remarked,
There are two worlds here. There is my world, which is the movies, andthere is this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel
universe—the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They
do not intrude on my world, which is a select period of time […] I do not
get too involved in the parallel universe.36

For an interview with Starlog magazine in 2005 Lucas reinforced this division of a “parallel world,” stating bluntly of the EU stories, “I do not readthat stuff. That is a different world than my world […] They try to maketheir universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get
enthusiastic and go off in other directions.”37 This later era of Star Wars
history was typified by the building of “possible worlds”—telling tales thatlikely originate from some place of possible truth but ultimately withoutauthorial authentication.38
36 Qtd. in “Canon,” Wookieepedia, accessed December 19, 2016, http://starwars.wikia.com/
wiki/Canon.
37 Ian Spelling, “New Hopes,” Starlog 337 (August 2005): 46-48.
38 Matthew Freeman, “Re-Building Transmedia Star Wars: Strategies of Branding and UnBranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” in Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production and Promotion,

72 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Similarly, the complexity surrounding Splinter’s transmedial statussuggests that transmedia storytelling is not simply about either forming
strategic, coherent expansions or ad-hoc additions, nor is it simply about
producing binary models that can be labelled as continuity or as multiplicity. Rather, during the late 1970s at least, transmedia storytelling occurred
as a complex interplay between different models of filmmaking and otherrelated contingencies of profitability that afforded a wide range of possibilities for telling many kinds of Star Wars stories.

edited by William Proctor and Richard McCulloch (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press,
forthcoming).

4.

Another Canon, Another Time
The Novelizations of the Star Wars Films
Thomas Van Parys

It was not written in the stars that a small novel based on an eclectic film
screenplay and ghostwritten as work-for-hire would have such an impact on
the process and practice of adapting films into novels. Thanks to the film’s
box-office success, the novelization of A New Hope (1976) has arguably had
a major influence on film novelizations as a genre. When David Seltzer’s
The Omen (1976) unexpectedly became a financial hit and went to the#1 spot in the United States, book publishers realized that, in addition tofunctioning as a marketing tool, novelizations could be bestsellers in theirown right. Thus, while novelizations have been around since the birth ofcinema, the arrival of Star Wars cemented their institutionalization in
Hollywood. That is, to the extent that this was not yet the case, the practiceof novelizing the latest potential blockbuster hit became an established partof film marketing and media franchising. Moreover, the amount and visibility of science-fiction novelizations increased as science-fiction cinema
boomed, while in the tie-in market, science-fiction novelizations became
more prominent because more films were increasingly based on original
screenplays, in contrast with the many adaptations from book to film thattook place in the 1950s and 1960s.
The novelization of A New Hope and the ensuing Star Wars novelizations
and franchise novels1 also had lasting effects on science-fiction literature,as original science-fiction novels now had to contend with the successof the innumerable spin-off novels of various franchises, to the dismay
of many science-fiction authors and critics. Science-fiction cinema waslong considered inferior to science-fiction literature, due to the supposed
mediocrity of its ideas; science-fiction novelizations therefore constituted
the bottom of the barrel. James Gunn even contends that science-fiction
films “translated into written form, would be unpublishable because of lack1 See Sean Guynes’s chapter in this volume on the media-industrial history of Star Wars
franchise novels.

74 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingof logic or originality,” regardless of “the success of the novelized versions ofa variety of SF [science-fiction] films, including A New Hope and its sequels.”2
Throughout its history, the novelization has had a double goal: it is bothpromotional material for the film and a prolongation of the film experienceto capitalize on its (potential) success. A novelization can function as aspoiler (before the film viewing) and as an expansion or elaboration (after
the film viewing). Fans may want to read a novelization to access extras,
such as character elaborations or altered, extended, and deleted sequences,which are fixtures of novelizations since they are usually based on an earlyversion of the shooting script.
In this chapter, I focus on how the novelizations of the seven main Star
Wars films,3 which I will discuss in publication order, add to the worldbuilding of the transmedia universe. I argue that they largely evolve fromminimal and faithful reworkings of the screenplay to explanatory elaborations that occasionally provide key insights into character motivations. This
also reflects how the contexts of the different film productions influenced
individual novelizers’ approaches: perhaps paradoxically, as the Star Warstransmedia franchise is developed over time, Lucasfilm has exerted greater
control over Star Wars literature, yet at the same time, novelizers have been
given more leeway. The novelizations also display self-awareness of theirtransmedial function within the Star Wars mega-text by mythologizing
the narrative and connecting with the previous films and even with earlier
novels. In this way, they draw attention to their double status as novelizations and chapters of a serialized story.
2 James E. Gunn, “The Tinsel Screen,” in Projections: Science Fiction in Literature and Film, ed.
Lou Anders (Austin,TX: MonkeyBrain Books, 2004), 45.
3 These seven novels are obviously not the only novelizations of the films. For the original
trilogy, other publications include storybooks (adapted by Geraldine Richelson, Shep Steneman,
and Joan D. Vinge, respectively and collected in Star Wars—The First Ten Years: Movie Storybook
Trilogy), Step-Up Movie Adventure books (A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back adapted by
Larry Weinberg, Return of the Jedi by Elizabeth Levy), and even “Book and Record” sets (“SEE thepictures, HEAR the record, READ the book”). The most curious tie-ins are perhaps the Special
Young Readers’ Edition novelizations, which are basically edited-down, rather than rewritten,
versions of the original novelizations. These novels are virtually identical—same format, similar
cover—only shorter. In 2004, Scholastic retroactively published original junior novelizations
by Ryder Windham to coincide with the original trilogy’s DVD release. For the prequel trilogy,
a similar range of books exists: Scholastic published junior novelizations written by Patricia
Wrede and, in 2017, Disney released “Read-Along Storybook and CD” sets. Further engaging ayounger interactive audience, the The Phantom Menace journals and the Star Wars Adventures
book series, which includes regular novels alongside corresponding game books, contain partial
novelizations of The Phantom Menace as well.

Another Canon, Another Time

75

A New Hope
Publishing Star Wars spin-off novels was a franchising strategy from the
beginning. As part of publicity supervisor Charles Lippincott’s marketing
plan, a deal was made with Ballantine Books for the publication of five Star
Wars books: two novels, two “making of” books, and a calendar.4 Published
as Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker with a cover design
by Ralph McQuarrie, the novelization of A New Hope first appeared in
December 1976, five months before the film was released. This pre-release
was partially due to a shift in the film’s release date and partially because
Lippincott wanted science-fiction fans to get to know the story and spreadthe word. The paperback hit the bestseller list and its print run of 250,000
copies sold out by February. In other words, the novelization was not justa book that benefited from the popularity of the film; in its own way, it
contributed to that success. According to Ballantine, 3.5 million copies weresold in three months,5 making it the fourth biggest bestseller in America.
Famously, the novel is credited to George Lucas, but was in fact ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster. Foster is recognized by fans and the publishingindustry as the novelizer par excellence, always mentioned first in any list.
Given his reputation, it is not surprising that he has the highest numberof hit science-fiction film novelizations to his name. “If you do something
and it sells umpteen zillion copies, then the next person who comes along
will look to you as a logical choice to possibly sell umpteen zillion copies of
their book,” Foster says.6 Among many other novelizations, he wrote Alien(1979), The Thing (1981), Transformers (2007), Terminator: Salvation (2009),
and Star Trek (2009). He is also the author of many franchise novels thatbuild upon the worlds of those films, most famously Splinter of the Mind’s
Eye (1978), a semi-novelization-turned-sequel to A New Hope that was partof the Ballantine book deal (see Matthew Freeman’s chapter in this volume).
Hired by Judy Lynn Del Rey, editor of Ballantine’s science-fiction line,
Foster’s experience on A New Hope’s novelization was a happy one; Foster
had a brief meeting with George Lucas and thought “he was the nicest
man I’ve ever worked with in the movie business.”7 Despite this line ofcommunication between director and novelizer, the novel is a prototypical
4 Chris Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of aMultibillion Dollar Franchise (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 158-160.
5 David Pringle, “SF, Fantasy & Horror Movie Novelizations,” Interzone 80 (1994): 40.
6 Randall D. Larson, Films into Books: An Analytical Bibliography of Film Novelizations, Movie,
and TV Tie-Ins (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1995), 141.
7 Larson, Films into Books, 142.

76 

Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingexample of the commercial novelization, in that it sticks closely to thescreenplay, offers minimal extra characterization, features a third-person
omniscient narrator with many displacements of focus and sudden cuts
to new paragraphs, and tells the story concisely. In this way, Foster set the
template for the novelizations of the original trilogy, which are adaptations
mostly placed outside the production context of the films and basicallylimited to transcriptions of the screenplays, with occasional additions.
In this novelization, the most significant bonus is the short prologue,
which effectively mythologizes the story. Presented as an excerpt “Fromthe First Saga/Journal of the Whills”—which Lucas was originally going to
use to connect his Star Wars universe to our world—and accompanied
by a quote ascribed to Leia Organa of Alderaan, Senator (“They were in
the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes.”8), theprologue briefly recounts the background to A New Hope. As Lucasfilm’s
Pablo Hidalgo points out, “[f]or decades, this 362-word introduction served
as the only real insight into the events potentially covered in Episodes I,
II, and III,”9 and it already embeds into the story the politics for which theprequel trilogy would later be so heavily criticized by fans.
In this prologue, Emperor Palpatine “was controlled by the very assistants
and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office” instead of the other way
around, and it is the Imperial bureaucrats that had “exterminated throughtreachery and deception the Jedi Knights.”10 As this was written before
Star Wars became a phenomenon and an expansive storyworld, there arebound to be surprising differences, from how the story would develop to
now famous lines (e.g. “I have a very strange feeling about this”11) and so on.
For the opening sentence, Foster replaced “A long time ago in a galaxy far,
far away” with “Another galaxy, another time,”12 arguably missing the pointof Lucas’s line, which goes counter to expectation by setting the narrative
explicitly in the past. However, from a certain point of view, the Star Wars
novelizations are set in yet another galaxy than the films, as we shall see. In
some ways, they enrich both the Star Wars universe and the films; in otherways they are hybrid, anachronistic objects that do not always rhyme withthat universe and never constitute fully fledged texts on their own—now
as well as then.
8 George Lucas, Star Wars (London: Sphere Books Limited, 1977), 6.
9 Pablo Hidalgo, Star Wars: The Essential Reader’s Companion (New York: Ballantine Books,2012), 182.
10 Lucas, Star Wars, 5.
11 Lucas, Star Wars, 112.
12 Lucas, Star Wars, 5.

Another Canon, Another Time

77

The Empire Strikes Back
The novelization of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was written by Donald F.
Glut, a friend of George Lucas’s at film school and originally the first to be
asked to write A New Hope’s novelization. But Glut had refused because thepay was low, there were no royalties, and Twentieth Century Fox wanted
Lucas’s name on the cover. The novelization of The Empire Strikes Back was
released a week in advance of the film and sold three million copies.13 Glut’s
novelization experience was rather less positive than Foster’s, as Lucasfilm’s
policy of secrecy and control around the production of the sequel hindered
his writing:“Some people could look at the scripts but not see the artwork; somepeople could see the artwork but not the scripts. They literally locked
me inside a trailer with all the McQuarrie paintings.” He made sketches
in a notebook and remembered showing an employee one sketch when
he came out. “Is this Yoda?” Glut asked. The employee threw his hands
over his eyes. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know.”14

Indeed, in the novel, Yoda has long white hair on his “blue-skinned head,”15
which matches early concept art of the character.16 It is also clear that
Glut’s interpretation of the Han Solo character is different from Harrison
Ford’s portrayal. Since he did not have access to any film footage, Glut “wasworried that the book would be a lot different than the movie and would
offend a lot of readers”: “all I had to go by, as far as the mood and the visual
style, was the first film. So I tried to apply what I remembered from the first
film to the novel of the second film.”17
In a sense, this novel may be regarded as a double adaptation—with
the story and dialogue novelized from the script and most of the visual
imagery adapted from the previous film and McQuarrie’s concept art. At
the beginning of the novel, Glut explicitly references A New Hope a few
times, effectively recapping the previous film:

13
14
15
16
17

Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 238.
Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 238.
Donald F. Glut, The Empire Strikes Back (London: Sphere Books Limited, 1980), 101.
Hidalgo, Star Wars: The Essential Reader’s Companion, 238.
Larson, Films into Books, 153.

78 

Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

The job had seemed simple enough: just pilot Ben Kenobi, plus young Lukeand two droids, to the Alderaan system. How could Han have known at
the time that he would also be called on to rescue a princess from the
Empire’s most feared battle station, the Death Star?18

Indicating how novelizers do not just transcribe the screenplay but draw
on different sources and media (such as conversations with the director,
previous film installments, artwork, publicity photos, and so on), theseexamples reinforce the evolution of Star Wars from an individual story toa serialized story universe. The novelization also ends with a prefigurationof Return of the Jedi’s plot: “[Luke] only knew he had to return to Yoda andfinish his training before he set off to rescue Han.”19
Whereas other novels might include small bonuses for fans with insight
into events or characters, Glut does not offer much additional interpretation.
This may be traced back to the novelization’s production constraints, but
ironically, the main reason for the film producers’ paranoia—Darth Vader’sidentity as Luke’s father—would indeed be given away beforehand by thenovelization itself.

Return of the Jedi
For the novelization of Return of the Jedi (1983), author James Kahn was
not allowed much “literary freedom”20 either. With additional characterbackgrounds being rejected, Kahn had to follow the screenplay closely,
more so for Return of the Jedi than for other novelizations. The following
quote may be read as subtle metafictional commentary on the restrictionsof the novelizer’s job:
This did not scan at all. Someone had obviously mislaid the correct
program. Nonetheless, he was only a droid, his functions well delineated.
Translation only, no free will please. He shook his head and continued.21

In another instance, Kahn virtually makes fun of the (heavily criticized)
twist that Leia turns out to be Luke’s sister:
18
19
20
21

Glut, The Empire Strikes Back, 7.
Glut, The Empire Strikes Back, 215.
Larson, Films into Books, 173.
James Kahn, Return of the Jedi (London: Futura, 1983), 42.

Another Canon, Another Time79

Pawn in a castle conspiracy? Cribs mixed, siblings switched and parted
and whisked away to different secret lives? Impossible. He knew who hewas! He was Luke Skywalker.22

It is, in fact, not unusual for novelizers to insert the occasional comment on
filmic logic or the film’s plot. As these examples illustrate, the constraints of
the novelization are countered with a literary style that can be described as
more specific, adult, self-conscious, humorous, and at times metaphorical.
What is more, Kahn elaborates throughout on characters’ motivations andthe thoughts behind their actions. In this way, by systematically providing
access to the characters’ reflections, Kahn also makes both Luke’s nearseduction to the dark side and the redemption of Darth Vader more plausible
than in the film:
Luke didn’t bury the thought, this time; he gloried in it. He engorgedhimself with its juices, felt its power tingle his cheeks. It made him feverish, this thought, with lust so overpowering as to totally obliterate allother considerations.23

Kahn tries to find the logic behind every question that might arise fromthe film’s story and plot.
In a sense, the increased focus on character development and plot consistency may be the main reason for fans to read this particular novelization. On
the one hand, the novel provides an alternative, expanded experience witha couple of “Easter eggs” thrown in; the multiple references to the Star Wars
mega-text, which are always functional here in terms of characterization,
are part of that:
And so Senator Palpatine had seized the moment. Through fraud, cleverpromises, and astute political maneuvering, he’d managed to get himself
elected head of the Council. And then through subterfuge, bribery andterror, he’d named himself Emperor.24

The novel also provides the first clue to how Anakin Skywalker transformed
into Darth Vader: “Memories of molten lava, crawling up his back … no.”25
22
23
24
25

Kahn, Return of the Jedi, 65.
Kahn, Return of the Jedi, 155.
Kahn, Return of the Jedi, 69.
Kahn, Return of the Jedi, 175.

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Even though these references also contain elements that would later be
retconned, they position the novel within a larger mythology, and again
include early hints of where the story would ultimately lead (back to). On
the other hand, the novelization functions as a corrective text that tries
to counter what Kahn perceived to be the film’s flaws. In this way, thetext can be read as an attempt to respond to every fan’s impossible wish
regarding every Star Wars film after the irreproachable The Empire Strikes
Back, namely to redo the Star Wars sequel in question as it should havebeen done.

The Prequel Trilogy
By the time of The Phantom Menace’s novelization (1999), Lucasfilm’s policy
regarding adaptation had changed. At the end of the 1980s, when there werevirtually no new Star Wars-related media on the market, Bantam proposed
starting a series of Star Wars novels, commissioning Timothy Zahn to write
a sequel trilogy. While they began to churn out a deluge of franchise novelsof varying quality very quickly, the original idea was, in fact, to produce
one well-written hardback a year that would be marketed as a movie-likeevent.26 The success of these franchise novels made Lucasfilm pay more
attention to Star Wars literature: they started to exert more control with aneye to Star Wars canon (even though the rule was that anything could becontradicted by film or television work authorized by Lucas), but Bantam’s
success with Star Wars franchise novels did influence their approach to thenovelizations of the prequel trilogy.
While The Phantom Menace has all the hallmarks of commercial fiction—the novel was a predestined bestseller and was released with four
different covers the fans could collect27—it also attempts to increase its
literary prestige: the novelization was longer than the typical screenplay
transcription, it was “the first Star Wars movie novelization to add newly
created scenes unique to the book,”28 and it was written by Terry Brooks, abestselling author of fantasy novels. Like Star Wars novelizers before him,
Brooks received direct input from George Lucas, but the additional material
is more substantive than in previous novelizations: going further than
26 Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 288.
27 For an analysis of the novelization as a bestseller, see http://bestsellers.lib.virginia.edu/
submissions/344.
28 Hidalgo, Star Wars: The Essential Reader’s Companion, 50.

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81

Kahn’s Return of the Jedi, it provides many explanations and motivations,and plentiful characterization. The novel features more background on theJedi Order and the Sith (all of which has since been expanded in franchisenovels, comics, and video games) and even includes a new beginning anda new sequence involving Anakin Skywalker, who consequently becomes
more central to the story.
The Phantom Menace’s novelization was clearly used as a template forthe next novelizations in scale, ambition, and approach. Continuing theestablished tradition, these novelizations were written by different authors.
Science-fiction and fantasy author R.A. Salvatore’s novelization of Attackof the Clones (2002) again contains exclusive sequences: the first threechapters, for instance, mainly deal with the abduction of Anakin’s mother,
Shmi Skywalker. The novel also features plenty of direct references to theother films, such as a mid-novel, one-page recapitulation: “that reminded
Obi-Wan of the difficult circumstances under which Anakin had entered
the Order.”29 In the description of Obi-Wan Kenobi—“Obi-Wan’s wheatcolored hair was longer now, hanging loosely about his shoulders”30—theword “now” is deictic and explicitly appeals to the reader’s familiarity withThe Phantom Menace. At one instance, Salvatore even refers to a sequence
from the previous novelization (in which Anakin saves the life of a Tusken
Raider) that is not present in the corresponding film:
He’d had some experience with Tusken Raiders, but on a very limited
basis. Once he had tended the wound of one gravely injured Raider, andwhen the Tusken’s friends showed up, they had let him go—somethingunheard of among the more civilized species of Tatooine.31

This exceptional reference to another novelization (rather than to the films)
is all the more striking because it seems to serve no practical purpose here.
The context even seems opposite to the recapitulated situation, but it does
help to flesh out Anakin’s biography.
Taking the usual nods to the Star Wars mega-text one step further, Matthew Stover’s Revenge of the Sith novelization (2005) continually refers to
the previous and next episodes, and even includes many instances of more
obscure references to other texts in the transmedia universe to the extent
that the novel can only be fully understood by the knowledgeable Star
29 R. A. Salvatore, Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones (London: Century, 2002), 105.
30 Salvatore, Star Wars: Episode II, 40.
31 Salvatore, Star Wars: Episode II, 232.

82 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Wars fan: “Flying, he could forget about his slavery, about his mother, about
Geonosis and Jabiim, Aargonar and Muunilinst and all the catastrophes ofthis brutal war.”32 Stover’s fan service has paid off, as the novel is allegedly “aminor classic, much beloved by fans,” not in the least because it elucidates
Anakin’s turn to the dark side.33 Like Kahn’s Return of the Jedi, it tries tocorrect perceived flaws in the film. According to Hidalgo, “its greatest
additions to the screenplay are extensive internal viewpoints exploring
the psychological underpinnings to character actions.”34 In effect, the novel
seems to be the culmination of the strategies in the previously discussed
novelizations: there is extensive additional material and characterization,and every action is motivated.35
With the story of Revenge of the Sith revealed, the present catches up withthe past for Star Wars fans. In a way, this is mirrored in the novel, which, as
Hidalgo also notes, “often switches tenses and time frames to present thestory as both an event of the past, and one ‘currently’ unfolding.”36 This isalready apparent on the opening page:
This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is alreadyover. Nothing can be done to change it. […] It is the story of the end of an age.
A strange thing about stories—Though this all happened so long ago andso far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also
happening right now. Right here. It is happening as you read these words.
This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. […] The end starts now.37

On the one hand, Stover builds upon, or even adapts, Lucas’s mythologization of Star Wars as a story of the “used” past (rather than one set in the
future). On the other hand, he draws attention to the novel’s own status asa narrative: as a prequel, it is a story that was over before it even began, andthere is nothing that the narrator can do to change its outcome. Moreover,although the novel is mostly written in the traditional past tense, thesefirst lines shift the narrative to the present. Indeed, in several sequences,
the reader is even put into the place of the characters:
32 Matthew Stover, Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (London: Century, 2005), 21.
33 Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 368.
34 Hidalgo, Star Wars: The Essential Reader’s Companion, 126.
35 For instance, the lightsaber fight between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and Count
Dooku—explained in terms of Star Wars lightsaber combat forms—is quite short in the film
but lasts fifteen pages in the novel.
36 Hidalgo, Star Wars: The Essential Reader’s Companion, 126-127.
37 Stover, Star Wars: Episode III, xi.

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83

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, right now: You don’t remember putting away your lightsaber. You don’t remember moving from
Palpatine’s private office to his larger public one; […] You remember onlythat the last man in the galaxy you still thought you could trust has been
lying to you since the day you met. […] Inside your head, there is only
fire. Around your heart, the dragon whispers that all things die. This is
how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, right now.38

From this passage, which occurs right after the Emperor has revealed himself to Anakin, the viewer also cannot “remember” the actions, thoughts,
and dialogue, as it does not occur in the final film. In this novelization, it is
not important anymore to reproduce the film precisely; instead, it is meant
to be a separate, enhanced experience. The shift to the present tense andsecond-person point of view also makes the novel reminiscent of a ChooseYour Own Adventure book. Although the reader remains passive here, thenovel offers an alternate version of the story. In this way, the novelization
becomes part of the heavily intertextual and interactive Star Wars narrative,
in which the franchise’s readers/viewers/gamers pick and choose their own
experiences amongst a plethora of heavily referential media tie-ins, and inwhich novelizations are only one of the myriad possibilities for storyworld
engagement.

The Force Awakens
As The Force Awakens pays homage to and even recapitulates major narrative moments of A New Hope, it is fitting that the novelization of The Force
Awakens also returns to the template of the first film’s novelization and to
its author, Alan Dean Foster. Besides the occasional addition, such as an
introductory three pages, which retell the opening crawl, characteristic
plot correction, and (pseudo-)scientific explanation—e.g., “the resulting
graviton flux released enough heat to ignite the core […] Turning the planet
into what astrophysicists called a pocket nova”39—the novelization sticks
closely to the screenplay and film. While Foster’s style and approach haveremained the same, the constraints and control have been tightened: for The
Force Awakens novelization, the “Lucasfilm Story Group vetted everything

38 Stover, Star Wars: Episode III, 290-293.
39 Alan Dean Foster, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (London: Century, 2016), 175.

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and while some of Foster’s creations stayed in the book, others he was asked
to take out.”40
This can be connected to the changed production circumstances. Whenthe franchise changed owners to Disney, the EU was reformulated as Star
Wars Legends, but, even officially, the novelizations are a special case. As
Del Rey tweeted, “movie novelizations are canon where they align with what
is seen on screen in the 6 films and the Clone Wars animated movie.”41 The
lingering perceived irrelevance of novelizations (why read the book when
you can see the film?) is mirrored here in the confusion about their canonicity. According to the new Lucasfilm Story Group’s continuity standards, thenovelizations do not seem to matter. Hidalgo, a member of the Story Group,for example, tweeted, “remember these novels have Luke as Blue Five, a blueskinned Yoda, and Owen as Ben’s brother.”42 Yet despite these continuity
errors, the novelization cannot be retired as easily as the EU novels becauseof their strong association with the films. The novelizations still remain in
print—bundled into two trilogy omnibuses—as historical documents or
nostalgic “time capsules”43 from another galaxy, another time.
More signif icantly, the novelizations have been a testament to thechanging attitude towards the storyworld and transmedia franchisingstrategies utilized throughout Star Wars history—an attitude that has
strongly influenced the approach and constraints of each novel. The firstnovelization was written on the occasion of a one-off film event, witheven its direct sequel (Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye) lacking input for alarger framework. The other two novelizations of the original trilogy had todeal with the secrecy surrounding those films’ productions and just as thefilms had different directors, the novels were written by different authors.
The expansion of the Star Wars storyworld through print fiction, as a way
to maintain interest in the franchise, had become increasingly importantby the time of the prequel trilogy. The prequels’ novelizations thus havestrong ties to other transmedia Star Wars texts and provide additional, thencanonical, background. It is no surprise, then, that as Disney has reined in
40 Lisa Granshaw, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens Novelization: An Interview with Alan Dean
Foster,” Syfy Wire, January 22, 2016, accessed February 20, 2017, http://www.blastr.com/2016-1-22/
star-wars-force-awakens-novelization-interview-alan-dean-foster.
41 Star Wars Books (@DelReyStarWars), Twitter post, April 30, 2014, 11:54a.m., https://twitter.
com/delreystarwars/status/461579307341840384.
42 Inside Sources (@pablohidalgo), Twitter post, December 24, 2015, 5:46p.m., https://twitter.
com/pablohidalgo/status/680202967106994176.
43 Inside Sources (@pablohidalgo), Twitter post, December 24, 2015, 6:08p.m., https://twitter.
com/pablohidalgo/status/680208376156913664.

Another Canon, Another Time85

and reset the storyworld, they have also returned to the original strategy
so as not to spoil future ideas. In other words, the greater the potential, thegreater the control over the transmedia content. As the cycle begins anew,
it remains to be seen whether future novelizations will again be allowed
to contribute value to the storyworld for readers and fans.

5.

Franchising Empire
Parker Brothers, Atari, and the Rise of LucasArts
Stefan Hall

Video games are everywhere. In watches, cell phones, handheld units,
on a variety of home consoles and computer operating systems, andwithin arcades, played by solitary gamers as much as by groups of friends
and strangers, in private and in public, across computer networks andeven at professional video-game competitions. While video games havebeen the subject of, or have played a signif icant role in, f ilms or havebeen adapted into f ilms, the examination of f ilms turned into gaming properties is a rich topic because of the ways that films and video
games converge and diverge. When the topic of film and video games ismentioned, people tend to think about the adaptation from video games
to film, yet considering films that have been the source for video game
adaptation yields a particularly interesting category for video games.
Films continue to prompt the development of many games; the influence
here is as much visual as it is conceptual (in terms of characters andnarrative) and economic.
With the introduction of the second generation of home consoles (19761983), companies inside and outside of the video game industry sought toharness improved technology to create properties based on adapted media.
From arcade ports to comic-book and film adaptations, the video-gameindustry sought connections with media sources that inspired transmedia
design in the past and also sought to make these more formal as a burgeoning business sector through contracted commercial ventures. Given
the necessarily visual nature of video games, an apparent source of richmaterial for adaptation existed in film. As both the video-game industry
and film industry sought to find ways to license existing media properties,
fantastic genres readily emerged as a rich source to be tapped, and Star
Wars proved to be a particularly lucrative property for adaptation by gamedesigners.
Parker Brothers, a toy and game manufacturer known for publishingmajor hits such as Sorry! (1934) and Monopoly (1935), entered the homeconsole video game market in 1982. The company had found success in 1978
with the electronic handheld game Merlin, selling the entire production runof 700,000 units before Christmas and reaching $100 million in sales the88 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

following year.1 But this success was short-lived, as the handheld game market quickly became oversaturated and sales began to fall. Early in 1981, thehead of Atari’s home computer division approached the senior vice presidentof research and development at Parker Brothers to ask if Atari could license
some Parker Brothers board games for home cartridge versions. Having
flirted with success in electronic handheld games, Parker Brothers decided
Atari’s interest was evidence enough that they should develop their own
games. What made the entry of Parker Brothers different from that of otherthird-party software producers was the fact that they were an establishedgaming company with a significant research and development division to
help ease the transition from physical to digital games.
At a cost of $50,000, Parker Brothers reverse-engineered Atari’s hardware,
enabling them to move into cartridge production independently.2 While
game development was being pursued at Parker Brothers, parent company
General Mills investigated two other possible scenarios for entry into thevideo-game market. The marketing and design office advocated a newvideo-game system to compete with Atari, which would require a tremendous commitment of resources. Kenner proposed licensing properties suchas Star Wars action figures and Strawberry Shortcake to Atari in orderto minimize risk of developing a rival game system, but Parker Brothers
presented a compromise to program their own cartridges internally,first for the Atari console, then for the Intellivision, and finally for homecomputers.3 Since General Mills owned both Kenner and Parker Brothers,
it was relatively easy for Parker Brothers to obtain the game development
rights and essentially outmaneuver Twentieth Century Fox on their own
film property.4 The excitement at the debut of Frogger and the film-to-game
adaptation Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (SW:ESB) at the 1982 Toy Fair
prompted Parker Brothers to revise its initial profit forecast of $15 million
several times over and to create at least four other titles for release that year.

1 Philip Orbanes, The Game Makers: The Story of Parker Brothers from Tiddledy Winks to Trivial
Pursuit, (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003), 174-75.
2 Sydney Ladensohn Stern and Ted Schoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy
Industry (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990), 259.
3 Orbanes, The Game Makers, 181.
4 Twentieth Century Fox became the first film studio to specifically create a video gamedevelopment studio when it established Fox Video Games as a subsidiary, first by licensing
games from Sirius Software and then using titles in their distribution catalog as the basis forvideo games, including MegaForce (1982), Fantastic Voyage (1982), and Spacemaster X-7 (1983).

Fr anchising Empire

89

From June through December 1982, cartridge sales ultimately generated $74
million in revenue for Parker Brothers.5
Given the technological limitations of the time, SW:ESB did not attempt
to replicate the entire film’s narrative, as later film-to-game adaptations
did, but took a particular moment and developed a game around it. In thiscase, the Empire’s memorable assault on the Rebels’ stronghold on Hoth was
especially useful. Parker Brothers marketing manager Bill Bracy recalled
the process of choosing the topic of the adaptation as coming from a small
group “including traditional game designers, video game players, and acouple of us in marketing brainstorm[ing] on the various scenes from The
Empire Strikes Back” and “developing storyboards and experimenting withgame techniques.”6
By limiting themselves to the Hoth battle, the development team at
Parker Brothers created a side-scrolling shooter that fit nicely into a familiar
genre. In dealing with the memory restrictions of home consoles, the mostdetail is devoted to the vehicles, which—though blocky—are still easily recognizable. Scale is also important, with the player’s snowspeeder
dwarfed by the size of the AT-ATs, providing an effect not typically seen
in games at the time, as the player and the opponents were often equalin size. The use of parallax scrolling between the mountain range in the
background and the surface ice in the foreground creates a distinctive
depth of field. Finally, the iconic theme from the John Williams score,
synthesized through the platform’s audio hardware, is played when thegame is first started and again every two minutes for as long as the player
survives the attack. Surviving then prompts a 20-second audio clip of themain title theme that functions as a power-up, imbuing the player with
the Force and becoming invulnerable to enemy attack. But as viewers of
the film surely know, the Rebels are still defeated in the end.7 Any sortof success in the game therefore comes not from changing the narrative
established by the film, but in delaying its outcome as long as possible.
5 Orbanes, The Game Makers, 186.
6 Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 128.
7 Noted author Harlan Ellison wrote an infamous review of the SW:ESB game in 1982 for the
September issue Video Review magazine in which he likened the repetitive gameplay to themyth of Sisyphus, describing the “inspired exploitation of the Star Wars totem in videogame
form […] as the most virulent electronic botulism,” and generally decrying the game because it
did not allow for the possibility of winning (since the player will either run out of ships or the
power generator will be destroyed). Harlan Ellison, “Rolling Dat Ole Debbil Electronic Stone,”
Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1984), 70.

90 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

While gamers had already become used to losing all of their lives in a gameand, indeed, many games of this time have no ultimate, resolvable goal of
victory, the ludic pleasure of gameplay clearly trumps the usual sense of(narratological) victory.
SW:ESB is a key text in Star Wars’s transmedia history and indeed in thehistory of video games because it is considered the first official licensing ofa film-to-game property for home consoles.8 Produced for both the AtariVideo Computer System (VCS) and the Mattel Intellivision, the game alsofunctioned as a cross-platform title. This business model differed from theexclusivity that Atari later promoted with its film-to-game properties; thedecision to promote a title as exclusive to a particular console or to diversify
across several different hardware platforms is central to the contemporary
video game industry, particularly as significant and potentially lucrativeendorsement deals are imbricated in these decisions. For a company
entering the video game market for the first time, the decision for Parker
Brothers to provide cross-platform support gave them an advantage overAtari and Mattel, who only produced games for their own systems, while
demonstrating that Parker Brothers was making a serious commitment
to video games.9 Although the game adaptation post-dated The Empire
Strikes Back by two years, the popularity and success of SW:ESB also set
the precedent for video-game developers to license games based on films
that had been released years (or even decades) earlier.
Two subsequent titles—Star Wars: The Arcade Game and Star Wars:
Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle—were produced by Parker Brothers
for the Atari 2600, with cross-platform versions for the Atari 5200. An
additional 2600 title, Star Wars: Jedi Arena, based tangentially on A New
Hope’s lightsaber training droid sequence, was released by Parker Brothers, with another Return of the Jedi title (Ewok Adventure) developed but
never released. The release of SW:ESB “shows how a compelling cinematic
situation can be translated effectively into a videogame challenge.”10 It also
initiated the most prolific franchise in video-game history, in addition to
being the most licensed film property, with over 120 unique titles appearing
8 The first game to be made and released in conjunction with a theatrical film was TRON,
released in 1982 several months before SW:ESB. TRON was an arcade game before being ported
to a series of titles for the Atari and Intellivision consoles.
9 At the time that support for both systems was announced, Parker Brothers had only
possessed the capability to program for the Atari. The engineers quickly employed theirreverse-engineering tricks with the Intellivision and would later go on to do the same with the
Colecovision platform and several home computer systems.
10 Montfort and Bogost, Racing the Beam, 16.

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in the 35 years following the release of SW:ESB across all available platforms
and ranging across a wide variety of genres.
Having observed the success of SW:ESB, other companies quickly began
to produce games based on film properties, including Atari. It scored two of
the biggest film licenses in those years when Atari acquired the home gamerights to the Steven Spielberg blockbusters Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) for a combined $20 million.11 Atari also soughtout other agreements in 1982, gaining the rights to arcade games based on
the Star Wars license, as the Parker Brothers contracts had only covered
home console cartridges. While Parker Brothers had outmaneuvered Atarion the console front, Atari had something Parker Brothers did not: an established coin-op division, which was the foundation of Atari as a company.12
Star Wars: The Arcade Game (SW:TAG) was a first-person flight simulator
released two months after Return of the Jedi hit theaters, despite being aloose adaptation of a scenario from A New Hope.13 SW:TAG featured digitized audio effects lifted from the film, including voice samples of Luke
Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, in addition to themain title theme. It had originally been developed as a game called Warp
Speed, designed by Ed Rotberg. When Rotberg left Atari, his game wasoverhauled to produce SW:TAG, and most of the original game elements werechanged.14 The player dogfights with TIE fighters en route to the Death Star,
using a yoke controller scheme instead of the typical joystick, and then flies
the trench run from the film (see Drew Morton’s chapter in this volume).
The trench was somewhat different from that of the film and, as the game
became more difficult during play, an intermediate level was introduced forthe player to fly through involving a run across the surface of the Death Star
to reach the trench. High-scoring players were awarded by induction into
Princess Leia’s Rebel Guard. To further highlight the connection between
the game and film, Atari produced a promotional poster for the game inthe style of the theatrical one-sheet.
Lucasfilm responded to Atari’s initial proposal for the game in an internal
memo dated December 15, 1982 by providing a list of seven points to eliminate inconsistencies between the game and the Star Wars storyworld. This
11 Rusel DeMaria and Johnny Wilson, High Score! The Illustrated History of Electronic Games(New York: McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004), 99.
12 Additionally, when Parker Brothers ported SW:TAG to home consoles, Atari was able to geta piece of the revenue.
13 John Sellers, Arcade Fever: The Fan’s Guide to the Golden Age of Video Games (Philadelphia,
PA: Running Press, 2001), 132.
14 DeMaria and Wilson, High Score!, 90.

92 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

includes an explanation of how X-Wings are piloted, celestial mechanics, anin-game rationalization for how deflector shields are charged, and clarification of terms such as “parsecs” and “warp drive” (which is, as the memo
points out, a term from Star Trek). In the prototype phase, Atari conductedfocus group testing on January 24, 1983: three groups of players—15-19
year-old men, 20-35 year-old men, and 17-30 year-old women—provided
interesting feedback about the game. Although its reception was generally
positive, the playtesters did raise the question as to why the game wasbeing designed so long after the movie’s release date. All groups saw thegame as appealing most strongly to male gamers. Another request wasfor the addition of a sit-down cabinet for added realism and the game wastherefore released in both upright cabinet and cockpit (with stereo surroundsound) versions.15
Lucasfilm was perhaps the most notable movie studio joining the ranks
of companies looking to expand their properties through video games in the
1980s. With the financial success of Star Wars, fueled by the sale of licensed
merchandise, Lucasfilm had the financial power to diversify across othermedia and so made its first steps into the video-game industry. Its Games
Group was founded in May 1982 within Lucasfilm’s Computer Division. By
cushioning the Games Group within several levels of its corporate structure,
Lucasfilm created a sort of contained design environment in what is now
commonly referred to as a “game incubator.” To further strengthen the
Games Group, Lucas signed a joint cooperative agreement with Atari,16
after which Atari invested $1 million into the Games Group.17 Accordingto Robert Doris, Vice President of Lucasfilm and general manager of theComputer Division, the company’s movement into the video-game business
was a calculated result of the perception that video games were becoming
increasingly cinematic. While this was an advantageous deal for both parties, Lucasfilm used Atari as a testing bed for video-game development,
taking several years to release the first two games—Rescue on Fractalus!
and Ballblazer for the 5200 and the 7800 game systems—because “[a]mid
this convergence of technology and entertainment, it was apparent thatthe core target audiences of special-effects movies and the Atari game

15 Interestingly, according to an inter-off ice memo dated August 2, 1983, Atari may haveconsidered a Star Wars II game that would essentially have linked games, in a sort of primitive
multiplayer system, to give players a squadron attack experience.
16 Michael Ciraolo, “Lucasfilm & Atari: Creative Partners,” Antic 3, no. 4 (1984): 40.
17 DeMaria and Wilson, High Score!, 198.

Fr anchising Empire

93

platform had significant similarities.”18 The Games Group began by creating
basic 3D point-of-view (POV) routines as an experiment, and then turned
to studying the dedicated chips and microprocessor of Atari’s computer.19
Since 3D computer modeling was barely in its infancy, the Games Group
had Industrial Light & Magic create scale models of the ships in Ballblazer
and Rescue on Fractalus! using the same process as the Star Wars films.
This gave the group a thorough understanding not only of the basic gamearchitecture, but also of where the technology could be pushed or “how theform might evolve—ultimately, maybe, to meld with movies themselves.”20
In 1983, two early versions of the first games—known at that point as
BallBlaster and Rebel Rescue—were shown to Atari.21 Final versions of thegames were delivered in May 1984 and announced at a press conference thatbegan with the opening sequence from A New Hope.22 This long period ofdevelopment enabled Lucasfilm to experience video-game industry operations while only committing a small amount of resources (the Games Groupinitially only counted six men). The Games Group borrowed heavily fromdevelopment procedures in the film-production division, including drawing
models, making costumes, and writing extensive storylines to develop anarrative underpinning for the games more fully. As Langston explained,“My charter was to figure out where in the entertainment industry to apply
the kind of high-tech approaches that were proving so revolutionary ingraphics, sound, and editing for movies […] It took very little time to settle
on pursuing games.”23 An internal memo written by game designer DavidFox in 1982 listed some thoughts on game development, in particular whatfilms do well—such as special effects modeling new realities and creating
narrative engagement—and where video games lag behind, noting that18 Rob Smith, Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books,
2008), 11.
19 Peter Langston, “Ten Tips from the Programming Pros: Secrets from Lucasf ilm’s Game
Group,” Atari Connection (Spring 1984): 34.
20 Associated Press, “Lucas Looks beyond Film—Will Interactive Movies Try to Eat Your
Popcorn?” Access (Fall 1984), 12.
21 During testing of Rebel Rescue, Lucas looked for a fire button on the controls. In the game’sf iction, it was explained that the weapons had been removed to make more room for themarooned pilots to be rescued. Lucas asked Fox if that was a part of the game design or a moral
choice. This is an important question to raise, and the introduction of moral choices as partof the play mechanics usually took the form of alternate endings based on what actions theplayer had or had not done. Offering different narrative outcomes was initially far easier to do
on computers and helped to distinguish them from other gaming platforms.
22 Jonathan Greer, “Star Wars’ Creator Teams Up with Atari,” San Jose Mercury News, May 8
1984, G1.
23 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 12-13.

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Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

they were not taking full advantage of the hardware, including video andaudio); that they sometimes seemed constrained in game mechanics due
to genre; and that they did not offer a high level of escapism.24
For many years, Lucasfilm Games would eschew developing its own Star
Wars games, preferring to license out the franchise instead. By Lucas’s own
admission, “I wanted to have a really creative, independent shop. It’s nota coincidence that our early video games were not based on the Star Warsor Indiana Jones films.”25 In 1990, a reorganization of the Lucas companies
made Lucasfilm’s Games Group a part of the newly created LucasArts
Entertainment Company, which included Industrial Light & Magic andSkywalker Sound. After achieving a level of success with Indiana Jones
games, Lucasfilm Games finally moved on to creating its own Star Wars
game after licensing the property to other developers for several years.
Because the publishing rights were still owned by JVC, the first Lucasoriginated Star Wars games had some insulation against risk should something go awry. To add extra insurance, Lucasfilm Games handled design
and production, while subcontracting the actual programming to Beam
Software, an outside studio based in Australia.26 The deal with JVC included
six games to be developed for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES),
with JVC advancing $1 million and each game budgeted at $80,000-$100,000
for development, leaving a financial cushion to handle any development
issues. As production on Star Wars (the game named simply after the first
film’s original title) commenced with an eye on a September 1990 releasedate, an issue with the limited memory capacity of the NES arose. Therefore,
the drive “to re-create every significant Star Wars-movie action scene wasabandoned in favor of fitting key gameplay scenes into the 128K available on
the NES.”27 Like the Parker Brothers version of SW:ESB, the game designers
had to decide what constituted an essential experience of the film and putthat into some sort of playable system.
Side-scrolling platformers were popular at the time, so the game wasdesigned for the player to primarily control Luke Skywalker—with Princess
Leia and Han Solo used for certain missions—and concentrated on distinct
locales such as Tatooine and the Death Star. To diversify the play experience
24 Fox also raised a question regarding the licensing agreement of Star Wars, as the title of Rebel
Rescue had to be changed because of its loose connection to the Star Wars universe, wondering
if games might be set in the world of the films that reference places, vehicles, and weapons, but
provide new characters and stories.
25 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 7.
26 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 72.
27 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 73.

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further, a first-person asteroid belt mission and a top-down Death Star
trench run sequence were added. Between the popularity of the NES and therecognizability of the Star Wars brand, the game sold well and production
on The Empire Strikes Back began soon thereafter in collaboration with
Utah-based Sculptured Software as subcontracted developer. This gameessentially followed the same formula as its predecessor and attempted to
identify core cinematic referents (locations like Hoth, Dagobah, and Bespin,and characters like Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and Yoda) while introducing
some gameplay not seen in the film, such as fighting the cloud cars of Cloud
City and racing against Boba Fett’s Slave I.
The decision to include these extra-cinematic play elements opened
the door to questions of authenticity and canon for this incarnation of
the franchise. This is an especially notable issue for Star Wars in that thefilms are often seen as the source from which all other stories derive.28
While Lucas had final say over all Star Wars products, and the EU tried tostay consistent at the time with the elements of the films, licensed media
properties generally had to remain aligned with the overall canon while
also offering experiences to their audiences that utilized the best aspectsof each medium. Predominantly for video games, this meant striking abalance between the narrative, the look of the game, and available gameplay
options.29 This issue becomes especially important for film-to-game adaptations that attempt to enlarge the world presented within the film.
While TESB was in development in 1991, Nintendo released the Super
NES (SNES), whose increased hardware potential piqued the attention ofLucasfilm Games. A decision was therefore made to develop most of thegame in-house, with Sculptured Software providing technical implementation. Both Super Star Wars (1992) and Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes
Back (SSW:ESB, 1993) were praised for taking advantage of the graphics
capability at the time, as well as being fun to play.30 Like The Empire Strikes
Back on the NES, SSW:ESB also veered away from what was canonical as
far as the film showed, with part of the rationale being that the game’s
28 The EU was especially important in the 1990s. In particular, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy
novels (1991-1993) renewed interest in the Star Wars brand, further enabling the video games tocapitalize on the franchise’s cultural appeal in the absence of any theatrical films.
29 For example, the fighting game Masters of Teräs Käsi (1997) goes to great narrative lengths
to explain why Star Wars characters are pitted in arena-style combat and, for this reason (aswell as bad game controls), it was widely regarded as a flop.
30 One of the advantages of the SNES was Mode 7, a texture-mapping technique to change
rotation and scale and thus provide a sense of 3D perspective, which allowed game designers
to more closely emulate the look of a movie world.

96 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling“visual effects created a clear separation in the audience’s mind between asmall-screen interactive game and a big-screen blockbuster.”31 While thissounds somewhat plausible given the severe technological limitations interms of video games’ degree of cinematic realism in the early 1990s, thisparticular distinction between a game and a film has since been disrupted
with the most current capabilities of gaming technology.
The success of the NES and SNES Star Wars titles gave Lucasfilm Gamesthe clout to restructure its distribution deals and eliminate the need forexternal publishers. For the newly rebranded LucasArts, technologicalissues again pushed game design, specif ically in CD-ROMs. While thestandards for using compact discs as a computer storage medium had been
established by Sony and Philips in 1985, practical and affordable distribution to the home user took several more years. Rebel Assault’s release in1993 was a primary reason why many home computer users decided to
upgrade to computers equipped with a CD-ROM drive.32 The CD-ROM’s
storage potential not only meant that game developers could create moresophisticated programs that would offer improved graphics and longer
play experiences, but they could also incorporate live-action footage seenin full-motion video (FMV) games such as The 7th Guest (1992) and Voyeur(1993). The designers of Rebel Assault decided to film new live-action footage
set in the Star Wars universe and this development caught Lucas’s attention:
If video was suddenly the primary visual production method, the games
would start to encroach on the movie space. According to producer Hal
Barwood, Lucas was concerned that if movie-like footage was shot, it
could cause confusion with the film canon, and players would assume
Lucas was somehow at the helm.33

The live-action footage was instead combined with overlaid sprites thatcreated sophisticated visuals that still remained distinct from cinematic
photorealism.34 Memory constraints and processing power also restricted
the free movement and sense of exploration that players experienced inother games by necessitating that the action largely remain confined to a
31 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 74.
32 Mark Langshaw, “‘Star Wars: Rebel Assault’ Retrospective: A Force to Be Reckoned With,”
Digital Spy, April 6, 2013, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/retro-gaming/
news/a470859/star-wars-rebel-assault-retrospective-a-force-to-be-reckoned-with/.
33 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 78.
34 Live-action scenes would be used again in Rebel Assault II (1995) and even more so—anentire hour’s worth—in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997).

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97

limited combination of interactions, making the game function like a railshooter. Finally, the game design provided a play experience that lasted
only a few hours, roughly equivalent to a Star Wars movie, thus also keeping
development costs more manageable.
Despite these limitations, Rebel Assault’s look and style helped make thegame a major success. Before its release, CD-ROM games sold an averageof 10,000 copies, but the first-day shipment of Rebel Assault moved 110,000
units; the game ultimately reached sales of over a million copies.35 While its
popularity certainly could be attributed partly to the Star Wars brand itself,
the gameplay also suggested a more cinematic experience and indicatedanother direction for game design as the hardware advanced. As Lucas
noted in a March 3, 1994 memo to Rebel Assault’s development staff:
By taking “Star Wars” into the CD-ROM platform you’ve extended myoriginal story ideas into a new and different form of entertainment. You
seem to have set the standard for what this new medium can accomplish
for interactive entertainment. It’s great that we can also set the standard
for what sales can be as well.36

The game’s influence, particularly in its use of CD-ROM technology, helpedthe LucasArts developers free themselves from the memory restrictions ofcomputer-system storage at the time and gave them new ideas for gamedevelopment.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lucasfilm Games developed a series of
military simulation games, beginning with Battlehawks 1942 (1988), a WWII
trilogy created by a team led by Lawrence Holland. Holland drew upon thisexperience for his next LucasArts project, the X-Wing series (1993-1999).37
This EU series attempted to simulate the film experience of starfighter
combat faithfully, which itself was based on gun-camera dogfight footage
Lucas had studied while making A New Hope.
In the early titles—X-Wing, released in 1993, with the expansions Imperial
Pursuit and B-Wing following the same year—the player worked for theRebel Alliance. These games begin before the events in A New Hope andinvolve missions in which allies must be located and the Death Star plans
35 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 78.
36 Smith, Rogue Leaders, 80.
37 Beginning in 1995, Michael Stackpole, collaborating with Mike Baron, produced a popular
X-Wing: Rogue Squadron comic book for Dark Horse. A year later, Stackpole, along with Aaron
Allston, also produced the popular X-Wing novel series for Bantam Spectra.

98 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingmust be delivered to Princess Leia. The action then moves to intersect withthe film and the attack on the Death Star. Players then deal with the evacuation of Yavin IV, eventually arriving on Hoth shortly before the events in The
Empire Strikes Back. The game was another commercial success that gave
players a new opportunity to fly spaceships within the Star Wars universe.
Additional Star Wars games opened up the possibilities for fan-player
engagement with the storyworld by allowing players to fly for the Galactic
Empire in TIE Fighter, a move that highlighted the conception of morality
in the Star Wars universe, which began as something fairly nuanced before
becoming more dogmatic in later Star Wars titles.38 According to Holland, “In
most great works, the villain or evil side has a lot of intrigue, and we wanted
to design with that in mind. We gave the Empire shades of gray, and gave
the player a chance to achieve some nobility.”39 The game’s narrative begins
after the Rebels’ routing on Hoth, continuing through a series of missions
in which the player must not only fight the Rebels but help to quell civil
wars, dispatch pirates and traitorous Imperials, complete secret objectives
for the Emperor, and generally try to keep the peace, albeit through heavily
militaristic means.
The first and last games in the series—X-Wing (1993) and X-Wing Alliance(1999)—paralleled events in the original Star Wars trilogy, including endgame missions that recreate the attacks on the first and second Death Stars,
despite the fact that Holland, with X-Wing, “didn’t want to do the movie overagain, though, but put in the familiar elements in a similar story.”40 Mostof the games feature voice acting, which was somewhat unusual for thetime, and animated cut scenes (supplemented with occasional computer
rendering) that advance the storyline, as well as feature music from theoriginal trilogy. Like X-Wing before it, TIE Fighter was a major commercial
success, eventually outselling X-Wing, and benefiting from improvementsin the game’s programming. 41 These critically and financially successful
games released by Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts demonstrated that it waspossible for a production company to flourish in the video-game industry,
draw upon and repurpose their own internal assets, and adapt films to

38 The ability to fly for either the Rebel Alliance or the Galactic Empire was proposed for
X-Wing but dropped due to programming and time constraints.
39 DeMaria and Wilson, High Score!, 203.
40 DeMaria and Wilson, High Score!, 203.
41 Anticipation for the game was so high that Dodge used it as part of their promotional
campaign for the Neon. People who test-drove the car received a demo of the game consistingof one playable level in an unfinished build and an advertisement for the Neon.

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games as appropriate to the medium, often while pushing the boundaries
of existing gaming technology.
Even as LucasArts continued to develop new film-to-game Star Wars
titles, the older titles in its catalog continued to be profitable. In this regard, despite some occasional technical upgrades, the gameplay remained
engaging even if the graphics had grown dated by contemporary standards.
Although its film-to-game properties were confined almost exclusively toStar Wars, LucasArts was a useful model for other film studios to consider
ways to successfully manage franchise development in video games, notonly for adaptations but also for acclaimed original works such as The
Secret of Monkey Island (1990) and Grim Fandango (1998). With the 2012acquisition by Disney and the subsequent dissolution of almost all of theLucasArts staff, the company now exists solely as a licensor of branded IP.
It is important, however, to remember the technological and industrial innovations that made LucasArts such a successful and influential company.
Considering how quickly change transpires in the video-game industry, it isuseful to reflect on this nascent part of its history and consider how earlier
developers like Parker Brothers, Atari, and Lucasfilm laid the foundation
for much of the medium’s future.

6.

“You must feel the Force around you!”Transmedia Play and the Death Star Trench Run in Star
Wars Video Games
Drew Morton

The overlap between fan studies and Star Wars in all its multimedia incarnations seems to encourage academics to indulge in an autobiographical approach to the franchise. After all, George Lucas’s narrative universe evokes
a range of emotions and personal reflections, from nostalgic memoriesof playing with action figures as a child to anger about the prequels andongoing editorial changes Lucas has made to the original trilogy over the
past decades. Like Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and Colin Harvey, I too cannot
avoid the autobiographical impulse as a form of introduction—like theDeath Star’s tractor beam, it just sucks me in—so allow me to be brief. In
the summer of 1998, when I was fifteen years old, my appendix broke. I
was misdiagnosed and went two weeks with a broken appendix before thedoctors figured out what was wrong with me. Because of the misdiagnosis,
I spent a month in the hospital having what I have since described as my“Martin Scorsese summer.” I went through the American Film Institute’s
Top 100 Films from the comfort of my hospital bed and used the moneyfrom all the get-well cards to upgrade my computer so I could play X-Wing
Alliance (1999).
Part of the game’s appeal was its status as one of the first Star Wars flight
simulators with photorealistic 3D graphics that allowed players to pilot theMillennium Falcon. I remember hovering over the monitor with my friends
as we watched from the crusty old ship cockpit as it went into hyperspace. It
was as thrilling as the first time we played Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997),
a first-person shooter that allowed players to use a lightsaber and Force
powers in such iconic settings as the carbonite freezing chamber from The
Empire Strikes Back. I mention this because there is a tendency in studiesof transmedia properties to emphasize narrative over play. Yet, to many
video gamers, play is much more important than story.
I noticed this disjunction between media studies scholars and gamerswhen I was finishing my book on style as having transmedia properties.1
1 See Drew Morton, Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During theBlockbuster Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 21-39.

102 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Specifically, if we look back at the seminal transmedia case study of The Matrix franchise and the Enter the Matrix video game, we can see a pragmatic
gulf in how academics, gamers, and critics engaged with the game. While
Henry Jenkins uses the franchise persuasively to build upon Marsha Kinder’swork towards his theory of transmedia storytelling—the conception that
integral narrative elements of a fictional world are dispersed systematically
across multiple media platforms—gamers and popular critics focused on
the gameplay.2 As one reviewer noted, “it’s a little disappointing that thegame does not allow you to play as the three coolest members of the Matrix
universe […] It would have been cool to take off through the city as Neo, orshoot it out with agents as Trinity.”3 Similarly, Stephen Poole at PC Gamer
asked, “But what’s with all the story? While some gamers will love to learn
of Ghost’s existentialist leanings or his unique stance on celibacy, mostwould trade this knowledge for some kickass action—and this is whereEnter the Matrix truly disappoints.”4
In both reviews, the critics voice a fairly common refrain that thosefamiliar with video games based on film or television licenses can traceback to Atari’s historic E.T. debacle. Even when they are based on film
properties, games are firstly meant to be playable. Narrative preoccupations
aside, the quality of that gameplay and its reflection of the visceral spiritof the source text matters most. As Carle notes, his disappointment stems
from not getting to experience the iconic “bullet time” of The Matrix fromthe perspective of one of the film’s main characters. Everything else—thestory, the philosophy lessons, the characterization—is secondary. The
purpose of this article is therefore to begin to formulate a theoretical andmethodological approach to transmedia as play and apply the concept toStar Wars video games, specifically the space simulation/combat games
that tend to return to the Death Star trench run, in the same way that fan
studies scholars yield to their autobiographical impulses.
In order to take these initial steps, let us begin with the def inition
and usage of the term “transmedia play” up to this point. While Jenkins
broadly alludes to the category in his 2011 blog post “Transmedia 202:

2 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old Media and New Media Collide (New York:NYU Press, 2006), 94.
3 Chris Carle, “Enter the Matrix Review,” IGN, May 20, 2003, accessed December 6, 2016, http://
www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/20/enter-the-matrix-review.
4 Stephen Poole, review of Enter the Matrix, PC Gamer, August 2003, accessed December 6,
2016, http://web.archive.org/web/20060315134412/http://www.pcgamer.com/archives/2005/07/
enter_the_matri.html.

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103

Further Reflections,” the term nevertheless remains elusive.5 Colin Harvey’s
2015 monograph Fantastic Transmedia traces the term back to 2008—to thework of game designer and theorist Stephen Dinehart. However, Dinehart’s
theorization merely states that the playertransforms the story via his or her own natural cognitive psychologicalabilities, and enables the Artwork to surpass medium. It is in transmedial
play that the ultimate story agency, and decentralized authorship canbe realized […] The Artist authored transmedia elements act [as] a story
guide for the inherently narratological nature of the human mind to
become thought, both conscious and subconscious.6

To which natural cognitive psychological abilities is Dinehart alluding?
How might the conclusions of a cognitive approach to video games ortransmedia play differ from the work of other cognitivist scholars likeDavid Bordwell and Edward Branigan? Dinehart never tells us (the above
quotation is actually the bulk of the blog post). How does transmedial playdiffer from transmedia storytelling? Both provide narrative worlds for thetypes of community-based behaviors—“decentralized authorship”—that
Jenkins already theorized. Needless to say, Dinehart’s work does not carry
the scholarly conversation very far due to its preference for unsubstantiatedgeneralizations.
Additional scholarly work on the relationship between transmedia andplay has been produced by Becky Herr-Stephenson, Meryl Alper, and Erin
Reilly at the Annenberg Innovation Lab (in collaboration with Jenkins).
But the research team’s study is focused on how it can be utilized to enrichconnected learning in children. The research team defines transmedia
play as the exploration, enjoyment, and remixing of “elements from diverse
media […] This ‘creative reworking’ (in Jenkins’ terms) allows children totell new stories, work through problems, and share with others.”7 This
conception provides a useful springboard that need not be specificallylimited to children.
5 Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia 202: Further Reflections,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, August
1, 2011, accessed December 6, 2016, http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/def ining_transmedia​_further_re.html.
6 Stephen Dinehart, “Transmedial Play: Cognitive and Cross-Platform Narrative,” The Narrative Design Explorer, May 14 2008, accessed December 6, 2016, http://narrativedesign.org/2008/05/
transmedial-play-cognitive-and-cross-platform-narrative/.
7 Becky Herr-Stephenson, Meryl Alper, and Erin Reilly, T is for Transmedia: Learning ThroughTransmedia (Los Angeles, CA: USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, 2013), 10.

104 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Think, for a moment, of Star Wars cosplay or a historical reenactmentof a Civil War scene, two activities that tend to be prohibitive to children
due to the cost of the costumes and props and the use of weaponry. Both,undoubtedly, are activities that rely on other media forms to create anarrative experience that is shared with others. Moreover, they are bothsocial activities that are often performed in public venues, ranging fromconventions to tourist locations. Sometimes those narrative experiences arenew. When I encounter one of a handful of Darth Vader cosplayers at San
Diego Comic-Con every year, the actors are not recreating scenes from thefilms, novels, or comics. While there may be performative punchlines like
“The Force is strong with this one,” the bulk of the interactions are basedaround the cosplayer interacting with me as they assume Darth Vader
would. Historical reenactment may differ in this regard based on the genreof practice: a reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg may not create a new
narrative, while a living history might. In any case, we can see that, while
the Annenberg scholars chose to focus on children, their theorization mightalso be useful for developing a theory of transmedia play on a broader scale.
So far, we can see that the Annenberg team’s conceptualization of transmedia play squares with Marsha Kinder and Jenkins’s work on transmedia
as an experience that migrates across media platforms. But is it compatible
with theories of play, specifically in relation to video games? According toMark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (who utilize an interdisciplinary toolbox
in their foundational work in video game studies), the most fundamental
elements of the video game are an algorithm, player activity, interface, andgraphics.8 Essentially, video games are a visual display of pixels (graphics)
that respond to the player’s input (player activity) at the junction point
between input and output (interface). Moreover, video games are definedby a set of procedures that are responsible for the game’s representations,
responses to input, rules, and randomness (the algorithm).9
For Wolf and Perron, “player activity is arguably the heart of the video
game experience […] without player activity, there would be no game.”10This player activity takes place in a game world that presents itself aswholly separate from the real world. For game theorists like Roger Caillois
and Johan Huizinga, the game world is a “second reality” that serves as

8 Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, introduction to The Video Game Theory Reader (NewYork: Routledge, 2003), 15.
9 Wolf and Perron, introduction to Video Game Theory, 16.
10 Wolf and Perron, introduction to Video Game Theory, 15.

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105

the venue for player action.11 Furthermore, for Wolf, Perron, and theorist
Alexander Galloway, there is a separation between the activities a player
performs within the game (diegetic activity) and the physical actions
performed outside the game, such as pressing a button, that are necessary
to perform those diegetic activities (extradiegetic activity).12 To illustrate,
there is both an overlap and disjunction between actions taken in the realworld (extradiegetic space) and the game world (diegetic space). A player
performing a dance sequence in Dance Dance Revolution (1998) or piloting
an X-Wing in the Star Wars arcade game performs abridged physical actions
in comparison to their digital avatars.
Does the video game’s algorithm therefore inhibit the exploration or
remixing of media elements? To a certain extent, at least, it does. Most video
games have spatial boundaries that confine player activity to a specificvenue. For instance, you cannot go “outside” the maps of Battlefront (2015),
nor can you pick Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker as your avatar (they only
exist in the game as special power-ups that you can receive). Video games,
like most new media, provide an illusion of choice based on a preexisting
database of information that can be accessed via predetermined commands.
However, boundaries and limitations tend to be inherent in the rules ofany game—video or analog. Do video games allow players to work throughproblems? Absolutely. Most games are based around objectives from “getthe most kills” to “navigate this space and avoid obstacles,” and almost
any multiplayer game, Battlefront included, relies on a social dimension(sharing with others) to achieve those predetermined goals. Moreover,players of Battlefront can explore the game’s spaces and partake in suchiconic events as the Battle of Hoth, the Battle of Endor, and the destructionof the first Death Star. Thus, Herr-Stephenson, Alper, and Reilly’s conceptionof transmedia play can be extended to account for both a larger audienceand play in the context of a video game.
The authors further note that transmedia play has five characteristics:
mobility (movement of stories across platforms creates new meanings), accessibility (each world has a variety of starting points), replayability (large-scale
experiences create high potential for multiple iterations), resourcefulness(encourages creative thinking about challenging situations or problems),
and social interaction (play occurs in conversation with others).13 I have
11 Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis, MN: Universityof Minnesota Press, 2006), 6.
12 Wolf and Perron, introduction to Video Game Theory, 15. See also Galloway, Gaming, 7.
13 Galloway, Gaming, 27.

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already engaged some of these points directly and indirectly. Transcribing
the Death Star trench run from A New Hope to one of the many video games
it appears in changes its meaning: the importance of the event is gleaned
from one’s knowledge of the film, while the immediacy of the first-person
experience magnifies that importance. Yet, the opposite sequence of events
could easily occur if a consumer played the video game before watching
the film. I have already discussed how such games—particularly of themultiplayer variety—showcase both the resourceful and the social aspects
that Herr-Stephenson, Alper, and Reilly describe. Moreover, a game neednot be strictly multiplayer to encourage social behaviors. Arcade culture
nurtured a certain type of public performance and tips, cheats, and exploits
still migrate amongst the players of single-player games.
What I would like to focus on for the remainder of this brief essay is replayability—the idea that transmedia play utilizes large-scale experiences
to nurture the potential for multiple interactions. Transmedia storytellingis dependent upon the consumer’s constant return to a narrative universe
through its overlapping texts; consumers need to do homework and stay
on top of story developments, which, in turn, enriches their understandingof the previously established texts and encourages re-consumption (think
about how knowledge of Shadows of the Empire changes the establishingshots of Mos Eisley in the special edition of A New Hope when we see
Dash Rendar’s ship fly across the sky). Enjoyment arises in consumers
when they can make these textual linkages, which goes back to Jenkins’s
theorization of transmedia storytelling as having a dimension of “additive
comprehension.”14 For Jenkins, one of the narrative goals of transmedia storytelling is that creators can re-consume texts while adding newly acquired
knowledge to “shift your perception.”15 To phrase it another way, transmedia
play can shift the consumer’s perception towards visceral pleasures. So what
is it about the Death Star trench run that keeps players coming back? The
iconic sequence that serves as the proving ground for the climax of A New
Hope has been remediated and recreated in video games ranging from the1983 Atari arcade game to the 1993 desktop titles Rebel Assault and X-Wing,and more recently in the 2009 iOS and Unity title Trench Run and 2015’s
Star Wars Battlefront.16 If the Force is a constant of the Star Wars universe,

14 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old Media and New Media Collide (New York:NYU Press, 2006), 123.
15 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 123.
16 For clarity and concision, I will now refer to this title as “the 2015 Battlefront.”

“You must feel the Force around you!”

107

the trench run seems to be the equivalent for Star Wars video games,17 thus
making it a prime example of replayability.
Jenkins provides a useful lens for contemplating the joys of replayability
in his article “Games, the New Lively Art.” The article advocates the embraceof critic Gilbert Seldes’s distinction between “great arts,” which “seek toexpress universal and timeless values,” and “lively arts,” which “seek to give
shape and form to immediate experiences and impressions. [Seldes] values
affect over intellect, immediate impact over long-term consequences, thespontaneous impulse over the calculated effect.”18 Thus, Jenkins largely
avoids the foundational theoretical skirmishes around ludic or narrative
approaches to video games in order to advocate for the investigation of
the pleasurable, the emotional, and the subjective. For instance, Seldes
describes what Jenkins terms and describes as “memorable moments”:
the pleasures of finding peak experiences within otherwise banal works.
[They] don’t simply depend on spectacle. After all, spectacle refers tosomething that stops you dead in your tracks, forces you to stand andlook. Game play becomes memorable when it creates the opposite effect—when it makes you want to move, when it convinces you that you
really are in charge of what’s happening in the game.19

In other words, memorable moments are illustrated by the times you played
the 2015 Battlefront and, tricked into seeing and feeling past the interface
as a bridge between extradiegetic space and the Millennium Falcon, started
rocking your body in sync with each turn and swerve of the ship. As Jenkins
later notes, the phenomenological closure created by good game design, afunctional interface, and an adept player prompts many players to conflate
the two spaces as being one and the same. He writes that we act as if we have“unmediated access to the fictional space. We refer to our game charactersin the first person and act as if their experiences” are our own.20 Of course,
the lynchpin in this relationship is game design that aids the player inmaking that conflation. Gamers can become more adept as they play agame (the progression system embedded in most games demands thatthey do) and broken controllers can be fixed, but poor game design was a
17 For a contextual media-industrial history of Star Wars video games and LucasArts, see
Stefan Hall’s chapter in this volume.
18 Henry Jenkins, “Games, the New Lively Art” Henry Jenkins: Blog, April 3, 2010, accessed
December 13, 2016, http://web.mit.edu/21fms/People/henry3/GamesNewLively.html.
19 Jenkins, “Games, the New Lively Art.”
20 Jenkins, “Games, the New Lively Art.”

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relative constant in games made before the 2000s (2003 saw the launch of
the first console patch). So how do game designers assist in the process ofmaking us feel like we’re fighting like Luke Skywalker, like we’re piloting
the Millennium Falcon as Han Solo?
In the case of the Death Star downloadable content (DLC) for Star Wars
Battlefront, it does so predominantly through a staged progression thatcombines a variety of gameplay modes with an epic scope. The centerpieceof the DLC is a game mode entitled “Battle Station” that involves threestages, culminating—once again—in the trench run. The first stage pits
Rebel and Imperial star fleets against one another as the former attempt toblow up the latter’s Star Destroyers. The mode allows for either first-personor third-person camera placement, while players can temporarily takecontrol of unique bonuses like Boba Fett’s Slave I or the Millennium Falcon
in order to give their teams an advantage. If the Rebels’ assault succeeds, themode progresses to the second stage: the rescue. Unlike the first stage, thesecond takes the guise of a first-person shooter in which the Rebels must
escort R2-D2 from the depths of the Death Star’s corridors to a docking
bay so the droid can be rescued. Like the first stage, the second allows
players to briefly take on such familiar characters as Bossk, Chewbacca,
and the Emperor (complete with Force powers and unique abilities) to swaythe battle in their favor. If R2-D2 is rescued, the final stage—the trench
run—is triggered, and three Rebel players are randomly selected to makethe attempted run while the others protect them and act as a diversion.
Like the first stage, the player can choose a first- or third-person camera
and can take part in the battle as Luke, Han, or Darth Vader.
Obviously, this transposition of A New Hope’s most iconic sequence differsfrom the canonized narrative. The Star Destroyer attack stage owes more to
the finale of Return of the Jedi, while the R2-D2 docking bay rescue seems
cribbed from the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. But the alternation between flight simulator attack-and-defense stages and a first-person shooter
stage provides the DLC with a sense of dramatic stakes and scale. Part of thisstems from the temporal investment players must make while playing themode. Altogether, the mode can take up to half an hour to complete (muchlonger than the usual six- to ten-minute round of team deathmatch). Thus,
if the Rebels fail in the second stage, they have to repeat the first all overagain. If they run out of time during the trench run, they also lose. Another
difference between the game design and the film, of course, is that thesestages do not take place simultaneously. In A New Hope, the cross-cutting
between the Rebel base on Yavin, Grand Moff Tarkin targeting the Rebelbase on the Death Star, Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing attack, and Vader’s pursuit

“You must feel the Force around you!”

109

created both dramatic stakes and suspense. However, the implementationof such precise coordination would undoubtedly make for an extremelycomplicated gameplay experience.
The second stage of the DLC therefore focuses on creating a sense of scale,in particular making the Death Star feel real by making the iconic space
explorable and by giving it a tangible quality. One corridor, for example,
leads to the trash compactor that almost killed our heroes, while anotherleads to the shield generators that Obi-Wan Kenobi deactivated. By thetime the third stage inevitably comes around, the Death Star has a physicalvolume and depth for both teams of players. As Forbes contributor Todd
Kenreck writes, the end result is “that you feel like you are in the movies”
when you see dozens of stormtroopers go into battle against the Rebels.21
Fittingly, Kenreck also focuses on the experiential pleasures of the DLC,
writing: “It is definitely a wish fulfillment piece of DLC. Being able to fly
down the trenches of the Death Star as Darth Vader is pretty much a dreamcome true.”22 As in the gameplay of Enter the Matrix, the story is secondary
whereas the transmedia play, the experience of being Darth Vader and Luke
Skywalker, is everything.
My analysis of the dimensional, transmedial space of the Death Starand how it creates enhanced dramatic significance in the 2015 Battlefront
dovetails with another concept by Jenkins that proves useful for examining
transmedia play—games as evocative spaces. In “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Jenkins encourages a compromise between the duelingcamps of ludologists and narratologists that examines “games less as stories
than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility.”23 A productive route forreaching this middle ground is by analyzing video games as “evocative
spaces,” similar to that of theme park attractions that “build upon stories or genre traditions already well known to visitors, allowing them toenter physically into spaces they have visited many times before in theirfantasies.”24 Fittingly, Jenkins cites game scholar and ludologist Jesper Juul,
who argues that “you clearly can’t deduct the story of Star Wars from Star

21 Todd Kenreck, “Star Wars: Battlefront’s Death Star DLC Has An Absurd Amount of Polish,” Forbes, September 28, 2016, accessed December 13, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/
toddkenreck/2016/09/28/star-wars-battlefronts-death-star-dlc-has-an-absurd-amount-polish/.
22 Kenreck, “Death Star DLC.”
23 Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in The Game Design Reader: A
Rules of Play Anthology, eds. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005),
672.
24 Jenkins, “Game Design,” 677.

110 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Wars the game.”25 For Jenkins, who was on the cusp of his pioneering work ontransmedia storytelling, this is too restrictive a conception of narrative (hewas writing this in 2005). The gift of Star Wars video games is the fact thatthe player comes into them with a previously established understanding of
the narrative and that they enrich our engagement with a larger universe bygiving “concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld,
creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact
with.”26 In short, gamers unfamiliar with the films or Star Wars universe
may not engage in transmedia play when encountering an evocative space
like the carbonite chamber or the Death Star for the first time. They may
get enjoyment from the games—similar to that of a person who is first
introduced to Star Wars via an ancillary offshoot—but I would guess thatthe “wish fulfillment” aspect would be lost on these gamers to a great degree(depending on their familiarity with the franchise and its world via otherintertextual and paratextual sources).
While we’ve analyzed a contemporary Star Wars game in relation to theconcepts of memorable moments and—indirectly—evocative spaces, let
us now return to the origin of our case study: the 1983 Atari arcade gamedesigned by Mike Hally. The Atari game was composed of 3D color vector
graphics and featured what were cutting-edge digital sound cues at thetime. We hear a lo-res rendition of John Williams’s iconic score. We can hearsamples of the voices of Alec Guinness, James Earl Jones, Harrison Ford, andthe growls of Chewbacca and beeps of R2-D2. The elaborately decorated
cockpit cabinet for the interface features stickers and faux computer screens
to give the player the impression that they are piloting an X-Wing on theway to save Yavin 4 from certain destruction. In short, the physical interface
itself—not just the game—aids substantially in the creation of an evocative
space. Fittingly, Jenkins quotes Don Carson, a senior show designer for Walt
Disney Imagineering, who writes that “every sound you play, every turn in
the road should reinforce the concept” and the “physical space […] doesmuch of the work.”27 Thus, the various aesthetic embellishments on theinterface itself, the music, and the sound effects go a long way in sowing
the seeds of illusion and creating that “second reality” that game theorists
describe. But how do we, as players, overcome one of the biggest perceived
obstacles on our path toward complete immersion: the lack of photorealistic

25 Jenkins, “Game Design,” 677.
26 Jenkins, “Game Design,” 678.
27 Jenkins, “Game Design,” 676.

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111

graphics? How do we align ourselves with Luke Skywalker if TIE fighterslook like rudimentary sketches?
I should note that I do not personally ascribe to this popular assumptionof video-game play. Of course, I have felt shock and awe in moments of realist beauty in video games—for example, the exit from the vault in Fallout 3(2008); the experiences of roaming the Wild West in Red Dead Redemption(2010); or the uncanny sensation of driving around a spatially abridged
version of my LA neighborhood in Grand Theft Auto V (2013). However, I stillfind playing Super Mario Bros. (1983) engaging despite the fact that twodimensional platform games do not offer the same kind of visual realism.
That being said, the evolution of graphics-generating hardware towards
greater visual realism has driven both the aesthetic norms of game design
and gamer expectations. But realism is, as always, contingent upon historical context. For instance, the photorealist computer-generated imagery ofTerminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993) today tends tobe met by my students with laughter. I say this because while Atari’s Star
Wars may not look “real” to us in 2016, it certainly was good enough forgamers in the early 1980s. As Dan Plotkin writes in a Compute! review ofthe game, the 3D wire diagrams give “such an excellent illusion of depth,”
while the “digitized sound” and controls make the Death Star sequence“breathtaking.”28 In other words, rudimentary wire graphics served theirimmersive purpose at the time. But I would like to add one more aesthetic
piece to this puzzle.
Consider the Death Star trench run in its original cinematic context. As
I have described, George Lucas cross-cuts between multiple points of view.
We watch as the Rebel attack squadron dispatches TIE fighters during theirapproach to the trench. Similarly, we watch as the Rebel military leaders
monitor the alignment of the Death Star’s destructive laser beam from theirown location on Yavin 4. One of the main tools in all of these settings is acomputer: the Rebel leaders trace the trajectory of the laser with a gigantic,
computerized war-room table, while the rival forces dogfight with the aidof targeting computers. The targeting computers in both the X-wings and
TIE fighters are lo-res representations constructed out of rudimentary 3D
vector graphics.
In both instances, we see the Death Star trench represented by lo-res
vector graphics and a z-axis vanishing point. To borrow from the work of Jay
David Bolter and Richard Grusin, the film remediates the computer in orderto give players the sensation that they are in the position of Luke Skywalker;
28 Dan Plotkin, “ST Star Wars,” Compute!, July 1988, 51.

112 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingthe arcade game does the inverse. It remediates the graphics of the targeting
computer to give us a similar illusion.29 However, this admittedly simplistic
analysis overlooks one key difference between the two representations. For,
when we see the targeting computer in A New Hope, it is in the context of oneof the film’s many point-of-view shots. Luke looks into his eyepiece while
flying and sees the digitized representation as being outside the confinesof the ship, ahead of the X-Wing. The Atari game, on the other hand, gives
us a point-of-view shot from the cockpit. In other words, the film separates
the view from the ship and the view from the targeting computer while the
Atari game equates them. Nevertheless, both representations of the trench
run—the cinematic and the vector graphic—utilize a subjective, computermediated point of view. The latter, when paired with the ornate cabinetof the arcade game, creates an evocative space that, to return to Jenkins,
conveys “new narrative experiences through its creative manipulation ofenvironmental details.”30

Coda
In this chapter, I have begun to explore the concept of transmedia play as
initially outlined by Becky Herr-Stephenson, Meryl Alper, and Erin Reilly as
the exploration, enjoyment, and remixing of “elements from diverse media.
[…] This ‘creative reworking’ (in Jenkins’s terms) allows children to tell
new stories, work through problems, and share with others.”31 In so doing,
I have broadened their conception of transmedia play beyond children
and connected learning to consumers of all ages and to the context of Star
Wars video games in particular. Specifically, I have argued that replayability—one of Herr-Stephenson, Alper, and Reilly’s qualities of transmedia
play—can be nurtured and magnified by Henry Jenkins’s conceptions ofvideo games as providing “memorable moments” and “evocative spaces”
with regard to the Death Star trench run in both the 2015 Battlefront andthe 1983 Atari game. As an initial step in conceiving transmedia as having
a playful quality, I have attempted to use Jenkins’s own work on video
games to elaborate on his tangentially associated theories of transmedia
storytelling out of a desire to acknowledge the long shadow of his influence.
29 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1999), 45.
30 Jenkins, “Game Design,” 678.
31 Herr-Stephenson, Alper, and Reilly, T is for Transmedia, 10.

“You must feel the Force around you!”

113

However, my account and methodological toolbox should not be interpreted
as being the only lens for such an analysis. As Obi-Wan once said, “What I
told you was true … from a certain point of view.” I eagerly look forward to
evolution in this area of inquiry and would suggest that scholarship basedon cultural memory, performance studies, and reenactment may provide afruitful supplement to the larger projects of media franchising, transmedia
world-building, and cultural studies.

Part II“Never Tell Me the Odds!”:
Expanding the Star Wars Universe

7.

Transmedia Character Building
Textual Crossovers in the Star Wars Universe
Lincoln Geraghty

As the other chapters in this collection attest, Star Wars is a prime example
both of contemporary transmedia storytelling and of media franchising.
The story and brand spread across multiple media platforms and textual
commodities, driven by the ongoing battle between the forces of good andevil. Star Wars is a “commercial supersystem of transmedia intertextuality,” or what Henry Jenkins, Marc Steinberg, and Colin B. Harvey, among
others, have more recently described as the phenomenon of transmedia
storytelling: a strategy informing the creation and development of megafranchises like Star Wars through the dispersal of one storyworld acrossmultiple media platforms.1 Transmedia storytelling and accompanying
media franchising contribute to how Hollywood builds on its filmic output,
ensuring longevity and financial success well beyond the first iterationof a text. For Derek Johnson, whereas “transmedia storytelling suggests
cultural artistry and participatory culture, ‘franchising’ calls equal if not
more attention to corporate structure and the economic organization ofthat productive labor.”2 In this chapter, I broaden Johnson’s discussion of
the relationship between transmedia storytelling and media franchising
to analyze recent developments in the Star Wars storyworld.
More specifically, I argue that certain characters throughout the historyof the franchise have been used as transmedia signposts, directing audiences to other media texts that surround the original movies. As a result,they have become important signifiers of Star Wars’s transmedia history,
carriers of inherent narrative meaning and objects of fan-cultural value. For
example, Boba Fett began as an animated character in the Holiday Special
1 Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet
Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3; Henry
Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University
Press, 2006); Colin B. Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative Play and Memory Across Science
Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); Marc Steinberg,
Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
2 Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 33.

118 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling(1978), then made his first film appearance in The Empire Strikes Back, andwas later added back into the 1997 special edition re-release of A New Hope.
Since the 1990s, his backstory has been fleshed out in novels and comics aswell as in the prequel films and animated series, The Clone Wars and Rebels.
Characters such as Darth Maul, Ahsoka Tano, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and
Saw Gerrera either debuted in the films and moved to other platforms orwere created as spin-off characters in novels and television to later appear
in films and series. The regular remediation of such characters, joining thedifferent media together, suggests that the Star Wars transmedia storyworld
is both flexible and reflexive. These characters have been transformed andreimagined to fit the transmedia narrative at different stages of its evolution
over the last 40 years while also acting as catalysts for new stories and new
franchising opportunities.
Disney’s announcement in 2014 that the canon was to be reset in order tomake the six original films and The Clone Wars and Rebels television series“immoveable objects” in the narrative universe, from which new stories andtexts would originate, underscores their strategy to rebuild Star Wars fora new generation.3 In anticipation of the release of The Force Awakens, theresetting of the canon and creation of the Lucasfilm Story Group cleared
the slate and deleted previously established characters, such as Luke andLeia’s respective Jedi offspring, so as to introduce similar characters such as
Rey (assumed by many to be Luke’s daughter) and Kylo Ren (Ben Solo). But,
where Disney was originally criticized for abandoning the EU and keystone
antagonists like Thrawn, it is now reusing old fan favorites to shape theuniverse for new audiences. As a corporate licensor, Disney is keenly awarethat it has to extend the franchise for future storytelling while playfully
engaging with its past. New toys, novels, guidebooks, comics, video games,
films, and television series all contribute to a complex narrative networkof Star Wars texts. Key characters in effect represent those “immoveable
objects” when used strategically in marketing campaigns. They become
texts in themselves: synecdochal signifiers of the Star Wars transmedia
universe. For Jenkins, “the core aesthetic impulses behind good transmedia
works are world-building and seriality.”4 Iconic characters in the Star Wars
universe are integral to this process since they help to establish the fictional
3 “The Legendary Star Wars Expanded Universe Turns A New Page,” StarWars.com, April
25, 2014, accessed May 8, 2017, http://www.starwars.com/news/the-legendary-star-wars​-expanded-universe-turns-a-new-page.
4 Henry Jenkins, “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, accessed
May 8, 2017, http://henryjenkins.org/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i_1.html.

Tr ansmedia Char ac ter Building

119world and aid in the serialization of the fictional narrative. William Proctor and Matthew Freeman describe this relationship between marketing,merchandise, and the text as the “transmedia economy” of Star Wars.5
This chapter therefore highlights the interconnected nature of corporate
production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building in the context
of cross-platform character development.
Marc Steinberg’s discussion of what he terms anime’s “media mix” provides a helpful framework for understanding what has happened with newand established characters throughout the transmedia history of Star Wars.
Media mix, as a “term for the cross-media serialization and circulation ofentertainment franchises,” shares much with Henry Jenkins’s examinationof contemporary convergence culture.6 However, Steinberg traces a longer
history of the term, suggesting that it starts with the emergence of animeon Japanese television in the 1960s. More than a style, anime is a mode ofcultural production and consumption in which animated characters andfranchises mix and merge across media platforms. Audience consumptionof these franchises and animated characters is not only about possession(purchasing and collecting merchandise and images) but also about participation. Thus, according to Steinberg,
the anime media mix simultaneously creates (1) the character merchandise as material object, (2) the world to which the character merchandise
belongs, and (3) the character as immaterial connective agent guaranteeing the consistency of this ever-expanding world.7

Before the Disney era, we see evidence of this media mix in how Lucas andLucasfilm continually manipulated the Star Wars narrative, promoted it
through proliferation of merchandising, and expanded the potential fortransmedia storytelling through the continual retelling and reorderingof individual characters and their histories. In the following analysis oftransmedia crossovers, I look at three specific characters in detail: Boba
Fett, Darth Maul, and Grand Admiral Thrawn. These characters represent
different iterations and time periods in the Star Wars franchise: Fett is fromthe original trilogy and has existed in various literary versions since the
5 William Proctor and Matthew Freeman, “‘The First Step into a Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars,” in Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology,
ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2016), 223.
6 Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix, viii.
7 Steinberg, Anime’s Media Mix, 200.

120 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

beginning; Maul is from the prequel trilogy and has undergone some very
recent changes in appearance and characterization in animated spin-offs;
and Thrawn, originally created in the EU following the original trilogy,
has now been reincorporated into the canon post-Disney. Moreover, allthree characters are notionally villains and thus serve as regular dramatic
foils in various media versions of the Star Wars metatext: Fett as bounty
hunter routinely pursues main protagonists such as Luke and Han Solo;
Maul carries a vendetta against Obi-Wan Kenobi; and Thrawn serves as
overarching nemesis of the whole Rebel Alliance. These crossover charactershave also been especially popular amongst fans, pointing to their longevity
and importance to the overall Star Wars universe.

Boba Fett: Perennial Antagonist
Boba Fett epitomizes Lucasfilm’s original attempts to rewrite backstory
through transmedial migration, as Lucas manipulated his core characters toestablish and to expand the Star Wars universe. With his story as peripheral
bounty hunter turned genetic progeny of the clone army, Fett highlights
Lucas’s original strategy for expanding the narratives of incidental characters. While The Empire Strikes Back was his first canonical appearance,
his animated form seen in the Holiday Special preceded this and became
part of the paratextual infrastructure surrounding the marketing andmerchandising of A New Hope following its 1977 release. His animated form
acted as an unofficial introduction to the character, depicting him as abounty hunter employed by Darth Vader to find Luke, Leia, and Han, andthereby foreshadowing his eventual role in The Empire Strikes Back andReturn of the Jedi. With the remastered re-release of the original trilogy
in 1997 in anticipation of The Phantom Menace, Fett was inserted into A
New Hope. His presence in Mos Eisley, during the scene in which Jabba the
Hutt confronts Han Solo, retroactively asserts his presence throughout
the original trilogy. Lucas likely included Fett in this deleted scene fromA New Hope because he had very quickly become a cult favorite for action
figure collectors.8 However, Fett also had several EU stories, novels, andcomics devoted to fleshing out his backstory so that Fett’s insertion into
8 Such action figures “underscore the plural in [Star Wars], declaring the central frame andtheme to be that of a never-ending series of grand and cosmic battles of mythic proportions.”
Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York:New York University Press, 2010), 180.

Tr ansmedia Char ac ter Building121

A New Hope works to substantiate and build upon the growing mythos
surrounding the secretive and unmasked antihero, while at the same timeasserting Lucas’s authorship.
Lucas as author is again emphasized in the prequels, particularly in
Attack of the Clones, wherein audiences learn about Fett’s origin: he is aclone of the bounty hunter Jango Fett, who dons the same Mandalorianarmor and raises the clone as his son. The story of Jango’s clone-son waslater developed and expanded throughout five seasons of The Clone Wars;
Boba Fett’s relationships with other well-known bounty hunters, such as
Bossk, became central storylines and bred familiarity for those wanting toknow more about his eventual journey to becoming Han Solo’s nemesis.
Before Attack of the Clones and The Clone Wars, Fett’s off-screen life is
explored in a series of short stories published as part of the Tales seriesedited by Kevin J. Anderson. In “A Barve Like That: The Tale of Boba Fett”
by J.D. Montgomery, published in Tales from Jabba’s Palace, readers learn
that Fett survives his plunge into the Sarlacc Pit in Return of the Jedi.9
Montgomery, writing as Daniel Keys Moran, follows this up in “The Last One
Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett” published in Tales of the Bounty Hunters;
Montgomery presents Fett as a one-time lawman, a sympathetic version of
the determined and haunted loner.10 Working to add depth to the character,while not necessarily making sense in terms of the narrative timeline,
these textual examples of Fett’s transmedia narrative are indicative of what
Andrew J. Friedenthal calls the phenomenon of “retroactive continuity,”
more commonly abbreviated as “retconning.”11 He argues that, while cinematic blockbuster franchises now “utilize the complexity of their fictional
universes in order to refresh the narratives and maintain audience interest
across multiple platforms,” this strategy has its roots in the comic-bookindustry.12 As Fett’s ever-growing transmedia story spans a number oftexts across different media platforms—comics, novels, games, televisionand films—individual authors adapt the character to fit plot, medium, andmerchandising opportunities.
Giving Fett an origin story in Attack of the Clones, however, in no way
devalues what came before—neither in the original films nor in the EU.
9 J.D. Montgomery, “A Barve Like That: The Tale of Boba Fett,” in Tales from Jabba’s Palace,ed. Kevin J. Anderson (New York: Bantam Books, 1996).
10 Daniel Keys Moran (J.D. Montgomery), “The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett,” inTales of the Bounty Hunters, ed. Kevin J. Anderson (New York: Bantam Books, 1996).
11 Andrew J. Friedenthal, Retcon Game: Retroactive Continuity and the Hyperlinking of America(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 7.
12 Friedenthal, Retcon Game, 10.

122 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

New insights into the character do not start his story over again, as with areboot, but rather add depth to what fans already perceive as a complicatedand important backstory. The subtle changes to Fett—for example, his
voice being redubbed in the original trilogy for the 2004 DVD re-release so
it matches Jango Fett’s from the prequels—are for continuity and are notmeant to redraw the character, although many fans felt this was further
evidence of Lucas tinkering too much. This example serves to unite thevarious iterations of Fett depicted over the 40-year history of the franchise,while familiarizing the character to contemporary audiences.
In his analysis of comic-book reboots, William Proctor argues that “theretcon differs from the reboot in the sense that it alters elements of a series’
chronology without collapsing the narrative continuum altogether.”13 Whathas happened over time with Boba Fett is a continuous and purposeful attempt to draw and redraw the character to fit with new story developments.
Because he proved to be so popular in paratexts, his constant presenceneeds to be tied into the overall filmic story arc while at the same timeremaining as true to the character’s established personality traits as possible. The retconning of Fett has therefore meant that he is able to movefrom new text to old text and back again with little disruption to the canon.

Darth Maul: From Prequel to Sequel
Unlike Boba Fett, who became an instant fan favorite in spite of his brief
appearances, the relatively little screen time given to Darth Maul in The
Phantom Menace endeared him neither to critics nor to fans. Indeed, Todd
McCarthy for Variety said in his review of the film, “As the most widely
anticipated and heavily hyped film of modern times […] [it] can scarcely
help being a letdown on some levels, but it’s too bad that it disappoints on
so many.” Maul gets only a brief mention, because he “doesn’t say much but
proves to be a particularly dexterous opponent of the jedis [sic].”14 Even
now, some fan websites reflect upon his rather lackluster dialogue andignominious death in the first prequel, citing the lack of original character
development as one of the main reasons for their intense dislike.
13 William Proctor, “Ctl-Alt-Del: Retcon, Relaunch, or Reboot?” Sequart, February 8, 2013,
accessed May 8, 2017, http://sequart.org/magazine/18508/clt-alt-del-retcon-relacung-or-reboot/.
14 Todd McCarthy, “Review: ‘Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace,’” Variety, May
10, 1999, accessed May 15, 2017, http://variety.com/1999/f ilm/reviews/star-wars-episode-i​-the-phantom-menace-1117499730/.

Tr ansmedia Char ac ter Building123

But Maul’s death at the end of The Phantom Menace was not the last fans
saw of the character. Indeed, in the years since The Phantom Menace, Maul
has become a cross-series regular. I want to consider in this section how his
character has survived criticism to emerge as a pivotal character for new
storytelling. As with many villains, his backstory was first fleshed out in theEU, which gave insight into his training by Darth Sidious and filled in someof the gaps between his apprenticeship and his final mission to kill QuiGon and Obi-Wan. Many of his stories appeared in the Dark Horse comics,
particularly in an anthology of short stories called Star Wars: Visionaries(2005). This follows in the tradition of the Tales series of books publishedin the 1990s: a compilation of shorter vignettes focusing on backgroundcharacters that expand the storyworld. The fact that his legs and torso
were separated in the film did not stop author Aaron McBride from writing
about Maul’s search for revenge in the comics story “Old Wounds,” which
depicted him with robotic legs and larger cranial horns seeking revenge
against the Jedi after Revenge of the Sith, only to die at the hands of Owen
Lars on Tatooine.15“Old Wounds” proved prophetic, since the writers of The Clone Wars later
bring him back from the dead, give him new cybernetic implants and legs,
and set him on a journey first to serve his old master again but then to seekout both Sidious and Obi-Wan in the animated series. Over seasons four andfive of The Clone Wars and season two of Rebels, Maul’s character becomesas much a victim of the Emperor’s plans as the Jedi. A confrontation in The
Clone Wars between master and former apprentice almost ends Maul’slife for a second time and pushes him to seek revenge on all those whohave done him wrong. In season three of Rebels, he is given the chance toconfront and kill Obi-Wan on Tatooine, who is himself in hiding and keeping
watch over an infant Luke, but Maul ultimately succumbs to the superior
swordsmanship of the older Jedi.
This new death scene adds much more weight to his character following
his first defeat in the prequel, this time passing away in the arms of his
nemesis and wishing for the Chosen One (a reference to Luke) to avenge
them both. Over the course of both animated series, Maul becomes amore clearly drawn character, rather than just a henchman for the Dark
Side, and his narrative is rewritten to allow greater agency and physicalfreedom. The relationship between canonical and non-canonical versionsof the character also adds importance, as his story becomes much more
15 Aaron McBride, “Old Wounds,” in Star Wars: Visionaries, ed. Jeremy Barlow (Milwaukie,
OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2005).

124 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingcomplex in the spin-off novels and comics. Moreover, while non-canonicalstories such as “Old Wounds” do not fit within the official narrative now
endorsed by Disney, they continue to have an impact, since they are referred
to as inspiration for the creation of content in the animated series: on
StarWars.com, for example, concept work by McBride for his “Old Wounds”
version of Maul is placed beside the final design used in The Clone Wars
episode “Revenge.”16This joining together of two or more iterations of the transmedia franchise works to legitimize the narrative universe in which the story is set.
Darth Maul’s appearances on both animated series indicate that they are as
much a part of the fictional history as the original films, but also represent
the larger fantasy to which one must refer for new textual knowledge about
the character. Moreover, Maul’s reintroduction to the Star Wars canon works
to rehabilitate the character following his disappointing reception in 1999.
This storytelling trait is not unique to Star Wars and can again be foundin comic book superhero narratives, where the integrity of the charactersdepends upon the existence of a universe in which all the characters owned
by a particular company inhabit the same fictional world.17 In Star Wars’scase, the larger stories that see the Republic on the brink of destruction are
made more urgent for the audience because once peripheral and underappreciated characters become important and interesting in their own right;
their threat is not restricted to just one series or even one plotline and Maul’s
importance as a recurring character is re-emphasized through cycles ofmarketing and merchandising opportunities.

Grand Admiral Thrawn: Heir to the Spin-off
Darth Maul is an example of how a character shifted from film to books andcomics and eventually to television. Even when stories like “Old Wounds”
were declared part of the Legends imprint and therefore non-canonicalby Disney’s Story Group standards, his character had already been given
new official life in stories written for the first animated series. Thanks tothese appearances and a renewed cybernetic body, fans have reclaimed thecharacter as one of the more popular; charting him at number sixteen on the

16 “Revenge Trivia Gallery,” StarWars.com, accessed May 8, 2017, www.starwars.com/tv-shows/clone-wars/revenge-trivia-gallery.
17 Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (London: B.T. Batsford, 1992), 37-38.

Tr ansmedia Char ac ter Building125

all-time greatest Star Wars characters list published by IGN in 2010.18 On thatsame list, EU character Grand Admiral Thrawn appears at number ten. Thisis evidence of the continuing significance of the EU for fans—characters
one to nine on the list were all from the original trilogy—and is illustrativeof the importance of “peripheral” characters and stories to the metatextual
Star Wars universe. Thrawn first appeared as the new villain, replacing theEmperor, in the Thrawn trilogy of novels (1991-1993) written by Timothy
Zahn, set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi. An additional two
novels by Zahn, Specter of the Past (1997) and Vision of the Future (1998), give
readers more insight into his origins and relationship with the Emperor. As
with Maul, his physical appearance (blue skin, red eyes) and characterization as being more imposing than Darth Vader made him a popular choice
for adaptations and even a range of action figures.
Thrawn first appeared as a liminal character, very much at the peripheryof canonical texts, made physical only through merchandise before therelease of The Phantom Menace, and then relegated to Legends status after
Disney reset the narrative. But he reemerged as central to the developments
depicted in Rebels season three (2016-2017), in charge of eradicating theRebel threat to the Empire between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Dave
Filoni, executive producer of the series, revealed Thrawn’s introduction toseason three at the London Star Wars Celebration in 2016—receiving a hugereaction from fans. This was quickly followed up by the announcementthat Zahn, original creator of the character, would pen an official novel
entitled Thrawn, which would rewrite Thrawn’s origin story to fit with the
new version on Rebels—thereby retconning Thrawn, like Boba Fett andMaul, to fit the new Disney era. However, whilst canon again seems to takeprecedence over legend, Filoni’s decision to integrate Thrawn into Rebels
replicates why the character was created by Zahn for the EU in the firstplace; namely, as a new dramatic foil for the Rebel Alliance. As Filoni putit, “There’s no one to defend [the Rebels] against Thrawn. We want to treat
him like a big time villain as much as Darth Vader, but on the strategic,
military side of things.” Bringing him back into the spotlight was clearly along-term plan: “Thrawn was always on the list.”19 Thus, the Legends still
have an impact on Disney’s version of Star Wars, as the metatext starts to18 “Darth Maul #16,” IGN, accessed May 8, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20120529123632/
http://www.ign.com:80/star-wars-characters/16.html.
19 Qtd. in Daniel Krupa and Eric Goldman, “Star Wars Celebration 2016: Rebels Will Treat
Thrawn as a Vader-Level Threat,” IGN, July 17, 2016, accessed May 8, 2017, http://www.ign.com/
articles/2016/07/17/star-wars-celebration-2016-rebels-will-treat-thrawn-as-a-vader-level-threat.

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accommodate all versions of a character previously spread across different
generations and different media platforms.
Star Wars as a long-standing franchise and Thrawn as one of the numerous
characters born from within are clearly subject to such flow across media,
and through Disney’s own network of conglomerated outlets (television
channels, movie studios, theme parks, etc.), their audience is potentiallyinfinite. As Henry Jenkins asserts, convergence allows for the archival ofand search for new forms of entertainment in which “the flow of content
across multiple media platforms” links the web with older media forms suchas film and television.20 Yet Disney cannot do this alone. To spread its newly
acquired IP as far and wide as possible—in different forms and formats—it
has undertaken a series of partnerships to benefit from the creative talentand energy offered by production companies, toy manufacturers, andpublishers. For Jennifer Holt, post-1970s industrial “integration” resulted
in synergy that drove media production and, thus, we can see how the
integrated strategies of Disney working with creators like Filoni on new Star
Wars projects such as Rebels diversify potential markets.21 Contemporary
media conglomerates seek to maintain their brands through strategies
epitomized by the media franchise, transforming all culture into valuable IP.
In the case of Star Wars and the reappearance of Thrawn, this means
Disney is protecting its assets by bringing Thrawn under copyright control
via Rebels and manages him so as not to dilute the Star Wars brand or risk
alienating the target audience. The realignment of the Star Wars canon after
2014 signals Disney’s intention to assert their rights as franchise owner andprotect the brand from alternative versions—such as the EU—as depictedin the novels, comics, video games, animated series, and roleplaying games
since 1977. Thrawn’s journey from EU to Rebels shows us how Disney can
profit from new character developments while also tying in older stories.
Franchises exploit these strategies in service of consolidation and conglomeration by bringing the property under tighter control to prevent thebrand from fading or its message from becoming confused. This affords thepromise of synergy, where the same content can dominate across markets
and generate more income.

20 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 2.
21 Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation,
1980-1996 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 3.

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Synergy, as Kristin Thompson describes it, is about “selling the same narrative over and over in different media.”22 For Disney, this means continuing
to produce new films and supporting television series, but also promoting
Star Wars on its many television channels, in its theme parks, and throughits chain of street-level stores. However, according to Derek Johnson, suchproduct diversification reduces the franchise to a selling machine, wherebusiness structures are purely about the marketing of the same productregardless of form and content. Star Wars is often described as mythic andtherefore timeless and unchanging, but the story in its various incarnations
and media-specific formats requires careful consideration and development, as partnerships are constantly negotiated between copyright ownerand the creative industries. This is particularly important since many partsof the transmedia franchise are marketed at specific audiences.23 Therefore,
as a transmedia narrative, Star Wars requires Disney to look outside of its
own corporate structures to enlist creative talent like Filoni, who started
out with Lucasfilm on The Clone Wars, and Zahn, who has been central tothe historical success of the EU storyworld, to drive and extend the property
beyond Disney’s established network reach.

Conclusion: Creating a Transmedia History
Many other Star Wars characters move across texts and media in similar
ways to the three analyzed above. Indeed, the stories I highlighted by nomeans exhaust Star Wars’s transmedia storyworld. Ahsoka Tano and Saw
Gerrera, for example, who both originated in The Clone Wars series, havebecome integral characters in the expanding fight against the Empire
and are increasingly popular with fans. Tano was introduced as Anakin
Skywalker’s padawan in the 2008 Clone Wars film, designed to help illustrate his own development from brash apprentice to wise master. Overthe course of the subsequent series, her character evolved too, becoming an
integral part of the Star Wars mythos. Her return from exile in season one
of Rebels represented not only a shift across animated series, but also thefulfillment of fan desire to see her face her fallen Jedi Master in his guise as
Darth Vader. Rumored plans to cast a live-action movie exploring Tano’s life

22 Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 82.
23 For example, Rebels is aimed at the tween demographic of Disney’s XD cable channel.

128 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingunderline Filoni’s own view that she can exist “in all forms of media.”24 Saw
Gerrera made the jump from animation to live action in Rogue One, where
he was played by Forest Whitaker, after having first appeared in the fifth
season of The Clone Wars. In Rogue One, he is a much older man, leader ofa group of extremist freedom fighters, but his Clone Wars narrative helps
to construct audience understandings of his character as new facts are
revealed. The film’s depiction of Gerrera provides further context for his
eventual appearance in season three of Rebels, now more in the mold of
Whitaker’s filmic portrayal. Tano and Gerrera are therefore by no means
limited by their animated origins, further reinforcing the notion that Star
Wars’s narrative history spreads across various and all forms of transmedia
platforms. Furthermore, both The Clone Wars and Rebels have become
important texts in themselves, creating new characters and stories that
inform our understanding of Star Wars history.
What the characters discussed in this chapter demonstrate particularly
well is Star Wars’s “media mix”—texts and paratexts, animation and films,
history and narrative merging together across multiple continuities. While
Boba Fett was clearly the first character to inspire elaborate transmedia
crossovers in Star Wars, he has certainly not been the last; Darth Maul andGrand Admiral Thrawn have been incrementally built and rebuilt using
earlier and alternate manifestations of their characters. But the old does
not simply pave the way for the new: watching and rewatching, reading andrereading newer textual iterations informs and opens up our understanding
and enjoyment of older tales. These characters have been transformed
and reimagined to serve the transmedia storyworld as the multimedia
franchise has grown and expanded. Crossover characters act as catalysts
for new stories and new marketing opportunities, while also functioning
as familiar narrative signposts directing fans to important moments andevents within the transmedia universe of Star Wars.

24 Qtd. in “Ahsoka’s Untold Tales Panel | Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016,” YouTube video,
1:02:22, posted by “Star Wars,” July 15, 2016, accessed May 15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=lS4sclln5J4.

8.

The Digitizing Force of Decipher’s Star
Wars Customizable Card Game
Jonathan Rey Lee

What kind of thread can hold together several millennia of galactic history?
In Star Wars, the only thread expansive enough is the Force, which unifies
the numerous depicted characters, governments, and worlds into a single
history, a galactic saga of lightsabers and levitation. But is this thread strong
enough also to hold together a transmedia universe spanning hundreds oftexts in different media? It certainly does its best to promote continuity by
tying together even overtly contradictory stories—for instance, allowing
The Force Awakens to reboot the Star Wars EU while remaining distinctively
and canonically Star Wars. Yet, even the fabric of a fictional universe canpromote such continuity only by the grace of its fans, who ultimately
determine to what extent a transmedia story is perceived as a whole. The
wisdom of the Jedi suggests that “many of the truths we cling to depend
greatly on our own point of view” (Return of the Jedi) and that “your focus
determines your reality” (The Phantom Menace). Similarly, one might saythat storyworlds depend greatly on how they are mediated; in other words,
mediation determines fictional realities. While this is characteristic oftransmedia storytelling more generally, this chapter focuses on a single
case: how the digital game mechanics of Decipher’s Star Wars Customizable
Card Game (hereafter the SWCCG) struggle to adapt four notions of theForce. In focusing on this popular yet doubly marginalized medium—CCGs
are typically overlooked within both Star Wars canon formation 1 andtransmedia storytelling scholarship—this chapter also sheds some lighton how medium-specific tensions introduce continuity and discontinuity
in transmedia storytelling.

1 Games have an especially ambiguous place within the hierarchical Star Wars canon, partially because they do not relate a consistent storyline and partially because game mechanics
are not considered ‘story,’ as described anecdotally on Wookieepedia. See “Canon,” Wookieepedia,
accessed March 28, 2017, http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Canon.

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CCGs as Digital Media
Although CCGs are not generally considered digital media, their mediumspecific contribution to transmedia storytelling is fundamentally digital.
This disjunction is due to the relatively recent colloquial definition of“digital” as “computational,” which associates digitality exclusively withcomputer technology rather than the broader conceptual paradigms—suchas counting—that give digitality its name. Thus, many contemporary theorists attempt to move beyond the technological definition2 and show how
digitality underlies aspects of modern culture as varied as the functioningof control societies3 and the nature of philosophical thought. 4 In thisbroader sense, drawing upon the etymology of “digital” as pertaining todigits, one can consider a medium to be digital insofar as it represents via
sets of discrete, countable symbols.5 While understanding digitality inthis way may not lead to clean definitional divisions, it does shed light on
how media function as interpretive paradigms that alternately represent
the world as assemblage or flow, particle or wave.
Digitality, then, is a lens for perceiving and representing the world discontinuously, quantitatively, combinatorically. While not all games are digitalin this way, games tend towards digitality because many common gamemechanics are systematically organized as discrete or countable. Discreteness is found, for example, in the boundary lines in sports and board games
and the sorting of game elements into hands, decks, and pools. Similarly,
countability is found in all scoring systems and game economies and mostrandomization systems like cards and dice. And, above all, games deploy
the above to perpetuate the binarization inherent in assigning winners andlosers.6 Given that “Collectible card games are at their root combinatorial
2 Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Benjamin Peters, “Digital,” in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information
Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 93-108.
3 Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015).
4 Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
5 According to Florian Cramer, “‘Digital’ simply means that something is divided into discrete,countable units—countable using whatever system one chooses, whether zeroes and ones,
decimal numbers, tally marks on a scrap of paper or the fingers (digits) of one’s hand—which
is where the word ‘digital’ comes from in the first place.” See Florian Cramer, “What is ‘PostDigital’?,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher (New York: Routledge, 2016), 694.
6 This is true even of cooperative and single-player games, the only difference being that insuch games all players either win or lose together.

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exercises,”7 CCGs abound in these kinds of digital elements, carving up theplay surface into discrete areas, employing game economies that structure
the circulation of discrete cards, and using numerical stats to arithmeticallydetermine game actions. More fundamentally, CCGs are defined by two
deeply digital logics which alternately give the CCG its name: collection
and customization.
Reading a CCG as a collectible card game places the emphasis on the CCG
as a branded media object defined by its unique method of distribution of
being sold in randomized packs. This is no small issue when one considers
that the most basic unit of media production or analysis is the text—boththe material object that is designed, marketed, and sold as well as the immaterial object that is received, engaged, and loved. Yet, the collectability of
the CCG is completely anathema to the idea that a singular object could be
the repository for something like a story. Instead, the CCG restructures its
textuality within a digital logic. Cards are not primarily conceived in isolation, but rather in relationships with other cards in a particular set—therandomized pack that constitutes the most basic CCG commodity, thecollection that functions as an expandable fan archive, or the deck that isused in gameplay.
This set logic reconstrues rather than replaces textual logic by encouraging combinatoric readings of the textual elements on different cards in theset. The design of the SWCCG cards includes visual and verbal signifiers
that have strong dialogic relationships both with other cards and withthe broader transmedia universe. The most prominent such signifier is ascreenshot that occupies the central space on each card. Arresting the flowof time by turning a single frame into a collectible still, the card highlights
visual details of the film. Above this central image is the card’s title and“flavor text,” both of which connect the image to the broader narrative.
These verbal descriptions generally situate the card within the storyworld(such as by indicating relevant characteristics or relationships) or fill in
details of the storyworld (such as by naming unnamed characters or describing untold backstories). The card thus has value not only within a tradingcard economy, but also within a knowledge economy, providing cultural
capital to fan communities. These encyclopedic8 visual and verbal signifiers
7 Eric Lang, “Design Decisions and Concepts in Licensed Collectible Card Games,” ElectronicBook Review, January 27, 2008, accessed May 15, 2017, http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/adaptable.
8 Whereas narratives like Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy (probably the key EU text) expand
Star Wars primarily by continuing the story, the SWCCG does so by filling in the universe’s
details. It f inds an unusual kinship, therefore, in various illustrated guides, encyclopedias,

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combine to produce a digital archive of images and facts that break up thetransmedia storyworld into bits of information meant to be individuallyassimilated and collectively reassembled.
To collect, then, is to assemble an archive at once digital and material.
Reading a CCG as a customizable card game, by contrast, emphasizes thetransition from set collection to set creation as players assemble cards
from their collection into 60-card decks that are used to play the game.
Deck-building, therefore, is a metagame: a form of curation that intertwines affective and strategic considerations. From a strategic perspective,
deck-building consists in authoring the possibility space of the gameplay
by selecting the cards that will be available during the game. From athematic perspective, deck-building is an experiment in counterfactual
world-building that determines what elements of the world—and, thereby,
what version of the Star Wars EU—will come into play. While individual
players may care more about one perspective than the other, gameplay andtheme are integrated into cards that function simultaneously as game items
and as fan collectibles. Relying on both aspects, the process of deck-building
is essentially staging, establishing props for emergent narrative gameplay;this staging is fundamentally digital in that the stage is constituted by acurated set of discrete cards.
Following the dual curations of collection and customization, thesedecks are put into play through a kind of strategic assemblage in which
players make decisions about which cards and combinations of cards touse within the game. Consequently, each playthrough produces a uniquecounterfactual unfolding of how the core struggle of Star Wars might playout. While this is not storytelling exactly, the narratives that emerge fromthese assemblages can be considered a kind of emergent fan fiction—astrangely collaborative form of story-making driven by a contested interplay of cards and game actions. To play a transmedia CCG is therefore
paradoxically akin both to authoring a fan response to the source text andperforming a goal-directed simulation of the source text’s world. Acting
upon the stage set by the digital deck-building, CCG gameplay constitutes
a kind of improvised dialogue in which the discrete signifiers of the cards
are circulated through a storyworld that is at once extrapolated from theseveral short story anthologies (such as Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina, Tales from Jabba’s Palace,and Tales of the Bounty Hunters) that provide narratives for background characters who became
iconic despite playing minor roles in the films.

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cards and referenced by the cards.9 In other words, this collision of decks
neither retells nor eschews the Star Wars universe—instead, it collects
and customizes that universe in a playful reassembly of digital elements.

Digitizing the Force
While all CCGs share this intersection of digital collection and customization, unique card designs and rule structures sharply differentiate CCGs
to the point where it might be plausible to claim that individual CCGs are
distinct media. Consequently, different CCGs generate different storyworlds—not just in their thematic content, but also at the fundamental
metaphysical level of determining what kinds of things can exist, whatkind of actions can take place, and what kind of relationships can emerge
within that universe. Thus, this section takes a closer look at the specificdesign of the SWCCG and how it digitizes four aspects of the Force thatorganize the storyworld.
The SWCCG was released two years after Magic: The Gathering inaugurated the CCG as a game genre with its wildly popular 1993 release. At times
second only to Magic in popularity,10 the SWCCG included eleven expansions
that mostly followed the events of the original trilogy films, only briefly
venturing into The Phantom Menace11 before being discontinued in 2001.
The game, therefore, is situated solidly within the EU era and maintains
many intertextual connections with the novels and other transmedia
texts of the period. The game itself refracts the material storyworld of Star
Wars into several card classes: Characters, Locations, and four types ofobjects: Starships, Vehicles, Devices, and Weapons.12 These are relatively
9 For further details on how CCGs play out fan response through a “haptic-panoptic” interface,see Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe (Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press, 2001).
10 According to the SWCCG Players Committee.
11 I will not refer specifically to The Phantom Menace cards, but it should be noted that thosecards perpetuated a persistent anachronism that both problematizes and extends the adaptive
potential of the game. By mixing two distinct eras in the pool of available cards, the game became
a much more fantastic representation of the Star Wars universe, moving from the logic of thealternate reality narrative—which allows fan/players to reconfigure elements of the narrative
universe in ways that are not canonical but are at least plausible—to the logic of the action
figure, in which the representation of decontextualized characters encourages mash-ups basedon physical simultaneity that can transcend narrative time and even media license.
12 Other card types, like Objectives, emerged later in the game’s development and are notdiscussed here.

134 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingstraightforward adaptations: Characters move between and battle over
Locations using various objects that enhance their capacity to do so.
Materially distinct entities are easily represented as distinct cards—thedigital logics commonly used to differentiate people, places, and things
are adapted intuitively. The adaptation of events, actions, and utterancesfrom the films is more complex, unhinging elements of the source plot fromtheir contextual and temporal frames. Interrupts, which allow players tointerject some immediate change into the gameplay, reflect the surprises,
decisions, causes, and consequences that make up the film plot. Similarly,
Effects represent ongoing conditions that take place in the storyworld andmodify basic game mechanics. Interrupts and Effects have a peculiarly
linguistic bent, with many of the card names drawing on quotations fromthe films. In so doing, these cards transform a variety of utterances (manyof them descriptive) into performative utterances that enact change inthe storyworld as they are played. Darth Vader’s implied order “I want thatship” in The Empire Strikes Back, for example, becomes an Effect that canbe played on an opponent’s starship to make it easier and more beneficial
to capture, altering the digital values of cards in the game world to betterreflect the thematic weight of the storyworld wherein certain ships are
more valuable to the plot. This is indicative of how the SWCCG routinely
generalizes specific events, actions, and utterances, transforming the happenings that constitute the filmic experience into the general potential for
certain kinds of actions.
As the material storyworld and the transmedia story are translated into
these card types, they are digitized in the process. A character with dynamic
skills becomes a Character card with rigid statistics. A location with substantive terrain becomes an abstract conceptual frame signifying the (binary)presence or absence of any number of characters. An event with contextual
significance becomes a quantifiable game action. This digitization presentsa peculiar problem for transmedia storytelling in general and for adapting
the Force in particular. While themes of digitality run throughout the Star
Wars storyworld,13 the prevailing logic of the Force is hyper-continuous. In
most canonical texts, the Force is presented as supernatural, mystical, andholistic. Even though the pseudoscientific explanation of the Force as due toquantifiable midi-chlorians suggests that the Force has a digital component,
the Jedi in the prequel trilogy still maintain a quasi-religious iconography
13 Digitality can be found in the binary logic of the battle of good and evil, in the themes oftechnology and data collection that run throughout the series, in the biological quantificationof Force ability as the presence of symbiotic midi-chlorians, etc.

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and meditative practices that suggests a more mystical paradigm. In fact,
the Force suspends, transcends, and sometimes transforms material reality,
most commonly as something that transcends quantifiable physical laws.
While this logic is not incompatible with CCG design, the tension between
the digital structure of the CCG and its holistic subject matter certainly
problematizes the continuity of transmedia storytelling. Thus, the following
four case studies demonstrate not a wholesale rejection of holism in favorof digitality, but the medium-specific challenges of striving to represent
holism through digital game mechanics.

The Force as Power
There is no question that the powers of the Jedi have captured viewers’
attentions over the decades. Indeed, Obi-Wan Kenobi opens his explanationof the Force by emphasizing that “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power” (ANew Hope). Echoing this sentiment, Dan Rubey argues that thematically, “IfStar Wars is ‘about’ anything, it is about power—and the source of ultimate
power in the film is the Force.”14 The mystical nature of the Force, however,prevents its power from being simplistically reduced to everyday notionsof power, such as physical power, technological power, or political power,
which are all ways of mediating an individual’s ability to act in and upon
the world. Instead, the supernatural power of the Force problematizes
the notion of power as an expression of agency. As Obi-Wan indicates in
response to Luke’s queries in A New Hope, the Force partially “controls youractions” and partially “obeys your commands.” On the surface, games are
not particularly amenable to adapting this kind of mystical synergy ofspiritual forces. Thus, Star Wars games typically digitize Force powers as
quantifiable game actions. While this instrumentalizes the Force by turning
it into a tool for player agency, the complicated relationship between theplayer and the game system reflects how the Force simultaneously localizes
and delocalizes agency.
The SWCCG implements Force powers through a multilayered process—firstly by quantifying the Force attunement of characters and secondly
by having activated abilities that often target this stat. Ability quantifies

14 Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago nor Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning
Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Myth, Media, and Culture Star Wars: An Anthology,
ed. Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 57.

136 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Force attunement 15 as a passive stat, a numerical value from zero to seven
assigned to all Characters.

Fig. 8.1: Character card – Darth Vader

Fig. 8.2: Interrupt card – Move along

This digitization thus turns Force attunement into a numerical value that
represents ability not as agential, but as a reservoir or a standing reserve. Like
the midi-chlorians, this digitizes the power of the Force as a potential rather
than kinetic energy—the precondition for action rather than action itself.
The most direct adaptation of Force powers is therefore found not in the rulesystem, but in game actions provided by the text of various cards. A notable
example is the Character card “Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith” (Fig. 8.1),
whose ability allows him to “choke” an opposing character. While examples
like this are relatively rare, Force abilities are more commonly represented
as Interrupts or Effects. For example, the “Move Along …” Interrupt (Fig. 8.2)
refers to a scene when Obi-Wan Kenobi uses the Force to pass unchallenged
through a security checkpoint. As a single card tied to a single action, such
15 The ability numbers make sense in the case of the Jedi, with Yoda and the Emperor receiving
the highest scores and Luke slowly gaining in ability as he becomes a Jedi himself. Yet, for theother characters, who do not exhibit any Force-sensitivity whatsoever, the values seem rather
arbitrary or, rather, tied to other non-Force measures of ability (e.g. Han has an Ability of 3
whereas a generic Rebel Trooper has an Ability of 1).

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Interrupts more clearly reflect Force abilities as interventions into the naturalorder wielded by active agents (characters and players). These representations, however, completely decontextualize the represented abilities fromthe scenes that feature them. “Move Along …”, for instance, allows a player tomove opposing Characters away from an ongoing battle. This simultaneously
digitizes and instrumentalizes the Force by turning a scene that initially
had significance within its filmic context into a discrete, isolated ability.
At the same time, this ability is designed to be redeployed in the strategic
assemblage of gameplay through a multilayered representation of agency
that is akin to the filmic representation of the Force. First, while these abilities are isolated from their narrative context, they are not fundamentally
insular. Force powers are enacted through the intersection of the player,
the card, and the game system itself, suggesting a distributed agency thatpartially reflects the mystical universalism of the Force. Second, the gameas a whole blends strategy and chance in ways that reflect how games
simultaneously play out fantasies of control and fatalism.16 In the end,
Force powers are abstracted away from their narrative context only to be
re-embedded in a gameplay context.

The Force as Morality
Drawing as much upon cowboy movies and the chivalric and samurai codes
as science fiction, Star Wars depicts a famously binary moral universe. The
age-old narrative trope of good versus evil is woven into the fabric of theuniverse itself as the tangible presence of the Force lends concreteness to themoral categories of Light and Dark. Yet, the intrinsically moral nature of thisbinarism becomes complicated when adapted into competitive gameplay,which presumes a kind of amoral antagonism. In this context, a tension
emerges between the imperatives for games to offer equal subject positions
and for adaptations to reflect hierarchies between subject positions present
in the source text. As a game adaptation and a participatory fan production,
the SWCCG reconciles this contradiction between narrative and gameplay
to create a play experience that is paradoxically both morally binarized
and amoral. Using the uniquely two-layered play experience of the CCG,
it maintains this paradox primarily by framing an amoral strategy playwithin an aesthetically binarized deck-building play.
16 See the discussions of agon and alea in Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer
Barash (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).

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To bridge the gap between the moral binary of Star Wars and the presumed amorality of competitive gameplay, Decipher chose a radical design
option: a thoroughly asymmetrical game in which the Light Side and Dark
Side play with decks constructed from completely independent pools ofcards. In addition to complicating competitive balance, there are several
thematic consequences to maintaining an absolute distinction between
the Light and Dark Sides. As moral allegiance is built into the card itself,
goodness becomes less a behavioral notion than a reflection of inherent
character—what makes Luke “good” and Vader “bad” in the game is nothing
more than that they are Light and Dark side cards respectively. While thiscertainly differs from the moral implications of the films, this difference
may be less stark than it initially appears given that the films tend to aestheticize morality in similar ways. Thus, Rubey argues that “All we reallyhave are two similar groups competing for power and dichotomized into
‘good’ and ‘evil.’ There is no complex understanding of what either good orevil could really mean.”17 While there are certainly moral distinctions to befound in the Star Wars films, it is also the case that the films consistently
differentiate Light and Dark aesthetically. Similarly, the dual design of thecards—which have different design templates for Light and Dark—becomesa frame that indelibly inks morality into the physical manifestation ofcharacters and other card categories within the game world.
Through this aestheticization of morality, the SWCCG builds the morally
binarized universe of Star Wars into the competitively binarized and physically divided universe of the game itself without implying any moral differentiation between the players. Translating this non-hierarchical aesthetic
into gameplay, both sides share fundamental rules of engagement such thatthe simple separation of the cards into Light and Dark bears most of thethematic burden of reflecting the moral binary of Star Wars, allowing theplay itself to take on a somewhat amoral (or at least reciprocal) character.
Consequently, the SWCCG transforms the films’ strict separation of Lightand Dark from a moral distinction into a perpetual opposition more like thatbetween yin and yang in Taoist philosophy. Ironically, however, this amoral
presentation distances players from participating in the moral binarizationof the films while at the same time rendering that very binarization moreabsolute. The digital logic of the binary, that is, becomes starker when the
distinction is linked with aesthetic design rather than moral behavior. In
17 Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago nor Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning
Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology,
ed. Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 59.

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other words, the SWCCG replaces a narrative logic of good and evil with agameplay logic in which all actions merely reflect self-interested strategic
maneuvers within a competitive arena.

The Force as Destiny
By deemphasizing the morality of the Light and Dark binary in Star Wars,
the SWCCG also transforms a third notion of the Force—the Force as
destiny—from fatalistic 18 to probabilistic, sacrifices some of its holism
in favor of a more digital logic. Although film audiences often leave satisfied when the narrative tension resolves into the expected outcome ofgood triumphing over evil, no competitive game has a built-in, completely
inevitable outcome. To be inevitable, in many ways, is to not be a game.19
Interestingly, the SWCCG does not abandon the concept of destiny, butreconfigures it from a fatalistic notion to a probabilistic one by using thecards as a semi-random element for determining the outcome of certain
actions.
Just as the Force as morality weaves the thematic opposition of goodand evil into the fabric of the fictional universe itself, the Force as destiny
also weaves an inherent optimism into the outcome of this struggle. Thus,
while the Emperor and Darth Vader are both depicted as wielding greater
power than Luke, neither of them benefit from the kind of serendipity that
Luke does. It is implied that the Force itself, sometimes anthropomorphizedthrough the specters of Luke’s former masters, guides Luke toward victory. This theme also runs throughout EU texts: in the Thrawn Trilogy, forexample, the Empire looks to be on the path to victory behind the superior
strategic genius of its new commander, but the New Republic manages todefeat him, because goodness itself tips the scales in its own favor.
Adapting this notion of destiny in a game form that cannot tolerate such
inevitability requires privileging the dramatic tension in the narrative over
18 For a more detailed account of whether the future is fixed in Star Wars, see Jason T. Eberl,“‘You Cannot Escape Your Destiny’ (Or Can You?): Freedom and Predestination in the Skywalker
Family,” in Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine, ed. Kevin
S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl (Chicago: Open Court, 2005).
19 This is complicated in various ways. For example, some video games do have a completely
determined sequence of events, but generally balance this by the tension of whether a player
will succeed or fail to unravel this sequence. Similarly, most highly skill-dependent games
will have inevitable outcomes in situations in which one player is much more skilled, but thisinevitability is itself probabilistic—there is always some slight chance of an upset.

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its inevitable resolution, which means, paradoxically, depicting destiny ina fundamentally self-contradictory way—as random rather than actuallypredestined. In the SWCCG, Destiny is the only attribute that is shared byevery card of every type. Destiny is a numerical value, generally between
zero and six, that is used instead of rolling a die to determine a random
outcome. Unlike the total randomization of a die roll or coin toss, thisprobabilistic mechanic synthesizes both luck and skill by allowing the“random” draw to be influenced by both deck-building (which changes theprobability distribution) and card counting. Thus, although this adaptationof the Force as destiny eliminates the agency of the universe, it builds ina degree of player agency that prevents the world from becoming a truly
random space. Players themselves embody divergent destinies that create
uncertainty by virtue of being opposed to one another, suggesting that
digitality and holism may not be as exclusive as they may seem. It is possible
to say, therefore, that the game pits the cosmic struggle of Light and Dark not
as random events, but as the uncertain clash of two destinies that attempt
to bend events towards their own desired outcomes.

The Force as Life
After presenting his instrumental explanation of the Force as “what gives a
Jedi his power,” Obi-Wan Kenobi turns towards the metaphysical to explainthat the Force is “an energy field created by all living things” (A New Hope).
While this notion of the Force as life is perhaps the most holistic of the fournotions explored in this chapter, it is ironically the one best represented
in the digital logic of the SWCCG, demonstrating that, while holism anddigitality create a constant tension for this game adaptation, they are by
no means mutually exclusive. In fact, digitality is precisely what enables
an organic flow of cards to reflect the ecological20 and relational unifying
field that is the Force.
In the SWCCG, the deck itself becomes a physical representation of theForce in what is perhaps the most elegant feature of the game’s design. The
60-card Light and Dark decks that oppose each other unify and collectively
represent the life of one “side” of the Force—a player loses not when their
20 For a more detailed analysis of environmental ethics in Star Wars, see Elizabeth F. Cooke,“‘Be Mindful of the Living Force’: Environmental Ethics in Star Wars,” in Star Wars and Philosophy:
More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine, ed. Kevin S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl (Chicago:
Open Court, 2005).

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141

characters die, but when the deck is depleted. The metaphor of the deck aslife is made explicit through rules for “losing life,” which require players todiscard cards, and “gaining life,” which bring previously discarded cards
back into the deck. This is further extended by rules for “Force Drains,”
which state that when a player controls a location, the opposing player
loses life equal to the number of their Force Icons—symbols that reflect
the strength of the Light or Dark side of the Force—on that location. Thus,
the game connects the physical universe of Locations to the metaphysicaluniverse of the Force as life, using the circulation of cards to reflect the
waxing and waning of power within the eternal struggle between Lightand Dark.
This circulation of cards complicates the Force-as-life metaphor, creatinga digital ecology in which individual cards perform different functions as
they circulate. The Force Pile mediates the Force as power by quantifying the amount of Force available for use, allowing the player to spend
Force (by moving a number of cards to the Used Pile) to deploy cards or
perform certain game actions. And, in a strangely counterproductive actof incarnation, it is this Force Pile from which cards are drawn, leaving
the holistic reservoir of the deck and becoming agents that draw upon thissame Force pile to affect the represented gameworld. Similarly, the Reserve
Deck mediates the use of Destiny, which is drawn from the Reserve Deck,checked, and placed in the Used Pile. Finally, this cycle is completed when
the Used Pile is placed under the Reserve Deck each turn. As cards cycle
and recycle through the deck, discrete cards become elements in an organic
flow that parallels the holism of a life Force that is generated by and yetinterconnects discrete living entities.

Conclusion
The SWCCG game adaptation, as with any ludic remediation, is designed tosynthesize a narrative play experience from narrative and play conventions
that are often in tension. As the SWCCG engages the tension between theholism of the Force and the digitality of the CCG, it does manage to adapt
the aforementioned aspects—power, morality, destiny, and life—as implementable relations between digital cards. In so doing, the game digitizes
the narrative.
However, for all the ways in which this game adaptation disrupts theunderlying narrative structure of the films and other EU texts, the SWCCG
is not really a subversive text. Instead, the game diverges from the narrative

142 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingin order to adapt the underlying fabric of the universe itself—the physical laws and narrative conventions that make Star Wars distinctive. The
consequence of this imperfect translation is that the game offers a uniqueangle on the Star Wars universe, one particularly suited to providing fanswith resources for constructing their own version of Star Wars from its
deconstructed elements. In this adaptive paradigm, the idea of Star Wars as
a fixed canon gives way to the idea of Star Wars as an imaginative storyworldthat invites fan engagement. The digitality of the game medium, moreover,scaffolds such engagement by providing both an immersive structure (therules) and narrative elements (the cards) for assembling emergent narrativeplay. This digital game, therefore, blends media reception and production
into a ludic experience that plays out rather than retells Star Wars.

9.

Publishing the New Jedi OrderMedia Industries Collaboration and the Franchise Novel
Sean Guynes

In April 2014, two years after Disney’s purchase of Lucasf ilm and its
constellation of intellectual properties (IP) in October 2012, Lucasfilm/
Disney announced plans to create the Lucasfilm Story Group that would
establish a single canon for the franchise and coordinate world-building
efforts across all forthcoming narrative media. Establishing a “truecanon—a single, cohesive Star Wars storyline” meant jettisoning the EUof comics, video games, television shows, made-for-TV movies, and novels
created since 1977. As the report of the Story Group’s new canon project
attested, the EU was largely conceived of as those adventures in the Star
Wars storyworld taking place “beyond what is seen on the screen.”1 To
save those off-screen stories, the EU was recycled in the new Legends
publishing line to encourage continued revenue from no-longer-canonicalsources. The header image of the announcement tellingly displayed the
new Legends cover for Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire (1991), the firstof the Thrawn Trilogy that formed the cornerstone of the EU’s popularity
with hardcore fans at a time when Star Wars was thought to be a franchisebeyond licensing revivification.
In terms of sheer quantity, most of Star Wars has taken place on theprinted page—in well over a thousand comics and novels. Yet, what scholarship exists on Star Wars continues to circle around film, television, andvideo games, while printed media, especially novels, are often worth little
more than passing mention.2 Even Chris Taylor’s massive How Star Wars

1 “The Legendary Star Wars Expanded Universe Turns a New Page,” StarWars.com, April
25, 2014, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.starwars.com/news/the-legendary-star-wars​-expanded-universe-turns-a-new-page.
2 Recent analyses giving any significant attention to novels include: Crystal Renee White,“How Media Created by Star Wars Defines the Franchise,” in Myth, Media, and Culture in Star
Wars: An Anthology, edited by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,2012), 101-112; the third chapter of Carolyn Cocca, Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation(New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); and the sixth chapter of Colin Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play, and Memory across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015).

144 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Conquered the Universe treats such fictions anecdotally.3 Similarly, despite
the crossing of media boundaries implied by the term “transmedia,” itsscholars seldom attend to printed media beyond comics, which were central
to providing the IP licenses that led to the development of multibilliondollar film franchises. This lack of attention to other printed media does
makes some historiographical sense, since the study of transmedia emerged
from Henry Jenkins’s notion of convergence culture, the term he gave topractices of twenty-first-century “new media” defined as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple
media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will
go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences
they want.”4
Focused as Jenkins was on the productive and participatory uses of media
by its consumers and on the responses to those uses by media industries,
Jenkins’s influence led a generation of scholars to look at particular typesof media, sidelining, for the most part, the publishing industry and prose
fiction. Novels became a part of transmedia and media studies primarily inthe dressing of adaptation theory, which focused heavily on novel-to-film
adaptations.5 But with the exception of the film novelizations, Star Wars
novels are not adaptations in Linda Hutcheon’s strictest sense;6 they are
not transpositions of existing storylines from one medium to another somuch as they are storyworld expansions that make up a part of what Matt
Hills calls the “endlessly deferred hyperdiegesis” that constitutes a given
transmedia fiction’s expansive storyworld.7 In this way, a Star Wars novel
hardly differs from other transmedia fictions, like video games or comics.
But novels are fundamentally different from other media within theStar Wars franchise. Not only have they been treated as such within transmedia studies, but they also offer different modes of narration, have been
historically significant to fan engagement with franchises, and are doubly
ghettoized in the literary market for their dual position as genre fiction
3 Chris Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of aMultibillion Dollar Franchise (New York: Basic Books, 2015). Taylor devotes the nine-page chapter
nineteen, “The Universe Expands” (286-295), to the entirety of Star Wars franchise novels.
4 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006), 2.
5 The section on novelization in Thomas Van Parys and I.Q. Hunter, eds., Science Fiction
across Media: Adaptation/Novelization (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2013) is an important exception
and includes chapters by well-known novelization writers.
6 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006).
7 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 142.

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145

and franchise production. I argue, therefore, in this chapter that franchisenovels8 provide unique insight into the relations of industrial collaborationthat constitute media franchises by highlighting the often lucrative licensing partnerships between publishing companies and the audiovisual media
industries. By focusing on franchise novels, I emphasize the key role they
have played in the transmedia history of Star Wars. Following a surveyof Star Wars franchise novels through the late 1990s that contextualizes
their position within the larger f ield of Star Wars world-building, thischapter turns to a specific instance: the nineteen-book New Jedi Order
series (1999-2003; hereafter NJO), an unprecedented publishing project tocreate a multi-authored mega-series designed by the publishers and Lucas­
film representatives, with input by Lucas, and carried out by individual
authors. I demonstrate how tactics of industrial collaboration have cometo account for the current production of Star Wars “by committee” via theLucasfilm Story Group. In attending to NJO as an example that situates the
franchise novel as a practice of industrial collaboration and transmedia
world-building, I claim that print media and the novel in particular are
critical to transmedia studies and in particular to studying transmedia asa media franchising strategy.

Publishing Star Wars, 1977-1999
Matthew Freeman’s notion of an early-twentieth-century model of “building” transmedia worlds9 defined the growth of the Star Wars franchise in
the late 1970s and 1980s. This world-building strategy contrasts with themore recent, convergent model of transmedia storytelling that utilizes
established interconnections among media industries and within media
conglomerates to forge synergized storyworlds that flow across multiple
media platforms.10 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. These extensions, which famously included
8 What I call the franchise novel is commonly referred to as the media tie-in novel. But theterm “tie-in” suggests a secondary, anecdotal relationship subordinating such novels to the“main” or “source” medium of storytelling. For many fans, however, these novels are vital to theexperience of a transmedia franchise’s storyworld.
9 Matthew Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2016).
10 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 282.

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toys, television shows, made-for-TV movies, and video games, began in theworld of print media, with the novelization of A New Hope appearing in
December 1976 and Marvel’s release of a six-issue comics adaptation of thefilm timed so that the first three issues were available before its opening.
Star Wars thus began for some fans in print before continuing into licensed
comics and novels.
Lucasfilm capitalized successfully on the rich possibilities of a 1970s
media ecology that was disposed to storyworld extensions through original
novels, as franchises had been doing for decades. It makes sense, therefore,that in addition to the first film’s novelization and the quick commissionof a quasi-novelization-become-standalone-novel (Alan Dean Foster’s 1978
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye11), the company also licensed major science-fiction
publisher Del Rey to publish original novels. Under their short-lived license,
Del Rey released six novels in two trilogies, one each for Han Solo (1979-1980)
and Lando Calrissian (1983), targeted at the growing Star Wars fandom andtied to the release schedules of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of theJedi. The two trilogies, written by the relatively unknown science-fiction
authors Brian Daley and L. Neil Smith, were set in locations invented by theauthors. They followed the title characters on adventures that placed themin conflict with local law enforcement, gangsters, and goons of corporate
enterprises. Setting the novels outside of the storyworld-to-date and before
the events in A New Hope ensured that the books did not conflict with
Lucas’s ongoing storytelling.
The Star Wars storyworld went into hibernation in the mid-1980s, shortly
after Return of the Jedi.12 As one potential licensee told Howard Roffman ofLucas Licensing in the 1980s, “Star Wars is dead.”13 Although it expanded
into the realm of TRPGs in 1987 with West End Games’s Star Wars: The
Roleplaying Game, Star Wars was not revived until it returned to bookstoresin 1991, when Zahn’s Heir to the Empire presented fans with the story of what
happened after Return of the Jedi. Heir to the Empire and the two novels thatcompleted this new trilogy (1992, 1993) were authored with a greater levelof oversight from Lucasfilm than were the Daley and Smith trilogies orMarvel’s comics, the latter of which led to occasionally bon­kers storylines. In
exercising greater control over Zahn’s novels, Lucasfilm hoped to establish
11 See Matthew Freeman’s chapter in this volume on the media-historical context of what hecalls Foster’s quasi-novelization.
12 Two Ewok-centered made-for-TV movies (1984, 1985) failed to encourage further interest;in 1986, Marvel ceased publishing its Star Wars comics and the animated children’s televisionseries Droids and Ewoks were both cancelled.
13 Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 284.

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a relatively consistent storyworld through the new novels and, as such,directed Zahn to draw on Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game’s encyclopedic
rundown of the storyworld’s elements, which included names, attributes,
and histories of virtually all characters, species, and locations from thefilms. Zahn’s success was a shock for Lucasfilm, but expected by Bantam’s
science-fiction imprint, Spectra. Founder and editor Lou Aronica had felt
aggrieved by what he considered the “so-so” quality of monthly novels published by other media franchises.14 But recruiting the Hugo award-winning
author Zahn15 and getting Lucas’s go-ahead to tell stories set after the films
did the trick: Star Wars became a major property for Bantam Spectra andthereby a coveted publishing license.
Aronica hoped to publish one bestselling hardcover per year. But theseries’s profitability and reader demand drove the number of yearly novels
higher, even as critics and fans agreed that the books’ quality deteriorated.
By 1996, Bantam Spectra was publishing at least ten novels per year in
addition to the numerous junior and YA novels licensed by other publishers specializing in children’s literature. Bantam ended up publishing over
50 novels before Lucasfilm moved the license back to Del Rey in 1999 inanticipation of a renewed interest in the franchise that would follow therelease of The Phantom Menace.16 The return to Del Rey was also motivatedby Lucasfilm’s dissatisfaction with the rapid sprawling of the EU and theuneven quality of the novels; they wanted the EU instead “to slowly build
up a vast and complex mythology.”17 To begin crafting this mythology,
positioned as an extension of the Skywalker story, Lucasfilm, Del Rey,
Dark Horse Comics (the comics IP licensee), and several authors therefore
planned NJO as a publishing blockbuster equivalent to the filmic saga.

14 Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 288.
15 On the process of planning and writing Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, and the negotiations
between him and Lucasfilm over control of the storyline, see Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered
the Universe, 290-293. On the process of writing Star Wars franchise novels under Bantam,
see Roger MacBride Allen, “Media Tie-Ins: Why They Are Nearly Impossible for Beginners to
Publish,” SFWA.org, January 4, 2005, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/
media-tie-ins-why-they-are-nearly-impossible-for-beginners-to-publish/.
16 Bantam was allowed to finish publishing books already contracted, so Bantam released
three final novels in the X-Wing series, the final in a trilogy about bounty hunters, and the final
in a series of short story anthologies in 1999.
17 Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 293.

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Industrial Collaboration and The New Jedi Order, 1999-2003
Franchise novels are products of industrial collaboration. Franchises,
Derek Johnson argues, “do not replicate themselves” ex nihilo but, rather,“are produced in negotiated social and cultural contexts.”18 Furthermore,“the replication of franchising extends not from the agency of corporatemonoliths, but from producers working for and within industrial power
structures.”19 In other words, media franchises are constituted in industrial
processes sustained by IP, licensing, and the profit from both. But they mustalso be understood as complex configurations of labor, legal, and sociocultural forces produced through a network of collaborations that connects
IP rights holders, licensees, creators who make products utilizing IP, andaudiences. Audiences, in turn, consume and, through their consumption
practices, respond in turn to the licensed product, franchise, and networkthat led to the product’s production and the franchise’s replication.
NJO offers a unique case study in the network of media franchising collaborations with the publishing industry since the series followed from an
explicit attempt by the IP rights holder to redirect a franchise’s relationshipwith the publishing industry to better enact a particular transmedia worldbuilding strategy. Moreover, NJO raises questions about the various levels ofcreative collaboration required to plan, write, and publish a nineteen-novel
book series—from collaboration between the NJO planning committee
entities and their various creative and industrial purchases on the project,
to that between individual authors and editors as well as, ultimately, toeconomic and cultural stakeholders.
If NJO is remembered for anything, it is for the death of Chewbacca, asoul-crushing event for many Star Wars fans that took place in the initialnovel of the series: Vector Prime by R.A. Salvatore, acclaimed author of Dungeons & Dragons franchise novels. Since the killing off of major characters
had been a no-no for Star Wars novelists from the beginning, Chewbacca’s
death signaled to readers that NJO meant to raise the stakes significantly
by changing the Star Wars storyworld.20 Vector Prime introduced a series of
18 Derek Johnson, Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 3.
19 Johnson, Media Franchising, 4.
20 Responding to criticisms of Chewbacca’s death, Salvatore explained, the planning committee “decided that we had to make the point clear that when [the main characters are] in afight, you really should be on the edge of your seat. In any book, at any time, someone could go”(bracketed text in original). Helen Keier, “R.A. Salvatore,” part II, TheForce.net, December 1999,
accessed March 1, 2017, www.theforce.net/jedicouncil/interview/salvatore2.shtml.

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minor plots subject to the galaxy’s invasion by a heretofore unencounteredextragalactic species, the Yuuzhan Vong. The Yuuzhan Vong were bothfascinating and repulsive: a species beyond the Force, unable to be sensed
by the Jedi; a society with bio-organic technologies that violently eschewed
all mechanical ones, possessing organisms bred to be starships, weapons,armor, and more; and a culture dedicated to the eradication or enslavementof all others, hell-bent on domination, and devoted to bodily mutilation inorder to gain social prestige. In short, NJO was less sanitized in its presentation of violence, blood/gore, death, and trauma than any prior storyworldtext, and thereby introduced more adult themes into the Star Wars universe.
NJO takes place 25 years after Return of the Jedi, far enough into the “future”
of the Star Wars universe that the series had all of the EU as retrospective, avast repository of horizontal memory that NJO planners and authors plundered to great effect. NJO writers, for example, relied on a massive cast of
characters found only in novels and comics, as well as using a superweapon(an EU plot favorite) from Roger MacBride Allen’s Corellian Trilogy (1995),
Centerpoint Station, which proved vital to the defense strategy of the Rebellion’s intergalactic successor state, the New Republic. NJO also expanded
the mythology of the Skywalker family from the original trilogy, the originof which had begun to be told in The Phantom Menace, by making Han andLeia’s children—twins Jacen and Jaina and younger brother Anakin, bornand given backstory in numerous EU novels—central to the multi-book story.
Moreover, the series was a logical extension of a major plot begun in Kevin J.
Anderson’s Jedi Academy Trilogy (1994) and continued in numerous novels
throughout the 1990s to train a new generation of Jedi (including the Solochildren) in fulfillment of Return of the Jedi’s titular promise to reestablish theJedi Order. NJO thus validated Bantam Spectra and other publisher-licensees’
Star Wars world-building while also rewarding long-term fan-readers withthe horizontal extension of those earlier novels’ storytelling. At the sametime, NJO charted the storyworld’s growth more closely in consultation with
Lucasfilm as the transmedia franchise’s key stakeholder.
What is clear from interviews and secondhand accounts of the planningand development of NJO is that Del Rey’s editorial director, Shelley Shapiro,
wanted to give Star Wars novels a new face. A few years after Aronica had set
out to make Star Wars novels better than “so-so,” Bantam’s franchise novels
were starting to look like “Star Trekish formula pablum,” as NJO co-planner
Michael A. Stackpole put it.21 The Bantam novels, in other words, jumped
21 Helen Keier, “Michael A. Stackpole,” TheForce.net, November 1999, www.theforce.net/
jedicouncil/interview/stackpole2.shtml.

150 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingaround the Star Wars timeline, occasionally contradicted themselves, andwere plotted with little concern for consistent world-building. Through aseries of meetings in 1998, Shapiro worked with Lucasfilm managing editor
Sue Rostoni, who had been in charge of basic continuity since the 1970s;
Lucy Wilson, Lucasfilm’s director of publishing; representatives from Dark
Horse Comics, including Star Wars comics editor Randy Stradley; a handfulof authors, including Stackpole and James Luceno; and various editors at Del
Rey,22 to plot an outline of 29 novels to be released over five years—though
this was later reduced to nineteen over four. In addition to being designed
by a committee of industry higher-ups, franchise stakeholders, and authors
who would be involved, the series’ major plot details—e.g. who would
die—were ultimately checked with Lucas.
As a complexly plotted series, NJO was both a significant collaboration
between multiple creative laborers and franchise stakeholders operating
at various levels within the media industries, but it was also a continuity
and world-building strategy devised purposefully by Lucasfilm. Wilson,
for example, had long lamented that Star Wars novels were too much thecreation of authors telling stories based purely on their individual whims.
In a round-robin interview, Wilson recalled that “[t]he Bantam books werevery much determined by what each writer wanted to create and were either
one-off titles or trilogy series. […] But as the universe got more complicated,
it was clear we had to take more control over where the stories were goingin order to maintain this continuity.”23 To reassert a semblance of control
over franchise novel continuity, Lucasfilm included “a new spin-off fiction
program that would be one big sequential story” in the contract it negotiatedwith Del Rey for the rights to produce prequel film novelizations and spinoff novels.24 In other words, the idea for NJO was part of a strategic contract
negotiation to effect a switch from one publishing licensee to another inan effort to produce a more unified, franchise-controlled linear expansionof the transmedia storyworld. More than an unprecedented publishingproject, NJO was a franchising move that reestablished Lucasfilm’s oversightof the Star Wars brand and was, no doubt, also an effort to increase revenue
from its publishing licenses.
Lucasfilm and Del Rey treated their novels as a departure from Bantam’s book series. This is especially evident in Del Rey’s marketing and
22 For the most complete rundown of all involved, see “Star Wars: The New Jedi Order RoundRobin Interview,” Unifying Force, by James Luceno (Del Rey, 2003), appended interview, n.p.
23 “Round-Robin Interview,” n.p.
24 “Round-Robin Interview,” n.p.

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merchandising tactics, its efforts at intramedial storytelling (throughconnections with non-NJO Star Wars novels published during the same
period 25), and their choice of authors. With the prequel trilogy sure to
inspire a renewal of popular interest in Star Wars and a new generation of
fan-consumers, Lucasfilm viewed a publishing license switch-up as a newstart for Star Wars novels and readers, some of whom would be coming
to the novels for the first time. NJO provided an important point of entry,
then, since it neither inhibited prequel spin-off storytelling nor retreaded
the shakily established EU continuity to date. Moreover, NJO’s debut also
followed two years after the original trilogy special editions were released
in 1997, opening a new market for the films and tie-in merchandising,and introducing a younger generation—including many six-year-olds like
me—to the first films. This context further layered the ways in which NJO
was positioned to catch the attention of possible Star Wars audiences. In thisway, NJO worked to rebrand the Star Wars franchise novel, as the examplesof their strategy below demonstrate.
Del Rey rebranded, in part, through targeted marketing, a visual shiftconsistent across all book-cover art from painted to digitally produced,26 andadapted merchandise, including a series of audiobook productions and aStar Wars: Roleplaying Game NJO sourcebook. One key marketing strategy
was the production of a television commercial for Vector Prime. Until the
1990s, book commercials were prohibitively expensive for publishingcompanies, but they became more affordable with the advent of cheaper
digital production tools that then prompted cable channels to begin offering“targeted, inexpensive advertising opportunities for publishers anxious toreach” new readers; by 1994, such commercials were commonplace, thoughstill reserved for projected blockbuster novels.27 Del Rey took advantage ofthis new advertising medium for books with a 30-second television spotthat aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in the months leading up to Vector Prime’s
November 1999 publication. The spot featured a montage of clips fromthe original trilogy, including digital shots introduced in the 1997 special
25 For example, Greg Bear’s Rogue Planet (2000), which introduced a living planet key todefeating the Yuuzhan Vong.
26 The first three NJO books were covered with art by famous science-fiction artist John Harris,a break from the previous Star Wars novels signifying a mainstream significance of the series;
every NJO and franchise-line cover was created digitally thereafter.
27 Doreen Carvajal, “Promoting Books via TV Commercials and Movie Trailers Has Become Affordable,” The New York Times, April 28, 1997, accessed March 1, 2017, www.nytimes.
com/1997/04/28/business/promoting-books-via-tv-commercials-and-movie-trailers-hasbecome-affordable.html.

152 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

edition, as Mark Hamill provided an ominous frame for NJO: “I have fought
the worst of all wars and witnessed the redemption of evil. […] Now, withmy loved ones and my loyal allies, I face a new challenge unlike any before.
And I’m not sure if this time we can win.” The commercial concludes witha pull-back from a close-up of the cover to reveal Salvatore’s novel, as adifferent voice-over actor announces “the first novel of the New Jedi Order.”28
Although Del Rey’s commercial appeared on a genre-specific channel, it
signaled a desire to grab new franchise readers by presenting NJO as asequel to the original trilogy, burying the EU’s complexities through a rapid
temporal shift from the “then” of Return of the Jedi to the “Now” of NJO. The
commercial also capitalized on visual references to the recently re-released
original trilogy and the cultural capital tied to hearing Luke himself vet
the novel as the continuation of his story—one with a mysterious enemy
and an unsure, unpredictable outcome.
Del Rey’s selection of authors for the series was equally important to
NJO’s rebranding of the Star Wars franchise novel. Inviting authors new to
the EU (Elaine Cunningham, Troy Denning, Shane Dix, Greg Keyes, James
Luceno, Salvatore, Matthew Stover, Sean Williams, Walter Jon Williams)
to work alongside those who helped pioneer it (Aaron Allston, Michael A.
Stackpole, Kathy Tyers) was a simultaneous appeal to longtime reader-fans
and newcomers. Bantam’s pool of Star Wars writers had grown stagnant,even if those regulars were producing novels that were well-liked by readers. Stackpole’s involvement in particular gave NJO a certain amount ofcredibility for die-hard reader-fans. The presence of other Star Wars wellknowns, like the occasional X-Wing series writer Allston and Tyers, authorof the early EU novel The Truce at Bakura (1993), ensured a sense of creative
continuity between Bantam’s punctuated expansion of the storyworld and
Del Rey’s more systematic approach. At the same time, the infusion of nine
new authors into the Star Wars writers’ fold added stylistic and tonal variety
to the storyworld and had the added bonus of ensuring new readers would
not be intimidated by too many authors with a long backlist of Star Wars
titles. It also meant that the franchise could piggyback on the popularity of
the new authors, all of whom were respected in various arenas of fantasy andscience-fiction writing. NJO’s selection of new and carryover authors thus
positioned the series and its beginning of a new era in Star Wars publishingto take advantage of multiple potential reader audiences.

28 “The New Jedi Order Vector Prime Commercial,” YouTube video, 0:29, posted by lugia6, May
30, 2010, accessed March 1, 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P13oUIn4BtU.

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New Jedi, New OrderNJO ended in November 2003 with Luceno’s The Unifying Force. Like mostof the novels in the series, it landed on The New York Times’s best sellers
list, debuting at number ten before quickly dropping off.29 Through its new
partnership with Del Rey, Lucasfilm wielded greater editorial power in
its relationship with the publishing industry, and the unprecedented NJO
novel series constituted an attempt to create a more coherent transmedia
storyworld for a new generation of fans. Of course, Del Rey’s NJO-led
rebranding of the Star Wars franchise novel and its attempt to develop asingle continuous storyworld together with Lucasfilm was hardly any more
successful than Bantam’s. Since the late 1990s, there has never been a year
in which fewer than ten Star Wars novels were published;30 rather than
reducing Bantam’s sprawl of franchise novel extensions, Del Rey actually
exacerbated it in response to a growing Star Wars fandom. In spite of thecontinuity “problems” posed by such a massive number of Star Wars novels,
the EU created by the various transmedia licensees supplied one of the
franchise’s most valuable assets. As noted in Disney’s 2012 press releasestatement of intended acquisition, the Star Wars “universe of more than
17,000 characters inhabiting several thousand planets spanning 20,000
years offers infinite inspiration and opportunities.”31 In other words, thefranchise was a lucrative IP farm for Disney, nearly all of which had been
supplied by transmedia extensions of the film franchise—especially the
EU and its novels.
NJO ultimately marked a shift in the production of Star Wars franchisenovels and the relationship between licensor and licensee. The series paved
the way for the tightly knit inter-industrial relationships that define thecurrent Lucasfilm Story Group’s approach to planning and producing not
only franchise novels but the entire transmedia storyworld. NJO’s uniqueposition in the history of the franchise novel therefore calls for a closer
attention to print media. Such attention is especially significant for studying
a storyworld like post-Disney Star Wars, since the now equally canonicalstatus of all narrative media, the plunderability of old EU IP to craft newtales, and the Story Group’s attempts to produce a single, unified storyworld
29 “Best Sellers: November 30, 2003,” The New York Times, November 30, 2003, accessed March
1, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/books/best-sellers-november-30-2003.html.
30 Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 290.
31 “Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm, Ltd,” The Walt Disney Company, October 30, 2012, accessed
March 1, 2016, http://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-to-acquire-lucasfilm-ltd/.

154 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

across a quickly rising number of media texts is unheard of. A grounding
in the novels and in other licensed print media, for example comics, will
help us better understand transmedia world-building by reconceptualizing
the primacy of media types in our analyses of the interconnections among
franchising and transmedia world-building strategies. That is, where thepre-Disney Star Wars canon model saw the films as more important thanother media permutations of the storyworld (liable to be wiped out ofcontinuity should a new film or television show contradict it), Lucasfilm’s
approach to building the Star Wars transmedia world in the Disney era
demands that we give equal weight to the novels. This change in the Star
Wars world-building model requires a shift in perspective on the part oftransmedia scholars in order to fully grasp how the franchise’s storytellingis evolving under a new set of strategies and how the industrial processesof convergence, prof it, creative license, and negotiated authorship are
unfolding in this new design-by-committee era of Star Wars.

10. How Star Wars Became MuseologicalTransmedia Storytelling in the Exhibition Space
Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera and Philipp Dominik Keidl
Star Wars’s production and reception histories—not to mention themillennia-long history of the storyworld itself—have been documented
across books, television specials, DVD extras, interviews, articles, wikis,
and fan-run websites. Another important site to encounter the franchise’s
history is the museum. In fact, with the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012,
George Lucas has turned his attention from filmmaking and producing to
the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is set to open in Los Angeles andwill house his collection of paintings, illustrations, comics, props, films,
and digital art.1
This museum project is not the first time that Lucas has appeared in therole of art collector, philanthropist, and museologist. Since the early 1990s,
Lucasfilm has licensed and co-curated several themed exhibitions for museums, science centers, and other exposition venues, offering visitors detailed
insights into the production process through the display of various objects
from Lucas’s cinematic oeuvre. Star Wars-themed exhibitions have been
the most popular of Lucasfilm’s exhibitions by far, bringing large numbersof visitors into many different institutions. For instance, throughout its
fifteen-month run from October 1997 to January 1999, The Magic of Mythdrew more than 900,000 visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Air andSpace Museum (NASM), becoming one of the most popular shows in theinstitution’s history.2 However, despite the franchise’s growing museum
presence, the study of exhibitions has only played a minor role in Star
Wars scholarship. The few studies addressing exhibitions mostly discuss
the complex and mixed perceptions of the franchise’s cultural status and1 After the unsuccessful plans to build the museum in San Francisco and Chicago, Lucasannounced in January 2017 that the project would be realized in Exposition Park in Los Angeles.
At the time of writing, the museum has no official opening date.
2 Kevin M. Williams, “Exploring the Myth that Is ‘Star Wars,’” Chicago Sun-Times, July 14, 2000.
Star Wars the Magic of Myth Press Clippings Chicago, Accession 07-135, Box 10, The Smithsonian
Institution Archives, Washington D.C.

156 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingits use as an educational tool within art, science, natural history, film, andtechnology museums.3
In this chapter, we redirect the debates of cultural and educational value
to a discussion of exhibitions’ role in Star Wars’s transmedia economy. We
argue that Star Wars-themed exhibitions function as a space for managing
and refocusing transmedia expansion and narrative coherence. In structure,form, and content, museum exhibitions are complex transmedial sites
engaged with current understandings of and practices pertaining to stories
and creativity. In particular, we are interested in how these exhibitions
manage Star Wars’s constantly expanding storyworld and mediate debates
about canonicity, authorial hierarchies, and collaborative creation. For
some scholars, transmedia storytelling opens up increased possibilities
for “participatory authorship” and “collaborative spectatorship”; for others,
however, it represents an industrial strategy where participation means
the “continuous consumption of texts that narratively and f inancially
supplement a franchise.”4
Transmedia storytelling problematizes notions of authorship by simultaneously encouraging collaborative productions and reaffirming creative authority. Indeed, the latter assures “audiences that someone is overseeing thetransmedia text’s expansion and creating meaningful connections between
texts.”5 Our chapter shows how Star Wars-themed exhibitions contributeto the processes of author and content management on three levels. First,
they position Lucas as the ultimate world architect and creative authority,
thereby sidelining other authors’ contributions. Second, in the translation of
the films to the museum, the curator emerges as another mediating authorial figure, even if Lucasfilm strictly oversees their curatorial agency. Third,
they encourage narrative speculation and expansion through interactive
activities, but also frequently limit and regulate visitors’ creative contributions through copyright and reaffirmations of the canonical boundaries set
by Lucasfilm. A study of these three authorial figures provides insight into
how exhibitions configure Star Wars’s collective memories in the museum

3 See Matt Hills, “Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory, and the Museum: The Cultural Statusof the Cult Blockbuster,” in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (London: Routledge, 2003),
178-189; Ian Peters, “‘Hello Shoppers?’: Themed Spaces, Immersive Popular Culture Exhibition,and Museum Pedagogy” (PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2015).
4 Suzanne Scott, “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer
Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 43.
5 Scott, “Role of the Fanboy Auteur,” 43.

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space, where institutional priorities, visitors’ creative contributions, andindustrial management intersect and sometimes collide.

A Brief History of Star Wars-Themed Exhibitions
Star Wars-themed exhibitions played a crucial part in the Star Wars renaissance of the 1990s, marking the end of the so-called Dark Ages, a term often
used to describe the period between 1985 and 1991. Following the release of
Return of the Jedi, no major related productions were planned or realized.6
The first Star Wars exhibitions accompanied content released concurrently
as part of what is known today as the EU. Beginning with Timothy Zahn’s
successful set of novels, the Thrawn trilogy (1991-1993), a number of notable
items were released, thus demonstrating the franchise’s continuing creativeand economic potential. These included Micro Machines, Topps tradingcards, several video games, a new line of comics now licensed to Dark Horse
Comics, a number of re-launched Kenner toys, and the introduction of
the fan magazine Star Wars Insider.7 Both The George Lucas Exhibition inTokyo in 1993 and The Magic of Myth in 1997 were launched in this period ofrevitalized interest. As with the EU productions, the exhibitions are morethan simply ancillary products in a well-oiled marketing machine. They areimportant sites for understanding the tensions that arise in the process ofworld-building, brand-building, and world-selling that began after the first
trilogy’s cinematic run.8
Star Wars exhibitions displayed the film’s production materials, props,
costumes, and narrative tropes in order to position the franchise as a crossgenerational cultural symbol. After years of accumulating dust in the Lucas­
film warehouses, production materials were unboxed, restored, and madevisible for The George Lucas Exhibition. Organized by Hata International incollaboration with Lucasfilm, the show celebrated the director’s imagination and creativity by presenting his complete oeuvre up to that date. At thesame time, the Smithsonian had begun planning its own exhibition project,
and requested the same objects for a Star Wars exhibition at the NASM. The
Magic of Myth, which presented the Star Wars films’ production history
6 William Proctor and Matthew Freeman, “‘The First Step into a Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars,” in Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology,
ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2017), 223.
7 Freeman and Proctor, “Transmedia Economy of Star Wars,” 225.
8 Freeman and Proctor, “Transmedia Economy of Star Wars,” 226.

158 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingthrough an exploration of classical mythologies and heroic narratives, wasdisplayed in various US and Australian venues from 1997 until January
2003. Since then, Star Wars-themed exhibitions have become a constantpresence on the international museum circuit, approaching more or less thesame selection of objects through the curatorial lenses of art, science, andpopular culture. The Art of Star Wars (Barbican Centre, 2000); Star Wars:
Art of the Starfighter (Smithsonian Institution, 2001); Where Science Meets
the Imagination (Boston Science Museum, 2006); Star Wars: The Exhibition(Cité des Sciences, Paris, 2006) ; Star Wars: Identities (Montreal ScienceCentre, 2012); Rebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen: Star Wars and the Power of Costume(The Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle 2015); An Art Odyssey (Le Café Pixel,
France, 2015); and Visions (The Mori Arts Center, Tokyo, 2015) are among
the best-known examples of the franchise’s extended museological life.9
Star Wars exhibitions have been profitable for museums, even though
their production and rental is expensive. For example, renting the Smithsonian’s third Star Wars traveling exhibition Rebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen: Star
Wars and the Power of Costume for a period of 22 weeks cost $US 400,000.
However, this was still a profitable investment given the large crowds andmedia attention these shows attract. In March 2014—two weeks before
its final run at the Tech Museum of Innovation (San José, California) and
20 venues and nine years into the exhibition’s tour—3,000,000 people
had visited Where Science Meets the Imagination. Moreover, an evaluation
conducted for the Boston Museum of Science (MOS), which originallyproduced Where Science Meets the Imagination, indicated that interest inStar Wars exhibitions also impacted general admissions, and encouraged
ticket sales to infrequent visitors at a higher rate than other exhibitions in
the museum.10
As the evaluation explains,
over 75.0% of respondents reported coming to the site that day specifically to see the Star Wars exhibition, […] about 50.0% of the audiences
9 The exhibitions listed here have circulated widely across several museums, most of themsituated in North America, Europe, and Australia. Many exhibitions, in fact, continue to do so(Identities and The Power of Costume). In this chapter, we list the museums where exhibitions
initially opened, omitting—for reasons of space—all the other sites where they have also beenpresented.
10 Carey E. Tisdal, Summative Evaluation of Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination
Museum of Science (Boston: Tisdal Consulting), 2007, 34. Exhibitfiles, accessed February 27,
2017, http://www.exhibitf iles.org/df ile2/ReviewFinding/247/original/Star__Wars__Summative__EvalutionReport__Final.pdf.

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across sites were infrequent visitors [and] the exhibition was successful
in attracting some atypical science center and science museum visitors
than it would first appear by looking at the numbers alone.11

The 2013-2014 annual report of the Canada Science and Technology Corporation also highlights that Where Science Meets the Imagination was far froma one-hit wonder. Its report on Identities listed attendance numbers of
130,000 over a five-month period at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum
and “significant media coverage, with more than 80 unpaid mentions.”12
The report also highlights the positive outcomes of the museum’s crosspromotional strategy, which offered visitors a 50% discount on admission
to the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum and the Canada Science andTechnology Museum, leading to “a spike in attendance across the board.”13
The exhibition’s marketability is also evident in the production of specificmerchandise sold on site, at the gift shop, and online. In addition to catalogues, this includes postcards, stationery, clothes, posters, and mugs with
Identities logos and imagery.

Museums, Canon-Making, and Authorship
Museums and transmedia storytelling both mobilize ideas aroundindividual creativity and authorship. Exhibitions about cinema and its
production histories, in particular, frequently emphasize individual creators and canonical films.14 They display discourses of authorship, offering
material evidence of a director’s filmic style and personal obsessions. For
example, exhibitions featuring the names of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley
Kubrick, Tim Burton, and, of course, George Lucas, have translated thework of (white, male) film directors into the exhibition format.15 In doing
11 Tisdal, Summative Evaluation of Star Wars, 34.
12 Canada Science and Technology Corporation. 3 Fascinating Museums: Canada Science andTechnology Corporation Annual Report 2013-2014, accessed February 27, 2017, http://technoscience.ca/doc/content/cstmc/AnnualReport2013-2014.pdf, 18.
13 Canada Science and Technology Corporation, Annual Report, 18.
14 For a detailed history of cinema-themed exhibitions see Alison Trope, “Le Cinéma pourle Cinéma: Making a Museum of the Moving Image,” The Moving Image 1, no.1 (2002): 29-67;
and Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Selling and Saving of Hollywood (Hanover, NH:
Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 11-88.
15 Examples include Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
2001); Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition (Deutsches Filmmuseum and Deutsches Architekturmuseum 2004); and Tim Burton (Museum of Modern Art, 2010).

160 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingso, these exhibitions not only perpetuate contested ideas about individual
creativity, but also make use of the author as a promotional discourse, justas the most commercially driven media-industrial economies commonly
do.16 Indeed, their use of recognizable names serves as a branding tool
throughout synergistic and cross-promotional efforts, providing immediate
recognition and encouraging consumption.17
In transmedia economies, authors add textual coherence to largely
dispersed narratives like Star Wars. Henry Jenkins writes that “the mostsuccessful transmedia franchises have emerged when a single creator or
creative unit maintains control.”18 For Jenkins, Star Wars is an exampleof transmedia storytelling that succeeds because Lucasfilm manages tomaintain textual coherence while offering something new with each media
expansion. Fans who want to get the whole picture are propelled to “hunt”
and “gather” bits and pieces across various Star Wars productions.19 The task,
then, is to determine what constitutes the whole. This, however, has becomea terrain of dispute between Star Wars fans, Lucasfilm, and now Disney,
due to the growing amount of canonical, quasi-canonical, or apocryphalmaterials constituting the galaxy. These conflicts over authenticity, labeled
by some fans as the “canon wars,”20 have divided fans between those who
recognize Lucas’s authority above all and those who deem the narratives
developed in the Star Wars EU and through fans’ creative contributions as
equally valid.21 These controversies are silenced within the context of theexhibition space, which grants Lucas exclusive creative authority.
Exhibition labels, catalogues, audio commentaries, and promotional
discourses consistently reference Lucas as the creative force behind Star
Wars. Lucas’s life experiences, artistic tastes, and personal commentary
are brought into the exhibitions as a framing device to understand creativeand narrative outcomes. The emphasis on Lucas was initially established in
1993’s The George Lucas Exhibition, which celebrated him as a storyteller andfilmmaker with the skills to craft and realize his artistic and narrative vision
16 For a detailed discussion on the commercial auteur see Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without
Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (London: Routledge, 1991).
17 Leora Hadas, “A New Vision: J.J. Abrams, Star Trek, and Promotional Authorship,” Cinema
Journal 56, no. 2 (2017): 46-66.
18 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006), 106.
19 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 21.
20 For a detailed overview on the canon wars, see “The Star Wars Canon: Overview,” Canon
Wars, accessed March 8, 2017, www.canonwars.com.
21 Freeman and Proctor, “Transmedia Economy of Star Wars,” 228.

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across several films. The promotional materials and exhibition cataloguethat were circulated beyond the gallery produced an image of authorshiptied to the idea of a unique creative mind. The catalogue cover and poster
even depicted Lucas in the center with his arms crossed, surrounded byStar Wars props and models, thereby explicitly signaling his mastery overthe storyworld.
Despite expanding the focus from the director’s persona to broader
themes, subsequent exhibitions have continued to position Lucas as thevisionary architect behind the franchise. The Magic of Myth’s audio tour provided commentaries through two main narrative strategies. First, Lucas’s
personal anecdotes detailed the writing process and discussed everyday
life experiences, such as how his dog made its way into the film by inspiring the character of Chewbacca.22 Second, the production crew recounted
the creative labor involved in bringing to life Lucas’s visions, such as thecomplex sound effects of the films. More explicitly, museum labels in The
Power of Costume reaffirmed Lucas as the main source of knowledge: quotes
made reference to what “George wanted,” what he “told” his creative team,what “was a priority for Lucas,” what was done “at Lucas’ request,” and how
the team helped to “realize his vision.” Even though the exhibition labels
mentioned members of the creative teams and other directors involved in
the production of the films, the labels firstly emphasized Lucas’s individual
vision as the ultimate Star Wars authority.
Off icial endorsements by Lucas, such as the ones presented in the
exhibitions, have become a point of reference for many fans who treasure
the narrative coherence of a clearly delimited world. Lucasfilm’s textual
authority, however, has resulted in a hierarchical system “with multiple
levels of authenticity,” with the films occupying a position of privilege.23
Novels, comics, video games, and television series have been set apart as
ambiguous products partly dismissed by Lucas as second-tier sub-worlds, inspite of the fact that they are also embraced by Lucasfilm Licensing and fans.
For their part, the exhibitions have become places to encounter, remember,and celebrate the films, but they also replicate industrial mandates thatobliterate sections of the Star Wars world, particularly those that havebeen created by other authors through licensing or fan engagement. In
doing so, exhibitions construct and disseminate a selective memory of the
22 Antenna Audio Production, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth Audio Tour Script, 1999, Accession
07-135, Box 12, National Air and Space Museum, Exhibits Design Division, Exhibit Records,
1991-1999, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington D.C.
23 Freeman and Proctor, “Transmedia Economy of Star Wars,” 222.

162 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingfranchise that does not reflect transmedia storytelling’s complex narrative
organization.

Transmedia Memory and Curatorial Agency
Building on Maurice Halbwachs’s research on the interrelationshipbetween individual and communal memories, collective memory studies have examined how the ways in which we encounter and share thepast in our everyday lives shape perceptions and beliefs.24 As “memory
institutions,” museums function as “social entities that select, document,
contextualize, preserve, index, and thus canonize elements of humanity’s culture, historical narratives, individual, and collective memories.”25
When exhibitions display Star Wars, they clearly function as “memory
institutions,” by selecting, classifying, and rewriting what we know about
the franchise’s content and production history. Such systematic processes,
where some objects and narratives are included while others are excluded,
become particularly relevant when we think of the central role of memory
in recalling transmedia narratives across multiple media.
Colin Harvey explains that memory is a defining factor of transmedia
storytelling, since “characters, plots, settings, mythologies and themes
necessarily have to be remembered from transmedial element to element
in order for the various elements to be considered as part of the same
storyworld.”26 In writing about encounters with Darth Vader across thefilms, video games, and novels, he describes how each medium not only
requires adaptation to its specific configurations, but also “to engage withthe work transmedially by recalling the character of Darth Vader from hisother appearances in the broader storyworld.”27 Harvey then introduces
the concept of transmedia memory to examine the various material andnarrative incarnations of a storyworld across media, assessing the impact
of copyright laws, licensing agreements, and other legal restrictions on themaking and reception of transmedia narratives. Given museums’ roles as“memory institutions,” transmedia memory is therefore key to examining
how Star Wars exhibitions produce, commodify, and circulate a distinct
24 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
25 Guy Pessach, “[Networked] Memory Institutions: Social Remembering, Privatization and
Its Discontents,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 26 (2008): 73.
26 Colin Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science Fiction andFantasy Storyworlds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 38.
27 Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia, 3.

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remembrance of the franchise that is tied to Lucasfilm’s control over its
contours.
Exhibitions contribute to building a cohesive and unified world, recreating a state of transmedia amnesia whereby non-canonical works, including
those co-scripted by Lucas which rank low on canonical hierarchies, areremoved from official commemorations of the franchise. A notable example
is the complete absence from exhibition displays of the notorious Holiday
Special, the 1978 television program that first introduced the character
Boba Fett in an animated short. A number of fans, and especially Lucas,
consider the program an “anomalous embarrassment,”28 but the filmmaker’s
attempts to keep the 98-minute special out of circulation have been jeopardized by fans who have uploaded it to online video portals. In comparison
with the internet, the exhibition space is, of course, easier to regulate; notonly are the unwanted memories of Star Wars’s past easier to conceal, but
exhibitions also permit Lucasfilm to rewrite Star Wars’s official history.
This has been the case with the character of Boba Fett. Labels in Identities
explained his origins by referring to his second appearance in The Empire
Strikes Back, not his infamous debut in the Holiday Special. This intentional
act of omission goes even further: its animated section was erased from thefranchise’s history in favor of The Clone Wars, which was the only animatedproduction on display.
Rewritings of the Star Wars canon thus raise the question of how much
Lucasfilm intervenes in the curatorial process of the exhibitions, regulating
what to remember as well as the ways in which visitors are invited to engage
with the displays. When we look at the makeup of curatorial teams—which,among museum curators and scientific experts, included in some instances
in-house personnel—Lucasfilm’s role becomes clearer. For example, Laela
French, current Director of Archives at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art,
co-curated the Identities and The Power of Costume exhibitions. While weknow little about how curatorial responsibilities are distributed in thesehighly interdisciplinary teams, it would seem that collaboration and coproduction are important aspects of the process. However, archival researchon the development of The Magic of Myth a few years earlier illuminates
the process and provides a model to understand how Lucasfilm oversees
curatorial teams’ proposals through their licensing agreements.
Contracts signed between Lucasfilm and the Smithsonian demandedthat displays should only be composed of “original creative elements […]28 Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York: Continuum, 2002), 103.

164 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingwhich appear in and have been associated with the motion pictures.”29 Thevagueness of the term “original creative elements” seems open to interpretation, but the exclusion of the EU and other non-canonized productions likethe Holiday Special indicates a reading of “original” very much in line with
Lucas’s delineation of canonical texts and his consistent privileging of thefilms. Lucasfilm’s right to “review and comment upon the overall ‘look’of the exhibit” restrains curatorial independence even further.30 What ismore, other typical curatorial activities were also covered by the agreement,
including public programs, audio tours, crowd control, exhibition promotion, book production, and the premiere event. The agreement granted
Lucasfilm final say over the objects and narratives on display as much as
the ways in which the museum designed interactions with the public.
As a result of these regulations, exhibitions contribute to the strengthening of a sanctioned but incomplete version of the Star Wars world, offering
details about the galaxy and its inhabitants without ever contradicting
canonical readings or including “secondary” texts. The Magic of Myth,
Where Science Meets the Imagination, Identities, and The Power of Costume
reinforce existing hierarchies that position Lucas as the only essential creative contributor. Despite these restrictive exhibition protocols, curatorial
teams still open up new points of entry into Star Wars by offering scientific,
technological, and anthropological understandings of the characters, geographies, and customs of the storyworld. In this way, exhibitions help build
a rich and complex world where humans coexist with equally developedalien societies and technologies. Identities, in its exploration of subject
formation around the character of Luke and Anakin, offered a tour of Star
Wars’s different societies and species, including a description of different
Force-sensitivities and a closer look at planets and species that could not
be given as much detail in the films. While curatorial teams are indeed
subjected to strict regulations that shape what and how we remember
Star Wars, the exhibitions’ contributions go beyond the mere encyclopedic
recounting and expansion of texts. Curatorial teams behind exhibition
design bring about novel readings of Star Wars that, using Jenkins’s term, act
as “cultural activators” propelling visitors and fans to decipher, speculate,and elaborate further.31
29 Licence Agreement, 1995, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, Accession 11-072, Box 1, National
Air and Space Museum, Exhibits Design Division, Exhibit Records, 1991-1999, Smithsonian
Institution Archives, Washington D.C., 1.
30 License Agreement, 2.
31 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 95.

How Star Wars Became Museological

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We can thus think of exhibition curatorial teams as transmedia coauthors, mediating collective memories, rewriting franchise history,
and generating fan commentary within the limitations of copyright andlicensing agreements that regulate the process. As Jenny Kidd explains,contemporary exhibition practices are transmedial and are enmeshed in
the processes of scripting and distributing information through different media forms such as films, museum labels, audio guides, interactive
games, and online platforms, among others.32 In translating Star Wars films
from the screen into the museum’s transmedial immersive environments,
curatorial teams make use of descriptions (labels, audio guides, texts),
images (stills, set photography, concept art, film excerpts, and additionallyproduced materials), sounds (sound effects, dialogue passages, scores), andinteractive elements (games, displays that have to be activated, hands-on
activities). Identities featured short explanatory films and interactive games
that used original footage from the first two trilogies and animations andcharts, each providing insight and expounding different aspects of theexhibition’s themes of subjectivity and psychology. In The Magic of Myth,the narrative was less structured around immersive media installations,
yet it also included a film produced specifically for the exhibition thatshowcased interviews with the main actors and Lucas, excerpts from thefirst trilogy, and films Lucas drew inspiration from.33 Curators developed
this “museum movie” so that visitors could make transversal connections
between the objects and the Star Wars films.
Exhibition media and interactive elements encourage visitors to participate in the expansion of the storyworld. Edutainment activities invite
visitors to use their creativity (within the boundaries of approved canonsand selective historical accounts of its past). In Where Science Meets the
Imagination, MOS included smaller creative tasks. The exhibition put
visitors into the role of engineers, who were asked to design their own
virtual cyborgs, droid characters, levitating vehicles, spaceports, moisture
farms, and walled Jawa towns at different workstations. Identities went evenfurther and made an interactive game the driving force behind its exhibition
narrative. The exhibition was entirely structured around an “Identity Quest”
where visitors were asked to translate their personality traits into a new
32 Jenny Kidd, Museums in the New Mediascape: Transmedia, Participation, Ethics (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2014), 3.
33 Meta Filmworks, Exhibition proposal and bid for film project, 1995. Star Wars: The Magicof Myth, Accession 11-072, Box 1, National Air and Space Museum, Exhibits Design Division,
Exhibit Records, 1991-1999, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington D.C.

166 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingStar Wars character. In twelve steps, visitors built their avatars by selecting their characters’ species, gender, family, culture, homeworld, mentors,
friends, defining life events, occupation, and values, and ended by choosing
whether they wanted to give in to the dark side or not. Before visitors leftthe exhibition, their character’s biography was visualized on a large screen,with references to the choices made throughout the quest. Character images
and biographies were later available for download via email.
Lucasf ilm’s right to veto curatorial proposals as expressed throughlicensing agreements also impacts the range of activities and participatory
elements present in the exhibitions. When the Smithsonian’s educational
department proposed the activity “Write the next episode,” which invited
visitors to speculate about what happens after Return of the Jedi,34 Lucasfilm
rejected the proposal and referred to potential intellectual property (IP)
infractions, as visitors would have relied on copyrighted materials.35 Thisdecision also resonated with Lucas’s ambiguous relation to fan fiction,
especially works with graphic descriptions of sex, violence, and substanceabuse.36 The main “Identity Quest” in Identities could be interpreted as an
opening toward user-generated content, even though restrictions in theavatar’s circulation and use point more towards a refinement of IP control.
Before visitors could access their avatars and personal biographies, they
had to agree to hand over all image rights to Lucasfilm. They could share
their avatars online if they did not modify them or remove the trademark,thus contributing with their own labor to the exhibition’s promotional gain
through social media. Of course, agreement to terms and conditions does
not necessarily mean user compliance, but it is still important to note that
this form of directed user-generated content comes closer to “fanagement”37
than to collaborative authorship and participatory spectatorship.
The regulated practices of curation within the controlled space of themuseum therefore represent an ambiguous development common for transmedia projects. Visitors to Star Wars exhibitions are invited to partake in the
34 Memorandum from exhibit committee to Mary Henderson, Impact Statement Star Wars,
September 30, 1993, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, Accession 11-072, Miscellanea 1, National
Air and Space Museum, Exhibits Design Division, Exhibit Records, 1991-1999, Smithsonian
Institution Archives, Washington D.C.
35 Memorandum from Gwen Crider to Nadya Makovenyi, Star Wars Options, December 12,
1995. Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, Accession 11-072, Miscellaneous 1991-1997, Folder 2, National
Air and Space Museum, Exhibits Design Division, Exhibit Records, 1991-1999, Smithsonian
Institution Archives, Washington D.C.
36 See Brooker, Using the Force, 164-171.
37 Matt Hills, “Torchwood’s Trans-transmedia: Media Tie-ins and Brand ‘Fanagement,’”
Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 409-428.

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expansion of a universe, although participation is circumscribed to notionsof canonicity, and unapproved expansions are legally restricted. Exhibitions
are as much a direct answer to fan participation through interactivity andappropriation of collaborative authorship as they are a re-installment ofLucas as main authority. What fans are encouraged to engage with in these
exhibitions is determined by Lucas’s vision of the canon, and this is equallytrue for the characters and stories those exhibitions facilitate and allow
them to create. Although the museum might not manage “to impose an
imagined consensus on a [fan] community that thrives on debate,”38 visitors who do not participate in fan-specific debates and practices are more
likely to remember this version of Star Wars as the authentic one. In thisway, exhibitions contribute to consolidating a selective form of collective
memory that is nonetheless linked to the franchise’s transmedia economy.

Conclusion
How then can we use these insights on the history and role of Star Warsthemed exhibitions for further investigations into the musealization oftransmedia storytelling projects? As Matt Hills writes, the museum has
been a site where the “struggle over Star Wars’s cultural status can andhas been played out.”39 While Hills’s approach draws on an understandingof the role of the museum in the discursive separation between economy
and culture, our study examines the role of the museum in transmedia
storytelling within a constantly growing franchise. Arguably, all of theexhibitions elevate Star Wars’s cultural value, but they are also central tounderstanding the franchise’s transmedia economy.
On the one hand, they produce selective cultural memories built aroundStar Wars’s cinematic releases. In doing so, they sideline works that are notsanctioned by Lucasfilm and influence how visitors build up dialogicalrelationships with non-canonical texts such as those of the EU. In short,what fans and visitors are encouraged to memorize in these exhibitions isdetermined by Lucas’s vision of the canon. On the other hand, the museum
is a distinct space in which to investigate the relationship between producers and consumers, and the different stakes and unequal power relations
among them. As such, Star Wars-themed exhibitions should not be seen as
simply another entry in an already long list of franchise products. Rather,
38 Brooker, Using the Force, 113.
39 Hills, “Star Wars in Fandom, Film Theory, and the Museum,” 197.

168 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingStar Wars-themed exhibitions offer a significant approach to investigating
the production of culture as well as the differences between cultures of
production, including the interaction among filmmakers, media industries,
curators, and visitors. Moreover, Star Wars is not the only franchise thatmakes use of themed exhibitions. Similar projects based on franchises
such as Star Trek, Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, andThe Hunger Games have circulated in museum and exhibition venues
worldwide, signaling a growing interest in the musealization of transmedia
storyworlds.40 With our focus on authorship, canonicity, collective memory,and visitor participation, our approach offers a model for further researchon how curatorial practices materialize in transmedia projects throughthe exhibition format.
We wish to thank Haidee Wasson and Zach Melzer for their ongoing support
and generous feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.

40 Examples include Star Trek (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 1992), Dinosaursof Jurassic Park (American Museum of Natural History, 1993), The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture
Trilogy: The Exhibition (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 2002), Harry Potter: The
Exhibition (Museum of Science and Industry, 2009), The Hunger Games: The Exhibition (SanFrancisco Palace of Fine Arts, 2016).

11.

Adapting the Death Star into LEGOThe Case of LEGO Set #10188
Mark J.P. Wolf 1

When one of the world’s most famous toymakers decided to license one of
the world’s most popular media franchises, a successful new line of products
perhaps seemed inevitable. The first Star Wars LEGO set appeared in 1999
and, since then, over 230 different LEGO Star Wars sets have appeared, as
well as LEGO Star Wars video games, books, pajamas, and other merchandise. Considering the importance of the Death Star within the Star Warssaga, it is not surprising that a LEGO set would be made of it, and set #10188
demonstrates how the film scenes on which it is based, the set’s audience,and the process of adaptation itself were all carefully taken into accountduring the design of the set.
Most of the work found in adaptation studies considers the adaptation ofa narrative from one medium into another (novels to films, films into television shows or video games, and so forth), but in the realm of transmedial
franchises set in imaginary worlds, we also find adaptation into toys andplaysets, using other kinds of media, such as LEGO bricks. Adaptation into aphysical playset is qualitatively different from narrative adaptation between
audiovisual media, since it involves not so much the adaptation of a narrative, but rather the settings, objects, vehicles, and characters from which anarrative can be interactively recreated by the user. At the same time, thiskind of adaptation still shares many of the same issues and processes andcan be discussed in relation to them (for example, video games also deal
with adaptation into interactive form, and the narrative recreation madepossible by a particular playset may still require the adaptation of theoriginal narrative on which it is based). The adaptation of the Death Star
from the Star Wars movies into LEGO set #10188 (released in 2008) provides
a good example of such an adaptation, and reveals many of the concerns
in the processes involved.
Other traditional forms of adaptation also involve transformation intoa physical form. When a novel or screenplay is adapted into a film, for
1 This chapter is an edited version of my essay “Adapting the Death Star into LEGO: The Case of
LEGO Set #10188,” in LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon,ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2014).

170 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingexample, descriptions must be fleshed out into visible designs and then into
physical sets, props, and costumes, a process that can change an original
conception due to its lack of practicality or level of vagueness in which
specifics are lacking and have to be assumed or extrapolated. While stage
plays and screenplays can be written with the constraints of adaptationin mind, making the process easier, the malleability of the end medium
also aids the process. LEGO, the bricks of which have been produced inthousands of specialized shapes since their first incarnation appeared in1949, is a far more versatile medium to use for adaptation than are other
older building sets like Meccano (1908), A.C. Gilbert’s Erector Set (1913),
the Tinkertoy Construction Set (1914), and Lincoln Logs (1916), which are
more limited in the shapes one can construct with their elements and theways in which those elements can be fit together.2 Thus, it should comeas no surprise that while other building sets have appeared in dozens ofdifferent sets, the much-younger LEGO has appeared in several thousand
different sets.
Concurrent with the rise and popularity of building sets was the development of the playset, the various elements of which are designed around aparticular theme or location, and are usually complete in and of themselves,needing little or no assembly. While less flexible than building sets, playsets
were often more representational than the abstracted versions of things
built from pieces of a building set, and had more complete and detailed
environments than those that one could construct with a building set. This
would, of course, change once LEGO became developed enough to matchthe level of detail and functionality found in playsets, but this would not
happen for some time. Thus, it is to the development of the playset that wemust next turn.

Development of the Playset
While the creation of miniature scenarios dates back to the models found inancient Egyptian tombs, such as that of Mehenkwetre (circa 2000 BC), which
reveal what daily life in Egypt was like, the earliest commercially produced
playsets were dollhouses. German companies produced miniatures for
2 Of course some sets, such as Tinkertoy, allows more flexibility if the models in question arebuilt at much bigger scales, but the stick-and-spool nature of its elements, compared to the blocks
used in LEGO, makes each medium better at one type of building over another, just as vector
graphics and raster graphics in video games each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Adapting the Death Star into LEGO

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collectors in the nineteenth century and, by the 1920s, dollhouses and theiraccessories were produced by American companies such as the TynieToy
company, who made replicas of New England homes. After World War
II, dollhouses and their furnishing were mass-produced, making themmore affordable and available as toys, but, at the same time, they were lessdetailed and simplified due to the demands of mass production. Other
playsets appeared around the same time, from companies such as Tobias
Cohn Company and Remco Industries, and most notably from the Marx
Toy Company, which became one of the largest toy companies in the world
during the mid-twentieth century.3
Begun in 1919, the Marx Toy Company made metal playsets during
the 1930s and 1940s, like the Sunnyside Service Station (1934) and theRoadside Service Station (1935). After the development of plastics in the
1940s, production became easier and less expensive, and the number ofplaysets increased, as did their popularity. In the 1950s, Marx produced
more generic sets, like the Western Ranch Set (1951), Cowboy and IndianCamp (1953), and Arctic Explorer Play Set (1958), as well as sets based on
actual events like the Civil War and real places like Fort Apache (1951) andFort Dearborn (1952). Other sets were adaptations of existing properties inother media, like the Roy Rogers Ranch Set (1952), Lone Ranger Rodeo (1952),
Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett at the Alamo (1955), and Gunsmoke Dodge City
(1960). The transmedial nature of these sets, which played on the popularity of existing franchises, encouraged the sale of playsets in general. The
Marx Toy Company made even more playsets during the 1960s and 1970s,
and the number of playsets based on transmedial franchises increased,
including sets based on Gunsmoke (1955-1975), Wagon Train (1957-1965), The
Untouchables (1959-1963), MGM’s Ben-Hur (1959), and more. 4
Other companies realized the value of known franchises and hurried tobuy up rights. During the 1970s, the Mego Corporation licensed Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s works, and produced toys for the Planet of the Apes, Marvel
Comics, DC Comics, and Star Trek franchises, and even The Wizard of Oz
and His Emerald City (1974) playset. Properties that were not already known
by the public were considered more risky, and in 1976 Mego turned down
an offer to license toys based on an upcoming science-fiction film named
3 According to the Marx Toy Company Museum, which claims that “During the 1950’s, LouisMarx & Co. became the ‘largest toy manufacturer in the world,’ with over one-third of all toys
in the U.S. being Marx toys.” See “The History of Marx,” Marx Toy Museum, accessed May 15,
2017, http://www.marxtoymuseum.com/info_marx_history.htm.
4 See Russell S. Kern, Toy Kings: The Story of Louis Marx & Company, Volume 1: 1919-1954, andVolume 2: 1955-1982 (Colorado Springs, Colorado: Atomic Home Videos LLC, 2011).

172 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingStar Wars (1977). The license went to Kenner Products, who produced over
100 different action figures from the original Star Wars film trilogy, alongwith several playsets, including Death Star Space Station (1978), Cantina
Adventure Set (1978), Creature Cantina Action Play Set (1979), Death Star
(1979), Droid Factory (1979), Land of the Jawas Action Play Set (1979), andMillennium Falcon Spaceship (1979).5 Kenner sold over 300 million Star
Wars action figures (rebranded by Hasbro, Kenner’s owner, after 1999) andbecame the largest Star Wars merchandiser of the twentieth century.6 But
after the first decade of the 21st century, LEGO outgrew Hasbro, with thehelp of over 200 sets of LEGO Star Wars merchandise.7

The Road to LEGO Star Wars sets
The genius behind LEGO was the combination of building sets and playsets
into a single product, resulting in the introduction of the LEGO System inwhich every piece fit together with every other piece, the first “system” inthe toy industry. When LEGO bricks first appeared on the market, building
sets like Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoy could build specific kinds of things(e.g. log cabins and stick-and-spool structures or vehicles, respectively), butthey generally were not used to build entire settings, nor did they containcharacters that children could use as avatars to vicariously experience
what they had built. Playsets, on the other hand, feature detailed settingsand characters to inhabit them, but they were limited to what they alreadyrepresented; everything was ready-made, and little or no new building could
be done. LEGO, however, suggested settings that could be built (which
determined what pieces came with each set), but children could build otherthings with the same bricks, and could even combine multiple sets together
to build even larger settings.
The gradual merging of the playset and building set can be seen in theearly development of LEGO. The first plastic bricks, Automatic Binding
Bricks were produced by the company in 1949 and the first set in the LEGO
system, Town Plan No. 1, appeared in 1955, along with other sets that could
5 See “Kenner Star Wars Catalogs,” Plaid Stallions, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.plaidstallions.com/starwars/index.html.
6 “Kenner Star Wars Action Figures,” Wikipedia, last modified May 4, 2017, accessed May 15,
2017, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenner_Star_Wars_action_figures.
7 See Christian Wienberg, “Lego Outgrows Hasbro, Mattel as ‘Star Wars’ Sets Boost Profit,”
Bloomberg, March 1, 2012, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-01/
lego-outgrows-hasbro-mattel-as-star-wars-sets-boost-profit.html.

Adapting the Death Star into LEGO

173

be combined with it to enlarge the town. The cars, trees, and especially theminiature people, however, were still like the plastic figures found in otherplaysets; each was a single piece that could be used during play, but notchanged. LEGO wheels, and the bricks to which they attached, came in 1961,8
allowing children to build their own vehicles. But characters, so crucial tothe playset because of their role as children’s avatars, would not becomebuildable for some time. In 1963, Master Builder Set #004 displayed on its
box cover a human-like figure built of LEGO bricks, but as a construction
around two dozen bricks tall, it was more of a statue than a usable avatar,and much too large to be used with typical LEGO vehicles and buildings.
The following year, several small sets appeared that were character-based;
Seesaw #803, 3 Little Indians #805, Cowboy and Pony #806, and Doll Set#905, and another set, Clowns #321, appeared in 1965. In all these sets, thecharacters had no faces or jointed limbs; yet were a step closer to a usableavatar in their design and smaller size. Over these years, dozens of vehicle
sets appeared, and vehicles remained the main avatars for LEGO play. One
set, Baggage Carts #622 of 1970, even had a few bricks that represented thecart’s driver, but only as a feature of the cart rather than a character that
could be used separately. Six of the Basic Sets released in 1973 (#1, #2, #3,#4, #5, and #8), along with Building Set #105 and Building Set #115, show
brick-built people amidst the scenes on their boxes, but still the blocky,
faceless kind. It was not until 1974 that LEGO finally introduced specialized
pieces representing people, which had round heads, faces, and jointed arms
and hands, and which were scaled to fit vehicles and buildings. Nine sets
were introduced that featured these human figures, and one set, Family#200, was made up entirely of people.9
While the introduction of human figures broadened the possibilities
for sets, the scale of these figures was still large enough that they could
not be included with some sets, which had smaller vehicles and buildings
representing larger structures. In 1975, a new kind of LEGO figure appeared,
one that did not have a face or jointed arms, but which had a specialized
head, a torso piece, and a single piece representing legs and feet. These
would be updated over the next few years, until in 1978 when the modernminifigure would appear, with a painted face, movable arms and legs, and
8 Daniel Lipkowitz, The LEGO Book (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2009), 21.
9 The other eight sets with people were Antique Car #196, Aeroplane and Pilot #250, Windmill
with Miller and His Wife #251, Locomotive with Driver & Passenger #252, Complete Kitchen with 2
Figures #263, Livingroom with 2 Figures #264, Complete Bathroom with 1 Figure #265, and Children’s
Room #266, according to Sebastian Eggers, et al., ed., LEGO Collector: Collector’s Guide (Dreieich:
Fantasia Verlag GMBH, 2008), 94-95.

174 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

hand pieces that connected to the arm pieces. Although the minifigure
would eventually replace the larger LEGO people, the two were produced
contemporaneously, even appearing together in some sets (like Mother with
Baby Carriage #208 and Nursery #297, both from 1978, and Bathroom #261,
Family Room #268, and Kitchen #269, all from 1979), with the minifigurespositioned as babies or children and the larger people as parents and adults.
Minifigures were featured in the sets for the new Town, Castle, andSpace themes, allowing their structures to be populated with characters(minifigures would be an important part of set #10188, which included 24
minifigures and droids, the most to come with any LEGO Star Wars set up
to that time). Along with the new application of themes, LEGO sets were
now available that had all the features of other types of playsets, completingthe merger between building sets and playsets. As the sets were designed
at minifigure scale, the larger people no longer appeared in sets after 1979.
Themed sets meant that LEGO could be designed to connect with prevailing themes in popular culture at any given time, yet without licensing
any particular property or franchise; the appearance of a space theme,in 1978, would certainly have fit in with the new popularity of sciencefiction projects due to the continuing success of the Star Wars franchise.
New space-themed sets would be released every year during the 1980s
and 1990s, including subseries of sets known as Blacktron, Futuron, Space
Police, M:Tron, Unitron, and U.F.O. The subseries designations grouped sets
together into LEGO’s own in-house brands; despite the rise of franchisingand merchandising tie-ins during the 1980s and 1990s, LEGO preferred tocreate their own original properties. But that policy changed in 1999, when
LEGO licensed its first property since the early 1970s,10 and the first LEGOStar Wars sets appeared.
The change in this decades-long policy may have been in part due tofinancial concerns. In 1998, the company had experienced a decline inprofits for the first time since 1932, signaling that changes were needed (thecompany would experience further losses in 2003 and 2004).11 Apart fromselling some foreign properties and reducing their staff and the variety of
10 Some of the earliest LEGO sets included brand names, though they were typically from theautomotive industry, like the Esso Trailer #252, VW Beetle #260, and Esso Filling Station #310,
all of 1958, or the Citroën DS 19 #603 and Fiat 1800 #605, both of 1965, or the Shell Service Station#648 of 1971. LEGO also produced some bathing rings and a wooden pull-toy featuring Disneycharacters in 1956. Lipkowitz, The LEGO Book, 156.
11 James Delingpole, “When Lego Lost Its Head—and How this Toy Story Got Its Happy Ending,”
Mail Online, December 18, 2009, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1234465/When-Lego-lost-head--toy-story-got-happy-ending.html.

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brick components produced (both about by half), LEGO also changed its
thinking about the kinds of toys it produced. According to reporter James
Delingpole,
What Lego’s staff also had to do was abandon their high-mindedness.
Typical of this was the internal row that had broken out in 1999, whena product tie-in with Star Wars was first mooted: the older company
hands had objected on the grounds that any product with ‘wars’ in thetitle set a bad moral example. The Star Wars series went on to become
one of Lego’s biggest sellers.12

Aside from helping the company’s sales, the success of these licensed sets
led to the production of over 200 different LEGO Star Wars sets, as well as
the purchase of other licenses, including ones for the Harry Potter, Piratesof the Caribbean, Batman, Minecraft, and Lord of the Rings franchises. But
Star Wars would remain the company’s most lucrative license.

Adapting Star Wars into LEGO
Adaptation into a physical playset differs from other forms of adaptation,
particularly due to the kind of open-ended play that a playset encourages.
Even adaptation into a sandbox-style video game, which may be the formof audiovisual media closest to a playset, generally restricts what the player
can do more than a physical playset will (although a video game can offerkinds of interaction that a physical playset cannot, in return). Instead of
merely adapting a narrative, a playset will be designed to provide its user
all the elements needed to reenact a particular narrative, without requiringthat the narrative be reenacted. Star Wars playsets (LEGO and otherwise)
include models of characters, vehicles, props (such as weapons), and locations, with which particular scenes from the movies can be recreated by
the user. Typically, these characters, vehicles, props, and locations will
be simplified, with their recognizable and distinct features exaggerated,
resulting in caricatures that still are able to evoke their original versions.
Thus their overall shapes, color palettes, and distinctive details, particularly
those clearly shown in the films, become the criteria behind the design ofa LEGO Star Wars set.

12 Delingpole, “When Lego Lost Its Head.”176 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingFig. 11.1: Four different LEGO incarnations of the Millennium Falcon, ranging in resolution from 663
pieces to 5195 pieces

In the world of LEGO, the least caricatured sets are those that are models
intended for display purposes (which are usually not playsets to be used withminifigures), including the models of the LEGO “Architecture” sub-brand(made up of the “Architect” and “Landmark” series), sets #21000 to #21021(as of 2014), as well as the LEGO Death Star II set #10143, which depicted
the unfinished second Death Star from Return of the Jedi. Set #10143 was
not nearly as popular as set #10188, according to online customer reviews,
and its “unfinished” nature gave it a much more detailed appearance andsilhouette, rendering it more difficult to adapt into a recognizable LEGO set.
Nor is the Death Star the only setting or vehicle to be featured in multiple
LEGO incarnations. The Millennium Falcon has appeared four times (seefigure 11.1), as set #7190 (released in 2000) at 663 pieces (and 12” across); set#4504 (released in 2004) at 985 pieces; set #7965 (released in 2011) at 1238
pieces; and set #10179 (released in 2007) at 5195 pieces (by far the largest
size, at 33” long, 22” wide, 8” tall). While minifigures can be used inside all
four sets, only set #10179 is actually scaled to match the minifigure size,
and is the least caricatured of the four sets; it features the most details on
the ship’s exterior, as well as recreated spaces within the ship’s interior.
Of all the Star Wars models, the first Death Star is one of the most iconic
designs found in the franchise because it can be recognizably represented
with the simplest of graphics: a circle with a line across its diameter, with aAdapting the Death Star into LEGO

177

Fig. 11.2: The Kenner Death Star set from 1979, designed for use with the Kenner action figuressmaller circle inside the upper half of the larger circle. These lines represent
the two distinctive features on the Death Star’s otherwise nondescript
gray spherical exterior, the equatorial trench and the concave crater-like
depression which focuses the multiple beams of the superlaser into one large
planet-destroying beam (never mind that such a beam ought to simply burna hole into a planet, rather than make a planet explode immediately theway Alderaan does, as though it were made entirely of flammable material).
Thus the first Death Star is, in one sense, a good candidate for adaptation,
since it has so few distinctive features needed for identification, making it
so easily recognizable. And indeed, the Death Star of set #10188 does havea spherical shape, equatorial trench, and superlaser crater, although eachof these features is reproduced to a different degree.
The two Kenner Death Star models, the plastic Death Star Space Station(1978) playset, and the cardboard Death Star (1979) (see figure 11.2), could be
used with Kenner’s action figures, but both represented only a section of thespherical shape. The 1978 set was wedge-shaped, standing four levels high,extending from an elevator shaft connecting the floors out to a section of
the station’s curved hull. The station was open on both sides between theshaft and hull, and its floors, from bottom to top, represented the garbage

178 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingcompactor level, a control room, an elevated walkway and bridge, and a laser
cannon at the top level. The 1979 set used cardboard dividers shaped into a
two-level hemisphere, with images on walls and floors depicting the various
locations, similar to the rooms of a dollhouse, although the rooms opened
all around the hemisphere, leaving no room for an exterior except at thevery top where a large gun was mounted. The design of the 1979 set was theclosest to set #10188, which would add the bottom hemisphere, completingthe Death Star’s shape, and include more exterior features, making it more
recognizable as the Death Star. Both Kenner sets were designed for thecompany’s 3.75-inch action figures, which required a scale much larger
than the typical height (1.5 to 2 inches, depending on headgear) of LEGO
minifigures. Thus, the smaller scale LEGO minifigures made larger-scale
adaptations more practical than the earlier Kenner action figures, giving
the Death Star a better chance of being adapted in more detail.

The LEGO Death Star Set #10188
The LEGO Death Star set #10188 was released in 2008, the year after the other
LEGO Death Star, set #10143, was retired after only two years of production. Whereas set #10143 was not designed to be used with minifigures, set#10188 was (and included 24 minifigures), leading to its greater success anddesirability. Its design, like a spherical dollhouse, features four levels, withfour small areas at the top level: the Imperial Conference Room, a droid
maintenance facility, the Overbridge Control Room (with its viewscreen),
and a gunnery area with two rotating gun towers; four larger areas on thesecond level down from the top, including Docking Bay 327, the Superlaser
Fire Control room (with the Docking Bay 327 Control Room up in thecorner, where it can overlook the Docking Bay), the Detention Block, andthe Emperor’s Throne Room; five areas on the third level down, including
the Garbage Compactor Room, Tractor Beam controls, the chasm that Lukeswings across (extending down to the bottom level), a garage-like work area,
and a Laser Cannon room; and four small areas of hallways and storage on
the very bottom level, which is harder to access due to the overhanging level
above (these areas contain very little and are not themed to specific locations in the films). Finally, an elevator shaft is set vertically into the centerof the model, connecting all the levels together with an open-sided elevator.
The inclusion of the Emperor’s throne room, along with minifigures of two
red-cloaked Imperial guards, the Emperor, and a black-suited short-haired
Jedi Luke, and images on the box showing Luke in a lightsaber fight with

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Fig. 11.3: The LEGO Death Star set #10188 (2008), as seen from the front and backDarth Vader, indicate that the set was designed for the reenactment ofscenes occurring on both Death Stars, though all the other areas are fromthe first Death Star (a similar conflation appears in the set Unexpected
Gathering (#79003), which combines things from before and after Bilbo’s
adventure in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy).
Despite the small size of LEGO minifigures, Death Star set #10188 is stillby far the most out-of-scale of all the Star Wars LEGO sets (see figure 11.3).
British astrophysicist Dr. Curtis Saxton has assembled detailed analyses ofvarious Star Wars-related topics on his webpages at TheForce.net, including a
discussion of the size of the first and second Death Stars, based on evidence
from the films, books, magazines, and other sources, which can be vague oreven appear to conflict.13 According to these sources, the first Death Star issaid to have 84 internal levels, each composed of 357 sublevels, for a totalof 29,988 sublevels, and the diameters of the first and second Death Stars
are, according to official figures, 160 kilometers (99.4194 miles) and 900
kilometers (559.234 miles), respectively. Assuming the typical minifigureheight (4 bricks tall, about 1.5 inches) is scaled to about six feet (a ratio of
1:48), scale models of the two Death Stars would have diameters of 3.3333
kilometers (about 2.0712 miles) and 18.75 kilometers (about 11.6507 miles).
Thus, set #10188 is out-of-scale by several orders of magnitude, even for thesmaller of the two Death Stars.
But a playset, of course, is judged by what it enables its users to do; and in
the case of a playset licensed from a movie, it is also judged by how well it
13 Curtis Saxton, “Death Stars,” Star Wars Technical Commentaries, last modified April 11, 2005,
accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ds/index.html.

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allows scenes from the movies to be reenacted. So how well does set #10188
represent the Death Stars, as seen in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi?
First, we must determine the importance of the Death Stars in each film,
and the relative importance of the various locations found within them. A
New Hope has a running time of 2 hours, 4 minutes, and 38 seconds (2:04:38),
according to the 2004 DVD release. Of that time, the Death Star, or part ofit, is onscreen for 40:37, which is almost a third of the film’s running time.14
Of the 40:37, the majority of the time, 34:11 consists of interior shots, while
exterior shots take up 6:26.
With a design like a spherical dollhouse, set #10188 lacks an exteriorshell, and thus has few exterior features. The equatorial trench is only
represented by a layer of gray bricks separating the upper and lower halves,
but the superlaser crater is present, and firing. The crater’s disc is attached
to a gun mount, making it movable and positionable, unlike in the film,
combining its properties with those of a laser cannon. The other surface
features represented in set #10188 are the two gun towers on the top level(see figure 11.4); while the other three areas of this level represent interiors,
the gun towers are exterior features, and are designed to move together in
unison. Together, these two features represent about 20 seconds of actual
screen time (2 seconds of the superlaser crater firing, and 18 seconds ofvarious shots of the gun towers), but as weaponry, they are memorable andimportant to the story. Thus set #10188 represents the Death Star’s exterior
to a degree (Darth Vader’s TIE fighter is also included, which appears inscenes on the Death Star’s exterior).
The Death Star’s interior is represented by a number of locations in thefilm: the most time (8:51) is spent on the connected areas of the Detention
Block, made up of a reception area (2:05), hallway (1:47), and Leia’s cell (49seconds), and the Garbage Compactor Room directly below it (4:10) (seefigure 11.5). These areas are all represented, and likewise connected, in set#10188. The next largest amount of time (8:39) is spent on the connectedareas of Docking Bay 327, where the Millennium Falcon is docked, and theDocking Bay 327 Control Room which overlooks it; 2:26 is spent in wider
shots of Docking Bay 327, while 1:06 is spent showing a side area where
R2D2 and C-3PO are hiding, and 5:07 is spent on scenes in the Docking
14 Not including the 1:09 of wireframe graphics representing the Death Star, 12 seconds of which
are the wireframe trench graphics viewed by the X-wing pilots, and 57 seconds of the wireframe
graphics presented at the briefing that occurs on Yavin 4 before the attack (in these graphics,
the Death Star’s superlaser crater is drawn over equatorial trench, not above it). A detailed listof the appearances of the Death Star in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi can be found in thelonger version of this chapter: Wolf, “Adapting the Death Star into LEGO.”

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Fig. 11.4: Comparisons of the gun towers on the Death Star’s exterior; in the film (top) and in set#10188 (bottom)

Bay 327 Control Room. Both areas are present in set #10188, and one overlooks the other as well. The third most-appearing interior location, theImperial Conference Room (4:39), is present in set #10188, as is the fourth,
the Overbridge Control Room (2:16; includes 18 seconds of close-ups of its
viewscreen, which is represented in the set by a double-side piece depicting
the unexploded Alderaan on one side and the approach to Yavin 4 on theother). The Overbridge is also located directly above the superlaser craterin the set, even though the spatial relationship between the two is only
indicated in sources outside of the film.15 The next two locations, the Chasm
that Luke swings over with Leia (1:17) and the Tractor Beam Controls (1:16),
15 It can be found elsewhere, as discussed in Star Wars: Death Star Technical Companion (NewYork: West End Games, 1991) and “Overbridge,” Wookieepedia, accessed May 15, 2017, http://
starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Overbridge.

182 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingFig. 11.5: Comparisons of the garbage compactor interior; in the film (top) and in set #10188(bottom)

are also represented in set #10188, as are the Superlaser Fire Control room16(0:21), the Elevator interior (0:12), and Laser Cannon Bay (0:06). Death Star
locations not represented by the set include the Elevator balcony by the air
shaft where characters wait for the elevator (0:35), the stormtrooper room
16 The Superlaser Fire Control Room is perhaps the most questionable representation, however;
although the superlaser of set #10188 does have control panels on its swiveling base, they differ
somewhat from those seen in the film. The film, however, depicts the control room as mainly
as banks of lights and switches, with little other detail.

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183

and TIE fighter bay that Han Solo almost runs into (0:02), the TIE Docking
Bay that Darth Vader’s TIE fighter and two other are seen leaving (0:02),
and the Particle Accelerator Tube used when the superlaser fires (0:02).
Finally, there are shots of various Death Star hallways (5:53), which could
be represented by the lowest level of set #10188, but are little more thanpassageways. If this is allowed, then out of the 40:37 of Death Star interiors
onscreen, only 41 seconds’ worth is not represented; which means thatset #10188 enables 98.31% of the interior scenes to be reenacted with theplayset’s locations.17
Set #10188 also contains the Emperor’s Throne Room from Return of theJedi, and the characters necessary for the film’s climactic scene. The second
Death Star has less screen time than the first one (28:01, which is 20.8% of
Return of the Jedi’s running time, according to the 2006 DVD release), eventhough Return of the Jedi is longer than A New Hope. Of that time, interiors
have far more screen time (23:43) than do exterior shots (4:18), while thesecond Death Star has a number of locations similar to the first (a Superlaser
Fire Control Room, an Overbridge, docking bays, hallways, and so forth),and the new location, the Emperor’s Throne Room, is where most of theinterior scenes are set (15:16 of the 23:43). The Throne Room in set #10188 has
everything needed for the film’s climactic scenes: the raised dais with thethrone by the window, the collapsing walkway for the fight scene, and the
walkway with railings that overlooks the chasm into which the Emperor
is thrown (this chasm connects with the one below it that Luke swings
across). Most of these locations also contain moveable elements, like doorsthat open and close, elevators that can be moved from one level to another,guns that can be repositioned, and so on. The tractor beam can be turned
off and the walls of the garbage compactor can be made to close inward.
In the docking bay, Darth Vader’s TIE fighter hangs ready to be used, andis large enough to seat the Darth Vader minifigure inside.
As stated earlier, the LEGO versions are like caricatures of the film’s
locations, simplifying them and exaggerating their salient features. Design
elements from the overall architectural style and color palette to such things
as the shapes of light fixtures, windows, doorways, and control panels all
evoke a feeling similar to the original, yet their disproportionate sizes givethem greater emphasis and make the viewer more aware of the style thatthey represent and embody (see figure 11.6). After examining set #10188,
one becomes more conscious of these elements in the films, despite the17 Of course, some scenes would require the Millennium Falcon to be present in the docking
bay, but none is provided, since a scale one would be too small for the minifigures to enter.

184 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingFig. 11.6: Comparisons of the Detention Block area, in the film (left, top and bottom) and set #10188(right)fact that they mainly occur in the background. The design also has a wayof compartmentalizing the film’s action, even though, as mentioned earlier,a number of locations are adjacent just as they are in the film (for example,
Leia’s cell connects to the Detention Block corridor, which is also above thegarbage compactor).
Aside from active play, the set is also designed to reenact film scenes
through the staging of vignettes, as is shown on the set’s box. That this isencouraged seems evident due to the inclusion of multiple minifigures
representing the same character; for example, the three representing
Luke Skywalker in his original desert garb, in a stormtrooper uniform,
and in black clothing as a Jedi (along with one black hand, representing theblack-gloved mechanical hand he has in Return of the Jedi). Thus, the set isdesigned to be put on display (like set #10143) by adults (originally priced at$400, it is hard to insist that the set was intended only for children). At thesame time, however, the dollhouse-like nature of the levels of open-walledrooms encourages, or at the very least allows, a dollhouse approach to play.
When two of my sons (then aged 8 and 9) were playing with the set with two
girls from the neighborhood, I happened to overhear their play, in which the
Death Star was a home where Luke and Leia had bedrooms and referred toDarth Vader as “Daddy”; thus the children used the familial relationshipsthat the film’s characters already had, along with the dollhouse design ofthe set, to create domestic play scenes that blended Star Wars with family
dollhouse play. Set #10188, then, appears to have been designed with anumber of potential uses in mind.
The adaptation of the Death Star into LEGO, then, successfully combines
a display model with a playset, just as LEGO itself combines building setswith playsets, and combines the two Death Stars of A New Hope and The

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185

Return of the Jedi into one set. It represents the films’ locations while alsochanging them, offering greater interactivity than a video game while at thesame time changing the way one sees the film locations, emphasizing theirproduction design as well as caricaturing it. The set exhibits an intriguingbalance between compactness and economy of the design and the levelof detail and recognizability of the film sets’ salient features, resulting ina model that can be admired by young and old alike, allowing the set tointerest an audience that includes children and adults, and spans multiple
generations. A transgenerational audience is something that both LEGO andStar Wars were both able to attain on their own, and this is strengthened
even further by their combination, as demonstrated by the clever way inwhich the Death Star has been adapted in LEGO set #10188.

12. Invoking the Holy Trilogy
Star Wars in the Askewniverse
Andrew M. Butler
In Kevin Smith’s Clerks. (The Comic Book) (1998), Randal Graves observes
to his lifelong friend Dante Hicks that “Star Wars is probably the biggest
thing that ever did or ever will happen to our generation.”1 Smith assertsthat his age group had “a childhood affair with three movies that were thecinematic equivalent of a prepubescent first marriage.”2 Star Wars fed into
Smith’s personal values, identity, and creative output: “a de rigueur Star
Wars conversational dissection or homage became one of the leitmotifs ofView Askew’s body of work.”3 The first dozen years of Smith’s directorial
output are dominated by six interconnected films—Clerks (1994), Mallrats(1995), Chasing Amy (1997), Dogma (1997), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
(2001), and Clerks II (2006)—that constitute the transmedia franchise of theView Askewniverse or Askewniverse, after Smith’s production company. In
addition, the franchise includes Clerks: The Animated Series (2000) and anumber of comic books, in particular Clerks. (The Comic Book). The manyreferences to Star Wars act both as a means of defining Askewniverse characters’ self-identities through their consumption of popular culture and as aform of advertising—unpaid labor for Lucasfilm. I will examine the natureof this labor within the Askewniverse as it depicts twenty-somethings in avariety of ways earning a living within late capitalism.
In Marxian terms, identity is derived from the individual’s relation to
the economic base of a society, including the manner of labor exchange forwages. But labor can take a number of different forms—productive, intellectual, spectatorial, and so on. Laborers sell labor to produce articles withuse-value that may be exploited by capitalists to produce capital derived
from exchange-value. In Marx’s own words, capitalists “appropriate theproduce of the labour of others by alienating [entfremden] the produce of
1 Clerks. (The Comic Book), written by Kevin Smith, drawn by Jim Mafhood, and lettered by
Sean Konot (Portland, OR: Oni Press, 1998), 12.
2 Kevin Smith, “Married to the Force,” in A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on
Twenty-Five Years of Star Wars, ed. Glenn Kenny (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 72.
3 Smith, “Married,” 72. View Askew Productions is the name of Kevin Smith’s production
company, which produced the Askewniverse films. His other feature films, television, podcasts,
and comic work are beyond the scope of this chapter.

188 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

their own.”4 For example, a father might labor to provide shelter, food,and clothing for his family, as well as consumer goods and entertainment,
some of which contribute to an ideological state that Marx describes as
false consciousness. Wages provide the laborer with the possibility toconsume something like Star Wars, but, at the same time, this particular
act of consumption turns them into “laborer-watchers.”
For the worker, a day only partly consists of sleeping and working, with therest of it used in a number of different ways, including eating, consumption,and leisure. Dallas Smythe argues that “[o]f the off-the-job work time, thelargest single block is time of the audiences which is sold to advertisers.”5
The audience consumes media such as films, sitcoms, or sports coverage, but
this also subjects them to advertisements. Audiences as laborer-watchers
are sold to advertisers of branded goods. In watching a Star Wars movie,
the audience views commercials and trailers, and is interpolated into atransmedia franchise of sequels, prequels, and merchandising.
Building on Smythe’s work, Sut Jhally and Bill Levant argue that thehistory of twentieth-century television is one of an increasing blur between
programs and commercials, “converting program into ad […] converting
consumption watching-time into labor watching-time.”6 While the Star
Wars films themselves would normally not include advertisements, themerchandising of characters and vehicles effectively transforms the films
into ads, just as the toys become commercials for the films. The laborerwatcher is alienated and commodified, even as play creates forms of culturalor social capital. M.J. Clarke argues that “the more we live in branded worlds,
the more we must learn how people can express themselves in and throughbrands.”7 As Clerks.’s comic-book version of Randal asserts, “if there’s anangle by which we can profit from ‘the Force’ in our little corner of the world,
then why don’t we?”8 Randal is aware of the capitalism underlying the Star
Wars franchise and the way in which he has been constructed as consumer
and laborer-watcher. By intervening in the sale of merchandising, Randal
hopes to enrich himself economically and perhaps increase his agency,
especially if it comes with the social capital attached to rare toys.
4 Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Pelican, 1976), 203.
5 Dallas Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of
Political and Social Theory 1, no. 3 (1977): 2.
6 Sut Jhally and Bill Levant, “Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness,” Journal of Communication 36, no. 3 (1986): 141.
7 M.J. Clarke, “Branded Worlds and Contracting Galaxies: The Case of Star Wars Galaxies,”
Games and Culture 9, no. 3 (2014): 205.
8 Clerks. (The Comic Book), 12.

Invoking the Holy Trilogy

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Another unifying factor in the Askewniverse is the presence of two
drug dealers: the sex-obsessed and foul-mouthed Jay and the appropriately
named Silent Bob. On at least two occasions, Silent Bob quotes Yoda fromThe Empire Strikes Back—“Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves not thesethings” (Mallrats) and “Do. Or do not. There is no try” (Chasing Amy)—as
well as trying to use the Force to levitate a cigarette and then a videocassetteat various points in Mallrats. In Dogma, the only Star Wars reference comeswhen Bethany recruits them to her mission and Jay observes to Bob: “I feellike I’m Han Solo, and you’re Chewie, and she’s Ben Kenobi, and we’re inthat fucked up bar.” As ancillary characters, Jay and Silent Bob perform akind of Greek chorus throughout the films, while also offering parallels tothe uninhibited Randal and repressed Dante (Clerks, Comic Book, AnimatedSeries, Clerks II), Brodie Bruce and T.S. Quint (Mallrats), and Banky Edwards
and Holden McNeill (Chasing Amy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back). Smith
recalls a French critic at Cannes asking if “‘The foul-mouth an’ ze fat man
outside ze shop […] are zey the Artoo De-too an’ See-Threepio of zis strange
universe you ’ave created?’”9
Alongside their appropriation of the street as a market space, Jay andSilent Bob are also laborer-watchers. The Star Wars media franchise thatthey labor through was itself the product of a failure to gain the rights toan intellectual property: George Lucas had wanted to adapt Flash Gordon.
Instead, he laminated Joseph Campbell’s monomyth onto space opera,
while drawing upon other genres such as Saturday chapter serials, theWestern, and the war movie, as well as specific influential texts, including
The Hidden Fortress (1958), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Lord of theRings (1949-1950). In the decade after 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), muchscience-fiction film had been dystopian rather than escapist; for example,
Lucas’s own THX-1138 (1971), Soylent Green (1973), and Zardoz (1974). A New
Hope offered a more optimistic spectacle during a period of American
stagflation and disillusionment. Luke Skywalker was an unambiguous
hero in an antiheroic era, recuperating the American Dream after the
Bicentennial, while rewriting military history; whatever Lucas’s personal
politics, the trilogy anticipated the neoconservatism of Ronald Reagan,
which reached its zenith in the Strategic Defense Initiative (colloquiallyknown as Star Wars).
Robin Wood labels the trilogy’s ideology Reaganite, arguing that it
reassures audiences about the dangers of fascism and the atom bomb by
9 Smith, “Married,” 71. It might be problematic pushing the parallel too far—C-3PO is sensible
but far from silent.

190 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingsaying “don’t worry, Uncle George […] will take you by the hand and lead
you through Wonderland […] never fear, he’ll also see you safely home.”10
The audience willingly becomes childlike again, lulled by the Wonderlandof special effects. The patriarch is reinstated as authoritative figure whoserole must be inherited by the son; Luke must follow the example of the“good father” Obi-Wan and repudiate the attitudes of the “bad father” Darth
Vader. Then, once Vader is revealed to be Luke’s biological father Anakin, thenarrative arc of the holy trilogy becomes the redemption of the father; theprequel trilogy thus constitutes the narrative of the good father’s temporaryfall.
As I have already noted, parents usually support their children economically, with pre-teen viewers the perfect age to watch the Star Wars films.
Whether merchandising is a present or bought with pocket money, it is a
gift from parents, as Smith’s first Star Wars toys were. Smith had seen the
Kenner Star Wars Early Bird set toys even before his first viewing of A New
Hope at around age seven.11 He financed the semi-autobiographical Clerks,
set in a convenience store and the neighboring video rental store, by selling
his comics collection, maxing out credit cards, and repurposing his college
fund. But while his characters constantly reference Star Wars and otherpopular texts, Smith’s debut is aesthetically closer to films by Spike Lee, Jim
Jarmusch, and Richard Linklater than to the blockbusters his charactersobsess over. Smith’s oeuvre is characterized by meandering, talky vignettes,
echoing the more non-linear career path Generation Xers experienced incontrast to their Baby Boomer parents’ linear career trajectories.
In a 1990 Time magazine article, David M. Gross and Sophfronia Scottnoted that Generation Xers “have trouble making decisions. They would
rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder. […] They crave
entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial.
[…] They postpone marriage because they dread divorce.” The restricted
geography of Clerks echoes this sense of entrappedness—in dead-end
McJobs, ambivalent about college, stuck living with parents—and offersa late-capitalist equivalent to Luke at the start of A New Hope. Dante isalienated, stuck selling groceries. The immaterial labor of clerks such as
Dante is located within the shop, a location for “the realisation of profit, […]the designed stage for marketing commodities, as the form that aggregates
10 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987), 165-166.
11 A New Hope was released May 25, 1977. Smith’s memory of seeing the Kenner Star Wars Early
Bird Set is in June 1977 (Smith, “Married,” 73).

Invoking the Holy Trilogy

191

specific products, coordinates logistics and distribution, and that organises
access to commodities within the built environment.”12 This increasingly
invisible form of labor is productive of surplus value, but not of material
objects.
Dante and Randal attempt to make life bearable via their shared cultural
knowledge of Star Wars, for example, having conversations about which isthe better film: Return of the Jedi or The Empire Strikes Back. As Dante claims,
Empire had the better ending: Luke gets his hand cut off, and finds out
Vader’s his father; Han gets frozen and taken away by Boba Fett. It ends
on such a down note. And that’s life—a series of down endings. All Jedi
had was a bunch of Muppets.

The two friends also have an ethical discussion about what happened to
the workers on the Death Star.13 Personnel in the one destroyed by Luke
in A New Hope were part of the Empire and thus culpable, Dante argues,
but the one destroyed by Lando Calrissian in Return of the Jedi would havebeen occupied by construction workers. Randal is bothered by “All those
innocent contractors hired to do a job [who] were killed—casualties of a
war they had nothing to do with.” A construction worker who overhears
their debate at the Quick Stop interrupts to correct them, recalling a job
for a gangster that he had turned down: “You know, any contractor willingto work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was theirown fault. A roofer listens to this … [taps his heart] not his wallet.” The
Death Star thereby becomes “a way of imagining the totality that surrounds
them,”14 which is to say the capitalist system. Whilst the worker has little
choice but to labor, there is clearly an ethics of where and for whom to labor.
The Death Star is also referenced in Mallrats, Smith’s second feature inwhich the two central characters, T.S. Quint and Brodie Bruce, are trying toreunite with their respective ex-girlfriends. T.S.’s former girlfriend, Brandi
Svenning, is about to be auctioned off by her father in a dating game show
being filmed at the mall. Brodie believes they can sabotage the game show
12 Bridget Kenny, “Retail, the Service Worker and the Polity: Attaching Labour and Consumption,” Critical Arts 29, no. 2 (2015): 200.
13 The published script has a longer speech, suggesting that the Empire is a theocracy and theEmperor is a religious leader: “he’s like the pope for the dark side of the Force. He’s a holy man; ashaman, kind of, albeit an evil one.” Dante says of the rebels, who fail to mention any religious
beliefs, “I think they were Catholics.”
14 Darren Jorgensen, “Death Star, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Globalization,”
symploke 15, nos. 1-2 (2007): 211.

192 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingand he enlists Jay and Silent Bob’s help. Jay claims, “We were gonna do thatanyway. […] Silent Bob stole the schematic of the stage from some foolishcarpenter and found a weakness, just like the fucking Death Star.” Brodie’s
own ex-girlfriend has meanwhile started dating Shannon Hamilton, a clerk
at the Fashionable Male store who specializes in seducing women on therebound.
The mall actively encourages processes of consumption, directing“the stroller to their windows and their wants; they become new social
spaces, facilitating intimacies.”15 The individual is thereby automaticallytransformed into a buyer within the flow of capital. Hamilton has no tolerance for those who refuse to consume—the mallrats. They engage in what
Mike Presdee calls “proletarian shopping,”16 a term he uses to describe theactions of unemployed youths who occupy mall spaces but do not makepurchases. Indeed, John Fiske argues that such “youths consumed images
and space instead of commodities, a kind of sensuous consumption that did
not create profits.”17 Despite Quint and Brodie’s lack of a “shopping agenda,”
the heterosexual couplings of the narrative lead to Quint’s wedding at the
Universal Studios Jaws ride and Brodie presenting The Tonight Show, tying
them both back to practices of media consumption.
Smith’s third feature, Chasing Amy, includes a racial critique of the Star
Wars trilogy by the first named African-American character to appear in
the Asknewniverse films. At a comics convention, Hooper X 18 parodies black
nationalist and particularly Nation of Islam rhetoric, shouting: “Always somewhite boy gotta invoke the holy trilogy. Bust this: those movies are about
how the white man keeps the brother down, even in a galaxy far, far away.”
Blond, blue-eyed, heroic Luke is an Aryan figure, whereas Darth Vader is“the blackest brother in the galaxy, Nubian god.” Of course, this is partiallytrue: Vader is voiced by James Earl Jones, the only black actor in A New
Hope, but his body is that of the white English bodybuilder David Prowse
and, in Return of the Jedi, Sebastian Shaw is substituted for the reveal of
Vader’s face. A New Hope’s racial diversity is only supplied by alien species,
offering “exotic beings [as] symbolically proxy for blacks and other people

15 Kenny, “Retail,” 200.
16 Mike Presdee, Agony or Ecstasy: Broken Transitions and the New Social State of Working-Class
Youth in Australia (Magill: South Australian Centre for Youth Studies, 1986), 16.
17 John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 1989), 17.
18 The character may be inspired by Eric Griffin and Nabile P. Hage of the association ANIA,
which brought together four black comic book publishers in 1993 to boost African-American
readership and to compete with DC and Marvel’s attempts at diversity.

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of color.”19 Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. defends the film against Smith/X’s charge ofwhites versus an evil black man by pointing out that the stormtroopers taketheir “name from the Nazis, and the members of the Imperial Command[have] uniforms based on the Nazis.”20 Nevertheless, nearly all quasi-humancharacters remain white.
Hooper also objects to Lando Calrissian, labelling him an “Uncle Tom
nigger.” For Hooper and other critics, Calrissian is a token figure, rather
than part of a wider social structure. Adilifu Nama notes that, in the context
of post-Civil Rights, early Reaganite America, “Working and middle-classwhites perceived that their economic well-being was threatened by thepotential of black workers being hired or promoted past them because ofaffirmative action.”21 Calrissian, despite or because he is a narrative agent
substituted for Solo, is always already stigmatized by the racist attitudes ofwhite audiences and therefore must be redeemed (and made ineffectual22)by the narrative.
Smith’s critique of Lucas’s shortcomings in representing diversity might
be undermined by the revelation that Hooper’s macho black militant attitudes are the performed persona of an effeminate gay man. Of course,
Hooper’s two personalities need not be mutually exclusive, but Hooper
is a doubly token figure, standing in for all black and male homosexual
identities in a film whose plot is about a straight man’s romantic pursuit ofa gay woman.23 Within the context of the film, however, Hooper’s militant
identity and publicity stunt is a sales pitch, adding economic value to his
comic books. He appears to have appropriated Darth Vader as a symbolof black power inherent to the character’s identity, but Chasing Amy is
ambiguous as to how seriously we should take Hooper. Hooper’s creativelabor in his comic book, White Hatin’ Coon, might be a personal expressionof his identity, a cynical performance of one to make money, or a mixtureof both.

19 Adilifu Nama, “R is for Race, Not Rocket: Black Representation in American Science Fiction
Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 26, no. 2 (2009): 159.
20 Kevin Wetmore Jr., The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Star Wars
Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 128.
21 Nama, “R is for Race,” 160.
22 Wetmore Jr., The Empire Triumphant, 133. Wetmore argues that he is ineffectual in the rescueof Han in Return of the Jedi and indeed needs to be rescued himself by the blind Han.
23 Smith returns to militant black male characters with Rufus in Dogma and Chaka LutherKing in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, both played by and drawing on the comic persona of Chris
Rock.

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Smith’s evident interest in comic books gave him both an ambition towrite in the medium and the opportunity to do so once he was an establishedfigure. After writing about Jay and Silent Bob and their superhero alteregos Bluntman and Chronic in issues of Oni Double Feature, Smith wrote
the one-shot Clerks. (The Comic Book). The Clerks. comic dramatizes the
economics of Star Wars collectibles, focusing on characters who buy increasingly specific toys: Handless Luke, Cremated Anakin Skywalker, Shriekin’
Luke Skywalker, and so on. Randal spies an opportunity to make money bybuying the in-demand toys to resell at a premium. Dante is surprised thatthe manufacturer has not increased production to satisfy demand, which
Randal dismisses as “commie talk,” as that would undermine the freedom of
the secondary market. Merchandising is explicitly compared to “the billion
dollar drug and sex markets”; all three appear to be satisfying needs thatthe market does not fully gratify. The supplier controls when the purchasecan be made—with only limited numbers made available—just as a dealer
controls the selling of drugs.
In the comic, Randal and Dante go in search of a supplier, Lord Howell,
who provides them with examples of Wave Sixty-Nine toys (with obvious
sexual connotations). Their foray into the free market is stopped by Jay andSilent Bob, who recognize that only a limited amount of disposable income
is spent on merchandising rather than weed and pills. Understanding thepower of supply and demand, Jay and Silent Bob hijack a truck carrying
Wave Seventy merchandising and flood the market with loss-leading toys,
driving other dealers out of business. Jay and Silent Bob then return to dealing. This exaggerated comparison between merchandising and drugs may
suggest a negative view of collecting. But on the other hand, Askewniverse
films take a neutral-to-positive view of drugs: in this world, there are no
overdoses or addicts. The characters in the comic may be cynical about Star
Wars’s attempts to build surplus value through new versions and formats,but the comic is itself an example of merchandising designed to attract
viewers of the films and to deliver an audience to those movies. In an earlyinterview with film producer John Pierson before the release of Mallrats,
Smith said, “What am I gonna do? Put Silent Bob on a shirt?”24 Within a few
years, however, Smith did indeed have his own line of merchandising, clothing, toys, posters, and more. His Askewniverse materials precisely mimic
Lucasfilm’s attempts to brand its audience—to make a permanent markof identity upon them and to deliver a lucrative cohort of laborer-watchers.
24 John Pierson, Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American
Independent Cinema (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 201.

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Perhaps Smith’s biggest attempt to deliver laborer-watchers came when,with Dave Mandel, he developed Clerks: The Animated Series. However,ABC got cold feet about ratings, canceling it after just two episodes. An
animated George Lucas appears in the second broadcast episode, “A Dissertation on the American Justice System by People Who Have Never Been
Inside a Courtroom, Let Alone Know Anything About the Law, But Have
Seen Way Too Many Legal Thrillers” (2000). Randal sues Dante on Jay’s
behalf and inexplicably calls Lucas as a witness, asking him “do you think
Phantom Menace is as good a movie as Empire?” Having pointed out twocontradictions between the original trilogy and the new film, Randal allegesthat Lucas “knew this was a bad movie, that you wrote it over a weekend
but kept telling people it was done for years.” Randal here represents adultdisappointment at the new material not matching up to the films they had
loved as children and teenagers. He challenges Lucas in a way that many
fans, such as those represented by the documentary The People vs. George
Lucas (2010), would be happy to second.
Blaming “Uncle” George, the once-reassuring father-figure, acknowledges
the hierarchy of textual authority from the original holy trilogy down to fan
writing, from author as owner through author-for-hire to amateur authorship that is a form of unpaid labor. Will Brooker argues that “George Lucas’s
involvement is absolutely paramount for a text to be considered genuinely
canonical.”25 Therefore, it is Lucas’s responsibility if canon disappoints, even
if he did not create it. Respect for his authorial status began to unravel
following criticism of changes he made to re-releases and special editionsof the original trilogy in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the many
disappointments of the prequel trilogy. One change considered particularly
egregious by fans was the re-editing of the Mos Eisley cantina scene in A
New Hope, in which Han shoots and kills the bounty hunter Greedo. In the1997 special edition, Greedo shoots first, undermining the earlier sense ofHan’s moral ambiguity.26 Meanwhile, whilst Lucasfilm is happy about theactivities of laborer-watchers in their consumption of merchandising and isdependent upon their advertising, the move to production in terms of fan
fiction and subcreation is commonly regarded with a degree of suspicion.27
25 Will Brooker, “Internet Fandom and the Continuing Narratives of Star Wars, Blade Runnerand Alien,” in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London:
Verso, 1999), 67.
26 In the 2004 DVD, they shoot in unison.
27 Whilst various products and films have been thought to infringe Lucasfilm’s Intellectual
Property, the production company co-ran The Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards 2002-11 and2015-2016.

196 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingThis policing of intellectual property (IP) is at the heart of Jay and Silent
Bob Strike Back, as Hollywood attempts to make a film featuring Jay andSilent Bob’s alter egos, Bluntman and Chronic. Chasing Amy had establishedthat McNeill and Edwards pay likeness rights money to the two drug dealers;
they wish to protect their identities and wish to control their exploitation.
In the course of the film, Smith references a variety of other films andtelevision programs—The Matrix, The Fugitive, and the Scooby-Doo and Star
Wars franchises. Jay and Silent Bob seem unlikely metonyms for the Empire,
but the pre-film caption—“A long time ago, at a convenience store not so
far away”—is a variant on Star Wars’s iconic opening frame. Moreover, thelogo of the film copies the stylized rendition of the Star Wars titles.
The film also includes a cameo from Carrie Fisher, who plays a nun. As
Leia, Fisher offered a first crush for many of Smith’s age and older, as she
was initially presented as a self-reliant and resourceful protagonist who later
turns out to be Luke’s twin. While Fisher rewrote later scripts, the character
lost agency through the series. Post-Star Wars, much of her work was incameos, while she worked as a script doctor and bestselling writer. Playing
a nun, she exhibits a fetishizable chastity, with Jay’s rejected cunnilingus
taboo. Mark Hamill is cast (as himself) playing the role of Cockknocker, thevillain of the comic and film Bluntman and Chronic. An onscreen caption“HEY KIDS! IT’S MARK HAMILL! [APPLAUSE!]” prods us to recognize him,in one of several fourth-wall-breaking moments in the film. There follows
a parody of lightsaber fights, albeit with bongs, and Jedi-style acrobatics,
with Jay calling himself Darth Balls and wielding a double-piped bong inreference to Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. Hamill, soi-disant Jedi
master, loses a hand with the exasperated aside to camera, “Not again.”
The director of the film-within-the film, Chaka Luther-King, suggeststhat Lucas might sue. Lucasfilm is happy with laborer-watchers to the extent
that such work delivers capital to them or to create a personal identity, but
it does not wish them to make capital of their own from poached IP. Thereis a narrow line being trod. Randal had sought to profit from the Force but
was unable to because of Jay and Silent Bob, who now stand to make moneyfrom their own IP as well as their drugs.
These likeness rights provide a kind of deus ex machina for Dante andRandal in the final Askewniverse film to date. Clerks II opens with themin their old jobs—although they lose them right away as Randal burns thepremises down. They move from being wage slaves for a family businessto slinging hash for a major fast-food franchise. But Dante has an escapeplan: he can move to Florida with his girlfriend Emma, where her father
will give him a house and a car wash to run. This is perhaps a step up from

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197

working for someone else, but Dante has benefited from nepotism rather
than succeeding on the merits of hard work.
The sharing of cultural capital continues to distract them from their
exploitation, even if the sources are in flux. At the time, Peter Jackson’s The
Lord of the Rings trilogy seemed to be eclipsing Star Wars as a pop-cultural
phenomenon. Randal might insist, “there’s only one ‘Return,’ okay, and it
ain’t of the King,’ it’s ‘of the Jedi,’” but a generation of viewers born after
Return of the Jedi needed more convincing. The dismissal of Jar Jar Binks
and the performances of the actors playing Anakin (“Manikin Skywalker”)
by Randal’s coworkers and customers strike a nerve. Former high schoolacquaintance Lance Dowds, now an internet millionaire, sneeringly suggests that they are still arguing over whether Han or Greedo shot first.
The engaged Dante continues to postpone marriage to Emma—having
been in a relationship with Veronica at the end of Clerks—by getting his
branch manager Becky pregnant. His dream is to marry Becky and maintainhis three-decades-plus friendship with Randal by returning to work at the
Quick Stop. This requires capital, which Jay and Silent Bob lend him, thanks
to the aforementioned likeness rights monies. Dante returns to where hestarted, but now working for himself, and will most likely end up exploiting
others. Thus, the overall story arc of the Askewniverse takes a Generation
X slacker from a McJob to being a business owner and father. At the sametime, Smith constantly drew upon Star Wars as part of his intertextualreferencing. While he could appear critical of “Uncle George” or “George
Toyboy Lucas” as he moved from consumer to prosumer to producer, parody
still allowed parasitism of others’ IP, especially Lucas’s, in the productionof his own transmedia storyworld.
Wood argues that, in the original Star Wars trilogy,
The Father must here be understood in all senses, symbolic, literal,
potential […] [including] the young heterosexual male, father of the
future, whose eventual union with the “good woman” has always formed
the archetypal happy ending of the American film, guarantee of theperpetuation of the nuclear family and social stability.”28

After a dozen years, Dante becomes that young heterosexual male, while
Becky becomes that good woman; in Clerks II, Dante finally becomes thepatriarchal capitalist.

28 Wood, Hollywood, 172.

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It may be that Star Wars’s cultural capital distracts from the wider
economic picture. Dante even admits:
I’d hardly call Star Wars the biggest thing to happen to our generation. It’sa movie that—granted—the flannel-wearing set of our generation seemto obsess over … present company especially … but it’s still just a movie.
Trust me, after the over-exposure of the re-release, no one but you gives
a rat’s ass about your precious trilogy anymore.29

And yet, the box office success of the prequels and the Disney-era The Force
Awakens and Rogue One might contradict this. The branding continues andSmith clearly remains a Lucas fan. In his shifts between self-financing,studio funding, and work-for-hire, Smith’s auteurist signature, his own
IP, is evidently made in part through his own laborer-watching of Lucas’s
franchise.

29 Clerks. (The Comic Book), 12.

13. Chasing Wild Space
Narrative Outsides and World-Building Frontiers in Knightsof the Old Republic and The Old Republic
Cody Mejeur
As introduced in the iconic line that precedes the first film’s opening crawl,Star Wars’s galaxy far, far away is the foundation for the franchise’s worldbuilding efforts. It is the backdrop and context for the story told by any
Star Wars film, novel, game, or other text,1 and as such it functions as anarrative world or storyworld. David Herman describes a storyworld as the“mental model” of the larger world of a text, one that audiences constructfrom “textual cues and the inferences that they make possible.”2 In otherwords, the Star Wars galaxy is only partially represented by any particular
text, and audiences use that partial representation to imagine how the restof the galaxy works. However, it seems strange to call the Star Wars galaxy,itself an agglomeration of inconsistent and contested narratives, characters,
and worlds, a singular storyworld. Marie-Laure Ryan’s recent conceptionof the narrative universe as an accumulation of storyworlds seems more
apt.3 This chapter therefore explores the space of the Star Wars galaxy
as a narrative universe, arguing that it renews itself and its transmedial
franchise through the mystery of outside spaces. The use of these outside
spaces in Star Wars suggests a new modification or addition to existing
theories of narrative world-building, and draws critical attention to the
ethical and political dimensions of world-building processes.
A narrative universe relies on the creation of narrative space, including
a dynamic process of expanding and exploring that space. Jan-Noël Thon
explains this as the difference between the “represented space” and the“space of representation,” where represented space is what the audience
directly encounters and the space of representation is the larger space not
1 While obviously lacking medium-specificity, the term “text” provides a useful shorthand forthe narrative objects that contribute to Star Wars’s narrative universe. I use the term “audiences”
for the receivers of texts in different media for the same reason.
2 David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln, NE: Universityof Nebraska Press, 2004), 1, 6.
3 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Story/Worlds/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious
Narratology,” in Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, ed. MarieLaure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

200 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

encountered, but indicated or inferred. 4 Represented space is constantly
expanding through new stories that expose audiences to new content,
leading them to continually revise their understanding of the narrative
universe.5 In the case of Star Wars, the represented space of the galaxy isa host of familiar planets and characters that audiences have encounteredthrough the franchise’s various media texts. Each new franchise entry has
expanded this by introducing new places and characters that add to themain story of the franchise, suggesting in the process that there is always
more for writers and audiences to imagine and explore. Matt Hills calls
this type of storyworld hyperdiegesis, “the creation of a vast and detailed
narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered
within the text, but which nevertheless appears to operate according toprinciples of internal logic and extension.”6 Hills’s emphasis on an “internal logic” here is significant: hyperdiegesis operates by establishing alarger space that presumably operates by the same or similar rules to therepresented space.
Yet, there are also narrative spaces outside the galaxy—spaces mentioned
or hinted at in various texts, whose content is unknown to the charactersand not (yet) revealed to audiences. Star Wars maps, especially those of thevideo games, illustrate this point most vividly. For example, the map from
the MMORPG The Old Republic (TOR) displays the available regions of thegalaxy that the player can visit. At the far left of the map is a region called
Wild Space, which lies beyond the border of the main galaxy and appears
to have few stars and planets. Wild Space is a recent addition to the game’s
map and was unavailable and unmarked prior to the Knights of the Fallen
Empire (Fallen Empire) expansion (2015).
TOR’s galactic map structures the game’s representation of its narrative
universe. It is an example of what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “maps of narrative
space,” as well as an “intradiegetic map,” a map that exists as an object inits storyworld.7 Crucially, this intradiegetic map affects the internal logicof the storyworld by dividing it into different territories. As Ryan explains,
the boundaries of a map “structure storyworlds into differentiated zones
obeying different rules,” and they “forbid crossing, but they are generally
4 Jan-Noël Thon, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 47.
5 Thon, Transmedial Narratology, 62.
6 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 137.
7 Marie-Laure Ryan, et al., Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory
and Geography Meet (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2016).

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not impermeable enough to prevent violations.”8 Within the boundariesof the galactic map, the lines delimit regions that operate by their own
rules—they are controlled by different factions, contain different species,
and present different challenges to the player. Outside of these boundaries
are other spaces where these rules may not apply, and this is especially trueof the spaces beyond the borders of the galaxy.
The drawing of a map is an act of inscription, the placing of boundarylines that distinguish between inside and outside. The space outside theline defines the inside, because the line creates an oppositional distinction; in other words, defining where a region is as opposed to where it isnot. Caroline Levine identifies this in her reading of Derrida’s conceptionof narrative form: “Derrida shows how there can be no belonging—noinside—without a ‘constitutive outside.’”9 In this sense, the mapping ofa storyworld or narrative universe always creates and relies on outside
spaces where the established rules (the internal logic) either do not exist or
operate differently. As Ryan suggests, these boundaries are not completely
impermeable, and can be violated in order to expand and transform anarrative universe like the Star Wars galaxy. Wild Space, as we shall see
shortly, does just this.
In TOR, the galaxy is both narrative space and play space, meaning thatits boundaries define both the narrative universe and where the player
can go within it. Johan Huizinga famously describes this as the Magic
Circle: “All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked
off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter ofcourse.”10 Recent scholarship has posited that the Magic Circle is porous,
particularly in how players and communities move across its borders, but
the in-game boundaries of the play space are almost completely impenetrable for the player, who can only select areas within the boundaries ofthe map, and in visiting those areas can only play in the provided space.11
In this sense, Wild Space and other territories beyond the boundaries of

8 Ryan, et al., Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative, 36.
9 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015), 26.
10 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon
Press, 2009), 10.
11 There are rare but possible exceptions to this with bugs, glitches, cheats, or modificationsof the game that allow the player to reach areas that should be inaccessible. However, these are
not the usual or intended player experience.

202 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

the game map are literally out of bounds and outside of play before they
are introduced.12
Drawing these points together, outside spaces are represented beyond theborders of maps that delineate the galaxy. The mystery of such spaces lasts
until they are later brought into the narrative universe, when it becomes
clear which aspects of the galaxy’s internal logic do or do not apply. I call thisprocess the hyperdiegetic cycle, drawing on Hills’s concept of hyperdiegesis
mentioned earlier. The hyperdiegetic cycle renews the narrative universeby introducing new elements to its internal logic, transforming an outside
space into an inside one by gradually making it identifiable and familiar.
This cycle operates in two directions: the first, internally oriented, fills innarrative space that follows the narrative universe’s internal logic, and thesecond, externally oriented, introduces outside spaces that transcend thenarrative universe’s logic. Hills hints at the latter type in his later revisitingof the hyperdiegesis when he suggests that familiar conventions of series
are occasionally punctured by moments of temporary “disruption.”13 I argue,
however, that outside spaces are more than this: their disruption is lasting
because their content is woven into the narrative universe’s internal logic,
forever changing the sense of what is familiar and conventional. Game
expansions illustrate this: the introduction of the Empire of Zakuul in
Fallen Empire fundamentally altered the narrative universe with a new,all-powerful threat, and changed gameplay with new mechanics and gamemodes.
The hyperdiegetic cycle constantly relies on this use of outside spaces
as a frontier: a place of unknown and unexpected possibilities where thenarrative universe is renewed and transformed through confrontation.
The hyperdiegetic cycle thus draws on the foundational frontier myth inAmerican popular culture, posited by Richard Slotkin in his seminal work
Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier.
Slotkin argues that the frontier exists on the boundary between civilizationand the wilderness beyond, and that, throughout America’s history, thenation and its subjects were reborn through frontier violence. As Slotkin
explains, “The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate
their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of the church and nation; but
12 Game expansions often demonstrate this process by adding new spaces that were previously
outside of play and unknown to characters and players (examples include Fallen Empire in TOR,
Mists of Pandaria in World of Warcraft, etc.).
13 Matt Hills, “Defining Cult TV: Texts, Inter-Texts and Fan Audiences,” in The Television Studies
Reader, ed. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (New York: Routledge, 2004), 512.

Chasing Wild Space203

the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence,and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuringmetaphor of the American experience.”14
Crucially, there is no frontier without a notion of spaces outside ofcivilization: spaces that are different and threatening, that must be tamed
and brought to order. The process of converting wild outside spaces into
controlled inside ones is inherently violent, changing everyone and everything involved. The individuals who travel to the frontier are transformedby their experiences there, as they are marked by what they learn fromencountering (or conquering) other peoples and places. At the same time,the inhabitants of outside spaces are violently subjugated by the colonizing culture. Finally, the internal logic of the narrative universe, including
its peoples, cultures, and politics, are both renewed and altered by the
introduction of new elements from outside spaces. While these elements are
particularly evident in Star Wars, they hold pertinent insights for narrative
world-building across transmedial franchises.
The same regeneration through violence that has driven American culture is at work in the frontiers of Star Wars and is central to the hyperdiegetic
cycle of the franchise.15 While all of the dark areas beyond the edge ofthe map are outside spaces and potential frontiers, there are several thatthe franchise has specifically identified: the Yuuzhan Vong galaxy, theUnknown Regions, and the aforementioned Wild Space. These outside
spaces have generated many mysterious, external threats to challenge andrenew the galaxy, including the Yuuzhan Vong Empire of the novels andcomics, the Killik and Ssi-ruuk of the novels, the Sith Empire and Empireof Zakuul of the Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) games, and Grand
Admiral Thrawn, most recently portrayed in the Rebels television series.
Each of these threats forced the galaxy to encounter its various frontiers;
together they reveal how outside spaces and frontiers have particularthemes, aesthetics, and ethics.

14 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,1600-1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 5.
15 This is partially due to the conventions that the franchise draws from other frontier genres, including the presence of Western tropes in Star Wars. See William H. Katerberg, Future
West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,2008) and Carl Abbott, Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond (Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).

204 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Wild Space
Similar to the romanticized Wild West in American culture, Wild Spaceis a frontier filled with unpredictable and unknown possibilities. In TOR’s
Fallen Empire expansion, it appears as a space outside the galaxy that thegame’s characters know little or nothing about. The expansion’s story
begins with chasing a threat into the undiscovered “depths of Wild Space”
in a desperate bid for answers. The Sith Emperor has destroyed a planet,
betrayed his people, and then vanished. Some time after his disappearance,
a “mysterious army” from a previously unknown civilization invades thegalaxy, conquering everything in its path. The Jedi and the Sith suspectthese events are related and enlist the player to help search beyond the edgeof the galaxy. They are quickly ambushed by a vast fleet of ships controlled
by the unknown civilization, which is soon revealed as the Eternal Empire,
Zakuul.
As part of Wild Space, Zakuul exhibits several characteristics common
to outside spaces in narrative universes. The first of these is an aesthetic
built on the concept of the infinite. This infinite aesthetic, as I label it,
presents objects as boundless in number, space, or time, making themseem overwhelming or even divine. Zakuul has many examples of this,including its moniker, the Eternal Empire, its fleet, the Eternal Fleet, andits seat of power, the Eternal Throne. To pick one example, the Eternal Fleet
is a virtually endless arrangement of ships, all identical and connected in
one sentient network. Beyond its considerable firepower, the Eternal Fleet
is visually imposing, seemingly occupying and controlling every spacereaching in every direction. It is, in effect, the representation of outside
space opposing the player and the galaxy. The infinite aesthetic is tied to
the function of outside spaces in the hyperdiegetic cycle. Not bound by thedefinitions and borders of the main galaxy, outside spaces are theoreticallyinfinite, and could consist of many other worlds, galaxies, or dimensions.
They thus provide the narrative universe with an infinite frontier, including
infinite threats, salvations, and possible expansions.
A second characteristic of outside spaces is their portrayal as unknown
and mysterious places. Zakuul’s invasion of the galaxy sets the stage for thisperception—no one knows for sure where Zakuul came from or what its
motives are. Zakuulian society centers on the Eternal Throne and Emperor
Valkorion, an ancient and powerful figure with a hidden agenda. Upon
encountering Valkorion, the player character and their companion immediately sense that he is actually the Sith Emperor they are hunting, though
his secret control of an unknown empire comes as a complete surprise toChasing Wild Space

205

them. As Valkorion later muses to the player: “Emperor of the Sith was myfirst face, but it is merely one of many I have worn.”16 Valkorion wears many
faces by transferring his consciousness to new bodies, which presents thepotential for limitless expansion of his plots and provides limitless material
for developers to spin into new stories for players to uncover. In this sense,
Valkorion personifies the infinite aesthetic, constituting an infinite narrative frontier for the game similar to how Palpatine and his scheming haveprovided fodder for many stories related to the main franchise. Valkorion
addresses this in his chiding of the player: “Given ten lifetimes, could you
unravel all I have wrought?”17 The unknown contents of Wild Space and themysterious motivations of its inhabitants thereby provide what Matt Hills
calls a “defining narrative enigma or puzzle” that drives the story forward.
As long as the enigma remains unsolved, the narrative will continue tocircle around it, creating an “endlessly deferred narrative.”18 Wild Space andValkorion are only two examples of how outside spaces and their characters
can function as enigmas, but they are representative ones.
Outside spaces thus alter the narrative universe and its characters, as
is evident in how Wild Space rewrites the identity of the player character.
Prior to Fallen Empire, the player character has many names and identities
determined by the player and the character’s class. A Republic Trooper, forexample, has a very different narrative and identity from a Sith Inquisitor.
Once encountering the Eternal Empire, however, the player character
becomes the Outlander, regardless of what narrative choices and identities
came before. All difference is subsumed into the single identity of the
Outlander, determined by the spatial relations between outside (WildSpace) and inside (the galaxy). One could argue that this is because of
the constraints of game narrative: giving every player character the same
identity makes it easier to write a story by eliminating the possibility
for divergence. But this design decision also reveals how individuals aretransformed by encounters with outside spaces and frontiers. Characters
who experience the frontier are marked as outsiders who are essentiallydifferent from others in the main galaxy. This trope is common in American frontier fiction, including prominent characters such as Hawkeye inJames Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, a frontiersman who
16 “Chapter II,” Star Wars: The Old Republic: Knights of the Eternal Throne, developed by
BioWare, published by Electronic Arts, 2016, Video Game.
17 “Chapter XI,” Star Wars: The Old Republic: Knights of the Fallen Empire, developed by BioWare,published by Electronic Arts, 2015. Video Game.
18 Matt Hills, “Defining Cult TV,” 513.

206 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

does not belong in the colonial settlements he originally comes from.
Similarly to these characters, the player character is redef ined as the
Outlander because of their exposure to Wild Space and, through their
exploits on the frontier, they play a role in reshaping the internal logic of
the galaxy.
The frontier therefore presents a slippage between the outside andthe inside, and this is precisely what transpires in the Outlander. At the
beginning of Fallen Empire, the Outlander is brought before Valkorion, but
manages to kill him with the help of Valkorion’s son Arcann. This is allpart of Valkorion’s plan to extend his power by transferring his spirit to the
Outlander’s body. Outside space, personified in Valkorion, becomes a partof inside space, personified in the Outlander, and the boundaries between
these spaces and characters start to blur. While this happens on the level ofindividual characters, it also happens with the larger narrative universe. As
the player learns more about Zakuul and Wild Space, these spaces become
more familiar and are assimilated into the internal logic of the galaxy. In
this way, the hyperdiegetic cycle expands the narrative universe, changing
it through encounters with outside space.

“If you had travelled far enough”
Having established an understanding of what outside spaces are and how
they function as frontiers in the hyperdiegetic cycle, one can now turn totheir effects. The original KotOR game was released in 2003; it precedes
TOR and its expansions in both the franchise and narrative timeline. KotOR
places players in the role of Revan, a Jedi knight who broke with the Jedi
Order in order to fight a questionable war. After winning that war, Revanjourneys with his apprentice to the Unknown Regions beyond the edge ofthe galaxy and returns changed, as explained by the character Carth Onasi
in the game: “When they left after the Mandalorian Wars ended, they were
Jedi. When they returned … they were something else.” On the surface,
Revan and his apprentice are Sith Lords typical of the franchise, but Carth’s
words suggest something more—like the Outlander, they were essentiallychanged, transformed by their experiences with outside space. What theyencountered were the ancient, powerful secrets of the Sith Empire and theInfinite Empire of the Rakata, which they used to their advantage. This isnever fully explained in the game, however, and these outside spaces remaina mysterious threat that shapes Revan, his apprentice, and the galaxy theyattempt to conquer.

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207

The KotOR games reveal the violence of the hyperdiegetic cycle and how
it engenders a politics of fear. The transformation presented by the frontier
is seen by characters as a threat to the galaxy—particularly to its greatest
champions, the Jedi. In a climactic scene in KotOR II (2004), the Exile (theplayer character) confronts three Jedi masters who explain why they exiled
her from the Order for following Revan to war. As Master Zez-Kai Ell tells
the Exile, “You had become different somehow, changed.” As with Revan,the Exile’s experiences at the edges of the galaxy transformed her into an
outsider and the Jedi feared that her mere presence would force a similartransformation on them: “And if you had stayed, you would have changed
us, and that we could not allow.” Rather than confront outside spaces andtheir unknown contents, the Jedi chose to retreat within themselves andremain as they were. Change to the galaxy’s institutions, philosophies, andidentities is suspicious and dangerous, and those that engender change must
be expelled—like the Exile. This politics of isolationism demonstrates axenophobia that is ultimately self-defeating, as Kreia, another characterfrom the frontier of the galaxy, expounds in the same scene: “How could you
ever hope to know the threat you face when you have never walked in thedark places of the galaxy, faced war and death on such a scale? If you had
traveled far enough, rather than waiting for the echo to reach you, perhaps
you would have seen it for what it was.” The fear of outsiders and outside
spaces is the death knell of the Jedi and even the galaxy itself because it
forecloses on the hyperdiegetic cycle and the possibility for growth. It is only
by traveling “far enough,” by going outside the familiar and the conventional,
that one attains the knowledge and perception needed to survive.
While isolationism within the hyperdiegetic cycle is untenable, thealternative of facing the frontier is always steeped in violence, conquest,
and domination. As Slotkin argues with the frontier myth in American
culture, this violence regenerates and makes one whole. KotOR II represents
this in the Exile’s experiences on the edge of the galaxy, where she witnesses
the cataclysmic destruction of an entire planet and hundreds of thousandsof Jedi, Republic soldiers, and Mandalorians. The incredible violence andtrauma broke her and led her to reject everything she knew before, turningaway from the Force, the Jedi, and the galaxy to become a reclusive exile. The
experience, however, also made her whole, as Kreia describes: “At last, you
could hear. You were whole. And, at last, you saw.” Beyond the experienceof one character, this process applies to the narrative universe as a whole
when it encounters the threat of outside spaces operating by a logic different
from its established internal logic. This encounter engenders a disruption,
to use Hills’s language, that must be violently overcome. The disruption has

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long-lasting effects and fundamentally changes the narrative universe byintroducing new experiences, possibilities, and expectations for audiences.
The politics of fear and the violence of Star Wars’s hyperdiegetic cycle
point us to major ethical and political problems with the use of frontiers innarrative world-building. The portrayal of outside spaces creates excluded
others who are always-already monstrous threats, objects to be used, andobstacles to be overcome. The fear of these spaces and outsiders portrayedby the Jedi in KotOR II is ever-present and channeled into endless, regenerative violence. In this sense, the hyperdiegetic cycle is founded on a colonial
mythos that has a dark history of dehumanization, oppression, and genocideof peoples considered outside civilization. This is especially pernicious
when it makes audiences uncritical of and complicit in the violence, such as
when the player finally claims the Eternal Throne and conquers the galaxy
in TOR. By fighting Valkorion, the player completes the cycle of violence,
eventually internalizing and employing the same structures of power anddomination against which they fought.
Despite being games, in which one would expect greater opportunity foraudience agency and narrative emergence, the KotOR series presents thisoutcome as inevitable. One can play within this narrative, but never against it.
In this regard, the potential for positive transformation and renewal throughthe hyperdiegetic cycle is foreclosed and the narrative merely reinscribes
the violence that drives it. This situation is not unique to the KotOR games,
but remains present and seemingly unchallenged in Disney-era Star Wars.
Supreme Leader Snoke and the First Order, for example, demonstrate manyof the same features revealed in Valkorion and Zakuul. Snoke is a powerful
unknown whose identity, origins, and motives remain, thus far, a similar kindof mystery. He and the First Order are new threats to the galaxy’s internal logic
from the Unknown Regions that must be violently stopped. Opposing themwill shape the galaxy and repeat the hyperdiegetic cycle, just as it has before.
However, there are potential ways out of this trap, one of which comesfrom within the franchise. The predicament of engaging in violence andbecoming defined by it is explored in-depth in The Clone Wars televisionseries that portrays the Jedi as they face a devastating war that blinds themto Palpatine’s schemes. In the final episodes of the series, Yoda sets out
on a journey to discover secrets that may yet save the Jedi. After facing a
number of trials, Yoda arrives on the Sith world of Moraband to endure one
last challenge in the series finale.19 In the episode’s climax, Yoda faces the
19 Moraband is a nod to the KotOR series, in which the same world containing the tombs ofancient Sith is named Korriban.

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209

dilemma of either revealing the identity of Darth Sidious or saving Anakin.
Sidious tempts him to abandon Anakin: “Let him go, let him die, and you
can stop all I will do!”20 Yet, fighting in this way would merely extend theviolence and make Yoda culpable, so he sacrifices the opportunity in orderto save Anakin. Yoda’s decision suggests there is another way to fight andthat there is perhaps a path other than violence. Yoda hints at this path at
the end of the episode: “No longer certain that one ever does win a war, I am.
For in fighting the battles, the bloodshed, already lost we have. Yet open to
us a path remains, that unknown to the Sith is.”21 For the Jedi, this path is theability to extend consciousness beyond death as Force spirits, allowing themto survive, pass on their knowledge, and eventually triumph as liberators
rather than conquerors. Effectively, the Jedi thereby find a way out of thecycle of violence that plays into the Sith’s hands—a different way to fightthat is not defined by the domination and brutality exhibited in the Clone
Wars. A similar (likely less mystical) path is possible for the hyperdiegetic
cycle, but finding it requires a critical reconsideration of how we perceive
and use outside spaces.
Outside spaces play a significant role in world-building and it is crucial
to develop an ethics in how we represent and use them in order to avoid
inadvertently re-inscribing the colonial mythology of the frontier. I suggestthat there is another meaning or approach to outside space—one that
can help break the cycle of narrative violence evident in Star Wars. One
can face outside spaces and learn from them in ways that are not violent,
controlling, and xenophobic. Certainly, one should resist threats of conquestand domination whenever and wherever they manifest themselves. But
outside spaces are not always-already evil threats and expansion throughconquest does not need to be the dominant mode of the hyperdiegetic
cycle. Instead, one could embrace the outside, the unknown, the strange,
and the other, along with the insights and new possibilities they hold. Only
by seeking such paths can we hope to unlock the transformative power ofhyperdiegesis and outside spaces, and to build narrative worlds that are
more inclusive, equal, and just.

20 Star Wars: The Clone Wars, “Sacrifice,” season 6, episode 13, Netflix, March 7, 2014, written
by Christian Taylor.
21 Star Wars: The Clone Wars, “Sacrifice.”

Part III“More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine”:
Consolidating the Star Wars Franchise14. From Transmedia Storytelling toTransmedia Experience
Star Wars Celebration as a Crossover/Hierarchical Space
Matt Hills
To date, transmedia storytelling has been analyzed formally, in termsof whether it promotes diegetic coherence or expansion,1 as well as politically, in terms of how it articulates capitalist values.2 Transmedia has
also been theorized via audience productivity3 and memory. 4 Perhaps
unsurprisingly, given that transmedia extensions occur within a proliferating, ubiquitous screen culture, the issue of transmedia’s locatedness inspace and place has generally been under-explored. Only the subcategoryof transmedia storytelling dubbed “Alternate Reality Games” (ARGs) has
tended to merit analysis of extra-diegetic spatiality and how this is utilized
within the ARG’s real-world gameplay.5 Otherwise, transmedia is assumed
to float free of spatial constraints, flowing across devices, platforms, andvaried screen media.6
However, this assumption does not match up with embodied andspatialized realities of transmedia branding/storytelling. Media tourism,for example, can involve the extension of film and television narratives
through located performances forming part of an “experience economy.”7
1 See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NewYork University Press, 2006) and Matthew Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early
Twentieth Century Transmedia Story Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2016).
2 See Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-building
Beyond Capitalism (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
3 See Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Mélanie Bourdaa, The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges
and Opportunities (New York: Routledge, 2017).
4 See Colin B Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science Fiction
and Fantasy Storyworlds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
5 See Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2010) andStephanie Janes, “‘You Had to Be There’: Alternate Reality Games and Multiple Durational
Temporalities,” in The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media: Permanence and Obsolescence inParatexts, ed. Sara Pesce and Paolo Noto, (New York: Routledge, 2016).
6 See Mark Bould “Doctor Who: Adaptations and Flows” in Science Fiction Film, Television and
Adaptation, ed. J.P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay (New York: Routledge 2012), 152.
7 See B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every
Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).

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The Doctor Who Experience based in Cardiff from 2012-2017 enabled fansto physically interact with a diegetic expansion and enactment of theWhoniverse. The Harry Potter Studio Tour London also enables fans toimaginatively “enter” diegetic spaces that are simultaneously physicalspaces; it is necessary to travel to Leavesden to do so. In a sense, then, suchmedia tourism can be thought of as transmedia tourism, and as Matthew
Freeman has recently noted:
This attraction […] allows audiences to visit the sets, props and costumes
created for the films. As well as seeing the spaces from the story world in
person, such as Privet Drive, the home street of Harry Potter […] thoseaudiences can also extract many of the physical artefacts from the story
world by purchasing the likes of Butterbeer, Gryffyndor [sic] scarfs […]and wands.8

Here, transmedia storytelling facilitates a sense of the storyworld operating
as if it were real and as if diegetic materials could become “extractable,”9i.e., capable of ontologically moving out of diegetic realms and into extradiegetic spaces.10
Given Star Wars’s powerful links to merchandising, it has, of course,
rarely been short of its own geographically and spatially located transmedia
tourism, in the form of assorted exhibitions or displays occurring overtime. Disney theme-park attraction Star Tours has offered a prime space
for transmedia tourism and will soon be joined by Star Wars Land at Walt
Disney World and Disneyland, a theme-park arena that promises to allow
visitors to “fly” a life-size Millennium Falcon and to enter the Mos Eisley
Cantina, among other delights.11 If one mode of transmedia storytelling
does indeed “flow” across spaces, then it should be apparent that a rival
class of franchised transmedia experience remains, by definition, rooted in
specific physical locations. In fact, located transmedia can confer value onthese very places, positioning them as symbolically hallowed or “auratic”
sites to which fans travel by way of “pilgrimage.”12
8 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling, 30.
9 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling, 30.
10 Bob Rehak, “Materializing Monsters: Aurora Models, Garage Kits and the Object Practicesof Horror Fandom,” Journal of Fandom Studies 1, no. 1 (2013): 29.
11 Secret Cinema Presents The Empire Strikes Back also offered a Cantina experience in thelead-up to its “immersive cinema” production in 2015, though this occurred in Shoreditch Town
Hall, East London, rather than inside an official Disney venue.
12 Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 144.

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215

In this chapter, I want to address one example of a Star Wars transmedia
experience: the Star Wars Celebration event which has been run periodicallyby Lucasfilm since 1999 and which now features almost annually in Disney’sroster of events. Having attended Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 at the
ExCeL in London,13 I am interested in how the Celebration—as an official,corporatized convention—engages with multiple iterations of the Star
Wars franchise. At times, Celebration Europe 2016 almost felt like a Star
Wars trade show aimed at promoting and selling every officially licensed
incarnation of the franchise to its established or new fans. Given that fact,
I will begin by examining the transmedia completism on show at Star Wars
Celebration (hereafter Celebration) and how it blurs together different
versions of the franchise. I will then move on to consider how the event
becomes auto-commemorative, as fans are encouraged to purchase a vastarray of “show exclusive” merchandise that demonstrate the “extractability”
not just of pseudo-diegetic merchandise but also of souvenirs that position
Celebration as auratic. Its incessantly commemorative, nostalgic use of
spatiality both reflects the integrative “transmedia economy” put in place
by Disney,14 but also implicitly restores an older, hierarchical model oftransmedia storytelling set up by Lucasfilm. First, though, how does thisofficial fan convention navigate its status as singularly brand-focused?

The Crossover Space of Star Wars Celebration as a Mono-Brand
Convention
Although fan conventions have arguably received less attention in contemporary fan studies than online fan practices, when work has explored thematerial culture of “Cons” then it has frequently focused on multi-fannish
events bringing together fans of different film franchises, television shows,

13 See Emma Pett, “Cosplay Rey: Intergenerational fandom and the importance of play at the2016 Star Wars Celebration, London,” Deletion 12 (November 24, 2016), http://www.deletionscifi.
org/episodes/episode-12/cosplay-rey-intergenerational-fandom-and-the-importance-of-play-atthe-2016-star-wars-celebration-london/, for another critical account of Star Wars Celebration
Europe 2016.
14 William Proctor and Matthew Freeman, “‘The First Step into a Smaller World’: The Transmedia Economy of Star Wars” in Revisiting Imaginary Worlds, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York :Routledge, 2016), 234.

216 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

anime, comics, and so on.15 Barbara Brownie and Danny Graydon also tackle
this type of multi-fannish convention when they argue that:
The fan convention is typically a crossover space. Its participants areaware of multiple fictional universes, and those universes share the same
physical space in the convention venue. As cosplayers move through thisspace, different fictional universes become blended in the same physical[location]. […] This […] is a condition that allows crossover fiction to
occur.16

Yet, since Celebration involves only Star Wars it might be said that no suchblurring or blending of diegetic material can occur in the extra-diegetic
spaces of the convention hall. In contrast to the likes of San Diego ComicCon or even London Film and Comic Con, Celebration offers a corporate
sense of “full control” over the context in which Star Wars’s branded goods
are encountered: “Disney and Lucasfilm’s profits extend beyond ticket sales
to concessions and branded merchandise. And there’s nothing to distractfans from consuming that ‘Star Wars’ culture.”17
However, pitting multi-fannish conventions against mono-branded
events (in a binary of “crossover storyworlds” versus a sort of “walled
diegesis”) fails to perceive how different kinds of crossover and storyworld
blurring can occur at Celebration. Such official events can gather together
under one roof, or perhaps in one hall, every commercially available (andsoon-to-be-available) version of a media franchise. At Celebration Europe
2016, presentations of Star Wars LEGO abutted those of the Star Wars
Battlefront game; realistic Black Series action figures aimed at collectors
were adjacent to Funko Pop’s highly stylized and cartoonish character
renderings, and not far from Hot Wheels’s character-inspired diecast toy
cars; tie-in novels were side-by-side with spin-off comics; and promotions
for the then-forthcoming live-action film Rogue One and the animated
15 See, e.g., Louisa Ellen Stein (2015) Millennial Fandom (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,2015), 171-176 on “LeakyCon”; Lincoln Geraghty, Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting
Popular Culture (London: Routledge 2014), 93-119 on San Diego Comic-Con and 143-148 on
Memorabilia/Collectormania; and Jen Gunnels “‘A Jedi like my father before me’: Social identity
and the New York Comic Con,” Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (2009), accessed April 2,
2017, doi: 10.3983, on New York Comic-Con.
16 Barbara Brownie and Danny Graydon, The Superhero Costume: Identity and Disguise in Fact
and Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 112.
17 Kate Erbland, “Star Wars Celebration: What Other Studios And Festivals Can Learn About
Balancing Art And Fan Service,” IndieWire, July 20, 2016, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.
indiewire.com/2016/07/star-wars-celebration-europe-2016-art-fan-service-1201706742/.

From Tr ansmedia Story telling to Tr ansmedia Experience

217

Rebels series shared promotional spaces. Whether repurposed for LEGO
fans,18 devotees of cute reversionings, or proponents of a darker Star Wars,
all the differently merchandised versions of transmedia Star Wars collide
at Celebrations. As such, the event offers fans a smorgasbord of storyworld
options and fetishized diegetic objects—a transmedia experience that
could be touched and photographed as well as purchased, thus furnishingfans with a sense of “haptic-panoptic control over images (and perhaps
feelings) that formerly sped past them during […] viewing.”19
As Nicolle Lamerichs has noted, the fan convention is a constructedsite “in which the place is arranged to have connections to fiction.”20 Yet,
Celebration Europe 2016 was constructed to have connections to all ofDisney’s different merchandised pathways into and out of the Star Wars
films and television series, displaying a level of paratextual and transmedia completism for fans to revel in. Indeed, at TheForce.net’s Jedi Council
Forums, fans compiled a list of all the “CE 16” show exclusives that wereavailable. The auratic status of the event for fans21 was therefore partly
premised on gaining access to star actors and subcultural celebrity producers/performers, along with being among the first to learn Star Wars
news.22 But it was also produced through the fact that all current versionsof the franchise were represented via their physical co-presence and highly
unusual spatial adjacency.
Although fan-targeted stores such as Forbidden Planet tend to gather
together Star Wars books, toys, comics, and other merchandise, there areproduct lines that they typically do not carry (e.g. video games), just as toy
stores such as Toys“R”Us also exclude specific product ranges (e.g. tie-innovels). But at Celebration it does not matter if you are interested in a DK
guidebook or a Del Rey/Penguin novel—Star Wars’s transmedia extensions
are fully arrayed together. Of course, not all fans will consume all the various incarnations and expansions; as Cornel Sandvoss has observed, it is

18 Geraghty, Cult Collectors, 168-178 and Mark J.P. Wolf, chapter in this volume.
19 Kurt Lancaster, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performance in a Media Universe (Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 102.
20 Nicolle Lamerichs, “Embodied Fantasy: The Affective Space of Anime Conventions,” in The
Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures, ed. Linda Duits, Koos Zwaan and Stijn Reijnders(Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 268.
21 Geraghty, Cult Collectors, 96.
22 Jason Scott, “From Behind the Masks to Inside: Acting, Authenticity and the Star Wars
Co-Stars,” in Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification, ed. Kate Egan
and Sarah Thomas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

218 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingcommon for fans to construct a sense of their own fan object by acceptingsome versions of it while rejecting others.23
And so visitors to Celebration, then, can plot their own specific pathways through the halls and exhibits in line with their specific interests.
Even while doing so, however, one unavoidably walks past and physicallyencounters versions of Star Wars that are perhaps less familiar or possibly
even charged with nostalgia. Despite not having collected Topps Star Wars
trading cards since the age of ten or so, I particularly enjoyed the Topps
stand, for example, and its show-exclusive merchandising. By bringing
together such a proliferation of licensed paratexts, Celebration Europe
positions fans as simultaneously nostalgic and current consumers, both
opening a door to transmedia memories of Star Wars comics and cards
from childhood24 and cueing transmedia recollections of recent novels or
television series.25 The density of this transmedia experience is very muchakin to one possible future for transmedia envisaged by Matthew Freeman
when he writes of “experiential convergence, bringing together […] multiple
stories and multiple pieces of different types of media content—text, audio,
comics, video, game etc.—within the same [space], […] bringing together
different forms of engagements, pleasures and media experiences.”26 If
Celebration can be said to act as a “crossover space,”27 then it is exactly asa crossover of assorted media pleasures and experiences aligned with theStar Wars brand. Freeman’s future of transmedia is already here, not onlyin the example he gives (Blu-ray menu screens and hidden extras), but also
in the form of corporatized and mass-attendance fan conventions.28
Writing about the Doctor Who Experience (DWE) in Cardiff, Paul Booth argues that this transmedia tourist attraction uses “convergent incorporation”
to proffer a “commercialized incorporation of the fan experience.”29 Thatis, fans interactively immerse themselves in the franchise by accumulatingknowledge about its fictional universe and/or creating their own fictions,but the paid-for Experience shapes a specific version of “immersion” and23 Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 131-132.
24 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, New
York: New York University Press, 2010), 184.
25 Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia, 146.
26 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling, 199-200.
27 Brownie and Graydon, The Superhero Costume, 112.
28 Celebration Europe 2016 was rumored to host around 60,000 attendees across its three days;see Erbland, “Star Wars Celebration,” 2016.
29 Paul Booth, Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2015), 103.

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219

pre-scripted interaction whereby fans are required to play their part andbehave in appropriately disciplined ways. As Booth puts it, “Engagement
is key to convergent incorporation. The DWE is effective at convergent
incorporation not only because it offers a ‘safe zone’ of fannish enthusiasm
but also because it sequesters fandom into a particular arena.”30
Although Celebration Europe is a very different kind of transmedia experience—one built out of memories and promotions of multiple transmedia
storytelling/branding—it too represents a “safe zone” of fan sentiment anda sequestering of fandom. As if being shepherded through an interactive“walkthrough adventure” (part of the DWE), fans at Celebration are disciplined into playing their part. Anyone who wants to visit the official Cele­
bration Store, for instance, has to tolerate a lengthy wait in the queue unlessthey have privileged access. Anyone wanting to attend the Celebration Stage
talks—e.g. Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, or Carrie Fisher, along with an
opening day session promoting Rogue One and a closing session on “FutureFilmmakers”—similarly needs to have queued very early in the morning inorder to secure an entry wristband. Celebration has its rules and systems
and attendees are required to observe them. On occasions, one uncovers afeeling of profound resignation rather than joyous celebration—that this isjust what large corporate conventions are like and if you want the pleasuresof access and exclusivity based on being there, then you simply have to put
up with endemic queueing, extremely early starts, bad/expensive food,and so on. There are 594 reviews of Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 on
TripAdvisor.com—hardly a niche fan space—and many complain about the
ExCeL’s facilities and the queue times, with one contributor summing up:
The ExCel is exactly like every other convention hall I’ve been to […]They just can’t cater for so many people all having lunch at the sametime […] A convention is hot, sweaty with lots of queuing. That’s prettymuch guaranteed […] My only peeve is how much the eateries charge,
it is extortionate for pretty average food with shabby service. Again,
unfortunately this is the same at all conventions.

Whether thought of as “experiential convergence” or “convergent incorporation,” Celebration is evidently not always experienced as celebratory. Warmup hosts address the Celebration Stage spectators prior to the Star Wars
guests coming on stage, for example, working to ensure that an on-brandlevel of excitement is forthcoming from the crowd. At the same time, fans
30 Booth, Playing Fans, 121.

220 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingare insistently addressed as “one of us,” with media professionals displaying
their fandom:More than anything, Celebration pushes the notion that “Star Wars” isn’t
just for any and all fans, it’s made by them too. From Lucasfilm president
Kathleen Kennedy to “Rebels” co-creator Dave Filoni, the sentiment thateveryone who works on every “Star Wars” property is a massive fan of
the universe is a common refrain. It was also a major theme of panelpresentations featuring freshly minted directors like Gareth Edwards,
Rian Johnson, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, all of whom shared stories about
how much the original films meant to them.31

Celebratory Star Wars fandom and celebrations of fandom are hence
constantly reiterated for attendees; celebration is the default affective
performance. Yet, fan blogs and TripAdvisor.com reviews alike testify toaspects of the event’s misery and restrictiveness, where positive sentiment can only be achieved “despite” the commercialism, the hyping of
new product, the constant queuing, and a need for “absurdly” early starts.
As another fan blog similarly and more succinctly says in a Spoiler Alert
review: “It was, as expected, crowded, expensive but damn right worth it.”Celebration’s disciplining of fans may appear ostensibly successful, yet itis achieved grudgingly, with many attendees exhibiting not univocal fan
fervor, but, rather, a mixture of resigned annoyance and fannish passion.
By contrast, the on-brand fandom of star actors, Lucasfilm executives, andStory Group members is resolutely upbeat. Even if these performances of
fandom from the stage are entirely genuine, their unrelenting positivity
nevertheless casts them as somewhat faux or posed. The fandom of paying
customers seems more rebellious, more defiant, and more alert to the darkside of commercial exploitation.
Thus far, I have argued that Celebration Europe 2016 can be thoughtof as a transmedia experience rather than as transmedia storytelling: it
auratically housed different mediated pleasures and transmedia expansionsof the franchise within one event and, at one site, including commodified
and professionalized fan art. But Celebration was not only a “crossover
space” bringing and blurring together varied extensions of Star Wars, it also
played a role in spatializing the hierarchies of the franchise’s “transmedia
economy,” as I will now show.

31 Erbland, “Star Wars Celebration,” 2016.

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221

Star Wars Celebration as an Auto-Commemorative andHierarchical Convention
Celebration may be, in part, a collaged promotion of transmedia storytellingwhere even the Lucasfilm Story Group has its own on-stage session, but
it is not only a celebration of Star Wars’s many iterations and extensions.
Fans are also encouraged to celebrate being there at the event itself.32 As
well as paid-for photo opportunities and autograph sessions with celebrities, there are also chances to queue up and pose for a range of souvenir
photos, whether astride Rey’s speeder from The Force Awakens, standing ina gigantic replica of an action figure’s card-backing (the illusory result of
which is to make the person standing there appear to be an action figure),or participating in the Disney SnapCube photo booth, which automaticallycomposites the Celebration logo into one’s image. The SnapCube souvenir
thus combines official event branding with indexical evidence of “being
there,” creating a branded authenticity that is entirely of a piece with theofficial merchandise on sale in the Celebration Store. Fans are not simply
placed in a mélange of Star Wars transmedia; they are also placed photographically within Celebration’s brand identity.
In addition, Rogue One costumes, props, and models were on display,with this exhibition serving to promote the latest film in the franchise.
Fans could commemorate their presence at Celebration by snapping away
in front of Death Troopers, for example. Likewise, fans fortunate enoughto gain access to the Rogue One panel on the Celebration Stage on Friday,
July 15, were given movie posters when they left the auditorium, making
this an “extractable” souvenir of having been there. By contrast, fans who
watched the panel screened on the second-tier stage, the Galaxy Stage, orin the Exhibitors’ Hall, were not presented with a souvenir poster: this “gift”
was strictly a marker of exclusivity, rewarding those who had successfully
queued for entry wristbands.
We should not, therefore, view “extractability”33 only as a matter ofpseudo-diegetic merchandise that works to create the impression for fansthat they have materially and physically entered diegetic space. This “object
practice” of ontological bridging34 is not just a part of transmedia tourism
such as the Doctor Who Experience or Star Tours, given that a related practice
32 Matt Hills, Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event—Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizinga Brand Anniversary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 72.
33 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling, 30.
34 Rehak, “Materializing Monsters.”

222 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingalso forms part of Celebration’s auto-commemorative activities. That is, fansare encouraged to take away mementoes from ExCeL London, especiallymaterialized memories in the form of assorted photo opportunities. “Being
there” at the auratic event can thus cross over into fans’ everyday lives,
blurring sacred and profane or extraordinary/ordinary culture. Other kindsof pre-structured souvenirs are, of course, provided by the many “showexclusives” that can be bought from exhibitors as well as in the Celebration
Store.
And yet, there is one aspect of CE16’s locatedness that is strangely glossed
over by the event’s key branding and auto-commemoration: its specificpresence in London. When Celebration is based in the US, it is named
after the host city; 2015 was Celebration Anaheim (Celebration events had
previously been numbered, as if they were akin to instalments or episodes
in the Star Wars saga itself). 2017, in turn, was named Celebration Orlando.
Celebration Europe, however, retained this designation from the first CE
event at the ExCeL in 2007 (CEII occurred in Essen, Germany, in 2013). The
result of naming US cities yet exnominating London—at least in the official
and on-brand title—is that America is defined as the unspoken, takenfor-granted home of Star Wars as a franchise. Different world cities are notplaced on an even footing with regards to Star Wars Celebration; labellingsome years as “Celebration Europe” or “Celebration Japan” demarcates them
relationally as not-American. By contrast, hosting events at named US
cities reinforces a sense that “Celebration America” can always remain
unstated, with the US instead being wholly obvious and naturalized as
the home of Star Wars. Some might argue that the UK at least has a claim
to this designation, given that Pinewood Studios hosted production of The
Force Awakens and Rogue One, with the original trilogy produced at Elstree
in Borehamwood and The Phantom Menace utilizing Leavesden Studios.
However, Pinewood’s recent involvement was barely acknowledged in CE16’s
official merchandise, though the Pinewood Studios-based “Creature Shop”
was featured in a Celebration Stage talk, “The Creatures, Droids & Aliensof Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on Saturday, July 16, whilst the ExCeL’s
relative proximity to Pinewood was also noted in the event’s program book.
Despite the President of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, penning a sharply
on-brand, celebratory message in the printed program that the UK is Star
Wars’s “second home,” there is no doubt of its first home, given the mannerin which this is structured into the very nomenclature of Celebration events.
But the largely unspoken US-centrism of Celebration is not the only
hierarchy underpinning Celebration Europe 2016. The show’s commemorative guide includes a rundown of different stages, beginning with theFrom Tr ansmedia Story telling to Tr ansmedia Experience

223

Celebration Stage and concluding with the One Force Stage. The Celebration
Stage/Auditorium is described as follows:[it] will shine with the biggest shows and presentations of the weekend.
Hosted by Celebration fan favorite and actor Warwick Davis, the Celebration Stage will present the not-to-be-missed productions […] DJ Elliottand Mark Daniel will get the stage rocking before every performance.
Get your seat early.

Following this up is the Galaxy Stage, which acts as an overflow screening
venue for some of the Celebration Stage events such as the “Future Filmmakers Panel,” but also offers “a wide variety of panels and presentations
that cover the depth and breadth of the Star Wars universe.” Thirdly, theBehind-the-Scenes Stage—rather curiously named since both preceding
Stages serve this role just as well—is described as “hosting guests who
made it happen for the movies, television, toys, books, comics and more.”
Disney’s model of an integrative rather than hierarchical Star Wars“transmedia economy”35 runs counter to how Lucasfilm had previously
valued George Lucas’s films, or “G-canon,” over events described in the EU of
television shows, books, comics, and beyond. At the same time, Celebration
continues to implicitly value the films over other media. The Celebration
Stage is clearly presented as the main venue and it hosted talks with Mark
Hamill, Anthony Daniels, and Carrie Fisher. One talk focused on Rebels andanother on EA Games, but the considerable majority of “not-to-be-missed
productions” were strongly oriented around Star Wars films of the past,present, and near-future. The “breadth and depth” of Star Wars transmedia
only begins to be gestured at by the second-tier Galaxy stage, and it isnotable that the EU texts are only explicitly referenced when introducing
the third-tier Behind-the-Scenes stage. The transmedia experience offeredto fans is, I would argue, very much coded hierarchically through the useof these differently sized and identified venues. Film comes first. Current
television and video productions are admitted into the “premier league”
of transmedia storytelling, but seemingly only somewhat begrudgingly;
they certainly are not placed spatially on an even footing with Star Wars’s
cinematic presence. Comics, books, and other transmedia expansions arerelegated to secondary or tertiary status—these are very much made to feel
as if they are not the main event and are there for subgroups and niches ofattendees who may be interested.
35 Proctor and Freeman, “First Step into a Smaller World” 234.

224 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

In this implied hierarchy, fan-oriented stages are at the bottom of theleague, with the Star Wars Fan and Collectors’ Stage and the One Force Stage
listed last. Unlike the Celebration Stage’s promise to “shine with the biggest
shows” and “not-to-be-missed productions,” the One Force Stage is describedin the printed program far more matter-of-factly in just two lines of text:“Presented by Jedi News […] Enjoy podcasts, DIY cosplay presentations andmore.” Thus, there is a pronounced tension between the way Celebration is
introduced by Kathleen Kennedy and the Celebration Team—both focusing
on the fans and on the event as “by fans for fans”—and the politics of spatiality within the ExCeL, where major spaces are predominantly occupied bycommercial exhibitors and by film-related marketing “reveals” and promos.
Although this auratic event is undoubtedly a kind of transmedia experience,
amply demonstrating the “experiential convergence” set out by Freeman,36
it is also very much a hierarchical experience. Specific versions (and media)
of current Star Wars are not more canonical than others in Disney’s official
discourses, but the movies nonetheless remain performatively and spatiallydominant at Celebration.
In this chapter, I have argued that we need to consider transmedia notjust as storytelling but also as a kind of experience; not just as a “flow” acrossplatforms and screens, but as potentially and spatially located. Celebration
offers one instance of how transmedia experience can possess a “crossover”
quality, even at an official mono-branded convention. At the same time,
the politics of convention space and place can work to prioritize films as
primary texts at such events, over and above transmedia extensions, even
where Disney discourses supposedly view all of these as part of a flattened,
non-hierarchical transmedia economy. Transmedial hierarchies—in linewith Lucasfilm’s prior “G-canon”—can hence be tacitly restored within thecommemorative Celebration event. Offering a completist’s commercial andparatextual inventory of Star Wars’s transmedia experiences,37 Celebration
spatializes and renders auratic the commodity-completism that it wishes
to incite amongst dedicated, disciplined fans.

36 Freeman, Historicising Transmedia Storytelling, 200.
37 Geraghty, Cult Collectors, 97.

15. Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass
Princesses
Star Wars and Popular Feminism
Megen de Bruin-MoléSince its acquisition by Disney in 2012, the Star Wars franchise has been
widely praised for its feminism. New heroes such as Jyn Erso and Rey havebeen hailed as feminist triumphs for Star Wars and mainstream entertainment more broadly. New characters aimed at a new generation of fans, like
Rebels’s pink-clad fighter-cum-artist Sabine Wren, and new novels devoted
to characters like Leia Organa and Ahsoka Tano (from The Clone Wars),1
are often cited as part of a growing commitment to female characters andto feminism by association. Likewise, the marketing force of Star Wars can
now be felt strongly in female-targeted sectors (makeup, fashion, dolls).2
Does all of this mean, as one reviewer put it, that Star Wars “finally awakens
to a feminist world”?3
Such assertions have rubbed some fans the wrong way—after all, women
have made up a significant and vocal portion of the Star Wars fanbase fromthe beginning. 4 As one fan commented, “I’m sure that people went ‘Wow!’
when they saw the first female Jedi in the prequels. The fanfic of the 1970s
had women Jedi all the time and women smugglers. Nothing new there forthe older fans.”5 Will Brooker has also argued that the original female fansmade the franchise their own through grassroots community-building,

1 Claudia Gray, Bloodline (London: Random House, 2016); E. K. Johnston, Ahsoka (Glendale,
CA: Disney Book Group, 2016).
2 Lisa Richwine, “Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Marketing Force Reaches for Female Fans,”
Reuters, December 15, 2015, http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-f ilm-starwars-women​-analysis-idUKKBN0TX1J720151215.
3 Michael Roddy, “Star Wars: The Force Finally Awakens to a Feminist World,” DNA India,
December 16, 2015, http://www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/report-star-wars-the-force-finally​-awakens-to-a-feminist-world-2156317.
4 As one famous Star Wars fanzine essay asks, “If there are men in media fandom, they’recertainly very quiet. To turn about a feminist phrase then, why is half the human race so poorly
represented in Star Wars and other media fandoms?” Pat Nussman, “Where the Boys Are,” inAlderaan: The Star Wars Letterzine, vol. 15 (Toledo, OH: Kzinti Press, 1981), 2.
5 Tish Wells, private email correspondence, November 14, 2016.

226 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

crafting, and fan fiction.6 In other words, their fandom is built on freeengagement with the storyworld and many do not feel a strong need to bevalidated or greeted as consumers of licensed merchandise.7 Fan activity, ofcourse, is not franchise-sanctioned and the kinds of stories that are licensed
can certainly have a significant impact on a storyworld’s feminist potential.
While Leia’s example is a powerful one, and although there are certainly
more female role models in the franchise now than there were in 1977, canwe call the Star Wars franchise feminist?
Broadly speaking, feminists believe in and advocate for social and political gender equality, but, as Mary Hawkesworth points out, feminism is “acollective noun” with many interpretations and aims.8 Rather than trying
to condense a rich discussion of feminism in Star Wars into just a handfulof pages, in this chapter I offer a few examples from very different cornersof the Star Wars storyworld. They illustrate some of the diverse “interpretations and aims” of feminist discourse that are created by the complex
interplay between fans and the multi-authored, media-industrial Star Wars
franchise.9 First, I look at discourses of feminism and the representationof women in Star Wars, paying special attention to the stories outside of
the films. Then, I explore the way the storyworld’s non-narrative paratexts—toys, clothes, and merchandising—have impacted its engagementwith feminist discourse. Finally, I look at some of the ways in which fansand storytellers have politicized Star Wars, and what this may tell us about
the future of the franchise. These examples provide a brief but informative
glimpse at the history of Star Wars’s engagement with feminist discourse.
6 Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York: Continuum, 2002), 199-220.
7 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (NewYork University Press, 2010), 17.
8 Mary E. Hawkesworth, Globalization and Feminist Activism (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield,2006), 25.
9 For other studies of feminist discourse and Star Wars, see Brooker, Using the Force, 129-71,
199-220; Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence,
and Participatory Culture,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David
Thorburn and Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 549-576; Diana Dominguez, “Feminism
and the Force: Empowerment and Disillusionment in a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” in Culture, Identities, and Technology in the Star Wars Films, ed. Carl Silvio and Tony M Vinci (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2007), 109-133; Gray, Show Sold Separately, 177-87; Derek Johnson, “‘May the Force
Be with Katie’: Pink Media Franchising and the Postfeminist Politics of HerUniverse,” Feminist
Media Studies 14, no. 6 (2014): 895-911; Mara Wood, “Feminist Icons Wanted: Damsels in Distress
Need Not Apply,” in A Galaxy Here and Now: Historical and Cultural Readings of Star Wars, ed.
Peter W. Lee (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 62-83; Carolyn Cocca, Superwomen: Gender, Power,
and Representation (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2016), 87-120.

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227

Star Wars and Popular Feminism
A New Hope arrived in cinemas during what Michelle Citron has described as“a larger mainstreaming of feminism.”10 Media fans were confident enoughabout the movement and its tenets to comment on the feminist potential of
the products they were consuming and Princess Leia inevitably became partof this discussion. In the second issue of the fanzine Alderaan (1978), one
fan wrote: “As a feminist, though I was delighted with Princess Leia, I wasdisappointed by the dearth of any other major female part—most especiallyamong the pilots of the rebellion.”11 In 1983, Rolling Stone described Leia as“the feminist from the fourth dimension.”12 Although Leia was recognized
as a feminist icon by some, feminist scholars generally ignored her. One
reason may be that many influential feminist critics at the time saw little place for feminism in popular culture. Only in the late 1990s did thisunderstanding of popular cinema as a “repetitive and formulaic system
which reproduces the dominant ideology” begin to shift.13
Even then, most feminist readings of Star Wars were negative, in part
because they focused on the story arcs of the films’ single female leads—
first Leia and later Padmé Amidala. Margery Hourihan argues that Leia
exists mainly to “invest [Luke and friends’] actions with ultimate approval
and to mark them as true heroes.”14 Diana Dominguez, likewise, writes
that, while Leia remains “outspoken and unpunished,” she is primarily an
enabler for male characters.15 Padmé’s story, on the other hand, is read as a
“disturbingly symbolic” representation of domestic abuse.16 Carolyn Cocca
devotes a chapter to Leia and Padmé in her book Superwomen, which also
includes a discussion of Leia’s daughter Jaina Solo from the EU. Despite
the many “feminist ideals” these characters embody, Cocca concludes thatthey remain relatively unchallenging, heteronormative representations.17
10 Michelle Citron, “Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream,” in Female Spectators:
Looking at Film and Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988), 56.
11 Jeff Johnston, ed., Alderaan Issue 2, vol. 2 (Toledo, OH: Kzinti Press, 1978), http://oaktrust.
library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/153131.
12 Carol Caldwell, “Carrie Fisher: A Few Words on Princess Leia, Fame and Feminism,” Rolling
Stone, 1983.
13 Mark Jancovich, “Screen Theory,” in Approaches to Popular Film, ed. Mark Jancovich andJoanne Hollows (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 145.
14 Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (NewYork: Routledge, 1997), 173.
15 Dominguez, “Feminism and the Force” 112, 120.
16 Domingueez, “Feminism and the Force” 125.
17 Cocca, Superwomen, 87.

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Opinion shifted again in 2015 with the release of The Force Awakens. In
popular discussions, Star Wars’s feminism was reframed as a progression
from Leia (a powerful but solitary role model in the original trilogy) to Rey,
who takes up the mantle of Jedi hero that previously belonged exclusively tothe male protagonists of the films. This progression was also calculated by
the amount of screen time given to female characters and how often they areallowed to speak in the old trilogy as compared to the new. For example, arecent YouTube video cut together all the lines spoken by women other than
Princess Leia in the original film trilogy.18 The total runtime was just overa minute and there is only a single line from The Empire Strikes Back. From
this perspective, Star Wars indeed appears to have come a long way since1977. The prequel trilogy was certainly more diverse in its casting than theoriginal trilogy, with multiple speaking roles for both women and peopleof color, and The Force Awakens “has by far the largest number of women,
period, in any Star Wars film.”19This perspective neglects several important factors, however, not least ofwhich is the transmedial spread of the Star Wars universe. As Dan HasslerForest points out, “our immersion in imaginary storyworlds takes place notwithin, but across, media.”20 From the earliest days of Star Wars, the story
existed beyond the films, spreading across novels, toys, comics, televisionshows and specials, video games, and more. As Star Wars itself illustrates,
a transmedia franchise’s feminist politics are much more complex because
open-ended storyworlds are always subject to new readings, additions, andalterations.
Star Wars offers a strong example of why increased visibility and accessibility in film do not, by themselves, translate to political change. Joanne
Hollows describes how early feminist film criticism tended to focus on
images of and for women.21 When discussing a popular storyworld’s engagement with feminism, however, there are three factors to consider. The first isindeed representational and asks whether a storyworld contains engaging,fully realized female characters. The second is paratextual, pertaining
to advertising, merchandise, and reception. Transmedia marketing often
18 Chris Wade, “Women Don’t Talk Much in ‘Star Wars,’” YouTube video, 1:23, posted by
New York Magazine, December 1, 2015, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ODgwL7DJ9dY.
19 Cocca, Superwomen, 115.
20 Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond
Capitalism (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 5, original italics.
21 Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture (Manchester University Press,
2000), 39-40.

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229

extends beyond the corporate control of Lucasfilm, but it still has a powerful impact on the way the Star Wars brand is consumed and interpreted.
Finally, we must also acknowledge industrial and political factors of who
is allowed to add to the story and feels entitled to claim it as their own.
These factors are often invisible to average consumers and may not evenbe acknowledged by the storyworld’s creators, but they are important if atransmedia franchise like Star Wars is going to inspire sustained, real-worldchange.

Witches of Dathomir: Representing Feminism in a Galaxy Far, Far
Away
To many fans, Princess Leia was a powerful role model for gender equality,
but even she would have been hard-pressed to sustain 40 years of Star Wars
fandom by herself. Padmé’s character and narrative in the prequel films
received mixed responses. Fortunately, despite the tendency of the Star
Wars films to focus on a single female hero among a group of men, complex female characters have developed in media across the franchise. The
numerous female characters in the texts of the EU (rebranded as Legends
in 2014) have formed a large part of the continued draw for female fans.
The best-known of these characters is likely Mara Jade, who first appearedin Timothy Zahn’s novel Heir to the Empire (1991).22 A former spy for theEmperor who became a smuggler after his death, Mara initially intends tokill Luke Skywalker, but is instead won over by the New Republic, becomesa Jedi, and eventually marries Luke. Mara was followed by many otherpopular female EU characters, including Jedi such as Bastila Shan andJaina Solo, or scientists and soldiers like Jan Ors, Ysanne Isard, and Qwi
Xux (the Death Star’s lead engineer before Disney’s canon reset). The 2003
video game Knights of the Old Republic even features one of the medium’s
few positive representations of older women and of disability in the formof the player’s blind mentor, Kreia. Recently, Anakin’s Clone Wars padawan
22 As Tracy “Dunc” Duncan of the long-running fansite Club Jade writes: “Mara is a huge reason
I got into the fandom in the first place. And Mara was a large part of the reason I kept reading,which is why I stayed in fandom.” Tracy Duncan, “Inside the Star Wars Generation Gap: Why We
Still Care about Mara Jade,” Club Jade, June 5, 2015, para. 5, http://clubjade.net/?p=64034. Not
everyone was as excited about the character, however, and some first-generation fans saw her
as “a stereotype of the ‘empowered 90s woman’” meant to tick a demographics box rather thanappeal to existing female fans. Shanna Gilkeson, Facebook Messages conversation, November
19, 2016.

230 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Ahsoka amassed a following that rivalled Mara’s. As Cocca has pointed
out, however, most of these characters do not really encourage serious
discussions of feminism at all because they are “privileged in terms of race,
ethnicity, class, ability, and sexuality, and face no discrimination in theirseemingly postfeminist and colorblind universes.”23 Like Padmé, many ofthem meet unhappy ends, most commonly for the sake of adding dramatic
tension to a male character’s story. These trends in the EU material reinforce
the disposability and secondary status of women in the franchise overall.
Many factors thus indicate that the Star Wars galaxy is a patriarchal
one. There are many female political leaders in Star Wars, but while these
individuals often stand against male-dominated systems—the Republic,
the Empire, and, in some cases, the Jedi—they rarely succeed in toppling
the galaxy’s patriarchal customs and politics. Married women take on
their male partner’s surname and children take the names of their fathers. Luke’s surname is Skywalker, not Amidala (or Naberrie), and Kylo
Ren’s birth name is Ben Solo rather than Ben Organa.24 These narrative
details obviously reflect our own world more than they do the potentialof a science-fictional universe. Most of Star Wars’s attempts to imagine
a non-patriarchal society can be found in the franchise’s non-canonicalEU stories. For instance, the Tython Twi’lek community in the massively
multiplayer online roleplaying game The Old Republic (2011) is matriarchal,as is the Noghri species from Heir to the Empire. Dave Wolverton’s The
Courtship of Princess Leia (1994) even brings three separate matriarchies
together. The first is the Hapes Consortium, a system of planets populated
by pirates but later united and ruled for thousands of years by a matriarchal
society led by a ruthless Queen Mother. Much of the story takes place on
the planet Dathomir, home to two female-led groups of Force wielders.
One of these, the Witches of Dathomir, have allied themselves with thesemi-sentient rancor species, who allow the Witches to ride and commandthem in exchange for special care and protection. The rancors, too, are led
by a “herd mother.”25
Published by Bantam Spectra, Courtship made the New York Times
Bestseller list and received largely positive reviews from critics when it
was first published in 1995. Following Timothy Zahn’s hugely successful
Thrawn trilogy (1991-1993), Courtship takes readers back to an earlier point
23 Cocca, Superwomen, 87.
24 The name Skywalker originally came from Anakin’s mother Shmi, but was only passed
down because the boy allegedly had no male parent.
25 Dave Wolverton, The Courtship of Princess Leia (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 240.

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231

in the Star Wars timeline, telling the story of how Han and Leia developed
from quarrelsome lovers into the happy couple depicted throughout the
EU. In the novel, the Hapes Consortium offers Leia its wealth and powerin the ongoing fight against the remnants of the Empire. Their offer comeswith one condition, however: Leia must marry Isolder, the handsome prince
whose wife will inherit the Hapan throne. Desperate to stop this marriage,
Han kidnaps Leia and takes her to Dathomir, a planet he won in a card
game. Luke and Isolder pursue them, only to find themselves embroiled
in a conflict with the planet’s inhabitants, the warlike descendants of a
stranded group of Jedi.
The novel’s reception by fans was mixed, with some considering it to be“one of the cheesiest and worst EU novels.”26 But criticism is generally leveledat Courtship’s overstuffed plot, melodramatic dialogue, and heavy-handed
26 Scott Rhee, review of The Courtship of Princess Leia, by Dave Wolverton, Goodreads, May
16, 2015, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1281835976.

232 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

moralizing, rather than its depiction of women. This depiction is positive
for the most part—or, at least, as positive as Star Wars depictions of any
ruling class, male or female. Women are not evil simply because of theirgender. Instead, like the male Force-wielders of the original film trilogy,
the Dathomirians are divided by their ideological approach to power: thelight-side Witch clans versus the dark-side Nightsisters. The way these matriarchies treat their subordinate male citizens (who lack Force sensitivity)
is likewise divided by ideology rather than gender. The Witches have acomplex gendered hierarchy, while the Nightsisters seem only to use men
as slaves and breeders.
In a 2016 interview, Wolverton argued that his idea for Courtship’s
matriarchal societies came about because “there really aren’t a lot of
powerful female characters in that universe” and he wanted to show “aSpace Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses

233

strongly feminist society where women were in control.”27 Although itfeatures matriarchal societies and strong female characters, Courtship is
ultimately unconvincing as a feminist narrative. Luke, Han, and Isolder
are the story’s real heroes. The Witches only defeat the Nightsisters andthe Imperial Warlord Zsinj with Luke’s help, Han wins his battle for Leia’s
affections, and Isolder stands up to his mother, the Queen of the Hapes
Consortium, by choosing to marry for love rather than political advantage.
While the novel also features powerful, positive depictions of older women,
the Witches’ skimpy tunics and exotic headdresses harken back to thesexualized Amazonian warriors of 1950s science fiction.
“Feminism” thus becomes synonymous with “female-dominated,” and,like other readings of strong women in Star Wars, “plays to fears thatfeminism means not equality, but man-hating female superiority.”28 As
many fans at the time protested, Courtship also valorizes Han’s abduction
and subsequent seduction of Leia, perpetuating the dangerous myth thatwomen must be coerced into sexual consent.29 Therefore, in spite of its
gender-progressive ambitions, the novel consistently exoticizes and objectifies its female characters and caricatures the feminism it claims to support
as a result. Though it opens up a space for feminist discourse, Courtshipalso serves as a useful illustration of the way strong female characters andstereotypically feminine genres (like romance) can still fail the most basic
feminist expectations on numerous levels.

Store Wars: Feminist Merchandising and the Gender Gap
While Star Wars’s representations of a matriarchal society are ideologicallyambiguous, its gendered approach to merchandising has influenced thestoryworld’s engagement with feminists and feminism most negatively inrecent years. The idea that gendered toys can communicate certain hetero­normative ideals to their young consumers is a familiar one. As Jonathan
Gray has argued, both marketing and the way consumers interact with
27 “Bombad Radio #51: With Author Dave Wolverton/Farland,” YouTube video, 1:06:48, posted by
Trail Makers, May 1, 2016, accessed May 15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdb_RAJt0p8.
28 Cocca, Superwomen, 102.
29 See Doug McCausland, “Lit Exclusive: Dave Wolverton Addresses Fan Criticisms of The
Courtship of Princess Leia, & MORE,” Jedi Council Forums, November 17, 2014, accessed May 15,
2017, http://boards.theforce.net/threads/lit-exclusive-dave-wolverton-addresses-fan-criticismsof-the-courtship-of-princess-leia-more.50024454/, which includes Wolverton’s defense of thisplot point.

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licensed products such as toys create a message about the franchise. Such
textual supplements, or paratexts, “tell us what to expect, and in doing
so, they shape the reading strategies that we will take with us ‘into’ thetext.”30 In her doctoral dissertation on the gendering of toy packaging in
the twentieth century, Elizabeth Sweet describes toys as “material objects
that embody the prevailing ideas of the society in which they are made […][that] also act as an important tool for the intergenerational transmissionof cultural norms and beliefs.”31 When toys or other children’s merchandiseare explicitly gendered as “for boys” or “for girls,” they transmit messages
about the types of play and stories with which children should engage. Star
Wars merchandise is no different.
On January 4, 2016, for example, just a few weeks after the release of The
Force Awakens, Carrie Goldman tweeted a picture of a letter written by her
eight-year-old daughter. It read:
Dear Hasbro,
How could you leave out Rey!? She belongs in starwars [sic] monopoly
and all the other starwars games! Without her, THERE IS NO FORCE
AWAKENS! It awakens in her! And without her, the bad guys would havewon! Besides, boys and girls need to see women can be as strong as men!
Girls matter! Boy or girl, who cares? We are equal, all of us!
Sincerely,
Annie Rose (age 8)32

The absence of Rey merchandise was read as an anti-feminist statement
and an inaccurate reflection of the film’s own feminist sensibility. Annie
Rose’s letter sparked a flurry of debate around the #WheresRey hashtag,
intended to pressure toy companies into releasing more Rey toys, and moreStar Wars merchandise “for girls” in general.33
30 Gray, Show Sold Separately, 26.
31 Elizabeth V. Sweet, “Boy Builders and Pink Princesses: Gender, Toys, and Inequality over the
Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2013), 5, http://search.proquest.
com/docview/1517101640.
32 Carrie Goldman (@CarrieGoldman), Twitter post, January 4, 2016, 5:17p.m., https://twitter.
com/CarrieMGoldman/status/683819496759537664, original emphasis.
33 A few days later, Hasbro announced that they would be releasing a new versionof Monopoly that included the character. See Michelle R. Smith, “‘Star Wars’ Monopoly Will Now Include Rey after an 8-Year-Old Wrote to Hasbro Telling Them ‘GirlsSpace Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses

235

Fans were quick to point out that this gap in the market was not new,nor had it gone unnoticed in the past. In the wake of another hashtag
campaign, #WeWantLeia, as well as a “furious” father’s complaint about
Hasbro’s Black Series Slave Leia (complete with neck chain) in his local toy
aisle,34 a mother’s 1983 letter to an Arizona magazine made the rounds ofthe internet. “Why is it that in all the mounds of Star Wars figures in all thestores in town there’s not a single Princess Leia to be found?” she asked.35
One of the online magazines that circulated the letter framed the complaint
as one in a long history of exclusion “that crops up regularly, in other words,
because girls have always loved this franchise.”36
While this comparison between similar forms of outcry in 1983 and2015 is provocative, it glosses over several important developments in the
toy industry. For one, gender stereotyping in children’s toys has become
far more pronounced since the late 1990s: “even when gender coding isn’t
explicitly reinforced by obvious signage in stores or different pages on theweb, the pervasive color coding of toys and the use of gender-stereotypicalthemes makes gender distinctions among toys impossible to avoid.”37 The
subsequent trend of basing children’s programming on toy lines, inspiredin part by the phenomenal success of Kenner’s Star Wars action figures,prioritized boys over girls as consumers well into the 1990s. As Gray points
out, Kenner’s color scheme and “framing of Star Wars as battle- and conflictdriven […] hypermasculinized the toys. […] Ads then carried this further,as did the packaging itself, which inevitably depicted young boys at play,
not young girls.”38 Indeed, toy companies have been “quite explicit about
Matter,’” Business Insider, January 8, 2016, accessed May 15, 2017, http://uk.businessinsider.com/
ap-star-wars-monopoly-to-include-rey-after-8-year-olds-note-2016-1.
34 Chris O’Connell, “Star Wars Action Figure Has Parents Furious,” Fox 29, July 13, 2015, http://
www.fox29.com/news/2029186-story.“That’s pretty inappropriate,” he allegedly objected. “I got
two daughters I don’t need seeing that crap.”
35 Susan Mills, “Where Are the Princess Leia Dolls?,” The Courier, December 9, 1983, sec. Letters,
5A.
36 Kelly Faircloth, “Parents Have Been Requesting Star Wars Toys for Their Daughters For
Decades,” Jezebel, November 13, 2015, para. 5, http://pictorial.jezebel.com/parents-have-been​-requesting-star-wars-for-their-daught-1742316633.
37 Sweet, “Boy Builders and Pink Princesses,” 1.
38 Gray, Show Sold Separately, 186. It’s worth noting that not all of Kenner’s toy products
share this same set of representational biases. Its R2-D2 and Jawa “Bop Bags,” for example,
feature both a young boy and a young girl on the packaging. The 1977 Early Bird Certificate
Package commercials also featured a boy and girl playing with action figures together, and oneof the three children in the Escape from Death Star board game commercial is female. When
girls appear in these ads, they are often shown playing with the female-gendered toys in theadvertised playsets, but otherwise they participate equally.

236 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

their strategy of segmenting the child market along gender lines in order
to sell more products.”39
In the days of the original trilogy, however, toys were not nearly as heavily
gender-marketed as they are today. Additionally, though most of the original
Star Wars merchandise was aimed at children, Star Wars was everywhereby 1983, not just in children’s products. Chris Taylor describes the period as“more obsessed with the saga than ever, awash in Return of the Jedi-themed
Pepperidge Farm cookies, AT&T Darth Vader phones, and Coca-Cola Star
Wars collectible glasses. Kids donned their Return of the Jedi roller skates
to visit the Jedi Adventure Center at their local mall.”40 These products are
not as clearly gender-coded as dolls or action figures, though some werecertainly marked by the color schemes Gray describes.
But Annie Rose’s point about Rey’s centrality to the plot of The Force
Awakens complicates the discussion of toy merchandising. In this case, acharacter who is central to the film’s plot is excluded from merchandise,allegedly because of her gender. With Leia, the situation is usually quite
different. In its infamous “empty box” campaign of Christmas 1977, Kennersold an Early Bird Certificate Package containing a Star Wars Space Club
membership card, stickers, a set of cardboard characters, and a postcard
that could be redeemed for an actual toy.41 In the set of four action figuresthat could be claimed with these vouchers from the spring of 1978, Leia wasincluded alongside Luke, Chewbacca, and R2-D2, suggesting her importanceto the story. 42 She was also featured prominently on general merchandise
like lunchboxes and T-shirts, and, in one instance, a set of Underoos.43 While
the mother in 1983 may not have been able to find Leia in her local toy store(perhaps due to demand or distribution issues), Leia was certainly out there.
Another concern with contemporary Star Wars merchandising involves
the industry’s own attempts at “feminist” marketing. Derek Johnson writes
39 Sweet, “Boy Builders and Pink Princesses,” 2.
40 Chris Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of aMultibillion Dollar Franchise (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 271.
41 See Ryan Lambie, “Star Wars: How an Empty Box Became a Must-Have Item in 1977,” Denof Geek, January 11, 2016, http://www.denofgeek.com/go/38416.
42 Though she was never as popular as the film’s male leads, Kenner/Hasbro made 44 Leia
figures between 1978 and 2012. Compare this to Luke Skywalker, the most frequently reproduced
figure, who had 89 versions in the same period. Including Leia, Hasbro has released 95 different
female characters in total from across the franchise, many of which have multiple versions andreleases (Padmé comes in 26 varieties). Taylor, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, 206.
43 Jason Bailey, “The Most Bizarre Tie-In Merchandise from ’80s Movie Classics,” Flavorwire, February 27, 2013, http://flavorwire.com/373862/the-most-bizarre-tie-in-merchandise​-from-80s-movie-classics.

Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses

237

about various forms of “pink media franchising” in Star Wars, arguing that“the historical organization, production, and marketing of the Star Wars
franchise has relied upon logics of gender difference that suggest unequalindustry interest in reaching boys versus girls, and men versus women.”44 In
other words, he suggests, these marketing paratexts have “cast Star Wars as
almost always for boys yet sometimes for girls.”45 This perception has received
the strongest outcry from feminist fans, but, as Suzanne Scott has noted, how
the franchise appeals to girls is just as significant as whether it does at all. In
her article on the gender politics of media paratexts, Scott argues that “whenmerchandise aimed at female fans does appear, these paratexts routinely
function as heterosexist attempts to hail them as postfeminist consumer
subjects, rather than acknowledging them as a part of the franchise’s preexisting fan demographic.”46
Johnson, likewise, discusses the way twenty-first-century affirmationsof female Star Wars fans are often synonymous with their re-absorption
into a heteronormative, postfeminist princess culture. Specifically, he takes
the examples of Katie Goldman, a girl who was teased at school for her Star
Wars water bottle, and of Her Universe, an online fashion and accessories
company managed by Clone Wars voice actress Ashley Eckstein. Althoughfemale fans are celebrated in both examples as “different,” Johnson argues
that “both industry and vernacular media cultures repositioned thesefigures in relation to beauty, princesses, heteronormative romance, andother postfeminist (but traditionally feminine) ideological frames.”47
Another part of the problem, therefore, is that merchandise is generally
reserved for the “official” portions of the franchise. The EU stories, whichstill proportionally feature the largest group of female Star Wars characters,
are typically ignored. Likewise, fan fiction—as an unlicensed activity thatdraws disproportionately large numbers of female fans and that represents
a diversity that official products have never come close to matching—isunrepresented in official merchandise. However, unsanctioned play can still
have an outsized impact on mainstream readings of Star Wars, especiallyon perceptions of its engagement with feminist politics.

44 Johnson, “May the Force Be with Katie,” 899.
45 Johnson, “May the Force Be with Katie,’” 900.
46 Suzanne Scott, “#Wheresrey?: Toys, Spoilers, and the Gender Politics of Franchise Paratexts,”
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34, no. 2 (2017): 138-147.
47 Johnson, “May the Force Be with Katie,” 895.

238 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance: Rogue Readings andFeminist Activism
Historically, critics have not categorized Star Wars fandom as politically progressive. As Sarah Calise argues through an analysis of fanzines, “The Star
Wars fandom, in particular, mirrored American society’s views on genderand sexual identities in the 1970s and 1980s,” though it became somewhat
more welcoming as it developed into the 1990s and onto the internet. 48
Recent critical work has described Leia as the first feminist action hero ofa new generation that came to feature outspoken and physically capablecharacters such as Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor.49 This characterizationis undoubtedly owed in large part to Carrie Fisher, herself an outspoken
feminist, who remained vocal about her role as Leia—and the sexism
levelled at her and her character—until her death in 2016. In a 1983 Rolling
Stone interview (the same edition in which Leia frolics on the cover in her
slave-girl bikini), Fisher dismissed descriptions of Leia as a “space bitch”50
and discussed the challenges of playing a strong female character:
You can play Leia as capable, independent, sensible, a soldier, a fighter,a woman in control—control being, of course, a lesser word than master. But you can portray a woman who’s a master and get through all
the female prejudice if you have her travel in time, if you add a magicalquality, if you’re dealing in fairy-tale terms. People need these biggerthan-life projections.51

This message of empowerment through fantasy is one that feminists (andfemale fans) took to heart in the ensuing years.
It may come as no surprise, therefore, that many also took their fandom
into the realm of direct political action. Fisher’s death on December 27, 2016closely followed the contentious election of Donald Trump and her nameand likeness as Leia became a rallying cry among women in the subsequent
48 Sarah E. Calise, “A Force to Be Reckoned With: Women, Star Wars, and Controlling Cultural
Production, 1977-1990,” Independent Research (Albert Gore Research Center, May 2016), 7, https://sarahcalise.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/a-force-to-be-reckoned-with.pdf.
49 See Gladys L. Knight, Female Action Heroes: A Guide to Women in Comics, Video Games,
Film, and Television (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010); Caroline Heldman, et al., “‘Hot,
Black Leather, Whip’: The (De)evolution of Female Protagonists in Action Cinema, 1960-2014,”
Sexualization, Media, & Society 2, no. 2 (April 22, 2016): 1-19; Cocca, Superwomen.
50 Caldwell, “Carrie Fisher,” para. 2.
51 Caldwell, “Carrie Fisher,” para. 11, original emphasis.

Space Bitches, Witches, and Kick-Ass Princesses

239

months. The unprecedented Women’s March on 21 January 2017 protested
Trump’s inauguration and sought to mobilize support for the preservation of
women’s rights. Posters of Princess Leia received substantial media coverageduring the event, and one particularly popular sign, designed by Hayley
Gilmore, read: “A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance.”52 Still other images
portrayed Trump as Jabba the Hutt, and dozens of “Jabba the Trump” memes
and cartoons, some featuring a “Huttslayer” Leia character, were circulated
online. Both sets of images situated the Trump administration within theStar Wars universe as an evil, anti-feminist force to be vanquished, and Leia
as a feminist role model leading the vanguard.53

52 Others proclaimed “We Are the Resistance” and “Rebel Against Hate” beside an image ofLeia, or depicted her as the 1940s icon Rosie the Riveter. Angela Watercutter, “Princess Leia
Gave the Women’s March a New Hope,” WIRED Magazine, January 23, 2017, https://www.wired.
com/2017/01/princess-leia-womens-march/.
53 Fisher’s advocacy of the movement as Princess Leia lends this reading authority, if not theofficial Lucasfilm stamp of endorsement. Though many key Star Wars figures (including Mark
Hamill, Daisy Ridley, and Lupita Nyong’o) came out strongly on social media in support of the240 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

In these fans’ reading of Leia, her position as a lone woman among men
became a positive point of identification rather than a negative exampleof Hollywood gender inequality. Like themselves or like women they knew,
Leia had faced numerous struggles and injustices in a patriarchal society,but nevertheless persisted. In this sense, Star Wars is made feminist by thefans, through public forms of “fannish play,” even when the franchise’s own
message is ambiguous and often confusing.
In conclusion: Star Wars has not become fundamentally more or lessfeminist over the past 40 years. Instead, its engagement with feminist
discourse has constantly shifted, shaped by the radical changes that boththe transmedia franchise and the political movement have undergone.
One thing that seems increasingly clear is that Star Wars tends to follow
mainstream politics rather than revolutionary ones. Fans, however, haveused their engagement with Star Wars to expand the boundaries of thestoryworld and continually transform it into something with real-world
impact. Despite the new Lucasfilm Story Group’s efforts to ensure “all Star
Wars stories tell the same story,”54 ultimately it is not Star Wars’s representation of women or its own feminist agenda that matters most, butrather how these representations and aims are continually negotiated andreinterpreted by fans, creators, licensees, and feminists around the world.

Women’s March—and its use of Leia—Disney/Lucasfilm predictably refrained from mentioning
either on its official channels.
54 Germain Lussier, “How The Lucasfilm Story Group Does Star Wars Canon,” Slashfilm, April
20, 2015, para. 1, http://www.slashfilm.com/lucasfilm-story-group-star-wars-canon/.

16. Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy
Kanan Jarrus, Outer Rim Justice, and the Legitimization of
the Obama Doctrine
Derek R. Sweet
One would be hard pressed to refute the argument that the Star Wars
universe stands as an exemplary model of cinematic bricolage. Cobbled
together from a variety of popular cultural artifacts, the mélange that is
the Star Wars space opera famously draws from 1950s serials, samurai epics,
war films, and Westerns. Despite the mishmash of textual references thatsolidified into one of the most recognizable transmedia franchises of alltime, Douglas Brode has argued that Star Wars, despite its technologized,
futuristic aesthetic, is primarily a story about “cowboys in space.”1 In fact,
the commonalities between the traditional Western and popular space
opera seem so apparent to Will Wright that he positions Star Wars as “justanother revision of the Western, the Western in intergalactic drag.”2 Even
Lucas’s penchant for the films of Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese filmmaker
known for his samurai epics, strengthens the case for reading Star Wars
as a continuation of the Western filmic tradition. As Michael Kaminski
argues, Kurosawa studied John Ford’s epic Westerns and incorporated Ford’s“long tracking shots, tension-driven editing, widescreen composition, anddynamic movement” into his own works.3 Though his admiration for theWestern-influenced works of Kurosawa, as well as his own appreciation of
Ford’s films, Lucas rehabilitates the Western mythos under a thin veneerof space opera. 4 One of the more obvious manifestations of this Western
mythos in the Star Wars pantheon is the Rebels character Kanan Jarrus.
Nearly eight months before the October 2, 2014 premiere of Rebels on the
Disney XD network, longtime Lucasfilm employee Dave Filoni (executive
1 Douglas Brode, “‘Cowboys in Space’: Star Wars and the Western Film,” in Myth, Media, andCulture in Star Wars: An Anthology, ed. Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (Lanham, MD: The
Scarecrow Press, 2012), 1.
2 Will Wright, “The Empire Bites the Dust,” Social Text 6 (Fall 1982): 120.
3 Michael Kaminski, “Under the Influence of Akira Kurosawa: The Visual Style of George
Lucas,” in Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology, ed. Douglas Brode and Leah
Deyneka (The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 90.
4 For a discussion of the relationship between horse opera and space opera, and how thelatter is derived from the former, see Brode, “Cowboys in Space,” 2.

242 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

producer and supervising director for the animated series) introduced
Kanan Jarrus, a character who confirmed that some Jedi Knights survived
Emperor Palpatine’s Order 66 and the ensuing Jedi purge in Revenge of theSith. In a live-streaming video featured on StarWars.com, Filoni described
Kanan as “the cowboy Jedi […] He’s a gunslinger that needs to put the gunaway and pick up the sword again to fight for noble causes and selflesscauses.”5 Kanan’s story, a narrative shifting back and forth from televisionseries, to comic, to novel, marked Disney’s initial foray into a transmediatedStar Wars universe. Important for this particular essay is the way Kanan’stransmedia representation reworks the familiar cowboy myth that is so
intricately intertwined with US national identity and that intersects sostrongly with contemporary foreign policy doctrines.
Grounded in the familiar narratives and iconography of the mythic
American west, yet presented via the postmodern pastiche of futuristic
space opera, the Star Wars megatext—the story that unfolds across films,
comic books, animated television series, and other media—simultaneously
reinforces and reconfigures the broadly accepted social truths of rugged
individualism, the hostile frontier, and gunslinger justice. Indeed, scholarsof Star Wars frequently argue that the mythic Wild West ethos developedby the original trilogy also has political resonance. Alan Nadel, for example,
draws parallels between Cold War geopolitics and intergalactic politics as heillustrates the ideological commonalities between Reagan-era foreign policyon the one hand and the fictional conflict between the Rebel Alliance and
the Galactic Empire on the other.6 My own analysis of The Clone Wars (20082014) questions the black-and-white ethos of cowboy diplomacy and situates
the animated series as an important cultural voice in ongoing wartime
deliberations concerning just war theory, peace, torture, and drone warfare.7
In a similar fashion, I turn my attention in this chapter to transmedial
cowboy-Jedi Kanan Jarrus to illustrate how the Star Wars saga continues
to reinvigorate and reconceptualize the familiar Western mythos. I argue
that the animated TV series challenges the notion of cowboy diplomacy
while calling on audiences to embrace President Obama’s turn toward a

5 “Kanan, the Cowboy Jedi,” StarWars.com, accessed November 11, 2016, http://www.starwars.
com/video/ star-wars-rebels-meet-kanan-the-cowboy-jedi.
6 Alan Nadel, “The Empire Strikes Out: Star Wars (IV, V, and VI) and the Advent of Reaganism,”
in New American Canon: American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War, ed. Steven
Belletto and Daniel Grausam (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 187-208.
7 Derek R. Sweet, Star Wars in the Public Square: The Clone Wars as Political Dialogue (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015).

Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy

243

supposedly more prudent, multilateral, and humanitarian approach to US
foreign policy.

Star Wars, Politics, and the Western Mythos
Kanan Jarrus stands as one of the first Star Wars characters to have his
narrative arc woven throughout multiple media in the post-Lucas era: anovel, a twelve-issue limited comic-book series, and a television series. The
idea that a character’s arc might reach across multiple platforms stands as
an example of what Anne Lancashire describes as an integrated megatext.
For Lancashire, Star Wars is “not a series of narratively-independent sequelsand prequels […] but an epic mythological saga […] consisting of […] an
intricately-designed narrative, mythological, and metaphoric whole.”8
Writing in the early 2000s, Lancashire could not have anticipated the
expansion of the Star Wars saga to include the animated elements (TheClone Wars and Rebels) and the continuation of the Skywalker legacy via the
Disney-backed third trilogy. With the rapidly expanding Disney-era canon,
the familiar mythical elements of Star Wars continue to inspire consumers
to meditate on their “responsibility to the world, to others, or to oneself.”9
In his work exploring the mythic American West, David Murdoch
moves beyond the common understandings of myth as a pedagogicalmeans of discerning and reinforcing communal values and turns to an
examination of how certain myths mediate specific cultural tensions.
These pragmatic, functional myths “arise as a means of dealing with afundamental contradiction which compromises core-values of the society,the sort of conflict which causes a persistent dilemma in the collective
unconscious.”10 To make his point regarding myth as the site of conflictmediation clear, Murdoch turns to the classic legend of King Arthur. The
Arthurian mythos, he posits, explores a basic inconsistency underlying
feudal society: the tension between the Church’s emphasis on transcendent
spiritual values like peace and care for the other and the political system’s
focus on social order through violence and class exploitation. The narrativesof heroic characters who strive relentlessly to live up to spiritual ideals,
8 A. Lancashire, “The Phantom Menace: Repetition, Variation, Integration,” Film Criticism 24(2000): 24.
9 John C. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope, and the Force (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 13.
10 David H. Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Cardiff: Welsh Academic
Press, 1996), 16.

244 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

but fall hopelessly short of doing so, provide solace for those encountering
the Arthurian myths. In a similar fashion, the myth of the American West
functions to mediate a societal conflict: the tension between reified social,economic, and political institutions benefiting cultural elites and a rustic,
national wisdom grounded in “chivalry, honour, courage, and self-reliance.”11
The mythic embodiment of this American cultural tension is, of course,
the Western cowboy.
While Murdoch’s work illustrates how familiar cultural myths invite
audiences to engage relevant social tensions and controversies, I want toshift attention to the way the Western mythos permeates US political narratives. Since the late nineteenth century, representations of the self-reliant
cowboy conquering the American frontier have been frequently associatedwith presidents’ personas and policies. Theodore Roosevelt, for example,
characterized himself as a man reinvigorated by the violence and hard
work accompanying a Western frontiersman’s struggles to subdue boththe natural world and his own unruly spirit. When Roosevelt wrote about
the cowboy, asserts Murdoch, he was writing not only about the people
he encountered in the Dakotas, but also about himself and the American
people at large.12 Always the savvy politician, Roosevelt cultivated theimage of the cowboy as he rode his way back into political relevance and,eventually, the White House. John F. Kennedy also drew from the mythic
West by replacing “an old, domestic, agrarian frontier” with a “new frontierof world power and industrial development.”13 Though Kennedy did notrefer to the archetypal cowboy directly, he did call on Americans to muster
their courage and sense of adventure as they turned toward the perils andopportunities—a metaphorical frontier—facing the nation in the latterpart of the twentieth century.
Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both embraced the Western mythos
as part of their respective presidencies and foreign policy doctrines. A political doctrine, suggests Donette Murray, embodies the guiding principles ofan administration, principles that offer a justification for why, when, andhow a particular administration chooses to act, or not to act, in particulargeopolitical circumstances.14 In his April 1, 1985 article for Time magazine,
Charles Krauthammer used the phrase “The Reagan Doctrine” to describe
11 Murdoch, The American West, 21.
12 Murdoch, The American West, 68-69.
13 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 3.
14 Donette Murray, “Military Action but Not as We Know it: Libya, Syria and the Making of
an Obama Doctrine,” Contemporary Politics 19, no. 2 (June 2013): 148.

Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy

245

the Reagan administration’s emerging policy of “overt and unashamed
American support for anti-Communist revolution.”15 The doctrine, steepedin the unambiguous moral imagery of the frontier myth, marked the returnof the US as the heroic, white-hatted cowboy protecting the dangerous
global frontier from relentless communist adversaries. When Reagan
referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” and made reference tothe space-based Strategic Defense Initiative program as “Star Wars,” hereinforced a political link between his Western-infused rhetoric and theStar Wars franchise.16
Although the Western experienced a decline during the late 1960s and1970s, the genre and its mythological themes did not disappear altogether.17
As Stephen McVeigh observed in his discussion of the Star Wars films ascommentary on US foreign policy, the prolonged conflict in Vietnam undermined American faith in two fundamental cultural myths: the myth of
the frontier and the myth of the superpower. The cultural trauma stemmingfrom the Vietnam conflict, particularly the atrocities committed by US
troops, raised important questions regarding the nation’s position as amorally righteous lawman. Likewise, the war “damaged the super power
myth by showing, that for all its might, a collection of untrained, poorly
equipped guerrillas could stymie the vast resources of the American military machine.”18 McVeigh illuminated these deteriorating cultural myths
and maintained that the Star Wars films, particularly A New Hope, offereda narrative that rehabilitated both. In one sense, the Western mythos
resurfaced in Star Wars by transporting “the tropes and conventions of theWestern from Earth to another galaxy” and, in doing so, “recontextualized
America’s Cold War ethos” to one wherein the US assumed the role of the
beleaguered yet stalwart cowboy attempting to blaze a geopolitical andideological trail of freedom, justice, and democracy.19 At the same time,
the films also criticized the impotence and immorality of US imperialism.
M. Keith Booker’s analysis of the original trilogy, for example, offers an

15 Charles Krauthammer, “The Reagan Doctrine,” Time 125, no. 13 (April 1985): 54.
16 Peter Krämer offers an excellent overview of the intersection between Reagan’s politicalrhetoric and the Star Wars films, Peter Krämer, “Star Wars,” History Today 49, no. 3 (1999): 41-47.
17 For an exploration of why films like Star Wars supplanted the traditional Western during
the 1970s and beyond, see Wright, “The Empire Bites the Dust.”
18 Stephen P. McVeigh, “The Galactic Way of Warfare,” in Finding the Force of the Star Wars
Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics, ed. Matthew W. Kapell et al. (New York: Peter Lang,
2006): 39.
19 Nadel, “The Empire Strikes Out” 191.

246 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

alternative reading wherein the US had more in common with the Empire
and the rebels were more akin with the Viet Cong.20
These dual readings of the saga’s central conflict, then, concurrently
depicted the US as regaining its moral footing as a righteous protector of
the people and warned against the dark side temptations associated withimperialism. In the more commonly articulated reading, such familiar
characters as the naïve homesteader, the worldly cardsharp, and theretired gunslinger—respectively, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and ObiWan Kenobi—graced the big screen and encouraged many moviegoers
to interpret the conflict between the principled Rebel Alliance and thenefarious Galactic Empire as an analog to the Cold War conflict between
the United States and the Soviet Union. Similar to the filmic portrayalof the Rebel Alliance, a small group of moralistic freedom fighters who
found themselves surrounded by the expansive, authoritarian Galactic
Empire, political dialogue of the late twentieth century positioned the US
as a virtuous tin star “surrounded and outnumbered by hostile adversaries.”21
Whereas the Reagan Doctrine foregrounded a hostile frontier thematic,
the Bush Doctrine emphasized the figure of the retired gunfighter. As
Stacy Takacs observes in her essay unpacking the relationship between
the television Western and American politics, the characterization of theUnited States as “a reluctant gunslinger forced by circumstances to resort
to violence” is a mainstay of US political discourse.22 Just as he had done for
Reagan, Krauthammer offered an explanation for George W. Bush’s evolving
foreign policy. The Bush Doctrine, argued Krauthammer in his September
13, 2008 piece for the Washington Post, consisted of four interlocking parts:
unilateralism, or the proclivity to disregard stakeholders and act solely in
US interests (for example, the US withdrawal from the 2001 Kyoto Protocol,
a greenhouse gas treaty agreement); a “with us or against us” approach topost-9/11 counterterrorism efforts; preemptive war to protect US interests;
and an emphasis on democratic nation-building as a means of ensuring
global peace. The Bush administration’s unilateral and preemptive policies,
particularly in the War on Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq,
contributed to Bush’s portrayal as a rugged, self-reliant do-gooder standing
against the savages of the global plains.
20 M. Keith Booker, Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture (Westport,
CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 116.
21 Nadal, “The Empire Strikes Out,”189.
22 Stacy Takacs, “The Contemporary Politics of the Western Form: Bush, Saving Jessica Lynch,
and Deadwood,” in Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture and the “War on Terror,” ed. Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell (New York: Continuum, 2010), 153.

Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy

247This image of the reluctant gunslinger forced to strap on a six-shooter andbring order to the lawless geopolitical frontier, particularly as referenced by
the Bush administration, corresponded with the reticence of the prequelfilms’ Jedi Knights to get directly involved in galactic conflicts. This time,
however, the Western-infused Star Wars franchise openly criticized US
foreign policy. A.O. Scott’s May 16, 2005 New York Times review of Revengeof the Sith, for example, described the film as a cautionary tale “about how
a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics
becomes militarized, about how Manichaean ideology undermines therational exercise of power.” As the film’s writer-director, Lucas spotlighted
the flawed logic of black-and-white geopolitics through Anakin’s “If you’re
not with me, you’re my enemy” challenge to his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The Obama Doctrine and Outer Rim Justice
Given the costs associated with the military operations in Afghanistan andIraq, as well as waning public support for the extended military occupations,
President Obama’s decision to change foreign policy’s course should comeas no surprise.23 The emergence of an Obama Doctrine, predicated on thenotions of austerity and war fatigue, shifted foreign policy away from blunt
military force and toward covert operations and drone strikes. Andreas
Krieg observed that “Obama appears to prefer waging war in the shadowswith a light footprint and if possible limited public scrutiny.”24 Moreover,a turn toward soft power represented a fundamental about-face: the US
would foster collaborative international relationships rather than going it
alone. Obama’s move away from unilateralism and toward multilateralism,
suggests Toshihiro Nakayama, marked a recognition by US policymakers
23 Mark Thompson’s January 1, 2015 Time article titled “The True Cost of the Afghanistan
War May Surprise You” cites figures from the Congressional Research Service that estimatesthe combined cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts at over $1.5 trillion. According to a
February 2015 blog post by the Brown University Watson Institute for International and Public
Affairs, over 6,800 troops lost their lives along with 6,900 independent security contractors.
According to a March 19, 2008 Pew Research Center report of “Public Attitudes Toward the War
in Iraq: 2003-2008,” support for military action in Iraq had dropped from 72% to 38%. Similarly,
as reported by Jennifer Pinto in her October 5, 2009 CBSNews.com article “Public’s Views ofAfghanistan War have Turned Sour,” a New York Times/CBS News poll found that only 47%
percent of respondents supported continued US involvement (down from 90% immediately
following 9/11).
24 Andreas Krieg, “Externalizing the Burden of War: the Obama Doctrine and US Foreign
Policy in the Middle East,” International Affairs 92, no. 1 (January 2016): 97.

248 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingthat the world is an increasingly complex place and “that the issues theworld confronts today have become too complicated for a single nation toprovide answers.”25 Finally, the doctrine also embraced prudence whencontemplating military intervention for humanitarian ends. In his August
2016 cover article for The Atlantic titled “The Obama Doctrine,” Jeffrey
Goldberg interviewed the sitting president regarding his foreign policy
philosophy. When asked about US intervention on humanitarian grounds,
Obama responded with his trademark pragmatism:
I also believe that the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place,and full of hardship and tragedy. And in order to advance both our
security interests and those ideals and values that we care about, we’ve
got to be hardheaded at the same time as we’re big hearted, and pick andchoose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where
the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible,
but not believe that we can automatically solve it.

The shift away from military occupation (e.g. of Iraq and Afghanistan)
toward special forces operations and drone strikes as the primary weapons
in the counterterrorism arsenal, as well as the move toward UN-backed,
multinational humanitarian operations (e.g. the 2011 Libya intervention),
exemplified Obama’s commitment to a complicated calculus concerning
security interests, risk factors, and human suffering.
As a reconf iguration of the traditional gunf ighter made politically
relevant for the twenty-f irst century, Kanan echoes both the tensions
contributing to the emergence of the Obama Doctrine as well as the doctrine itself. The Rebels storyline commences roughly fifteen years after
the rise of the Empire, depicting the people of the Outer Rim Territories as
downtrodden and weary from years of Imperial occupation. Overworked
and lacking resources, inhabitants of planets such as Lothal shuffle throughtheir day-to-day lives. Kanan’s backstory, developed in comic books and anovel, further reinforces the bleak atmosphere of the television show. While
the first six issues of the Kanan comic—collected in a trade paperback
titled Kanan: The Last Padawan—show hungry and exhausted former Jedi
padawan Caleb Dume struggling to survive in the days immediately following Order 66, the novel A New Dawn describes the twenty-something—now

25 Toshihiro Nakayama, “Strategic Patience in a Turbulent World: The Obama Doctrine andits Approach to the World,” Asia-Pacific Review 22, no. 1 (May 2015): 4-5. [1-15]

Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy

249

going by the alias Kanan Jarrus—as a dispirited drifter moving aimlessly
from one job to another.26
Kanan’s experiences as a war veteran struggling to contextualize theconflict he survived reinforces the connection with post-9/11 war fatigue.
Although Rebels, as the name suggests, is a series exploring the emergenceof an organized military resistance against the Empire, Kanan expresses
opposition to becoming an active participant. Like Ethan Edwards in John
Ford’s The Searchers (1956), a cowboy scarred by his service as a Confederate
soldier, or the 2002 television show Firefly’s Malcolm Reynolds, a psychologically wounded former resistance fighter, Kanan’s military service left anindelible mark. When the crew of Kanan’s starship Ghost is drawn into
organized resistance operations more frequently, the character’s ability
to avoid large-scale military combat and maintain his status as a retired
gunslinger becomes increasingly diff icult. He expresses his dismay tolongtime friend and crewmate Hera Syndulla:
Kanan: I survived one war. I’m not ready for another one. I saw what it did.
Hera: To the Jedi.
Kanan: To everyone.27

The exchange captures Kanan’s personal loss—that of the Jedi Order—andpoints toward broader consequences for the soldier, innocents caught inthe crossfire, and the galaxy at large. Unlike a gunfight at high noon, ora lightsaber duel in the reactor chamber of a Star Destroyer, war always
harms those on the periphery. Kanan’s wartime trauma is exposed when
he relates his experiences to Ezra, a Force-sensitive he has taken on as his
own padawan learner. As he recounts: “It was at the end, the end of the war.
Our fellow soldiers, the clones, the ones we Jedi fought side by side with,suddenly turned and betrayed us. I watched them kill my master. She fought
beside them for years and they gunned her down in a second. Then theycame for me.”28 This important moment in the Rebels narrative leaves thedetails of Kanan’s trauma unexplored; Kanan: The Last Padawan, however,picks up the storyline and describes, in graphic detail, the moment clone
26 Kanan: The Last Padawan, written by Greg Weisman, drawn by Pepe Larraz and Jacopo
Camagni, and colored by David Curiel (New York: Marvel Entertainment, 2015); John Jackson
Miller, A New Dawn (New York: Del Rey, 2015).
27 Star Wars Rebels, “The Siege of Lothal,”season 2, episodes 1-2, directed by Bosco Ng and Brad
Rau, written by Henry Gilroy, Disney XD, June 20, 2015.
28 Star Wars Rebels, “The Lost Commanders,” season 2, episode 3, directed by Dave Filoni and
Sergio Paez and written by Matt Michnovetz, Disney XD, October 14, 2015.

250 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

troopers turned on Caleb and his Jedi Master, Depa Billaba, who sacrificed
herself so Caleb could live.
Just as Kanan reverberates with the war fatigue experienced by muchof the US public, he also epitomizes the tenets of the Obama Doctrine:
prudent militarism, multilateralism, and humanitarianism. One of thedifferences between Kanan and other cowboy referents in the Star Wars
megatext is his reluctance to engage in full-scale military operations. Unlike
Luke Skywalker, a farmer, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, a retired fighter, who rushheadlong into a sprawling galactic conflict, Kanan resists the call to become
embroiled in a public shootout or high noon showdown. In the premiere
episode of Rebels’s second season, “The Siege of Lothal,” Kanan expresses
his reluctance to join the rebellion and suggests that a fight against the
Empire complicates their primary mission: helping those in need. He states,“Fighting alongside soldiers isn’t what I signed up for […] When you and I
started together it was rob from the Empire and give to the needy. A noble
cause. But now we’re getting drawn into some kind of military thing. I don’t
like it.”29 Doing his best to avoid being pulled into a direct conflict with the
Empire, Kanan fights a “war in the shadows” rather than on the front lines.
Part cowboy-Jedi and part covert special forces soldier, Kanan uses his
unique skills to gather intelligence, free prisoners of war, procure supplies,
extract defectors, and sabotage Imperial war efforts.
Embodied in Kanan’s attempts to avoid the public, high-noon showdown
is also a commitment to multilateralism. Kanan’s narrative arc—fromtelevision, to comic book, to novel—includes numerous kinship groups
that help him navigate the complicated galactic events of which he finds
himself a part. As detailed in the second trade paperback collection of
the Kanan comic, Kanan: First Blood, the master-apprentice relationshipbetween Master Billaba and Caleb reinforces the idea that connections
between individuals help both on their respective life journeys.30 Likewise,
Kanan’s relationship with the Ghost crew bolsters an underlying thematicconcerning deliberation, collaboration, and group decision-making. Whileeach individual on the Ghost has a unique backstory and motivation forbecoming part of this particular family of choice, they engage in meaningful
dialogue regarding what actions to take.
Although Kanan stands as the sole “superpower” in the group, theperson who, as a cowboy-Jedi, could take matters into his own hands, he
29 Star Wars Rebels, “The Siege of Lothal.”
30 Kanan: First Blood, written by Greg Weisman, drawn by Pepe Larraz, and colored by David
Curiel (New York: Marvel Entertainment, 2015).

Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy

251

respects the decisions of the family. This tendency to work with others
also extends to the people Kanan and the crew encounter through theirtravels. For example, in “The Protector of Concord Dawn,” Kanan attempts
to negotiate a covert shipping route through Mandalorian controlled territory.31 Despite the Mandalorians’ reputation as a warrior people who
resolve conflicts through violence, Kanan insists on trying to negotiate a
non-violent solution. At various moments throughout the series, Kanan andhis crew ally themselves with space pirates, smugglers, Imperial officers,
and even a former Sith Lord. My point here is that Kanan’s portrayal as aspace cowboy who manages to keep his blaster holstered—at least someof the time—complements a central tenet of the Obama Doctrine’s foreign
policy logic: there are times when diplomacy might be a better alternative
than violence.32
Finally, Kanan’s characterization as a pragmatic humanitarian also
coincides with the ideals that comprise the Obama Doctrine. Even though
warfare is obviously a central theme in the Star Wars universe, Kanan’s
storyline unfolds during a period of military occupation and resistancerather than one of full-scale military conflict. The Galactic Civil War of
Kanan’s youth ended with the collapse of the Republic and the subsequent
rise of the Galactic Empire. So, while stormtroopers march in the streets andStar Destroyers patrol the skies, the real conflict in Rebels is the constantfight to help those in need. The opening minutes of the Rebels television
movie premiere, Spark of Rebellion, introduces Kanan as a speeder bikeriding gunslinger who robs from the Empire and gives to the poor.33 The needto help others, whether taking in an orphaned street kid to train as a Jedi
padawan, tracking down Force-sensitive infants in order to protect themfrom the Emperor, or making an attempt to run much-needed foodstuffs
through an Imperial blockade, is reiterated time and again as Kanan’s primary purpose. Unable to liberate the dusty town streets from the clutches

31 Star Wars Rebels, “The Protector of Concord Dawn,” season 2, episode 13, directed by Brad
Rau and written by Henry Gilroy and Kevin Hopps, Disney XD, January 27, 2016.
32 At the same time, it is also important to note here that reaching out to others does notalways work. A diplomatic solution might be rejected (as was the case in “The Protector of
Concord Dawn”) or an uneasy alliance might fail and do more harm than good (the former Sith
Darth Maul, for example, turns on his Ghost-crew allies and permanently blinds Kanan). These
moments underscore, as President Obama made clear in the aforementioned quotation, thatthe galaxy “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy.”
33 Star Wars Rebels: Spark of Rebellion, directed by Steward Lee and Steven G. Lee and written
by Simon Kinberg, Disney XD, October 3, 2014.

252 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingof the black-hatted villain, Kanan devotes his life to alleviating the sufferingof others. Although his order is extinct, he continues to serve like a Jedi.
In spite of his commitment to assisting others, an underlying tension
runs throughout the series: even with all his Jedi powers, Kanan cannot saveeveryone. A conversation between Kanan and Ezra captures the idea that
actions in the Rebels universe, like actions in Obama’s global community,
remain complicated. When Kanan and company come to the attentionof the Empire and raze a refugee camp in retaliation, a subdued Kanan
explains, “There’s a cost to any action we take now, Ezra.”34 As the long-term
consequences of US foreign policy suggest—for example, the rise of ISIL,
the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo, and a resurgent Taliban—Kanan’s
observations resonate with the long-term effects of post-9/11 US foreign
policy.
Trading his six-shooter for a blaster, his horse for a speeder bike, andhis Stetson hat for a ponytail, Kanan Jarrus calls viewers to engage boththe contemporary visual representation of the cowboy and the historical
Western mythos long married to US political culture since the late nineteenth century. As a character embodying the honesty, self-reliance, andjustice associated with his mythic counterpart, but also reverberating with
Obama’s prudent, multilateral, and humanitarian foreign policy rhetoric,
Kanan emerges as a site of active, transmedial myth-making. With one bootin the culturally and politically familiar themes of the frontier mythos, andthe other in the pragmatic foreign policy decisions of the Obama presidency,
Kanan’s narrative arc—as he moves from wayward youth to aimless drifterto principled hero—reconceptualizes the cowboy, changing him from thelone purveyor of justice who shoots first and asks questions later into a
prudent negotiator who cooperates with others, thinks before acting, andcarefully weighs the costs of military solutions. As his story unfolds across
television, comics, and prose fiction, Kanan Jarrus emerges as a reinvigorated space cowboy who provides the opportunity to interrogate the cultural
tensions between a war-weary public and the national responsibility towatch over the global frontier.

34 “The Siege of Lothal,” Star Wars Rebels.

17. The Kiss Goodnight from a Galaxy Far,
Far Away
Experiencing Star Wars as a Fan-Scholar on Disney Property
Heather Urbanski
While scholars have examined what can be labeled transmedia tourism
or destination fandom in relation to texts such as the BBC’s Sherlock andTwilight,1 satisfying the fan impulse to visit the galaxy far, far away is more
complicated. Star Tours, the franchise’s signature attraction at the Disney
Parks, has embodied experiential fandom since 1987, with its spaceportterminal queue area and exhibit narrative of a thriving space tourism
company. Tied into Disney’s relaunch of the Star Wars franchise with The
Force Awakens, the Disney Parks have kicked into high gear to expand
opportunities for guests to experience the saga, particularly at Hollywood
Studios in Orlando.
Disney Parks are not the only venues creating Star Wars experiences. In
her analysis of original qualitative data gathered from fan-attendees at two
London-based Star Wars “immersive attractions,” Emma Pett highlights that“the appeal of event-led cinema and interactive media is cross-generationaland demographically diverse—and perhaps more closely linked to established fan loyalties than to the appeal of the immersive experience in andof itself.”2 Pett discusses, for example, Secret Cinema’s staging of The Empire
Strikes Back, which included a nightclub replica of the Mos Eisley cantina
where attendees were assigned identities and missions, and interacted freely
with costumed character actors. Pett describes the event as one “designed
to downplay the mainstream branding of the franchise, and accentuate,

1 See, for example, Stijn Reijnders, “Stalking the Count: Dracula, Fandom, and Tourism,”
Annals of Tourism Research 38 (2011); Christine Lundberg and Maria Lexhagen, “Bitten by theTwilight Saga,” in Contemporary Tourist Experience: Concepts and Consequences, ed. by Richard
Sharpley and Philip R. Stone (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Christina Lee, “‘Welcome to
London’: Spectral Spaces in Sherlock Holmes’s Metropolis,” Cultural Studies Review 20, no. 2(2014).
2 Emma Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected’: Eventising Star Wars for Transmedia Audiences,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 13 (2016): 153.

254 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

via immersive roleplay, the potential for fans to display subcultural capitaland being ‘in the know.’”3
My position “in the know” of both the Disney and Star Wars fan communities, influenced by my identity as what Henry Jenkins calls an aca-fan,4
is a deeply personal, affective one, as many of my experiences involved
attending events with family. Family and aca-fandom have combinedfor years through such experiences as the (now discontinued) Star Wars
Weekends from 1999 through 2015,5 the Last Tour to Endor party in 2010, andthe runDisney Inaugural Dark Side Challenge Race Weekend in 2016—all
hosted at Walt Disney World in Orlando. My first costume for WorldCon
was a Jedi robe, my niece and nephew wore custom costumes (designed
and created by my mother) for the Last Tour to Endor, and I have traveled
hundreds of miles the past two years just to see the new Star Wars film on
opening night with my sister and her children.
My triple identity as Disney fan, Star Wars fan, and popular-culture
scholar provides me with a distinctive vantage point for considering the
fan dynamics and subcultures on display at the Disney Parks. Where otherchapters in this collection examine the many mediations of the Star Warssaga over the past 40 years, the reflections in this chapter are much more
personal in nature. Still, as a scholar who embraces the aca-fan label, these
personal reflections are processed through an analytical lens, leading me toidentify and question the tensions at play between inclusivity and gatekeeping within Star Wars fandom experiences.
In this chapter, I compare my experiences and perspectives on Star
Wars fandom with the intentionally and expressly exclusive Secret Cinema event described by Pett. Engagement and immersion within the Star
Wars franchise, as I have experienced it in the Disney Parks, offers a stark
contrast with other fandom experiences, such as Secret Cinema and San
Diego Comic-Con. Rather than appealing to the more exclusive tendencies
of fandom, Disney Parks explicitly welcome fans with any level of experience
with the franchise, no matter how “original” or new that experience mightbe. It is difficult to imagine anything more mainstream than the Walt
Disney Corporation, and recent changes and additions to the Star Wars
3 Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 158.
4 Henry Jenkins, “How to Break Out of the Academic Ghetto,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July12, 2006, accessed May 15, 2017, http://henryjenkins.org/2006/07/how_to_break_out_of_the_academ.html.
5 For example, at the second Star Wars Weekend in 2000, I won the trivia contest held in what
was then called Disney-MGM Studios. Several cast members expressed surprise that “a girl” wasstill left in the final rounds.

The Kiss Goodnight from a Gal a x y Far, Far Away

255

experience in the Disney Parks reflect what I see as a purposefully open
embrace of that broadly communal experience.

A Brief History of Star Wars in the Disney Parks
Despite vocal negative fan reaction to the Walt Disney Company’s purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012, the Disney Parks have maintained a licensed
relationship with Lucasfilm for decades. The first Lucasfilm-Disney Parks
collaboration produced the 3D film Captain EO, which premiered in 1986,
followed the next year by Star Tours, a motion-simulator attraction with a
Lucasfilm-produced Star Wars video and storyline.6
I experienced Star Wars in the Disney Parks (almost exclusively in Walt
Disney World) for more than a decade before joining organized fandomwith the 2001 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia. The online“flame wars” on sites like TheForce.net when The Phantom Menace wasreleased left me with a profound distaste for online Star Wars fandom. Of
course, toxic fan practices, like gatekeeping to only allow in “true” fans, hurling heavily gendered insults, and creating an unwelcoming environment
for anyone who does not identify as white, cis-gendered, straight, and male,also appear at real-life events. Such toxicity was especially noticeable during
the Last Tour to Endor party in August 2010 at Disney’s Hollywood Studios;
not because it was the first time I encountered it, but because it was thefirst time I was not attending a fandom event solo. That year, I convinced
my parents, my sister, her husband, and their young children to attend
with me. Seeing the toxic behavior through the lens of how my motheror seven-year-old niece were treated was eye-opening. Clashes regarding
acceptable decorum while children are present, particularly the use of
expletives, persisted throughout the several hours at the Last Tour party.
While hours-long queuing is common at conventions such as San Diego
Comic-Con and even the Star Wars Celebration (with which the Last Tour
party was affiliated), this is not the case at Disney Parks such as Hollywood
Studios. The elaborate Disney ride queues are designed to be part of thestory, are nearly always indoors, and are permanent fixtures intended toaccommodate all but the largest of holiday crowds (such as on New Year’s
Eve or the Fourth of July). Similarly, a FastPass system has been in place fornearly two decades to reduce waiting time. This is the Disney Parks ethos
6 As I write this, the first pictures of the construction of new Star Wars Lands at both Walt
Disney World and Disneyland are being promoted ahead of the 2019 opening dates.

256 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

I was accustomed to and expected to be in force at the Last Tour to Endorparty. Unfortunately, because of this ethos, Hollywood Studios was not
equipped to deal with the massive crowds of Star Wars fans that night, forwhom standing in a queue for hours was not unexpected. This clash of fanethos led to overcrowding on a hot and humid August night, heated tempers,
and the abusive language that all too often follows such strained conditions.
As the release of The Force Awakens approached, however, the story-firstethos of Disney became central again to the Disney Parks experiences,making 2016 the start of what feels like a new chapter for Star Wars fandom.
My own 2016 adventures started on the Disney Fantasy, one of the ships in
the Disney Cruise Line, with its inaugural Star Wars Day at Sea cruise in January. On the event day, many passengers wandered around decks in full cosplay,while most sported branded t-shirts and hats. Tusken Raiders wandered the
Atrium, interacting with passengers while Rebels episodes played continuously
on FunnelVision, the huge screen overlooking the family pool. That screen
participated in the storytelling with a video of an Imperial officer warningof Rebel infiltration, after which point stormtroopers dispersed among thecrowd. The ship’s horn, which typically cycles between seven iconic Disneytunes, instead played the “Imperial March” several times during the day.
The day was capped off by a f ireworks show that opened with theintroductory crawl from A New Hope on the FunnelVision screen. The
performance felt very similar to the 2009 Star Wars in Concert event I attended in Philadelphia, built around clip montages assembled along similar
themes to match the music (like “Duel of the Fates” synced to lightsaber
battles from the various films), with the addition of costumed actors posing
on stage. Scenes from Rebels were included in the fireworks show, as wereclips from all seven films, though scenes from The Force Awakens were usedsparingly since the film had opened less than a month before. When theattention shifted to the fireworks themselves, additional touches, such as
Vader’s breathing added to the “Imperial March,” completed the experience.
Several months later, in April 2016, came the inaugural Star Wars: Half
Marathon—The Dark Side experience, a race weekend that included a 5K,
10K, and half-marathon, plus the option to complete the Dark Side Challenge (both the 10K and half-marathon on consecutive days). My entire
family competed in at least one race and I could not pass up the chance forrace medals in the shape of the Death Star and TIE fighters. While we were
waiting in the corrals with thousands of other runners to begin the halfmarathon, Star Wars references were everywhere, including the announcer’s
constant reminders of the scene in The Force Awakens where Finn and Reytell themselves “I can do this” as they escape from Jakku. Large screens also

The Kiss Goodnight from a Gal a x y Far, Far Away

257

showed original trilogy trailers while we were waiting, making for a nostalgic
trip back in time, as well as frequent laughs at the now-dated visual effects
on display.
In her article, Pett reflects on her own experience attending the Secret
Cinema event, where she “was conscious of [her] cultural competences as a
fan being manipulated as a consumer of a high-end immersive event; however this awareness did not detract from my enjoyment of the experience.”7
I, too, shared Pett’s dual perspective during my trips to the Disney Parks in
July and November 2016. I felt chills throughout each performance of theStar Wars-themed nighttime fireworks, laser, and music show in Hollywood
Studios, the Galactic Spectacular. This show is clearly designed to hit on fan
loyalties and “sweet spots” with lines not only from the films but also fromthe trailer of The Force Awakens. For example, when Maz asks, “Who areyou?” and Rey answers, “I’m no one,” the moment is made to fit seamlessly
alongside classic lines such as “Never tell me the odds” and “I love you”/“Iknow” split across the two side screens, with Leia on the right and Han on
the left. Yet in contrast to the Secret Cinema event, this “manipulation” of
my cultural competence was open to all park guests, included in the price ofpark admission, essentially the opposite of the “high-end immersive event”
Pett describes.8 This contrast strikes me as the most critical element of theStar Wars experiences in the Disney Parks.
Pett’s analysis of Secret Cinema’s The Empire Strikes Back event concludes
that such events “are designed to downplay the mainstream branding of
the franchise, and accentuate, via immersive roleplay, the potential forfans to display subcultural capital and being ‘in the know.’”9 This “veil of
exclusivity” is inextricable, according to Pett, from the “economic practices[that] generate consumer pleasure for those initiated and ‘in the know,’”10
and relates, in my mind, to the toxic fan behaviors that have similar rootsin the protection of subcultural capital from mainstream audiences. The
gatekeeping in these events can be fairly literal, as in the secret passwords
for the Secret Cinema nightclub, or more informal, as in the “quizzes” manyfans (particularly non-white men) encounter when entering a fandom space
like San Diego Comic-Con or an online forum; it is nearly impossible to missonce one knows what to look for.

7
8
9
10

Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 159.
Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 159.
Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 158.
Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 158.

258 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Such exclusivity stands in sharp contrast with the (relatively) open invitation to all park guests to experience and enact Star Wars fandom. Recent
additions to the Star Wars experience in the Disney Parks even represent
a change from previous fandom events in those spaces, such as Star Wars
Weekends, which, in later years, had become an exercise in queuing, special
access for an extra fee, and long lines for autograph sessions. Starting in 2016,
however, Disney Parks returned to centering fan-guest engagement aroundthe Star Wars story, as opposed to limited-edition merchandise, ticketed
events, and celebrity encounters. This approach was more consistent with
the Disney Parks ethos of immersing guests in the story of an attraction
or experience, like the long-time fan favorite Pirates of the Caribbean. Suchimmersion is a hallmark of Disney Parks that separates it from other amusement parks like Six Flags or Seaworld, where the rides and attractions are
more disparate and disconnected.
Of course, as Pett mentions by referencing Thomas Austin’s work, wecannot ignore the economic realities of such fandom practices, and I certainly acknowledge that attending the Disney Parks is not cheap. Therefore,
participating in supposedly “free” events and experiences still requires
substantial economic privilege, but, even with this caveat, Disney Park
immersive events and attractions do reflect a more inclusive approachthan those described by Pett and by myself at more specialized events like
Comic-Con and Star Wars Celebration.

New Era of Star Wars in the Disney Parks
The sale of Lucasfilm to Disney marked the beginning of a new Star Warsera. The release of The Force Awakens in December 2015 led to a remarkable
year for Star Wars at the Disney Parks, where fans immersed themselves
further in the story. While 2016 included new experiences like thosedescribed above, the bulk of the new Star Wars attractions at Disney arelocated in Hollywood Studios, where the classic Star Tours ride (relaunchedin 2011) was updated with scenes of Finn and BB-8 after The Force Awakens
opened. Approaching Star Tours as part of the transmedia Star Wars experience requires seeing the attraction as both a film and a ride, along with animmersive spatial location for fans that fits the Disney Parks’ “story first”
emphasis neatly.11 The Star Tours queue area is designed as a space terminal
11 Other attractions at Disney Parks, Space Mountain in Disneyland and Rock ’n’ Roller
Coaster in Hollywood Studios, also received “overlays” temporarily turning them into StarThe Kiss Goodnight from a Gal a x y Far, Far Away259

for a travel service, complete with commercials for such destinations as
Naboo and Endor, and is filled with its own self-referential nods as well,such as the droid pilot from the previous version of the ride, Rex, who isseen in a shipping container.
Pett references Alison Griffiths’s work “on ways in which audience mobility within the viewing space is a key factor shaping the immersive experience” as part of her own analysis of the “mobile, participatory environment
and the various pleasures this facilitates.”12 Such mobility is a key elementof fun for guests who engage with the wandering Jawas and stormtroopers
both on the cruise ship and at Hollywood Studios. In that park, the combination exhibit and attraction Launch Bay is designed for and around audiencemobility, including the artwork in the queue. That queue is decorated withso many reproductions of original concept art that a long wait time is mademuch more bearable. Inside the exhibit, fans wander among props behindglass, have their picture taken with characters such as Chewbacca andDarth Vader, and play Star Wars video games on consoles set up along a wall.
And of course, there is also a gift shop where ultra-expensive collector’s
items are sold alongside less exclusive merchandise such as books, plush
toys, and custom phone cases.
The experiences, however, are not limited to just the permanent locations of Star Tours and Launch Bay. For example, we were stopped near theentrance to Hollywood Studios in November 2016 to let Captain Phasma
and a squad of First Order stormtroopers make their way up Hollywood
Boulevard toward the stage for one of their many daily appearances to warn
against the Resistance. My family and I joined dozens of other guests behindthe squad, marching along to John Williams’s score from The Force Awakens
toward the stage, with its backdrop projection of the First Order insignia.
The cross-generational aspect of these events was on full display, my view
partially blocked by young kids on adult shoulders so they could see better.
Once on stage, Phasma addressed the crowd as if we were stormtroopers:“I am here under the authority of General Hux. You are here under theauthority of me. Stand proud. Troops in this division are held to the highest
standard: mine.” The performance ended with the warning, “We do nottolerate traitors, nor those who hide them,” before the entire group marchedto Launch Bay.
The most remarkable 2016 addition, though, was the new nighttime show,
the Galactic Spectacular. While a more passive than interactive experience,Wars attractions.
12 Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 154.

260 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

it clearly fits with Pett’s conclusions that such events are “cross-generational and demographically diverse” and “closely linked to established fan
loyalties.”13 As fans, we were given the chance to re-experience the Star Wars
story in a different space and across different media, without attempts toretell the story in a cohesive way. It is also the communal event in the parks
that invokes the most varied media, which is likely why I am personally so
impressed by the experience of music, fireworks, and images from the saga
together with hundreds of other guests.
Pett places this kind of immersive experience within a long “historyof moving image narratives and storytelling techniques,” interpreting its
history “as a series of technological advancements in the quest to create theperfect illusion of an all-encompassing fictional space.”14 The multi-sensory
elements of the Galactic Spectacular at Disney’s Hollywood Studios workin much the same way, with heat from flames coming out of the top of thetheater (at three moments in the show); the iconic sound of Vader breathing
synchronized with rising and lowering red lights; Force lightning flowing
from the screen to lights in the trees; lasers timed to sounds and images of
X-wings, TIE fighters, and blaster fire; and actual fog supplementing the
Yoda segment on Dagobah.
This long quest for cinematic immersion also has a history in amusement
parks with “historical para-cinematic sites of amusement, such as Coney
Island and the Berlin Lunapark” being events that “gave early filmgoers
the opportunity to engage with the new medium of the moving image
within a space which was primarily designated for an interactive audience
experience, often on an impermanent basis.”15 This fits very well with theperpetually changing offerings at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and theDisney Cruise Line events offered in 2016 and 2017. Its impermanent basis
was particularly noticeable with the Galactic Spectacular, as new elements
were often added literally overnight, so that guests watching the show at
the end of one day could see a modified version the next. Pett sees such
immersive attractions as a “communal experience” and investigates “what[immersion] offers to the event participants.”16 Considering the Galactic
Spectacular as a communal experience, I am reminded of the excitement
in seeing a montage of iconic moments and dialogue from all three periodsin the Star Wars saga along with the intensely familiar John Williams music
13
14
15
16

Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 153.
Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 153.
Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 154.
Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 156.

The Kiss Goodnight from a Gal a x y Far, Far Away261

and Disney Parks fireworks—known among cast members as the “KissGoodnight.”
Pett specifically mentions “the heavily branded Star Wars at Madame Tussauds and Legoland’s Star Wars Event Days,” describing them as “marketed
for a broad, family-oriented demographic, extending existing consumer
loyalty across new, transmedial spaces.”17 And in the auto-ethnographic
section of her analysis, Pett describes her experience at the wax museum’s
event as “uncomfortable and not particularly enjoyable” because
the overcrowded “mainstream” environment of Madame Tussauds merely
facilitated agitation and an overall sense of the inauthentic. Furthermore,
whereas the Secret Cinema participants were predominantly middle
class, or more likely to be in possession of disposable income, visitors
to Madame Tussauds were more obviously tourists, which grated on mysense of identity as a London resident.18

When I compare this characterization to my own aca-fan experiences at theDisney Parks, I imagine that those who share Pett’s preferences would alsofind Launch Bay and the Galactic Spectacular to be insufficiently authentic.
From my perspective, however, enacting Star Wars fandom in the Disney
Parks feels decidedly more open and welcoming when compared to events
where tests of subcultural capital and an intentional non-mainstream vibe
are invoked.
Another aspect of the mainstream events Pett critiques is the commercial
nature of twenty-first-century franchises (something particularly on display in the Disney Parks experience). Much fandom scholarship expresses
frustrations that fan enthusiasm is manipulated for profit. My position asa member of this shared Disney Parks/Star Wars community complicates
those conventional critiques. Rather than feeling manipulated against
my will, or treated only as a profit center, I do also see the merchandise
available in the parks as souvenirs of family time spent on vacation and a
way to identify myself to fellow fans. Similarly, such “official” merchandise
often marks a particular trip to the Disney Parks, either with a year on theitem itself or just a specific memory attached to it (such as the BB-8 ears
my niece bought me after I had struggled to complete the runDisney Dark
Side Challenge), while also not requiring fans to be able to construct theirown handcrafted items that often carry more prestige in fandom circles.
17 Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 153.
18 Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 159.

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In their editorial overview to a special issue of Transformative Worksand Cultures, Lucy Bennett and Paul J. Booth observe that “performance isan integral part of fandom and fannish experiences.”19 While Bennett andBooth acknowledge that “visible and overt” performances such as cosplay
are most often viewed by popular culture as “‘true’ (or, at least, the most
explicit) fannish performances,” they also advocate for a more expansive
view of fan performance that “often goes beneath the surface.”20 In my own
Disney Parks observations, the in-person fan performances range fromfull-on cosplay (though recent security rules restrict this to guests under
the age of fourteen) to more subtle displays of iconic images, such as myAlex and Ani bracelet collection. I particularly prize objects that allow me
to express both fandoms at once, such as the water bottle I often carry withme to class, commemorating the relaunch of Star Tours in 2011.
Bennett and Booth recommend that we view fandom through the lensof performance, as “artificial enactments permeated by meaning,” andbehavior through rituals “of consumption, viewership, collecting, conspicuous consumption, and even overt emotional display (squee!).”21 The Disney
Parks, with their focus on story-based experiences enacted by cast members
for and with guests, is a space for fandom performances of many kinds,
displaying John Fiske’s “enunciative productivity” across franchise andintellectual property. This classic concept is described by Matt Hills as “characterising meanings that are shared or spoken in face-to-face culture,”22
though Fiske’s own description is clear that production extends beyond
text or speech to also include the “styling of hair or make-up, the choiceof clothes or accessories [as] ways of constructing a social identity andtherefore of asserting one’s membership of a particular fan community.”23
An incomplete list of such enunciative productivity from my November
2016 trip to Walt Disney World includes watching a young boy in Epcot,
wearing a full sweatsuit-like stormtrooper costume and dancing to an
Irish jig in the United Kingdom pavilion, just steps away from where Aliceand Mary Poppins make their daily appearances. Meanwhile, the crowd
gathering for the November 5 performance of the Galactic Spectacular was
19 Lucy Bennett and Paul J. Booth, “Performance and Performativity in Fandom,” Transformative Works and Cultures 18 (2015), doi:10.3983/twc.2015.0675.
20 Bennett and Booth, “Performance and Performativity.”
21 Bennett and Booth, “Performance and Performativity.”
22 Matt Hills, “Fiske’s ‘Textual Productivity’ and Digital Fandom: Web 2.0 Democratization
versus Fan Distinction?” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 10 (2013): 132.
23 John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture andPopular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992), 38.

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263

full of guests “asserting” their fandom membership. I counted at least three
young girls in Rey costumes, dozens of light-up ears showing the Death
Star, X-wings, and TIE fighters in battle, more than ten BB-8 and R2-D2
ears on adults and children, not to mention dozens of lightsabers. And
all around us were opportunities to purchase park-specific merchandise,such as popcorn buckets in the shape of Han Solo in carbonite and commemorative BB-8 cups. In this communal space, open to all park guests,
clothing and other objects (most “officially” licensed, but some homemade)contributed to what Fiske describes as the “generation and circulation ofcertain meanings of the object of fandom within a local community.”24
The community as constituted that night was local and short-lived, yet
the “established fan loyalties” described by Pett formed the basis for our
experiences that evening.25
While the Secret Cinema event Pett analyzes and the Disney Parks Star
Wars experiences are clearly very different, fans attending either seemto reflect Pett’s observation that “pre-existing fandom of the Star Wars
franchise played a significant role in their experiences of the event, offering
them a ready-made sense of communality that outlived the duration of theevening’s entertainment.”26 For example, as I was on my way back to my hotel
on November 5, 2016, I overheard the conversation of the family in frontof me. The daughter said, “Look at the moon!” to which her father replied,“That’s no moon. That’s a space station.” Light laughter spread through thecrowd as the “official” part of the Disney Parks experience came to an end,
while the communal experience continued just a little bit longer.

24 Fiske, “Cultural Economy of Fandom,” 38.
25 Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 153.
26 Pett, “‘Stay Disconnected,’” 164.

18. Formatting Nostalgia
IMAX Expansions of the Star Wars Franchise
Allison Whitney
On July 8, 2014, J.J. Abrams’s production company, Bad Robot, released atweet with an image of an IMAX camera suspended over a desert landscape,with the hashtag #bestformatever.1 At this point in time, the company
had released only a few oblique details about the production of The Force
Awakens; while it was not immediately clear if they were shooting the film inthis format, the image inspired speculation about how the much-anticipatedStar Wars film might be enhanced by the experience of IMAX. However,this was not the first intersection of Star Wars and IMAX. In this essay, I willaddress how IMAX iterations of three Star Wars films draw upon viewers’
transmedia experiences with and nostalgia for the franchise.
The 1996 documentary Special Effects: Anything Can Happen, directedby Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt, features a recreation of the opening
sequence of A New Hope in IMAX format. Using IMAX’s unique discourse ofscience documentary and sensory immersion, the recreation offers viewers
a simulation of the theatrical awe that is central to Star Wars’s place inpopular history. Six years later, Attack of the Clones was among the first films
to be reformatted for IMAX exhibition using the DMR (digital remastering)process. The IMAX version invited and magnified comparisons among anddebates about the relative merits of digital and analog formats. While many
twenty-first-century films have engaged in such discourse, Star Wars’s
decades-long rhetoric of technological innovation and cinematic nostalgia
made Attack of the Clones’s use of IMAX particularly interesting. Finally,
The Force Awakens includes a sequence shot with IMAX cameras, a factthat played a key role in the film’s promotional rhetoric by emphasizing its
faithfulness to pre-digital filmmaking practices. These three applicationsof IMAX technologies offer illuminating case studies for how Star Wars’s
transmedia manifestations cultivate viewer sensitivity to the aesthetics andphenomenology of particular film formats and subsequently align thoseformats with nostalgic sentiment.

1 Bad Robot (@BadRobot), Twitter post, July 8, 2014, 2:51 p.m. https://twitter.com/bad_robot/
status/486628757780721664.

266 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Before I go any further, I must acknowledge the complexity of defining
IMAX, a term that refers simultaneously to a corporate entity, several
exhibition formats and systems, camera technology, and a film format.
The founders of IMAX invented a 15/70 film system, which means 70mm
film (65mm negative) with fifteen perforations per frame (standard 70mm
has five perforations). This is the largest film format in use, widely referred
to as IMAX film. On the exhibition side, the IMAX brand covers several
types of projection systems and theater designs. Historically, flat-screen
IMAX involved screens between six and eight stories in height, with an
aspect ratio of 1.43:1. These theatres are now referred to as IMAX GT (Grand
Theater), the first permanent facility of which was built in 1971. 1973 saw
the beginnings of IMAX Dome, also called OMNIMAX, where the image is
projected into a dome and fills the audience’s field of vision. A 3D system
was introduced in the mid-1980s. For the first 30 years of IMAX history,
the majority of its cinemas were in museums, science centers, or at tourist
sites, but, in the late 1990s, after a change in ownership, the company began
to expand into other venues, introducing a smaller-screen design in 2003
termed MPX. In 2008, they debuted the 4K IMAX Digital projector and,in 2015, they introduced IMAX Laser, a digital system that most closely
approximates the look of 70mm film.2
While each exhibition system creates distinct experiences, IMAX offers
extreme sensory engagement, a rhetoric of immersive and participatory
media, a feeling of “being in the picture,” and a mode of cinema that isemphatically theatrical, in that it is impossible to recreate the geometryof IMAX in a home theater system. In this chapter, I discuss how theseconcepts inform each of the IMAX Star Wars films, encouraging viewers toconsciously compare IMAX’s properties to other formats, and to contemplate how format informs their engagements with the text. Furthermore,
I consider how IMAX plays into the relationship between innovationand nostalgia, both in the films themselves and in their promotion andreception.

2 To complicate matters further, companies besides IMAX use 15/70 film and there are now
competing digital projection systems that boast similarly large screens and high definition.
Given that the films I discuss were produced in cooperation with the IMAX Corporation, it
seems fair to use the term IMAX. Furthermore, there is now an IMAX digital camera, but it was
not used for the titles I discuss here.

Formatting Nostalgia

267

Special Effects
Special Effects is a documentary that traces the history of cinematic illusions, explores the science behind effects’ manipulation of perception, andfeatures an homage to King Kong, as well as behind-the-scenes footage fromthe sets of Independence Day, Jumanji, Kazaam, and the 1997 original Star
Wars trilogy special edition, including IMAX-format recreations of scenes
from A New Hope. The special-edition production footage included scenesof stormtroopers on Tatooine, a visit to Lucasfilm to examine props andpuppets from the original trilogy, and discussion of new innovations indigital effects that would appear in the forthcoming films. Special Effects
not only cultivates interest in the special editions, but it also offers what
we might regard as a series of historical reenactments. By demonstrating
how they recreate the special effects for the IMAX version of A New Hope,
the filmmakers essentially reenact the original film’s production—they
resurrect the physical objects, such as the spaceship models from theLucasfilm archive, and the filmmaking techniques in order to rehearse
the 1970s processes, all the while contemplating how IMAX cameras anddigital tools offer new challenges and possibilities. The final product ofthese sequences is then shown to the audience, offering yet another kindof reenactment, as the experience of watching A New Hope is reproduced
in a theatrical setting.
On the surface, the opening space battle from A New Hope is a practicalchoice for IMAX recreation because it does not require actors or narrative
set-up for unfamiliar viewers, but it also taps into popular narratives ofspectatorship about this specific moment in the film. Indeed, many people
who viewed A New Hope during its initial run describe the shot of the Star
Destroyer flying overhead as transformative, not only for their engagementwith the movie, but also for their understanding of cinema and its possibilities. For example, in “Zooming Out: The End of Offscreen Space,” Scott
Bukatman begins his essay with “You remember the shot […] I’m sure you
do,” then goes on to describe the opening of A New Hope in the knowledge
that any reader interested in an essay on special effects will recall how inthat shot “new cinematic technologies redefined space, displaced narrative,
and moved cinema into a revived realm of spectacular excess.”3
When presented in IMAX, the scene’s capacity to create visceral thrills
and disorientation, while challenging traditional notions of perspective,
3 Scott Bukatman, “Zooming Out: The End of Offscreen Space,” in The New American Cinema,
ed. Jon Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 248.

268 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

landscape, and mise-en-scène, calls upon viewers’ memories of the text
and of the material properties of the formats in which they have seen it. It
allowed younger viewers who might only know Star Wars from VHS, butwhose cinematic sensibilities had been shaped by the subsequent developments in special effects, to comprehend the awe of the original. At thesame time, it allowed seasoned viewers to revisit the nostalgic pleasure oftheatrical viewing, all the while positioning that experience within IMAX’s
unique discourse of sensory immersion. Special Effects thus attempted asimulation of the theatrical experience that is central to Star Wars’s placein popular history.
In order to pull off this simulation, the filmmakers had to combine historical techniques with the newest technologies. Visual effects supervisor
Bruce Nicholson “planned to film the original models and matte paintings
with a motion controlled 15perf/65mm camera, scan the original negative,
and composite the elements digitally.”4 Yet, as they worked on the project,they realized that the distinct features of IMAX film, specifically the frame’s
relationship to the viewer’s field of vision and the high-definition image,complicated the illusion. First, the large size of the IMAX camera changed
its spatial relationship to the models, so, instead of the five-foot-long Star
Destroyer model from A New Hope, they had to use the eight-foot one fromThe Empire Strikes Back to create a comparable effect.5 Further, as the Star
Destroyer flies overhead, Burtt allowed it to enter further into the frame
than in the original film. In the IMAX facilities operating in the 1990s, theframe would approach, or even extend beyond the audience’s field of vision,and therefore Burtt realized that the object’s relationship to the frame
had to change accordingly. They also had to adapt the sound for the IMAX
system; Nicholson notes that they took great pains to create “an exposure
sheet timing the rhythm of the laserblasts” so that they would match theaudience’s memories of not only the sound effects but the precise detailsof their pacing.6
Meanwhile, the high-definition quality of IMAX 70mm film and thefact that there were no wide-angle lenses for IMAX cameras complicatedthe standard miniature techniques, where filmmakers manipulate depthof f ield to exaggerate space and depth. They addressed some of theseconcerns by using larger models, but these presented more challenges inturn, as their higher level of detail, which “everyone agreed was necessary
45
6

Kelly Tyler, “The Making of Special Effects,” The Big Frame, Summer 1996, 34.
Ron Magid, “Amazing Special Effects,” American Cinematographer, August 1996, 34.
Magid, “Amazing Special Effects,” 36.

Formatting Nostalgia

269

for large-format, actually worked against the realism of the shot,” to theextent that they ended up dusting the models with powder to reduce their
sharpness.7 Burtt explains that
So much of special effects is Impressionism […] but creating impressions
for such a huge screen is much harder. Our images were subject to suchmagnification and sharpness that we feared audiences would suddenly
become aware of the imperfections. The medium asks us to see things—
even special effects—for what they really are, and that’s tough.8

Indeed, one of the reasons that IMAX has been difficult to use for fiction
filmmaking is that it picks up levels of detail that would pass notice in
35mm.
This tension between generating photorealistic illusion and educating
the viewer about the mechanics of said illusions speaks to a larger dynamic
in special-effects cinema. As Bukatman explains, by “emphasizing cinema’svisuality, special effects foreground principles of perception, while theirreflexive, presentational quality emphasizes the technologies of theirproduction.”9 In the context of Special Effects, the specific properties of both
IMAX film and new digital-effects systems raised questions about shifts
in perception and aesthetics by using material that was well-known to theaudience but also designed to highlight shifts in standards of photorealism.
Susanne Simpson, producer and writer of the documentary, explains how
Movie illusions are becoming increasingly harder to spot for what theyare. Digital technology allows us the ability to manipulate images andto recreate almost everything in this world. In the future people will
have to be very visually sophisticated to be able to tell what’s real andwhat isn’t.10

Simpson’s call for media literacy is intended to promote the film’s educational qualities to the museum market, but it also suggests that, while thedocumentary draws upon its audiences’ nostalgic attachments to Star Wars

7 Magid, “Amazing Special Effects,” 35.
8 Magid, “Amazing Special Effects,” 31.
9 Bukatman, “Zooming Out,” 254.
10 “NOVA Goes Hollywood: An Interview with Susanne Simpson, Producer of Special Effects,”
Special Effects Press Kit, Boston: NOVA/WGBH, 1996.

270 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingby valorizing technologies of the past, it also equips its viewers to appreciate,
and even question, the digital transformations of the special edition.11

Attack of the Clones
In 2002, IMAX introduced DMR, a process for digitally remastering 35mm
films for exhibition in the IMAX format. DMR technicians scan the 35mm
print, use proprietary software to analyze the image’s grain, and extrapolate from it, allowing the image to be blown up to IMAX proportions. The
soundtrack is also remastered for the IMAX six-channel system. The first
DMR release was Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, a film chosen for the historicaland scientific themes that made it attractive to the museums that housed
the majority of IMAX facilities. The second film to undergo the process was
Attack of the Clones, whose IMAX version was released six months after it
first appeared in cinemas. One reason for the delay was that DMR was a
time-consuming and labor-intensive process, but the waiting period also
had a significant impact on how audiences experienced the film.
The temporal delay meant that Star Wars fans would have already seen
Attack of the Clones, often multiple times, before seeing the IMAX version.
Not only did Attack of the Clones have the ubiquity of any Star Wars release,but the promotional campaign had placed a great deal of emphasis onformat, as it was the first Star Wars film to be shot entirely with digital
cameras (The Phantom Menace used both 35mm and HDCAM) and it was
shown, with much fanfare, in digital projection. As Richard Grusin explains,
Attack of the Clones’s digital properties were “heralded in the popular media
as marking a watershed moment in the history of film” and were evenreferenced in the industry as anticipating the end of analog filmmaking.12
While many filmgoers would have seen the film in 35mm prints, mostwould also have been acutely aware of its status as a digital text. Given
that the audience for the IMAX version would consist of Star Wars fans,
who are often highly conscious of even the smallest distinctions among
releases and formats, the IMAX version encouraged viewers to contemplate
11 It is worth noting that given IMAX documentaries’ long-running engagements and staggered
release schedules, Special Effects screened in many markets during the theatrical releases ofthe special-edition films.
12 Richard Grusin, “DVDs, Video Games, and the Cinema of Interactions,” in Post-Cinema:
Theorizing 21st Century Film, eds. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books,
2016), 65.

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271

how the film’s narrative and aesthetic properties, as well as the theatricalexperience, were affected by technological change.
Attack of the Clones is an interesting artifact of IMAX’s early DMR period,in that the reformatting reveals the interactions among technologies. First,
they decided to change the aspect ratio, accomplished through a combination of reframing and digital pans, to accommodate a shift from the original
2.35:1 to 1.81:1, which would make better use of the vertical immensity of the
IMAX screen. They also edited the film for length. IMAX films’ duration had
been limited to about 40 minutes due to the size of the projector’s platter,but DMR productions required much longer run times. Engineers soon
realized that a print over two hours in length was simply too heavy for therotors to handle, so Attack of the Clones had to cut 22 minutes of footage,
resulting in significant shifts in narrative, tone, and characterization.13
Many of the edits minimized expository dialogue, including several scenes
with Jar Jar Binks, Obi-Wan’s discussion with Jocasta Nu in the Jedi Temple
Archives, C-3PO’s introduction of Owen and Beru, and Padmé and Anakin’s
conversation with Queen Jamillia. They also removed or shortened severalof the more light-hearted scenes between Anakin and Padmé, including
the awkward exchange upon their reintroduction early in the film andthe scene in which they frolic in a field on Naboo. Many regarded the edits
as an improvement, helping to resolve inconsistencies in characterizationand narrative logic, particularly in the Anakin/Padmé dynamics, where
the IMAX version of their relationship has a consistently darker tone that
foreshadows its anticipated tragic outcome.
Viewers debated the merits of the changes, but many agreed that the“IMAX version winds up being decently similar to fan edits that succeededit.”14 While fan culture has a long tradition of remixing mainstream texts, fanedits had received considerable attention since the release of The Phantom
Menace; revisions such as The Phantom Edit began to be distributed among
fan networks.15 While it is plausible that many Attack of the Clones fan edits
were influenced by the IMAX version, it is interesting to think about the

13 Online fan communities made a point of documenting the changes. For example, see “TheDefinitive IMAX Cut Scenes List,” TheForce.net, October 31, 2002, accessed May 15, 2017, http://
www.theforce.net/latestnews/story/the_definitive_imax_cut_scenes_list_64801.asp.
14 Aluminum Falcon, “Star Wars Episode II—Attack of the Clones (2002): IMAX Cut Reconstruction,” Fanres, January 11, 2017, accessed May 15, 2017, https://forum.fanres.com/thread-1243.
html. Fanres.com is a website devoted to fan restorations of films and television programs.
15 Daniel Kraus, “The Phantom Edit,” Salon, November 5, 2001, accessed May 15, 2017, http://
www.salon.com/2001/11/05/phantom_edit/.

272 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

DMR transformation as part of a larger phenomenon of Star Wars films’transmedia reconfigurations.
While changes to the narrative had the closest connection to fan remixingof the story, the shift in scale also encouraged a different kind of engagementwith the film, one in which viewers were acutely aware of the possibilities and limits of digital cinema. Since the DMR software was designed toanalyze film grain, the fact that the images were shot on HDCAM resulted
in some digital artifacts such as pixelation, particularly of textures likehair and fabric. At the same time, the large image allowed viewers to better
appreciate the film’s astonishing efforts at world-building, with digitalmise-en-scène generating compositions so complex that they invite multiple
viewings. Kristen Whissel has discussed this moment in special-effects
history when animators began to cultivate “digital multitudes,” noting how
elaborate crowd scenes demonstrated the possibilities of digital effects tocreate minute detail and vast diegetic spaces.16 When screened in IMAX,and especially to viewers who had previously seen Attack of the Clones
in smaller formats, the film invites its viewers to look around the image
and appreciate these details, while also noting how the unique geometryof the IMAX theatre maximizes the film’s dramas of scale. For example,
a post on TheForce.net relays the observations of an IMAX projectionist,
who notes that:
this movie is much more intimate—you are allowed now to be drawn into
the details, of which there are so many that George put in that it’s hard
to believe! For example, [in a scene on Tatooine] you can see Jawas moving around inside the crawler now […] The background details become
functional instead of just being background—he says you’ll probably
spend more time watching them than anything else, because we’ve neverbeen able to see them this clearly before!17

Viewers also remarked that action and dialogue scenes alike benefitted
from the larger screen. For example, the chase sequence on Coruscantbecame all the more thrilling thanks to IMAX’s capacity to create feelings
16 In her essay, Whissel discusses the appearance of the vast Clone Army on Kamino in Attackof the Clones as an example of such digital multitudes, noting the common visual connection ofmultitudes with large spaces. Kristen Whissel, “The Digital Multitude,” Cinema Journal 49, no.
4 (2010): 97.
17 “AOTC IMAX Cuts and Deletions,” TheForce.net, October 30, 2002, accessed May 15, 2017,
http://www.theforce.net/latestnews/story/AOTC_IMAX_Cuts_and_Deletions_64824.asp.

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of vertigo, while the immensity of close-ups allowed one to appreciate
nuances of actor performances, further enhancing the sense of intimacy.
Each of these observations depends on a combination of factors, including viewers’ previous viewings of the film—therefore enabling viewers totake the time to notice changes—and the distinct technologies of IMAX
cinemas. It is important to recall that there were very few commercial
IMAX venues in 2002, so the experience of seeing a Star Wars movie ina museum or educational institution differentiated it from conventionalfilm spectatorship. With this in mind, it is interesting to note that theposter for Attack of the Clones: The IMAX Experience features Yoda wielding
his lightsaber below the tagline “Size Matters Not. Except on An IMAX
Screen.” While most Star Wars posters show characters against a starfield,
Yoda here stands above a map of the United States featuring American
landmarks, including Seattle’s Space Needle, San Francisco’s Golden Gate
Bridge, New York’s Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, Dallas’s
Reunion Tower, St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, and Washington D.C.’s Capitol—all cities that house IMAX theatres. The poster playfully references
Yoda’s commentary on scale from The Empire Strikes Back, but, equallyimportantly, it identifies this version of the film as a site-specific experience. In the hyper-cinematic spaces of IMAX theatres, viewers were able
to access properties of a film that was arguably ahead of its time, with its
complex digital multitudes only becoming fully visible on the big screen.
Further, if we regard the changes in both narrative and aspect ratio within
the larger constellation of Attack of the Clones’s transmedia manifestations, from novelizations to fan edits, then the IMAX version stands as avalorization of the creative possibilities of Star Wars’s continual remixing
and recirculation.

The Force Awakens
In the thirteen years between the releases of Attack of the Clones and The
Force Awakens, IMAX underwent substantial transformations in its exhibition infrastructure and its relationship to mainstream filmmaking. There
was a significant expansion of the commercial theatre network and the
DMR process was refined and streamlined, such that Hollywood productions now routinely have IMAX releases, sometimes featuring footage
shot on IMAX film. Fans of the format were often disappointed with these
new cinemas, which tended to have smaller screens and lower-resolution

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digital projection, decrying them as “fake” or “LieMax.”18 In contrast, themore traditional GT and Dome facilities—particularly those that retained
their 15/70 projection systems—came to represent notions of authenticity and principled cinephilia, in no small part thanks to filmmakers like
Chris­topher Nolan, who makes a point of eschewing digital cameras andvalorizing the IMAX 15/70 versions of his films as the most authentic to his
vision.19 By 2015, IMAX 15/70 had become a reference point for the valueof film in a digital age and it is in this context that The Force Awakens
articulated its own production and spectatorship narrative, incorporating
IMAX cameras and theaters as part of its rhetoric of nostalgia.
To be clear, the perceived clear divide between analog and digital filmmaking, or the notion of one being more “real” than the other, is based on
specious and arbitrary distinctions. The Force Awakens used all manner ofdigital effects, and was released in every digital format available, including Digital 2D, Digital 3D, IMAX 3D (Digital), and the motion-seat D-Box
system. And yet, advertising for The Force Awakens was careful to emphasize
the use of 35mm and IMAX film cameras, as well as practical effects suchas models, miniatures, and other non-digital techniques, and to ensure thataudiences were aware of the option of seeing IMAX film prints. For example,
a behind-the-scenes video prepared for the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con
emphasizes the similarities between The Force Awakens and the original
trilogy on the basis of a pre-digital materiality.20
The video is narrated by Mark Hamill and begins with a series of rackfocus shots, each starting with a clapboard, then suddenly shifting focus toreveal evocative sets and props, such as the Millennium Falcon, R2-D2, andstormtrooper helmets. These are followed by images of conceptual paintings, models, and puppets, whereupon Hamill’s commentary explains, “Realsets, practical effects: you’ve been here, but you don’t know this story. Nothing’s changed, really. I mean, everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed.”
Over shots of studio sets, Lupita Nyong’o wearing her motion-capture rig,
and Anthony Daniels in costume as C-3P0, Hamill’s voice continues “To see
18 The best-known objection to smaller IMAX facilities is: Aziz Ansari, “REBLOG THE FUCKOUT OF THIS,” Aziz Ansari, May 12, 2009, accessed May 15, 2017, http://azizisbored.tumblr.com/
post/106587114.
19 For further explication of Nolan’s use of IMAX, see Allison Whitney, “Cinephilia Writ Large:
IMAX in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises,” in The Cinema of
Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, eds. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015), 31-43.
20 “Star Wars: The Force Awakens—Comic-Con 2015 Reel,” StarWars.com, 2015, accessed February 12, 2017, http://www.starwars.com/video/star-wars-the-force-awakens-comic-con-2015-reel.

Formatting Nostalgia

275

how the technology has evolved, and yet, keeping one foot in the pre-digitalworld”—that final phrase over an image of a film camera, opened so we
can see and hear the film running through its gears. Several more film
cameras appear throughout the video, including an IMAX rig mounted on
the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.
This video cultivates excitement about the upcoming film in large part bymaking the case that it will adhere to filmmaking techniques whose roots
are in the 1970s, framing viewers’ nostalgia in explicitly technological terms.
Indeed, the rack focus technique is one of several formal strategies, alongwith lens flares and handheld cameras, that became popular in the 1970s as
a means of drawing attention to the apparatus of filmmaking. Julie Turnock
has argued that these strategies, and their photographic artifacts, have beencultivated for decades in the special effects traditions of Industrial Light and
Magic as a means of communicating notions of realism and authenticity.21 In
contemporary cinema they are often used as a counterpoint to the perceived
artificiality of CGI, and J.J. Abrams has come to use lens flares with such
regularity that they are something of an authorial signature, even to thepoint of becoming a joke among fans.
Given the promotional campaign’s clear alignment of film with Star
Wars’s emotional essence, we might read The Force Awakens’s IMAX sequence as a spectacle framed by technological nostalgia. Audiences who
saw the film in IMAX theatres (whether 15/70 or Digital) would be able todiscern the native-IMAX footage because of a change in aspect ratio. As
the sequence begins, Rey and Finn run toward a quad-jumper to escape theFirst Order, and Finn points off-screen to another ship, which Rey dismisses
as “garbage.” When their intended ship is destroyed, she announces “thegarbage will do” and the camera turns to reveal the Millennium Falcon—thefirst beloved icon from the original trilogy to appear in The Force Awakens.22
As they run inside the ship, its presentation in IMAX forces the viewer tocontemplate this emotionally loaded space in new terms. Indeed, the higher
resolution of IMAX film and the difference in aspect ratio encourage thekind of attention to detail that audiences had experienced with the IMAX
version of Attack of the Clones—one feels invited to look around “inside”
the Falcon in a way that its earlier representations did not.
21 Julie Turnock, “The ILM Version: Recent Digital Effects and the Aesthetics of 1970s Cinematography,” Film History 24, no. 2 (2012): 162.
22 By this point in the f ilm, we have seen familiar technologies, such as the crashed Star
Destroyer, and the ruined AT-AT where Rey has built her house. Unlike the Falcon, however,these are more generic relics of the Empire.

276 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

The combination of familiarity and novelty that is integral to the Star
Wars experience comes across in a sequence that quite literally brings life
to old machines: not only the Falcon, but also the pre-digital film camerathat reanimates it. Rey and Finn are not only under siege from the First
Order, but they must also contend with the Falcon’s antiquated equipment:
Rey barely gets the ship off the ground and Finn struggles to operate its
ill-maintained weapons. Rey chooses the unlikely but visually thrilling
strategy of flying the Falcon inside a ruined Star Destroyer, a spacecraft
whose form has become a kind of shorthand in Star Wars iconography forthe cinema’s capacity to enact dramas of scale, to transform the function of
the frame, and to offer ever more moving spectacles. The IMAX sequence
uses the combined powers of 15/70 film, practical effects, and cutting-edge
digital tools to activate viewers’ nostalgia for the cinema of the past; then,this dynamic is mapped onto a spectacle in which the characters resurrect
discarded machines, revisit the archaeological ruins of bygone wars, andultimately unite their respective hero’s quests.
While Special Effects, Attack of the Clones, and The Force Awakens employ
IMAX technology in distinct ways, they each reward audiences’ familiarity
with Star Wars as a story, an iconographic system, and a cultural phenomenon, as well as encourage audiences to contemplate how different media
formats inform the franchise’s transmedia manifestations. IMAX iterationsof Star Wars use the format’s extreme properties of scale, sensory engagement, and image quality to immerse the viewer in the films’ visceral andemotional pleasures, while also drawing their attention to the interplay oftechnology, nostalgia, and collective experience that sustains Star Wars
as a cultural force.

19. Fandom Edits
Rogue One and the New Star Wars
Gerry Canavan
For the first 35 years of its existence, the Star Wars franchise was branded as
the inspired vision of a single auteur-genius, George Lucas, who controlled
the franchise both creatively and economically. Among its major competitors in science fiction and fantasy, perhaps only Tolkien’s The Lord of theRings has been so closely identified with the mind of one person—andwhere Tolkien had his legendarium, the mythopoeic totality of the Middleearth narrative, Lucas had his saga. In interviews, Lucas typically spokeof the Star Wars saga as a unitary megatext from which the first movie
just happened to draw somewhere in the middle.1 Lucas’s self-conscious
promotion of Star Wars as a modern myth—intensified by his frequent
references to Joseph Campbell’s study of mythic narrative, The Hero witha Thousand Faces—presented the narrative as emerging from a coherent“master plan” Lucas developed in the 1970s and that has slowly unfurledever since. Borrowing from Foucault the concept of the episteme—that“strategic apparatus” within a discourse that allows “a field of scientificity”
to determine what is thinkable and unthinkable within that system2—wemight say that Star Wars had, until recently, treated Lucas’s authorial vision as the “one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all
knowledge.”3 In this chapter, I discuss Rogue One in the context of the 2012
sale of the Star Wars franchise to Disney, which functions as a moment of
epistemic break for the Star Wars franchise. While Star Wars remains Star
Wars both before and after this moment, our relationship to it as a systemof knowledge is entirely different; indeed, in this strange early momentof transition between one episteme and the next, we might even say thecurrent Star Wars episteme finds itself in a period of civil war.

1 Both the Tolkien legendarium and the Star Wars saga share this sort of bleed between text
and archival paratext as well; in both cases, much of the “full story” exists only in interviews,
letters, and author’s notes, to the extent that it exists in any fixed form at all.
2 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1980), 197.
3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 168.

278 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Lucasfilm Minus Lucas
Either as corporate brand or as episteme, any proposed coequality between
Lucas and the franchise already ignores key elements of the franchise’s
development since 1977. First, it brackets Lucas’s own frequent changes
and reformations of what the terms of that supposed master plan originallyentailed. It likewise diminishes the importance of Lucas’s many creative
collaborators on the original trilogy, including editor Marcia Lucas (hisex-wife), screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, and directors
Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, whose contributions to the Star
Wars saga were recoded as marginal or incidental within the logic of the
mythopoeic saga episteme.
That idea of Star Wars as a saga authored by a single creative genius
becomes even more untenable when considering the EU of transmedia expansions. I am hardly the first to note that Star Wars only properly became
science fiction, as opposed to space fantasy or even space fairy tale, within
the more nuanced EU material, which took the comparatively juvenile
films as building blocks to sketch out a larger and much more complicatedgalactic world-system.4 In interviews, Lucas himself has always recognized
the existence of these competing EU texts as a genuine challenge to his
narrative authority, albeit one he did not ultimately accept:
Starlog: The Star Wars Universe is so large and diverse. Do you ever findyourself confused by the subsidiary material that’s in the novels, comics,
and other offshoots?
Lucas: I don’t read that stuff. I haven’t read any of the novels. I don’t know
anything about that world. That’s a different world than my world. But I
do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars
Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it
up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could
make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, wewould have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try
to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously
they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions.5

4 I develop this argument in more detail in an article forthcoming in Extrapolation: “Hokey
Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots.”
5 Ian Spelling, “New Hopes,” Starlog 337 (August 2005): 46-48.

Fandom Edits279With the eventual release of the special editions and mixed critical reception of the prequels, the authority of Lucas’s vision began to face an evenmore dangerous challenge: the rebellion of the saga’s most-devoted fans. A
cottage industry of post- and anti-Lucas reconceptualizations of the Star
Wars franchise emerged: bootleg “despecialized” editions of the original
trilogy that remove Lucas’s changes have circulated on the internet as
the “proper” way to view the film, as have various edits of the prequelsthat remove their supposedly problematic content (including the so-called
Phantom Edit, cutting eighteen minutes of The Phantom Menace) and actor
Topher Grace’s re-edit of the prequels into a single 85-minute feature. The
widely circulated Machete Order fan practice does The Phantom Edit one
better, proposing that future viewers ought to ignore Lucas’s pretensions
to mythopoeic unity and screen the films in the order IV, V, II, III, VI, VII(omitting I entirely).6 Circulating mostly via memes and forum posts, thenow well-known Darth Jar Jar theory—which attempts to make sense of theunhappy foregrounding and subsequent unceremonious backbenching of
the controversial CGI character by proposing that he is actually the secretevil mastermind behind the rise of the Empire—is only the most popularof a large number of fan rewrites, reconceptualizations, and “head canons”
that have sought to improve the prequels.7 Most widespread among fans,though, is the ultimate fan edit: a running joke wherein fans of the franchisecollectively agree to pretend among themselves that the prequels never
happened.8
Still, it cannot be denied that Lucas provided the epistemological grounding for Star Wars in the first decades of its existence. In its so-called Jedi
Holocron, a database containing tens of thousands of entries detailing all
known persons, places, technologies, and events within the Star Wars universe, Lucasfilm developed an internal hierarchy of knowledge—eventuallyadopted by fans as well—that formally prioritized the original films andproclamations of Lucas, followed by various devalued levels of secondary
canon. With the sale to Disney in 2012 and Lucas’s formal removal as thecreative figurehead of the Star Wars project, a sort of epistemic crisis has
emerged for the franchise. Now the saga has continued into a new trilogy
6 Rogue One, discussed below, poses an interesting problem for the Machete Order viewer.
Should Rogue One, as “Episode 3.5,” be watched before A New Hope? After? After The Force
Awakens? Should it be watched at all?
7 Darth Jar Jar, accessed May 15, 2017, http://darthjarjar.com.
8 In parallel, many older fans of the franchise have become prickly even on the question of
the proper name for the original Star Wars film, many now refusing the A New Hope retitlingas a gesture that refuses Lucas’s authority as sovereign (re-)writer.

280 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingwithout Lucas’s supposedly unitary vision and also expanded into theanthology films that will tell new stories that likewise fall outside the scopeof Lucas’s mythopoeia. These films will be accompanied by a new set oftransmedia tie-ins, replacing the old EU, which has been relegated to thestatus of Star Wars Legends. With this new, clean slate, Disney’s plan is fortransmedia licensed works such as comics, books, toys, and video games
to be henceforth developed in tight internal consistency, eliminating any
need for internal divisions of canon. In the post-Lucas Star Wars there willthus be more and more texts competing for the top level of authority, as
well as more writers, directors, set designers, costumers, tie-in novelists andcomics artists, toy designers, corporate hacks, etc. all speaking with equal
authority about Star Wars—none of whom possess the same sort of obvious
sovereignty over the franchise once held by Lucas and the original films.
Disney’s ambitious multi-decade plans for the anthology films—“You
Won’t Live to See the Final Star Wars Movie,” as Wired memorably put
it—will soon swamp the Lucas-inspired saga films centered on the dramaof the Skywalker family, ostensibly in favor of a larger Star Wars universe
in which other sorts of stories about other sorts of characters might be
told. Of course, given the extremely poor reception of the prequels, thedecentering of Lucas has generally been taken as good news for the healthof the franchise. Still, the external shift in the political economy of theStar Wars franchise takes on a challenging epistemological character withregard to the internal continuity of the shared universe. Where once theprocess of adjudicating the canonicity of a given fact was in some sense
automatic—is it in the movies? did George say it?—it now requires more
complex considerations among a much larger series of competing texts andauthors that will inevitably come into conflict with one another.
What’s more, without even the fiction of a Lucas-authored master planlicensing its creative ambition, Disney cannot help but admit that they
are simply making things up as they go along, thereby weakening fan
confidence that the sequel trilogy and post-saga anthology material will
ultimately cohere to the extent the original trilogy did. J.J. Abrams famously
announced in interviews around the release of The Force Awakens that hedid not work on the next two episodes at all, saying he was leaving them inthe capable hands of Rian Johnson (who announced in interviews that hedid not work on the untitled Episode IX). All the Disney-era saga films have
had extensive periods of rewriting and reshooting, sometimes leading tosignificant delays in production, as with the six-month delay in the releaseof The Last Jedi and the shock firing of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller
from Han Solo in favor of Ron Howard midway through production. DisneyFandom Edits281

has also conceded that, following the unexpected death of Carrie Fisher in
December 2016, it has simply had to “start over” with Episode IX entirely.9
These twists and turns are strongly at odds with the more mythopoeic ideaof Star Wars. Furthermore, Disney cannot help but fuel fan speculation
about the contingencies and competing creative visions that influencea finished product, as well as further encourage fans to create their own
competing canons and visions for the franchise. In what follows, I proposethat Rogue One offers an opportunity for us to check in on the formationof this new, unmoored episteme of the Star Wars franchise in the momentthat it is still taking shape; for the moment, after all, Rogue One is still therogue one—the outlying exception that will soon become the rule.

Rogue One: Defining the Anthology Film
As soon as Rogue One was announced, it began to fuel speculation as towhat a non-saga Star Wars film would look like. Would it begin with thefamiliar fanfare and opening crawl? Would there be the familiar earlyshot of a starfield, quickly panning away to a spaceship? Would it use thewipes between scenes that the classic and prequel movies did? Would it
use music from the original trilogy? Would it use a John Williams-styleorchestral score at all? Questions like these drive home the unusual natureof the anthology film project for the franchise by questioning what formal
elements—what sights, sounds, paratexts, editing techniques—stamp amovie as truly a Star Wars film. Interviews with the production crew havemade clear that formalist concerns around familial resemblance strongly
occupied the studio during Rogue One’s production, at times swinging
back and forth between possibilities. Fans likewise hotly debated the possibilities among themselves as they waited for news to trickle out. This
period of anticipation set the pattern that emerged across Rogue One’s
production and reception: Disney’s lack of sovereign control over the Star
Wars episteme necessarily produces competing visions among fans who not
only understand themselves more as co-creators than as passive receiversof the franchise, but who now possess the digital tools to easily create anddistribute their own alternative visions of the franchise.

9 Esther Zuckerman, “Disney Started over on Star Wars: Episode IX after Carrie Fisher’s
Death,” The A.V. Club, May 5, 2017, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.avclub.com/article/
disney-started-over-star-wars-episode-ix-after-car-254835.

282 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

In the end, Rogue One distanced itself formalistically from the Star Warssaga in a number of key ways: there is no opening fanfare or crawl, in favorof a cold open, and the film uses regular cuts as opposed to Lucas’s famouswipes to move between scenes. The film also adds non-diegetic onscreen
text to indicate on which planet each scene takes place, a new technique
for the franchise. At the same time that it attempts to assert these kinds ofminor formal differences, however, Rogue One takes pains to inject itself
into the continuity of the original films, even to an extent that some might
describe as painful, suturing itself to the old Star Wars saga even as it begins
the process of ostensibly expanding and remaking it. The film draws its
plot from the first line of the original opening crawl of A New Hope—“Rebel
fighters, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory overthe evil Galactic Empire”—and contains frequent narrative and visualreferences to that movie, even ending on a CGI shot of the young Princess
Leia set perhaps minutes before the first film begins. The film lovingly
recreates that milieu in costumes, staging, and visual composition, even
deploying previously unused footage of X-wing pilots from A New Hope tolink the two films’ background characters together (as well as including
obtrusive cameos from R2-D2, C-3PO, Darth Vader, the two troublemakers
from the Mos Eisley Cantina, and so on).
The flip side of this strict (even suffocating) devotion to the original
Star Wars canon is that Rogue One presents itself as utterly disposablefrom the perspective of the Star Wars saga. Because every major character
dies and every plot thread flows directly into A New Hope, without any
excess, the film presents itself as emphatically optional from the perspectiveof the larger saga. Early fan assumptions that there would someday be a
Rogue Two, or that characters from Rogue One would eventually appear in
the saga films—based in part upon rumors that Felicity Jones had been
contracted for at least two movies—proved unfounded; instead, Rogue
One neatly dismantles itself, leaving behind no residue or storyworld mess.
Marketed as the untold story behind the destruction of the Death Star, thefilm leaves the viewer with the impression that the story is untold within
the Star Wars universe itself. Despite the direct participation of many of theprincipals from the original trilogy, none of its events are ever mentioned by
the saga characters again, even in their immediate aftermath. Rogue One’scommitment to its own self-sterilization in the service of canon hygieneis truly profound.
Contrary to the supposed expansion of the universe effected by theanthology films, then, Rogue One actually grants the saga films maximum
priority. As more anthology films arrive, this paradox will only intensify,

Fandom Edits

283

eventually making the original totalized view of a mythic saga untenable
while simultaneously reinforcing the importance of the saga films as the
only possible common ground among a decentered and multiply authoredmegatext. Moreover, without the imprimatur of an acknowledged auteur
granting it textual authority within the Star Wars episteme, Rogue One
seems unable to sustain a single canonical interpretation even within
its own limited terms. In practice, Rogue One has been marketed with astrategy that is nearly the opposite of the one used by the original Star
Wars saga; that is, rather than adopting the pose of a singular mythopoeic
vision, springing into existence fully formed, in its marketing for Rogue
One, Disney instead highlighted Rogue One’s multi-author and highly
contingent design process, including its rewritings, reshoots, excisions,and apocrypha. Where the original mode of Star Wars fandom was a kindof exegesis—unpacking a divine myth that came to us from on high, orfrom our collective unconscious, by way of Lucas’s artistic vision—the
new mode of Star Wars reception is instead a collaborative and negotiatedco-creation, in which the fan is invited by the creators themselves torewrite the movie and its place in the larger mythos in whatever terms
they prefer.
The initial spark for fandom edits—and their unusual promotion by
Disney—apparently occurred only by accident. The first teaser trailer for
Rogue One was released on April 7, 2016 and featured a number of striking
moments that never appear in the finished film; highly publicized reshoots
later in the summer, as well as post-release interviews from the creative
staff, indicate that the film was not yet in fixed form. After the film wasreleased, the highly scrutinized trailer became the locus for investigation
into that phantom originary version of the story. Fan news sites immediately
produced lists of the major changes from the trailer to the finished film
in an effort to produce a sense of what had been changed and to speculate
about what the reasons might have been. The key change seems to be in
the character of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), whose personality was evidently
more hard-edged in the original vision of the film. The trailer presents her
as something of a scoundrel (perhaps even a female variation on Han Solo)
who has been drawn into the rebellion against type. A stern voice lists her
rap sheet—“Forgery of imperial documents. Possession of stolen property.
Aggravated assault. Resisting arrest”—while Mon Mothma talks about
how reckless and undisciplined she is. Over scenes of violence, Erso retorts:“This is a rebellion, isn’t it? I rebel.” The trailer ends on a shot of Jyn in a
TIE Fighter pilot’s uniform under dialogue asking “What will you become?”
further suggesting that the character will be in some sense fundamentally284 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

untrustworthy, even perhaps that she might ultimately betray the Rebellion,
or at least appear to do so.
The seeds that were planted here influenced interpretation of the later
trailers, snowballing into a premediation of the film centered on Jyn that wasstrongly at odds with the finished film. Consequently, initial fan receptionof the film returned to the trailer (especially the initial teaser) to discoverthat most of what was presented in that format was cut, including its mostmemorable images and dialogue. Jyn’s character is not, as the trailers madeit appear, a dangerous criminal brought in by a desperate Rebellion to doa dirty job; she is instead recruited to be a living letter of introduction thatgains the Rebellion access to characters they might otherwise not be able tospeak to. Likewise, nearly all of the dialogue portraying her as an anti-hero
was gone, as was most of her roguish edge; or, as K.M. McFarland’s analysis
put it, “somewhere along the way Jyn-as-agitator got downgraded to Jyn-asjaded-neutral-objector.”10 Without the fan expectations produced by thepremediation of the trailers, Erso’s personal motivations and backstory are
fairly opaque, and her character therefore largely remains a cipher. Perhaps
not incidentally, much of the initial fan analysis of the film has found itself
nostalgic for the trailer, as opposed to appreciating the finished film—moreattached to the premediation than to the thing itself.
The film’s bleak ending similarly turns out to have multiple possibilities
in the trailers, with characters appearing in locations during the final heistthat would be impossible in the narrative as presented. In this difference
between the trailer and the final film, the development of a new epistemein Star Wars is clear; while the facts of Rogue One are set (they all die), theexplanation for the emergence of that set of facts becomes a contested siteof speculation between text, paratext, creators, and fans. Who intervened,
when, and why, to give us this Rogue One—as opposed to any one of its
many possible alternatives? In the old Star Wars we could have simply said,for better or worse, “George did it”; in contrast, the new Star Wars produces
multiple competing actors, each exerting force on the production, with noone faction definitively responsible for any one creative choice, or evenappearing to have final authority.
Perhaps sensing this muted sense of fan dissatisfaction, Disney’s postrelease strategy has focused to an unusual extent on explaining how thefilm reached its finished form, as well as detailing other directions the
10 K.M. McFarland, “Let’s Take a Second to Think about the Rogue One That Almost Was,”
Wired, December 20, 2016, accessed May 15, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2016/12/rogue-one​-discarded-dialogue.

Fandom Edits285

narrative might have taken. A lengthy interview with editors John Gilroy
and Colin Goudie at Yahoo UK walked fans through the process of thereshoots,11 while director Gareth Edwards’s appearance on the podcast “TheDirector’s Cut” explained his method of capturing material in a period ofcinematic experimentation called an “Indie Hour”: “It was just a way for thecrew of understanding, for now, we’re just going to do loads of random shit.
Don’t try to ask, we can’t explain. It would just be things I thought were abeautiful moment or ‘This is a great idea’ and a lot of the stuff in the trailer
ended up through that process.”12 “Random shit”—quite a change from themythic, quasi-divine inspiration that ostensibly birthed the Old Star Wars!
Other interviews with the Rogue One production staff further suggested
the fraught process of conceptualizing the film even while it was being shot,
including the last-minute addition of the climactic Darth Vader massacre atthe very end of the film, which was added in at the last possible moment. The
headline of a piece by Andrew Liptak at The Verge suggests the somewhat
dangerous PR strategy here: “Rogue One’s reshoots show how Disney saved
the first standalone Star Wars movie.”13 Rogue One was emphatically not,we are told, an inspired work of genius appearing fully formed within themind of its creator; rather, it was nearly a disaster, something that had to besalvaged at the last minute. The inevitable implication is that other versionsof the film might well have been better (or much worse) and that future entries in the franchise will likewise vary widely in planning, execution, tone,
and overall quality. Unable to control the episteme of Star Wars with theauthority Lucas once wielded and unable to microtarget global blockbusters
to suit the interests and desires of every possible fan demographic, Disney’s
unique strategy with Rogue One has been to gesture to paratexts outside thefinal print and thereby invite Star Wars fans to remix and misremember
the film in ways they find more pleasing. Very much by design, there is now
many more than just one Rogue One.
The key exception to this marketing strategy has been in the DVD
and Blu-Ray releases, which contain little deleted material despite its
11 Tom Butler, “Rogue One’s Editors Reveal the Scenes Added in the Star Wars Standalone
Reshoots (Exclusive),” Yahoo UK, January 3, 2017, accessed May 15, 2017, https://uk.movies.
yahoo.com/rogue-ones-editors-reveal-scenes-added-in-the-star-wars-standalone-reshootsexclusive-110124381.html.
12 Qtd. in The Directors’s Cut 52, https://soundcloud.com/thedirectorscut/episode-53-rogueone-a-star​-wars-story-with-gareth-edwards-and-chris-miller.
13 Andrew Liptak, “Rogue One’s reshoots show how Disney saved the f irst standalone
Star Wars movie,” The Verge, January 15, 2017, accessed May 15, 2017, https://www.theverge.
com/2017/1/15/14268850/star-wars-rogue-one-reshoots-disney-gareth-edwards-tony-gilroy.

286 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

importance to the film’s post-release promotion. Disney has claimed, tofan frustration, that the material does not exist in sufficiently fixed form to
be distributed as extras. “The stuff people talk about, like what they saw inthe trailer, they’re not scenes you can just put on a DVD,” Gareth Edwards
told Fandango in an interview.
They’re moments within scenes and threads, and you pull a thread andit all changes. It was changing the whole time. It’s not like there was one
version and then there was this other version—it was like this thingthat incrementally evolved constantly through all of post-production
and didn’t stop until there was a gun at our heads and we were forced torelease the movie.14

Disney’s marketing strategy for Rogue One thus rests on a core paradox:
Rogue One exists in multiple forms for the purposes of fan identification andcritical interpretation, while still only ever existing in a single fixed form.
The contradiction between Disney’s proliferation of paratextual alternate
versions of Rogue One—even above and beyond what it can actually commoditize as salable product, and outside the filmic canon the corporation
will commit itself to respecting in future outings—and its simultaneous
insistence on the primacy of its final cut registers the final breakdownof the old Star Wars episteme. There, everything rotated around a core ofmovies—first three, then six—mythopoeically authored by George Lucas,
on which the tie-in products commented but with which they did not reallycompete. If Rogue One is the model, the new Star Wars will be somethingquite different: now without a single privileged author and without any coretext, every entry in the franchise will reproduce and intensify this tension
between endlessly personalizable fan customization and flattened-out
mass-audience appeal. In the anthology era, Disney will need to sell eachStar Wars fan the version of each “Star Wars Story” they most prefer, allwithout taking the risk of alienating any other market or constraining thepossibilities for maximum profit-seeking further down the line. Rogue
One’s middling success—fun enough, but formulaic, and instantly forgettable—suggests this will be a very difficult balancing act to pull off, muchless iterate over and over again in a new Star Wars film every year for the
rest of our lives.
14 Qtd. in Germain Lussier, “There’s Something Weird About This Explanation for Why You
Can’t Watch Rogue One’s Deleted Scenes,” io9, March 14, 2017, accessed May 15, 2017, http://io9.
gizmodo.com/theres-something-weird-about-this-explanation-for-why-y-1793264866.

Fandom Edits

287

The Keepers of the Whills
Several years ago, Cory Doctorow made an interesting observation about
fandom over the course of an email interview with one of my classes. Speaking about the “custodial” and intensively protective relationship that fansof Disney seem to have with the theme parks, Doctorow noted competing
impulses within the Disney corporation. Over the years, the strategy has
been to simultaneously inculcate this sort of fierce loyalty and to interrupt
it, so that the “social contract” between fans and the corporation always“becomes a commercial relationship again,” with The Disney Company’s
monetary interests indisputably at the head. For Doctorow, this tension
recalled a plot from the 1992 Greg Egan novel Quarantine, in which people
whose brains have been altered by a sinister conspiracy in order to ensure
perfect loyalty ultimately overthrow the conspiracy’s dark masters, on
the grounds that only those with altered brains can be truly loyal to theconspiracy:
I always thought that was a really interesting little bit here, to say: whoare you to say that you’re the true keeper of the flame? Maybe I’m the true
keeper of the flame. You’re just a corporation who’s in it to make as muchmoney as you can from these assets. And maybe that converges sometimes with being the best custodian, and maybe sometimes it doesn’t;
maybe sometimes you’ll go off and chase the quarterly profits at theexpense of long-term value. Meanwhile, I have no commercial interest in
it—therefore I’m a better custodian than you, I should have more say in itthat you do. And I think that relationship beats in the heart of big Disneyfans, the people you see who know the park like the back of their hand.15

In the context of Star Wars, of course, the more precise term would not be“flame” but “Whills.” From his earliest drafts, Lucas imagined the Guardiansof the Whills as a monastic order devoted to chronicling the history of
the galaxy; he even described the Star Wars movies as a narrative told by
R2-D2 to some “Keeper of the Whills” a hundred years or more after the
events of the original trilogy. The Guardians of the Whills—long a saga
paratext with canonical, Lucas-backed authority despite never appearing on
15 “Trying to Predict the Present: An Interview with Cory Doctorow,” Gerry Canavan, Spring
2010, accessed May 15, 2017, http://gerrycanavan.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/from-the-archivesinterview-with-cory-doctorow-on-disney-sf-violence-meritocracy-goodharts-law-fandom-andutopia.

288 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

screen—finally became canon in Rogue One in the characters Baze Malbus
and Chirrut Imwe, non-Jedi who exhibit a religious devotion to the Forceand even seem to have some access to its powers.
The reemergence of the Keeper of the Whills from the primordial Star
Wars mythos into the post-Lucas Star Wars era provides an interesting
figure for the task of managing the Star Wars episteme in its Disney era. The
figure of the Keeper of the Whills suggests a history that is simultaneously
authoritative and constructed—objective but perspectival, obsessively
detailed but not total or complete. It foregrounds precisely the epistemic
grounding that Star Wars now faces: a history that is neither authoritative
nor authored but rather partial, polyvocal, and negotiated among multiplecompeting actors with sharply divided interests.16
It cannot be coincidence that, in the recent Aftermath: Empire’s End
novel, we see a glimpse of the holy writing of the Whills that points to thecrisis of knowledge that comes to Star Wars after God (Lucas) is dead (or atleast retired). Remixing the language from the foundational retcon of theLucas era in Star Wars—the awkward moment in Return of the Jedi in which
Obi-Wan comes close to conceding that everything he told Luke about his
father in A New Hope was a lie—the Journal of the Whills proclaims: “Thetruth in our soul / Is that nothing is true. / The question of life / Is what thendo we do? / The burden is ours / To penance, we hew. / The Force binds us
all / From a certain point of view.”17 The return to the Order of the Whills
strikes me as a telling metaphor for the situation of Star Wars as a franchisein this moment of transformation: Disney has traded the epistemic certaintyof the Lucas era for the post-authorial, post-mythopoeic multiplicity of the
post-Lucas Star Wars. As an initial outing, Rogue One suggests this strategy
will be financially lucrative, but creatively bankrupt—but this was only
the Death Star’s first test.
My thanks to Dan Hassler-Forest and the Rogue One panel at ICFA 2017 forhelp in developing these thoughts.

16 Leland Chee, developer of the original Lucasfilm continuity database, the Jedi Holocron,
was dubbed “The Keeper of the Holocron” by Star Wars fans; fittingly, the Disney-era successor to
the post (which includes Chee as one of many such “Keepers”) is the somewhat less audaciously
named “Lucasfilm Story Group,” suggesting even more debate, disagreement, incompleteness,and uncertainty than even that provisional Keepership. The fan alternative is the collaborative,
multi-authored Wookieepedia project.
17 Chuck Wendig, Star Wars: Aftermath: Empire’s End (New York: Random House, 2017), 178.

Afterword: “You’ll Find I’m Full ofSurprises”
The Future of Star Wars
Will Brooker and Dan Hassler-Forest
Dan Hassler-Forest: Will, you’ve been a lifelong Star Wars fan and you’ve
published numerous books and articles on the franchise and its fan culture.
Having invested so many years in Star Wars, where do you stand right now
regarding the films in the Disney era? Have the new movies made you moreor less of a fan?
Will Brooker: The meanings of “being a fan” and of “Star Wars” (and therefore, of “being a Star Wars fan”) have changed so much during my lifetimethat it’s hard to answer in terms of more or less. Between 1977 and 1983, tobe a Star Wars fan at my age meant that you loved the world depicted inand suggested by three feature films: you saw them as often as you could in
the cinema, bought all the toys that you could afford, played games basedaround the stories and characters of that world, maybe read the comic books
and spin-off paperbacks, and pursued other assorted activities like taping
the soundtrack from TV broadcast onto cassette.
Being a Star Wars fan now could involve a much broader and morediverse range of activities, around a much broader and more diverse rangeof texts: within the new Disney-authorized canon alone, there are eight
official movies, various TV series; console, PC, and phone-based games;
new comic books and novelizations; and, of course, new toys, costumes,
and other merchandise. And this is just within the post-2014 canon. A
Star Wars fan might have to specify that they also like the EU that was
relegated to Legends status after the Disney takeover; that they pretend
the prequel movies didn’t happen, and don’t include those in their own
head-canon; that they prefer the retro texts like trading cards, comics, theHoliday Special, and the Ewok movies from the era of the original trilogy.
And, of course, there are many more ways of engaging in fandom now:phone apps and online discussion boards weren’t available to me when
I first encountered Star Wars, but neither were conventions, because of
my age, and cosplay, although I did of course dress up in my own modest
way at home.

290 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

So I don’t think it’s possible to measure a person’s commitment acrossdifferent periods of “Star Wars fandom,” given the way all the words inthat phrase have so radically changed; but I could give a rough sense of myrelationship to the franchise.
As I’ve discussed in my own academic work, my first burst of Star Wars
fandom was around the original trilogy, starting when I was seven years old;it faded when new films stopped being made, inevitably, but I would say I
was still a fan at heart throughout the 1980s. I experienced a special rush
when I played the arcade games or even the basic, bleepy home computer
games based on Star Wars movies. So the Timothy Zahn books of the 1990s
revived something that was only dormant in me, rather than dead. I reallyenjoyed that return to the world and the familiar characters, and boughta few games for the more sophisticated PCs I owned during that decade.
I started writing academically about Star Wars around 1995 (an early
chapter in Postmodern After-Images, reprinted later with some framing
remarks in Liquid Metal) and I was ready to be an enthusiastic fan of theprequels, but, while I tried—a review I wrote for Scope journal at the time
is testament to that—I was, like many people, disappointed. My book Using
the Force makes an effort to celebrate Attack of the Clones and I remember
being relatively satisfied with Revenge of the Sith. But, in hindsight, I thinkthey’re simply not great films. I find it hard to even enjoy short clips ofthem now, although the online fan groups that have recently arisen around‘prequel memes’ convincingly encourage an affectionate, ironic look backat those flawed movies.
So, that’s where I was in the lead-up to The Force Awakens: wary, disillusioned, distanced. I deliberately avoided all trailers and production
information, wanting to see the film unspoiled. I was pleasantly surprisedby it, though, looking back, I do think it ticks easy boxes and treads a safe
path. I was more impressed by Rogue One the following year, which I think
did something more interesting and exciting with the dynamic between old
and new. I saw that movie three times in a week, which is not something
I usually do.
So I am not more of a fan of Star Wars now than I was between 1977 and1983, or even in the remainder of the 1980s and 1990s. I am more of a fanof Star Wars than I was between 2005 and 2016, but I also recognize that
it isn’t being made entirely for me, and people like me, anymore. On the
one hand, I feel I have a kind of authority as a long-term curator of Star
Wars—someone who lived through it and cherished it for decades, as wellas writing about it professionally—and on the other, I don’t really know
a lot about the details of the new Star Wars universe as it now stands, inAf terword: “You’ll Find I’m Full of Surprises”

291

terms of the expanded worlds and history sketched out by all the spin-offs
I now ignore. So I respect that there are other people, perhaps from younger
generations, much more expert and also more enthusiastic than I am.
The neat thing, of course, is that Star Wars is all about legacy, and generations, and passing the torch, so it’s quite easy to comfortably identify withthe older characters of the saga, giving the kids their blessing. You canfeel a connection with those fundamental themes even if you don’t reallyfeel you’re deeply invested in the franchise any more: so Star Wars has aninherent, built-in role for the older people who lived through the old battles
and now recognize that it’s time to let others have a turn.
DHF: One of the things that’s changed recently is that George Lucas is no longer
involved creatively. Instead, the new movies are the product of a collaboration
between self-declared Star Wars fans like J.J. Abrams, Gareth Edwards, Rian
Johnson, and the new cast members, together with veterans like Kathleen
Kennedy, Lawrence Kasdan, and the surviving cast members. What do you
think this will mean for the future of the franchise, and for its fan culture?
WB: Given what Lucas did with the prequels, when he had a great deal of control, it would be a struggle for anyone to make worse movies. So I can’t regretthat the franchise is now, apparently, out of his hands. I’ve read speculation
recently that his role may be still more significant than was imagined—that
The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and plans for the anthology films actuallyfollow Lucas’s notes to a surprising extent—but I feel he’s lost much of thecreative talent he had. Perhaps he was always strongest at sketching out
grand, mythical ideas, rather than writing dialogue and directing actors. So,
if there is now genuinely a situation where other people are implementing
the detail and doing the hands-on work, based on his broad strokes—as was
the case with The Empire Strikes Back—that seems promising.
If the original creator has always shown a strong, steady hand on thehelm throughout a franchise, then I can see there could be hesitancy
about passing it on to anyone else. But that isn’t the case here. I doubt thenewer, younger generation of Star Wars fans cares whether Lucas is directly
involved, and I expect many of the older generation feel like I do—though I
did hear that there was an online current of resistance to Abrams, a strand
of fandom which took a revisionist approach to the prequels and tried toargue that Lucas was the one with the true authorial integrity.
DHF: Star Wars has always been a transmedia phenomenon, with peaks ofactivity surrounding the occasional film release. Now that Disney plans to292 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

release a Star Wars film once a year, alongside a variety of TV shows andcomic books, how do you think that will impact fan production? Is this a way
for the franchise’s owners to gain more control over the Star Wars storyworld?
WB: I don’t think more official texts limits fan production. Batman appears
in multiple comic books every month and, of course, a variety of TV shows,movies, and games, and I don’t think that incredible amount of official
material has ever limited or controlled what fans do. If anything, I think the
dynamic might be opposite and that fan activity tends to tail off when facedwith a lack of canonical primary texts—compare Star Wars fandom now to
30 years ago, in the late 1980s. Equally, I don’t think producers can control
fan engagement by flooding the market. I would suggest that official texts
actually help to prompt and encourage fan creation and, on one level, they
provide the materials for bricolage, mash-ups, and other forms of pastiche.
A better example of producer control over fan activity was the official
website’s attempt to rein in and fence off unauthorized creativity, in the early
2000s; I believe there was a wave of cease and desist orders from Lucasfilm,
coupled with an invitation to produce work within the boundaries of theofficial site, where, of course, that work would be restricted and controlled.
DHF: The decision to update the films’ representation of women and ethnic
minorities in the recent films has created very different responses: on the one
hand, what seems like a majority of fans who have strongly embraced thefeatured presence of female protagonists and more diverse cast members,
while there have also been boycott campaigns accusing the films of “politicalcorrectness” and “white genocide.” Does this point to a separation within Star
Wars fandom—or perhaps even two separate kinds of Star Wars fandom—and if so, how would you relate it to the current political climate?
WB: I would hope that we don’t need to recognize racist Star Wars fans as asignificant group. I wouldn’t be surprised if the people who claim The Force
Awakens and Rogue One embody “white genocide” are affiliated more withother, political groups, and have latched onto Star Wars as a particularly
topical, high-profile platform. I also suspect that a proportion of those
may be young, immature people who don’t actually hold right-wing ideas,
misguidedly trolling and trying to provoke a reaction, using these hashtags
just to get attention and to feel part of a group: they are also “rebels,” I
suppose, but in a very stupid way.
I’m not trying to claim that Star Wars fans cannot be racist, of course,
but I do feel these boycott campaigns are more about a general bigotry thanAf terword: “You’ll Find I’m Full of Surprises”

293

they are about feeling this specific franchise has betrayed them politically.
Star Wars, to them, would (I think) be just one more example of a downward
cultural slide.
Star Wars has always lent itself to diverse political readings. In the 1980s,
it was associated with Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, of course, andwith his views on the “Evil Empire” of Russia. The Original Trilogy andRogue One are inherently about colonialism and terrorism, and can be readin a variety of ways in parallel to a range of real-world occupations andrevolutions. So I think, in themselves, they are essentially about the samething now as they always were in a political sense, which is not “everything
and nothing” exactly, but a lot of things and thus nothing specific. The
battle fought by Jyn and her comrades in 2017 is the same one that Luke,
Han, and Leia pursued in 1977: Rebels against an Empire, an opposition thatinvolves many cultural signifiers pointing in different directions. And ofcourse, that is a sensible decision—the only commercial decision—when
you’re trying to market a blockbuster franchise to audiences around theworld.
What changes, in a more fascinating and significant way, are the readings of that fictional political dynamic. The term “Resistance” began tocirculate online in the early days of the Trump administration, linked tothe currently vast and deep cultural affection for Carrie Fisher, who, ofcourse, had recently died and, in turn, her role as leader of the Rebellion
across five films of the Star Wars saga. The idea of a female-led resistanceagainst America’s current leadership and its policies clearly drew inspirationand iconography, at least superficially (in terms of placards and tweeted
images) from Leia and Jyn. I don’t think that is a meaning inherently in the
primary texts, but it’s a very interesting use of the films.
DHF: The Marvel Cinematic Universe (now also owned by Disney) has become
a media-industrial model for robust, commercially successful transmedia
storyworlds. Its complex multi-platform, multi-phase organization was
clearly inspired by Star Wars, but has now also provided a model for further
commercial development of transmedia properties. Is this a model that you
see Star Wars mimicking over the coming years? Or, if not, how do you think
Star Wars will be different?
WB: I don’t see a great difference between the Marvel Cinematic Universe
and the way the Star Wars Universe is now operating. I think Harry Potter isalso going the same way and Universal is attempting something similar withthe revival of its classic monsters. There may be less use of, and intersection

294 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingwith, television than we’re currently seeing with Marvel, but I can imagine
the films cross-referencing each other and overlapping in similar ways.
One key difference is that the Star Wars universe was firmly establishedin cinema in 1977, whereas Marvel was able to create the terms of its cinematic world and characters far more recently; so Star Wars producers now
are working in the gaps, within existing structures, and in that respect thetask is more tricky—though with more of a nostalgic pay-off when it works.
DHF: Nostalgia has always been central to the Star Wars experience, but, inthe original films, this was a diffuse and somewhat undefined nostalgia for anolder form of storytelling. Now, in the Disney-era Star Wars films, a lot of thisnostalgic sensibility has been about recreating the experience of the earlier
films (and their transmedia extensions). Is this a self-consuming nostalgia?
To what extent is Star Wars a forward-looking franchise?
WB: I think there’s a complex dynamic here. Star Wars is inherently about
the past, about legacy, inheritance, and the relationship—symbolic andliteral—between fathers and sons (and now, belatedly, also about daughters). The original trilogy essentially explores Luke’s relationship with
Vader; whether he will follow his father’s path or resist it, whether he will
destroy Vader or save him. The prequel trilogy now functions as a long
flashback—the fan-recommended Machete Order of viewing the films
positions it this way—it’s explicitly all about the past, and how things
reached the point where we came in at the start of A New Hope.
As such, the end of Revenge of the Sith is the most rewarding part of theprequels for old-school fans like me because we finally see some meshing of
the two in terms of character, plot, and design aesthetic: it satisfies becauseof our nostalgia for the originals. Rogue One is able to play up those pleasures
to a much greater extent and, in a way, has a far easier task than The Force
Awakens because of all the nods, cameos, and overlaps with the originalthat its place in the sequence enables it to introduce. That said, The Force
Awakens also hooks deeply into original trilogy nostalgia wherever it can,sometimes subtly through visual and narrative echoes and sometimes
directly, as with the reintroduction of Han Solo. The exchanges between Leia
and Han incorporate a wistful, affectionate melancholy into the storyworld,
echoing what fans are feeling.
As such, the films were always about looking back, and The Force Awakens
ramps that up even more. But at the same time, I think there is a sense of
forward dynamic. There is a new generation of young heroes, more culturally diverse than we saw in the older movies, in both the recent Star Wars

Af terword: “You’ll Find I’m Full of Surprises”

295

films. In Rogue One, of course, they all have to die, for the sake of continuity,
but I think we can see it as a progressive step—literally progressive, as
in “moving forward.” (There’s a complication here in that Rogue One isprogressive about the past, rewriting history and suggesting that the Star
Wars cast was always more diverse than we saw at the time.) I expect to seea shift away from the older characters in The Last Jedi, with Leia probably
passing on somehow in The Last Jedi and a focus primarily on Rey and hercompanions by the (as-yet-untitled) Episode IX.
However, for that to happen, I think we will either have to retain Lukeas fairly central in the story, and/or have Rey revealed as a member of oneof the saga’s central families—because Star Wars has become essentiallya family saga, a story about the Skywalkers, and I think the challenge is
to move it along while retaining that focus. So, to answer the question, itfunctions like a family: it does progress and hand its inheritance down to a
new generation, but it remains steeped in history, and I think it has always
been about looking back, learning lessons from the past while adapting to
a new period and its new challenges.
DHF: So if Star Wars has developed primarily into a semi-mythical familysaga, do you think Star Wars will remain in some way bound to the story of the
Skywalker clan across the generations? Or do you think it will start branchingout further within the central “authorized” storyworld?
WB: Obviously, Star Wars will complete the nine-episode saga, as planned,
which revolves firmly around the Skywalkers. The next anthology film,
about Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, will not be about that family andhas no obvious reason to include members of that family. If it excludes the
Skywalkers entirely, it will immediately set a new precedent for the featurefilms, as both Leia and Vader had iconic cameos in Rogue One.
On the other hand, we could argue that Han is part of the extended Star
Wars “family,” so his solo movie is an easy sell, even if it branches off fromthe Skywalker saga. Equally, a movie about Vader (between Revenge of theSith and Rogue One) would essentially be about Anakin Skywalker, a Boba
Fett movie would inevitably feature Vader, and a movie about Obi-Wan
Kenobi’s exile on Tatooine would doubtless include the young Luke. So, ina way, you would have to take a huge step away from the familiar ground of
the central saga to avoid all references to the Skywalkers. Han Solo movie
aside, that would be a riskier prospect.
Games and novels have explored the distant past and the far future of theoriginal trilogy’s world and the movie series could also, in theory, go that296 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingroute in future. I would suggest that a movie about previous Dark Lords of
the Sith, or Luke’s grandchildren, will be more difficult to pitch to a broad
audience than it was to sell to the more niche fan-base of games and novels,
so I’m not sure if I do anticipate such huge leaps forward and backwards intime, in the anthology movies.
I would expect to see side-narratives about what Han, Fett, Kenobi, andVader were doing in the gaps of the original movies first and then perhaps
the same types of solo movie about Poe Dameron, Finn, and other key
members of the sequel cast, depending on how well the next episodes arereceived, and the extent to which those new characters continue to beembraced by fans. I could possibly envisage spin-offs from the prequels,
about Darth Maul and Mace Windu, for instance, but I think those are
more likely to be kept to television series rather than standalone featurefilms. I don’t imagine we are going to get an anthology movie about Walrus
Man (Ponda Baba) or the legendary Darth Plagueis the Wise, but I guess ifthey’ve exhausted all other options, the producers might have to explore
those avenues to keep the franchise going in cinemas.
Star Wars has survived for 40 years, at the time of writing, including asixteen-year gap—easily enough time for it to lose its fan base—between
Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. It has survived a prequel trilogy
that was derided both by mainstream critics and by hardcore, long-term followers of the saga. It survived the loss of the entire EU, built up over decades
and now relegated to “Legends limbo” and thereby officially outside canon.
It now has fans who are too young to read and write, as well as middle-aged
professors adding to the academic library of Star Wars scholarship. In theabsence of official texts, Star Wars fandom—if my experience is anything
to go by—lies dormant, rather than dying: like Han Solo in carbonite, itremains alive, and in perfect hibernation. But we now know that Star Warsis bigger than Abrams, bigger than Lucas, bigger even than Disney. It is a
popular myth, passed on from one generation to another. It will do morethan just survive: it will outlive us all.

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About the Contributors
Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies
at Concordia University in Montreal. Her current research discusses the industrial
and cultural dynamics that emerge out of the institutional partnerships that havebrought together museums and film studios since the 1990s to produce collaborative exhibition projects.
Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Kingston University,
London. He was the first British editor of Cinema Journal and is the author of many
books and articles on popular culture and its audiences, including Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice’s Adventures, The Blade Runner Experience, Hunting
the Dark Knight, Forever Stardust, and the BFI Film Classics volume on Star Wars.
Andrew M. Butler is the author of Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s andEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He has the horrible feeling that Mallrats
might be his favorite movie ever. He is a co-editor of Extrapolation and is non­judging chair of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Gerry Canavan is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction. His first book is Octavia E.
Butler (University of Illinois Press, 2016). He is an editor of the journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, and co-editor of several collections inscience-fiction studies.
Megen de Bruin-Molé is teacher and PhD researcher at Cardiff University. Her
current work focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of popular remix culture, using the themes of mashup and the monstrous to explore how the twenty-first
century appropriates historical fictions and figures. You can follow her work atangelsandapes.com.
Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa
University and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He researches
media across platforms and history, and is the author of Historicising Transmedia
Storytelling (Routledge, 2016), Industrial Approaches to Media (Palgrave Macmillan,2016), and co-author of Transmedia Archaeology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

318 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Lincoln Geraghty is Reader in Popular Media Cultures in the School of Mediaand Performing Arts at the University of Portsmouth. His publications include
Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe (I.B. Tauris,2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television (Bloomsbury, 2009), and Cult
Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (Routledge, 2014).
Sean Guynes is a PhD student in the Department of English at Michigan State
University. In addition to writing on the politics of American popular fiction, he isco-editor of Whiteness and the American Superhero (forthcoming). His dissertation
is a critical/cultural history of the Futurians, a group of early-to-mid twentiethcentury leftist science-fiction writers.
Stefan Hall is Associate Professor of Communication at High Point University. In
addition to teaching Game and Interactive Media Design, he is co-Chair of the Department of Communication in the Nido R. Qubein School of Communication. His
research interests include video games, film, comics, and science-fiction studies.
Dan Hassler-Forest works as Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies
at Utrecht University. He has published books and articles on superhero movies,
comics, transmedia storytelling, adaptation studies, critical theory, and zombies.
Matt Hills is Professor of Media and Journalism at the University of Huddersfield.
He has published widely on media fandom and science-fiction film and TV, beginning with Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002) and including Cultographies: Blade
Runner (Wallflower Press, 2011) and Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015).
Henry Jenkins, the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, CinematicArt, and Education at the University of Southern California, is the author or editorof 17 books. Among them, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory
Culture; Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide; Fans, Bloggers
and Gamers; and, most recently, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism.
He blogs at henryjenkins.org.
Philipp Dominik Keidl is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies atConcordia University in Montreal. Philipp’s research focuses on the intersection ofmaterial and moving-image culture. His dissertation examines historiography asa fan practice, including case studies on publication projects, restoration tutorials,
and fan-curated museum exhibitions.

About the Contributors

319

Jonathan Rey Lee received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside, where he specialized in nineteenth-century realist
literature. He has published several papers on tabletop games and is currently
completing a book on the medium and messages of LEGO.
Tara Lomax is completing a PhD in Screen Studies at The University of Melbourne,
with a thesis on the historical, aesthetic, and industrial conditions of franchisecinema. Her other recent publications examine the industrial identity of superheroes and the sequential dynamics of villainy in Star Wars.
Cody Mejeur is a PhD candidate in English at Michigan State University, specializing in new media, narrative theory, and digital humanities. He has published ongames pedagogy and queer representation. He works in MSU’s Digital Humanities
and Literary Cognition lab, and is adjunct faculty at Ivy Tech Community College.
Drew Morton is Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University–Texarkana. He is the author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film,and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016).
Derek Sweet, associate professor of Communication Studies at Luther College,
writes about the intersection of rhetoric, popular culture, and politics. He is anavid fan of Star Wars, Iron Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, DC’s Bombshells, andspecialty coffee.
Heather Urbanski is Associate Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State
University with a Master of Arts in Writing and PhD in English (Composition/
Rhetoric). Her books, Plagues, Apocalypses, and Bug-Eyed Monsters and Science
Fiction Reboot, combine her fandom interests in science fiction and scholarly focus
on popular-culture rhetoric.
Thomas Van Parys is an independent researcher in adaptation, film, and television studies. His articles have appeared in History of Photography, Literature/Film
Quarterly, Science Fiction Studies, and more; he is also co-editor of Science Fiction
across Media: Adaptation/Novelization (Gylphi, 2013).
Jeremy W. Webster is Dean of the Ohio University Zanesville campus and Associate Professor of English. He is the author of Performing Libertinism in Charles
II’s Court: Drama, Sexuality, Politics and researches gender and sexuality in lateseventeenth-century British literature. He recently began teaching courses ontransmedia Star Wars.

320 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Allison Whitney is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on discourses oftechnology, gender, and genre in film history.
Mark J.P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. He has written about imaginary worlds, video games, franchises,
cinema, special effects, LEGO, and both digital and analog technology. He lives
in Wisconsin with his wife Diane and his sons Michael, Christian, and Francis.

Index#WeWantLeia 235#WheresRey 234
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 189
Abrams, J.J. 46-47, 265, 275, 280, 291, 296
aca-fan(s) 13, 15, 254, 261
aca-fandom 254
action figures 13, 16, 101, 120, 120n8, 125, 172,
177-178, 216, 221, 235-236
see also: toys
see also: Kenner
Aftermath: Empire’s End (novel) 288
Ahsoka (novel) 225n1
Ahsoka Tano (character) 118, 127, 225, 230
Alderaan (location) 54-55, 57, 76, 78, 177, 181
Alderaan (fanzine) 225n4, 227, 228
Aleppo, Syria 252
Alien (film) 75
Alternate Reality Games 213
American Westmythology of 202-203, 241-242, 243-247, 252
see also: frontier
see also: Western (genre)
Anakin Skywalker (character) 19, 21, 27, 42-44,
79, 81-83, 127, 149, 164, 190, 194, 197, 209, 229,
247, 271, 295
see also: Darth Vader
Apollo 13 (film) 270
An Art Odyssey (exhibition) 158
The Art of Star Wars (exhibition) 158
Arthurian myth 20, 243-244
Askewniverse 187-198
AT&T 236
AT-AT walker (vehicle) 89, 275n22
Attack of the Clones
film 43, 121, 265, 270-273, 275, 276, 290
novelization 81
The IMAX Experience (film) 273
auratic experience 214, 215, 217, 220, 222, 224
see also: transmedia → experience
auto-commemoration 215, 222
see also: transmedia → experience
B-Wing (game expansion) 97
Baby Boomers 190
Bad Robot 265
BallBlaster (game) 93
Batman (character) 292
Batman (franchise) 175
BB-8 (character) 258, 261, 263
Bear, Greg 151n25
Ben-Hur (film) 171
Bennett, Lucy 216-262
Berlin Lunapark 260

Beru Lars (character) 271
Bespin (location) 95
black nationalism 192-193, 193n23
Black Series 216, 235
Bloodline (novel) 225n1
Boba Fett (character) 18, 95, 108, 117, 119,120-122, 125, 128, 163, 191, 295
Booker, M. Keith 245-246
Booth, Paul J. 213n5, 218-219, 261-262
Bould, Mark 213n6
see also: Zane, Billy
Brackett, Leigh 278
Brooker, Will 13, 38, 40, 65n20, 163n28, 166n36,
167n38, 195, 225-226
Bukatman, Scott 267, 269
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 70, 171
Burton, Tim 159
Burtt, Ben 265, 268-269
Bush, George W. 244, 246-247
Bush Doctrine 246-247
C-3PO (character) 37, 41-45, 46-47, 67, 180, 189,
189n9, 271, 274, 283
Caillois, Roger 104, 137n16
Campbell, Joseph 15, 20, 189, 277
canon
G-canon 223-224
head canon 279
see also: Star Wars → canon
Cantina Adventure Set (playset) 172
capitalism 13, 187, 188, 190-191, 197, 213
Captain EO (film) 255
Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (madefor-TV movie) see: Ewoks → made-for-TV
moviesCGI (computer-generated imagery) 38, 275,
279, 282
Chasing Amy (film) 187, 189, 192-193, 196
Chaykin, Howard 51
Chee, Leland 288n16
Chewbacca (character) 108, 110, 148, 148n20,
161, 236, 259
Christmas Special (TV film) see: Holiday
Special (1978)
Clerkscomic book 187, 188, 189, 194, 198
film 187, 189, 190-191, 197
Clerks II (film) 187, 189, 196-197
Clerks: The Animated Series (TV series) 187,
189, 195
The Clone Warsfilm 84
TV series 23, 118, 121, 123, 124, 127-128, 163,
208, 225, 229, 237, 242, 243

322 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story tellingClub Jade 229n22
Coca-Cola 236
Cold War 242, 245-246
collective memory 156, 162, 165, 167, 168
colonialism 26, 30-31, 202-203, 206-209, 293
Coney Island 260
convergence 22, 36, 63-64, 92, 119, 126, 154, 218,
219, 224
Convergence Culture see: Jenkins, Henry
convergent incorporation 30, 218-219
Cooper, James Fenimore 205
Coppola, Francis Ford 40, 65
Corrigan, Timothy 42, 160n16
Coruscant (location) 272
cosplay 27, 104, 216, 224, 256, 262, 289
The Courtship of Princess Leia (novel) 230-233
cowboy 137, 242, 244, 245, 249, 250-252
cowboy diplomacy 242, 244-245
Creature Cantina Action Play Set (playset) 172
crossover space 215-216, 218, 220, 224
customizable card games 121-142
Dagobah (location) 70, 95, 260
Daniels, Anthony 46, 53-54, 219, 223, 274
Dark Horse Comics 97n37, 123, 147, 159, 157
Darth Jar Jar theory 279
Darth Maul (character) 118-120, 122-124, 125,
128, 196, 231n32, 296
Darth Plagueis (character) 296
Darth Sidious (character) 123, 209
see also: Emperor Palpatine
Darth Vader (character) 40-41, 42-45, 50, 52-56,
58-59, 66, 70, 78-79, 91, 95, 104-105, 108-109,
120, 125, 127, 134, 136, 1389, 139, 162, 179, 180,
183-184, 190-193, 236, 256, 259-260, 282, 285,
294, 295-296
see also: Anakin Skywalker
Dathomir (location) 230-233
DC Comics 70, 171, 192n18
Death Star (not a moon) 52, 58, 78, 90-91, 94,
97-98, 101-102, 105-106, 108-112, 169, 176-177,
179-180, 180n14, 182-185, 191-192, 229, 256,
282, 288
see also: LEGO → Death Star (set #10188),
Death Star II (set #10143)
Death Star (playset) 172, 177-178
Death Star Space Station (playset) 172, 177-178
Dena, Christy 68-69
digital remastering 265, 270-272, 273
Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (exhibition) 168
Disney 11, 25, 27, 46, 66, 68, 74n3, 84, 110, 118,174n10, 214-217, 254, 256, 280-281, 283-288,
289, 293, 296
Disney Cruise Line 256, 259, 260
Disney Parks 126, 127, 214, 253-263, 287
Disney XD 241
diversitysee: Star Wars → gendersee: Star Wars → race

see: Star Wars → sexuality
Doctor Who Experience (exhibition) 214,
218-219
Doctorow, Cory 287
Dogma (film) 187, 189
Droid Factory (playset) 172
EA Games 223
Eckstein, Ashley 237
Edwards, Gareth 46, 220, 285, 286, 291
Egan, Greg 287
Emperor Palpatine (character) 56, 57, 59,
70, 76, 79, 83, 98, 108, 123, 125, 136n15, 139,
191n12, 229, 242, 251
The Empire 55, 57-59, 62, 78, 89, 98, 98n38, 125,
127, 139, 191, 191n13, 196, 230, 231, 242, 246,248-252, 275n22, 279, 282, 293
The Empire Strikes Backfilm 16, 19, 43-44, 70, 80, 89-90, 98, 101, 118,
120, 134, 146, 163, 189, 191, 195, 228, 253,
257, 268, 273, 291
novelization 74n3, 77-78
Endor 105, 259
Enter the Matrix (video game) 102, 109
enunciative productivity 262
Epcot 262
Episode IX [as yet untitled] (film) 280-281, 295
Erector Set 170
Escape from Death Star (board game) 235n38
EU (Expanded Universe) 12, 44n29, 71, 84,
95, 95n28, 97, 118, 120, 121, 123, 125-127, 129,131n8, 132, 133, 139, 141, 143, 148, 149, 151-153,
157, 160, 164, 167, 223, 228-230, 237, 278, 280,
289, 296
Ewok Adventure (video game) 90
Ewoks (character) 21, 42
made-for-TV movies 146n12, 289
Ewoks (TV series) 23, 146n12
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (made-for-TV
movie) see: Ewoks → made-for-TV movies
experiential convergence 218, 219, 224, 253
fan conventions 26, 104, 192, 215-219, 221,224-245, 255, 257, 289
see also: London Film and Comic Con
see also: San Diego Comic-Con
see also: Star Wars Celebration
see also: WorldCon
fan fiction 28, 29, 132, 166, 195, 225, 226, 237
fan films 24
fanagement 166
fandomand feminism 225-226
gatekeeping in 254, 255, 257
feminism 226, 227, 232-233, 239-240
see also: fandom → and feminism
see also: Star Wars → gendersee also: Star Wars → and feminism
Filoni, Dave 125-127, 220, 241-242

323

Index

Finn (character) 28, 257, 258, 275, 276, 296
Firefly (TV series) 249
First Order 208, 259, 275, 276
Fisher, Carrie 53, 196, 219, 223, 238-239, 239n53,
281, 293
Fiske, John 192, 262-263
Flash Gordon (franchise) 66, 189
the Force 21, 59, 66, 89, 101, 104, 106, 129, 133-141,
149, 164, 188-189, 191n13, 196, 207, 209, 230,
232, 249, 251, 260, 288
The Force Awakens
film 22, 27, 46-47, 118, 129, 198, 221, 222, 225,
228, 234, 236, 253, 256-259, 265, 273-276,
279n6, 280, 290, 291, 292, 294
novelization 83-84
Ford, Harrison 69, 77, 110
Ford, John 241, 249
Foster, Alan Dean 50, 61, 66, 68-70, 75-76, 77,
83-84, 146
franchise novel 12, 19, 41, 50, 66-72, 73, 75,
95n28, 97n37, 104, 118, 120-121, 124-126, 133,
143-155, 145n8, 157, 161, 162, 199, 203, 216, 217,
218, 225, 228, 229-233, 242, 243, 248, 250,
278, 280, 288, 295-296
see also: tie-in novel
Freeman, Matthew 49, 50, 61n3, 62n6, 65n20,
70n34, 70n35, 71n38, 119, 145, 146n11, 157n6,
160n21, 161n23, 213n1, 214, 215n14, 218,
221n33, 223n35, 224
frontier 202-203, 205-209, 242, 244-247, 252
The Fugitive (film) 196
Funko Pop 216
Galactic Spectacular (amusement park
attraction) 257, 259, 260, 261, 262
Galaxies (video game) 23
gatekeeping see: fandom → gatekeeping in
gender see: Star Wars → gender
Generation X 190, 197, 198
Genette, Gérard 36, 39
Glut, Donald F. 77-78
George Lucas Exhibition (exhibition) 157, 160
Grace, Topher 279
Gray, Claudia 225n1
Gray, Jonathan 39, 42n21, 48n38, 120n8, 218n23,
226n7, 233-236
Greedo (character) 195, 197
Grim Fandango (video game) 99
Gunsmoke (TV series) 171
Hamill, Mark 53-54, 152, 196, 219, 223, 239n53,
274
Han Solo (character) 46, 53-54, 69, 77-78, 91,
94, 108, 120-121, 146, 149, 183, 189, 191, 193n22,
195, 197, 231, 233, 246, 257, 263, 283, 293, 294,
295, 296
Han Solo Anthology Story [as yet untitled](film) 280
Harris, John 151n26

Harry Potter
franchise 16, 17, 168, 175, 293
Harry Potter: The Exhibition(exhibition) 168
Harry Potter Studio Tour London(exhibition) 214
Harvey, Colin B. 101, 103, 117, 143n2, 162, 213n4,
218n25
Hasbro 172, 234-235, 234n33, 236n42
Heir to the Empire (novel) 143, 146, 229, 230
Her Universe 237
The Hero with a Thousand Faces 277
The Hidden Fortress (film) 189
Hills, Matt 101, 144, 156n3, 166n37, 167, 200, 202,
205, 207, 214n12, 221n32, 262
Hitchcock, Alfred 159
Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences(exhibition) 159n15
The Hobbit (film trilogy) 179
Holiday Special (made-for-TV movie) 12, 23, 117,
120, 163, 164, 289
Hollywood 15, 17, 24, 26-27, 28-29, 31, 35, 40, 61,
62, 64-66, 73, 117, 196, 240, 273
Hollywood Studios 253, 255-256, 257-260
Hot Wheels 216
Hoth 89, 95, 98, 105
Howard, Ron 270, 281
Huizinga, Johan 104, 201
The Hunger Games (franchise) 168
Hunger Games: The Exhibition (exhibition) 168
Hutcheon, Linda 68, 144
hyperdiegesis 144, 200, 202, 209
hyperdiegetic cycle 202, 207-208, 209
IMAX 265-276
4K IMAX Digital 266
definition 266
experience 265-268, 271, 273, 275, 276
HDCAM 270, 272
IMAX Corporation 266n2
IMAX Dome (OMNIMAX) 266, 274
IMAX Laser 266
MPX 266“Imperial March” (musical theme) 256
Imperial Pursuit (game expansion) 97
Independence Day (film) 267
Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) 35, 93, 94,
275
infinite aesthetic 204-205
intellectual property (IP) 20, 23, 25, 36, 38-39,
46, 61, 99, 126, 143-144, 147-148, 153, 166, 189,
195n27, 196-198, 262
intertextuality 36, 39, 41-43, 83, 110, 117, 133, 197
ISIL 252
Jacen Solo (character) 149
Jaina Solo (character) 149, 227, 229
Jakku (location) 256
Jango Fett (character) 121-122

324 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Jar Jar Binks (character) 21, 24, 30, 197, 271
see also: Darth Jar Jar theory
Jarmusch, Jim 190
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (film) 187, 189,
196
Jedi 20, 118, 122, 123, 129, 134, 135, 136n15, 140,
149, 178, 184, 189, 196, 197, 204, 206, 207, 208,
209, 225, 228, 229, 230, 231, 242, 248-252,
254, 288
Jedi Academy (book series) 149
Jedi Adventure Center 236
Jedi Holocron 279, 288n16
see also: Star Wars → canon
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (videogame) 96n34, 101
Jedi Knights 19, 20, 76, 206, 242, 247
Jedi Master 127, 196, 207, 250
Jedi News 224
Jedi Order 81, 149, 206, 207, 249
Jedi Padawan 127, 229, 248, 249, 251
Jedi Temple Archives 271
Jenkins, Henry 13, 35-36, 61n4, 63-64, 68, 101,
102-103, 104, 106-107, 109-110, 112, 119, 126, 144,
145n10, 160, 164, 213n1, 226n9, 254
Convergence Culture 23, 36n2, 61n3, 63n9,
64n13, 102n2, 106n14, 106n15, 117n1,
126n20, 144n4, 145n10, 160n18, 160n19,
213n1
Jocasta Nu (character) 271
Johnson, Derek 48n38, 117, 127, 148, 226n9,
236-237,
Johnson, Rian 46, 220, 280, 291
Johnston, E.K. 225n1
Jumanji (film) 267
Jurassic Park (franchise) 168
Jurassic Park (film) 111
Jyn Erso (character) 26, 235, 283-284, 243
Kahn, James 78-80, 81, 82
Kamino (location) 272n16
Kanan (comic book series) 248, 249-250
Kanan Jarrus (character) 242, 243, 248-252
Kasdan, Lawrence 278, 291
Kazaam (film) 267
Kennedy, John F. 244
Kennedy, Kathleen 46, 220, 222, 224, 291
Kenner 88, 157, 172, 177-178, 235, 236, 236n42
Kenner Early Bird Package 190, 190n11, 236
see also: action figures
see also: toys
Kershner, Irvin 278
Killik 203
King Arthur 243-244
Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Fallen Empire (game expansion) 200, 202, 204-206
Knights of the Old Republic (game series) 23,
203, 207-208

Knights of the Old Republic (videogame) 206, 229
Knights of the Old Republic II (videogame) 207-208
Korriban (location) 208n19
Kowakian monkey-lizard see: Salacious B.
Crumb
Kreia (character) 207, 229
Kristeva, Julia 42
Kubrick, Stanley 159
Kurosawa, Akira 241
Kylo Ren (character) 28, 118, 230
Kyoto Protocol 246
laborer-watcher 188, 189, 194-195, 196, 198
Land of the Jawas Action Play Set (playset) 172
Lando Calrissian (character) 146, 191, 193, 295
The Last Jedi (film) 280, 291, 295, 296
The Last of the Mohicans (novel) 205
Last Tour to Endor (amusement park attraction) 254, 255-256
Launch Bay (amusement park attraction) 259,
261
Lee, Spike 190
Legends see: Star Wars → Legends
LEGO
adaptation 169-170, 175, 179, 184-185
Death Star (set #10188) 169, 176-185
Death Star II (set #10143) 176, 178, 184
history of 172-175
Legoland 261
Millennium Falcon (playsets) 176
Star Wars playsets 13, 169, 171-172, 174,
175-176, 216, 217
see also: toys
Leia Organa (character) 27, 46, 49-59, 66,
68-69, 76, 78, 91, 94, 97, 118, 120, 149, 180, 181,
184, 196, 225-233, 235-235, 236n42, 238-240,
239n52, 257, 282, 293, 294, 295
see also: Slave Leia
lightsaber 30, 70, 82n35, 83, 90, 101, 129, 178, 196,
249, 256, 263, 273
Lincoln Logs 170, 172
Linklater, Richard 190
London Film and Comic Con 216
The Lord of the Rings
exhibition 168
films 197
franchise 168, 175
novels 189, 277
Lucas, George 13, 17, 19-26, 29, 35-48, 49, 50,
51n6, 51n7, 54, 61, 62, 65-66, 68-71, 75-77,
80, 82, 92, 93n21, 94-97, 101, 111, 119, 120-122,
145-147, 150, 155, 157, 159-161, 163-167, 189, 193,
195, 196-198, 223, 242, 247, 277-280, 282-283,
285-288, 291, 296
LucasArts 22, 35, 87, 94, 96-99, 107n17
Lucasfilm Licensing 161

325

Index

Lucasfilm Story Group 46, 49, 83-84, 118, 224,
143, 145, 153, 220, 221, 240, 288n16
Luke Skywalker (character) 11, 27, 54, 62,
66-70, 78-79, 84, 91, 94, 105, 108-109, 111-112,
118, 120, 123, 135, 136n15, 138, 139, 152, 164,
178, 181, 183-184, 189-192, 194, 196, 227,229-233, 236, 236n42, 246, 250, 288, 293,
294, 295, 296
Machete Order 279, 279n6, 294
see also: Star Wars → fan edits
Madame Tussauds 261
Magic Circle 201
The Magic of Myth (exhibition) 157, 161, 163-164,
165
Mallrats (film) 187, 189, 191-192, 194
The Mandalorian Wars 206
Mandalorians 121, 206-207, 251
Mara Jade (character) 229-230
Marquand, Richard 278
Marvel Cinematic Universe 25, 27, 293-294
Marvel Comics 25, 171, 192n14
see also: Star Wars → Marvel Comics
Marx, Karl 187-188
Marx Toy Company 171, 171n3
The Matrix (franchise) 102
The Matrix (film) 102, 196
Meccano 170
media convergence see: convergence
megatext 74, 79, 81, 242, 243, 250, 277, 283
Mego 170, 171
Mehenkwetre 170
merchandising 11, 17, 27, 38, 65, 92, 119-121,
124-125, 151, 159, 169, 172, 174, 188, 289, 194,
195, 214-218, 221-222, 226, 228, 233-237,
258-259, 261, 263, 289
see also: toys
Micro Machines 157
midi-chlorians 21, 134, 134n13, 136
Millennium Falcon (vehicle) 101, 107, 108, 176,
180, 183n17, 214, 274-275
see also: LEGO → Millennium Falcon(playsets)
Millennium Falcon Spaceship (playset) 172
Minecraft (franchise) 175
Mon Mothma (character) 18, 283
Moraband (location) 208, 208n19
Mos Eisley (location) 106, 120, 195, 214, 253, 282
The Muppet Show (TV series) 11
Muppets 11, 25, 191
mythopoeia 277, 278, 279-280, 281, 283, 286,
288
Naboo (location) 259, 271
Nadel, Alan 242
nerf herder, scruffy-looking see: Han Solo
A New Dawn (novel) 248
New Hollywood 61, 62, 64-66, 67, 69, 70
A New Hopefilm 15, 19, 37, 41-43, 49-53, 55, 56, 59, 61,
66, 74, 76, 77, 83, 90, 91, 93, 97, 106, 108,
112, 118, 120-121, 135, 140, 146, 180, 180n14,183, 184, 189-192, 195, 227, 245, 256, 265,267-268, 279n6, 279n8, 282, 288, 294
novelization 73, 74n3, 75-77
The New Jedi Order (book series) 145, 148-152,
153-154, 203
The New Republic 139, 149, 229
Nightsisters 232-233
Nolan, Christopher 274
nostalgia 218, 265-266, 274-276, 295
novelization 12, 16-17, 50-51, 52-53, 54, 55, 61-62,
66-72, 73-85, 74n3, 144, 146, 273, 289
Nyong’o, Lupita 239n53, 274
Obama, Barack 242-243, 247-248, 251n32, 252
Obama Doctrine 247-248, 250, 251-252
The Old Republic 124, 205, 207, 230, 251
The Old Republic (video game) 200, 201,
204-206, 208, 230
Owen Lars (character) 84, 123, 271
Padmé Amidala (character) 227, 229, 230,
236n42, 271
Palpatine (character) see: Emperor Palpatine
paratext(uality) 13, 36, 39, 62, 110, 120, 123, 128,217-218, 224, 226, 228, 234, 237, 277n1, 281,
284-287
The People vs. George Lucas (film) 22, 38, 195
Pepperidge Farm 236
Pett, Emma 215n13, 253-254, 257-263
The Phantom Edit (film) 271, 279
The Phantom Menace
film 21, 24, 37, 43-45, 120, 122-123, 125, 129,
133, 133n11, 147, 149, 195, 196, 222, 255,
270, 271, 279, 296
novelization 74n3, 80-81
pink media franchising 236-237
Pirates of the Caribbean (franchise) 175
Pirates of the Caribbean (amusement park
attraction) 258
Planet of the Apes (franchise) 15, 171
Poe Dameron (character) 28, 296
postfeminism 230, 237
Proctor, William 65n20, 71n38, 119n5, 122,
157n6, 160n21, 161n23, 215n14, 223n35
proletarian shopping 192
Quarantine (novel) 287
Queen Jamillia (character) 271
R2-D2 (character) 41-43, 67, 108, 110, 180, 189,
235n38, 236, 263, 274, 282, 287
race see: Star Wars → race
Rakata (The Infinite Empire) 206
Reagan, Ronald 30, 189, 244-245, 246, 293
Reagan Doctrine 189, 193, 242, 244-245, 246
Rebel Alliance see: Rebels

326 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

Rebel Assault (game) 96-97, 106
Rebel Assault II (game) 96n34
Rebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen: Star Wars and thePower of Costume (exhibition) 158, 158n9,
161, 163, 164
The Rebellion see: Rebels
Rebel Rescue (game) 93, 93n21, 94n24
Rebels 54-55, 57-59, 68, 89, 91, 97-98, 98n38,
108-109, 111, 120, 125, 136n15, 149, 239n52,
242, 246, 256, 282, 284, 292, 293
Rebels (TV series) 118, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128,
203, 217, 223, 225, 241-242, 243, 248-249, 250,
251-252, 256
The Republic
see: The New Republic
see: The Old Republic
The Resistance 47, 238-240, 259, 293
see also: Rebels
Return of the Jedi
film 41, 43, 62, 71, 78, 90, 91, 108, 120, 121,
125, 129, 146, 149, 152, 157, 166, 176, 180,180n14, 183, 184, 185, 191, 192, 193n22, 197,
236, 288
novelization 78-80, 81, 82
Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle (videogame) 90
Revan (character) 206-207
Revenge of the Sithfilm 43, 44, 108, 123, 125, 242, 247, 290, 294,
295
novelization 81-82
Rey (character) 26, 27, 118, 217, 221, 225, 228,234-236, 256-257, 262, 275-276, 295
Rinzler, J.W. 38
Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster 258n11
Rogue One (film) 26, 29, 128, 198, 216, 219,
221-222, 277, 279n6, 281-286, 288, 290,
292-293, 294-295
Rogue Planet (novel) 151n25
roleplaying games 19, 126, 146-147, 151, 200, 230
Roosevelt, Theodore 244
runDisney 254, 256, 261
Russia 27, 293
see also: Soviet Union
Ryan, Marie-Laure 199-201
Salacious B. Crumb (character) 43
Salvatore, R.A. 81, 148, 152
San Diego Comic-Con 26, 104, 216, 254, 257, 274
Sandvoss, Cornel 217-218
Sci-Fi Channel 151
Scolari, Carlos 61n4
Scooby-Doo (franchise) 196
Scott, Suzanne 156n4, 237
The Searchers (film) 249
Seaworld 258
Secret Cinema 214n11, 253, 254, 257-258, 263
The Secret of Monkey Island (video game) 99
sexuality see: Star Wars → sexuality

Shadows of the Empire (novel, comic bookseries) 106
Sherlock (TV series) 253
Sith 20, 53, 70, 81, 203, 204-205, 206, 208-209,
251, 296
Six Flags 258
Slave Leia 235, 238
see also: Leia Organa
Smith, Kevin 187-198
Snoke, Supreme Leader (character) 208
Soviet Union 245, 246
see also: Russia
Soylent Green (film) 189
space 24, 26, 41, 156, 157, 160-167, 176, 189, 192
games 105-112, 131-132, 140
narrative 199-203
see also: transmedia → space
Space Mountain (amusement park
attraction) 258n11
Spark of Rebellion (made-for-TV movie) 251
Special Effects: Anything Can Happen(film) 265, 267-270, 270n11, 276
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (novel) 61-62, 66-72,
75, 84, 146
Ssi-ruuk 203
Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition(exhibition) 159n15
Star Destroyer (vehicle) 168, 249, 251, 267, 268,
275n22, 276
Star Tours (amusement park attraction) 214,
221, 253, 255, 258, 259, 262
Star Trek
franchise 15-17, 168, 171
Star Trek (film) 75
Star Trek (exhibition) 168
Star Trek: The Original Series 17
Star Wars (1977 film) see: A New HopeStar Wars
anthology films 280, 281-283, 286, 291,
295-296
brand/ing 11, 13, 39, 46, 95, 95n28, 96, 97,
99, 117, 126, 131, 150-152, 153, 172, 194, 198,
215-216, 218, 219-220, 221-222, 224, 229,
253, 256, 261, 277, 278
canon/canonicity 11, 20, 41, 45, 49, 80,
84, 95, 96, 108, 118, 120, 123-126, 129,133n11, 134, 142, 144, 153-154, 156, 159,
160, 162-165, 167, 168, 195, 224, 229, 230,
243, 279-281, 282, 283, 286, 287-288, 289,
292, 296
collecting 80, 119, 120, 131-133190, 194, 216,
218, 224, 236, 259, 262
despecialized editions 279
Disney era 13, 25, 27-29, 84, 118-120, 124-127,
143, 153-154, 160, 198, 208, 223-224, 229,242-243, 253, 280-281, 283-286, 288,
288n16, 289, 294
Disney purchase 12-13, 25, 84, 99, 143, 155,
225, 255, 258, 277, 279

Index

episteme of 277, 278, 281-286, 287-288
fan edits 271, 279, 279n6, 283-284, 294
see also: Star Wars → despecialized
editions
see also: Machete Ordersee also: The Phantom Edit
feminism 225-240, 225n4, 226n9
gender 25-27, 29, 166, 225-240, 255, 293
in Disney Parks 127, 214, 253-263
Legends 44, 44n29, 84, 124, 125, 143, 229,
280, 289, 296
Marvel Comics 47, 51, 146, 146n12
race 25-28, 192-193, 192n18, 230
sexuality 25-27, 29, 52, 166, 192, 193-194, 197,
230, 233, 237, 238
special editions 22, 37, 39n15, 106, 118,
151-152, 195, 197, 267, 270, 270n11, 279
see also: Star Wars → despecialized
editions
Topps trading cards 157, 218
Star Wars Celebration (fan convention) 215224, 255, 258
Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 125,215-224
Celebration Anaheim 222
Celebration Japan 222
Celebration Orlando 222
Star Wars: The Art of the Starfighter(exhibition) 158
Star Wars Day at Sea 256
Star Wars: Identities (exhibition) 158, 158n9,
159, 163, 164, 165
Star Wars in Concert 256
Star Wars Insider 157
Star Wars Land 214, 255n6
Star Wars Space Club 236
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (videogame) 88-91, 95
Star Wars: The Exhibition (exhibition) 158
Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game 146-147, 151
Star Wars Weekends 254n5, 258
Starlog 44-45, 71, 278
Steinberg, Marc 117, 119
stormtrooper 27, 28, 50-53, 109, 182, 184, 193,
251, 256, 269, 262, 267, 274
Strategic Defense Initiative 189, 245, 293
Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (videogame) 95
Tales from the Bounty Hunters (fiction
anthology) 131-132n8
Tales from Jabba’s Palace (fiction
anthology) 131-132n8
Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (fiction
anthology) 131-132n8
Taliban 252
Tatooine (location) 19, 44, 81, 94, 123, 267, 272,296

327
Taylor, Chris 66, 75n4, 77n13, 77n14, 80n26,
82n33, 143-144, 146n13, 147, 153n30, 209n20,
236
Terminator: Salvation (film) 75
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (film) 111
terrorism 58, 293
see also: War on Terror
TheForce.net 179, 217, 255, 272
Jedi Council Forums 217
The Thing (film) 75
Thomas, Roy 51
Thon, Jan-Noël 199-200
Thrawn (character) 118-120, 124-127, 128, 203
Thrawn Trilogy (novel series) 71, 80, 95n28,
124-127, 131n8, 139, 143, 147n15, 157, 229, 230,290
THX-1138 (film) 40, 189
TIE fighter (vehicle) 91, 111, 180, 183, 256, 260,
263, 283
TIE Fighter (game) 98
tie-in novel 145n8, 216, 217, 280
see also: franchise novel
Tim Burton (exhibition) 158n15
see also: Burton, Tim
Tinkertoy 170, 170n2, 172
Tolkien, J.R.R. 277, 277n1
see also: The Lord of the Rings
tourism see: transmedia → tourism
toys 17, 18, 27, 87, 118, 126, 146, 157, 169-172,
174n10, 175, 188, 190, 194, 216, 217, 223, 226,
228, 233-236, 259, 280, 289
see also: action figures
see also: Kenner
see also: LEGO
see also: Tinkertoy
Transformers (film) 75
transmedia
brand/ing 61, 65, 126, 131, 157, 160, 176, 169,
213, 215-216, 219, 221-222, 266
character crossover 119-128
economy 119, 156, 160, 167, 215, 220, 223, 224
experience 16-18, 22, 50, 51, 74, 79, 83, 92n15,
94-97, 102, 104-107, 111-112, 134, 137, 141-142,
144, 145n8, 172, 201n11, 214-215, 218, 219, 220,223-224, 253-263, 290, 294, 296
see also: auratic experience
see also: auto-commemoration
extractability 18-19, 214, 215, 221-222
licensing 13, 22-23, 35-36, 39, 44-46, 49,
62, 71, 87-88, 90-92, 94-95, 99, 102, 118,
133n11, 143-153, 155, 157, 161-166, 169,
171-172, 174-175, 179, 215, 218, 226, 233-234,
237, 240255, 263, 280
space 213-224
see also: space
see also: crossover spacestorytelling 11-14, 17, 18, 21, 22-23, 28, 35-36,
47, 49, 54, 61-64, 66-68, 70, 72, 102-103,
106, 110, 112, 117-119, 129-130, 132, 134-135,

328 Star Wars and the History of Tr ansmedia Story telling

145, 149, 151, 154, 156, 159-160, 162, 167,
213-215, 219-221, 223-224, 260, 294
tie-ins 12, 49, 73, 74n3, 83, 145n8, 151, 174,
175, 216-217, 280, 286
see also: transmedia → licensing
tourism 213-224, 253-263
transtextuality 36-37, 39, 41-42, 44, 47
Trump, Donald 238-239, 293
Tusken Raiders 43, 81, 256
Twilight (film) 253
TynieToy 171
Underoos 236
Unknown Regions 203, 208
The Untouchables (TV series) 171
US foreign policy 242, 244-245, 246-248, 250,
251-252
see also: Bush Doctrine
see also: Obama Doctrine
see also: Reagan Doctrine
Vector Prime (novel) 148-149, 151-152
veteran experience 249
VHS 22, 268
Viet Cong 246
Vietnam War 245-246
Visions (exhibition) 158
Wagon Train (TV series) 171
War on Terror 246, 247-248, 247n23
see also: terrorism
Wendig, Chuck 288n17
Western (genre) 111, 137, 189, 203n15, 204, 241,242-246, 247
see also: American West → mythology of
Wetmore, Kevin Jr. 193
Where Science Meets the Imagination (exhibition) 158-159, 164, 165

Whills 76, 287-288
Wild Space 200, 201, 203, 204-206
Williams, John 15, 89, 110, 259, 260, 281
Witches of Dathomir 230-233
The Wizard of Oz (film) 189
The Wizard of Oz and His Emerald City
(playset) 171
Wolf, Mark J.P. 65n20, 68, 104-105, 119n5, 157n6,
215n14, 217n18
Wollen, Peter 36-37, 39, 41, 42
Wolverton, Dave 230-233
Women’s March 239
women’s rights 239
World of Warcraft (video game) 202n12
WorldCon 254, 255
World War II 97, 171
Xena (franchise) 16
X-wingvehicle 91, 105, 108, 110-112, 180n14, 260,
263, 282
X-Wing (1993 game) 98, 98n38, 100
X-Wing (game series) 97
X-Wing (novel series) 97n37, 147n16, 152
X-Wing Alliance (game) 98, 101
X-Wing: Rogue Squadron (comics
series) 97n37
Yoda (character) 77-78, 84, 95, 136n15, 189,
208-209, 260, 273
Yuuzhan Vong 149, 203
Zahn, Timothy 71, 80, 95n28, 125, 127, 131n8,
143, 146-147, 147n15, 157, 229, 230, 290
Zakuul (location) 202, 203, 204-206, 208
Zane, Billy see: Bould, Mark
Zardoz (film) 189