Every supposed Star Wars virgin has actually picked up an extraordinary number of spoilers in their lives—this was my hypothesis. I decided to test it in a larger experiment. For May the Fourth—Star Wars Day, an event first suggested by a British MP’s pun on “May the Force” in 1979, but really came into its own as a holiday for the first time in 2013—Mashable asked Lucasfilm and the petition website Change.org to collaborate on a screening of the original movie for #StarWarsnewbies (“virgin,” we decided, was too much of a hot-button word), held at the Change.org headquarters in San Francisco.
The first thing we discovered was how hard it is to find anyone in the Bay Area in the twenty-first century who had never seen any Star Wars movies. This was, after all, ground zero for the first culture bomb; it only took until the end of 1977 before the number of people who’d bought a ticket to see Star Wars in the city exceeded its 750,000 population. Even with the combined recruitment efforts of StarWars.com, Change.org, and Mashable, we managed to unearth just thirty newbies, alongside a much larger number of friends and relatives who simply wanted to watch them watch it for the first time.
Before the screening, the newbies were interviewed to determine just how much they knew. Again, they surprised us. “I know it’s out of order,” said Jamie Yamaguchi, thirty-two, a mother from Oakley, California, of the set of six films. “I thought that was kind of strange.” (Her parents’ strict religious code meant she’d seen few movies to begin with.) The characters she knew: Princess Leia, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Artoo, Luke, “the gold guy, and that annoying guy who speaks funny. Oh, and Darth Vader.”
Many answers were along the lines of this (also real) response: “Oh, I don’t really know any of the characters’ names—except for Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda. That’s all I got.”
“I know the big reveal,” said Tami Fisher, a teacher at UC Hastings College of the Law and a former clerk to a California Supreme Court justice. “The father-son relationship between whatever their names are.”
“My kids asked me if Luke and Leia knew they were brother and sister,” said Yamaguchi. “I was like, ‘They are?’”
It’s increasingly hard to avoid Star Wars spoilers. They bombard us from birth whether we seek them out or not. A number of parents have come up to me during the process of writing this book and asked how come their younger kids know all the names of all the characters and planets in Star Wars and can recite the most obscure historical details behind almost every aspect of the franchise, despite the fact that those kids are too young to have seen any of the six movies yet. I’ve responded by asking either “Where did Luke Skywalker come from?” or “What are those teddy bear creatures in Return of the Jedi called?” When the parents answer “Tatooine” or “Ewoks,” I say, “There you go. That planet was never named in the original Star Wars; those creatures are never actually named in a Star Wars movie. You picked their names up someplace else.” (I found out what Tatooine was called at the age of four in 1978, years before I saw Star Wars, when I read it on the back of a cereal box; the revelation of the Ewoks came in a 1983 book of collectible stickers, months before Return of the Jedi.)
How far has this benign cultural infection spread? Is there anyone on the planet not carrying a little piece of Star Wars code in their heads? “We do not know how many individual people have seen a Star Wars movie in a theater,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson told me, “but we do know that there have been approximately 1.3 billion admissions over the six films worldwide.” That seems a conservative estimate, and it would be equally conservative to add another billion home video viewers on top of that, judging by the $6 billion the franchise has earned in VHS and DVD sales over the years. This does not even begin to count video store rentals or the vast market of pirated copies. How many billions more have watched it on TV, or seen an ad, or picked up one tiny piece of the $32 billion worth of Star Wars–licensed merchandise that’s cluttering up the planet? Or, to look at the question the other way around, how many billions, or millions, of people have managed to avoid every last one of these trappings of the Star Wars franchise? And just who are these people?
I was naïve enough to think I could just come to somewhere like Window Rock and catch wide-eyed innocents watching Star Wars for the first time. But that hope was dashed the moment the Albuquerque and Salt Lake City Garrisons of the 501st Legion, a charitably minded bad-guy Star Wars costuming organization, rolled into Window Rock after epic long drives, donned their uniforms, and marched into the rodeo grounds at sunset. They were met with rapturous applause from the packed bleachers—a welcome greater than any I’d seen the 501st get at a Comic-Con or Star Wars Celebration convention. They marched in alongside the lines of viewers that had been forming for hours in 107-degree heat—a Stormtrooper, a snowtrooper, a biker scout, an Imperial guard, a bounty hunter, and of course, one Dark Lord of the Sith himself. Darth Vader was mobbed, with babies pressed into his arms while excitable mothers took pictures on iPads.
I also noticed a bunch of enterprising kids selling lightsabers. They were wearing Stormtrooper T-shirts with the legend “These aren’t the Diné you’re looking for.” I asked Wheeler if the T-shirts were his doing, but he shrugged. He only made the sparkly “Navajo Star Wars” tops for the crew. He wandered off to have his picture taken with Boba Fett.
Help me, Elders, I thought. You’re my only hope.
And then, as the mesas turned from sunset crimson to twilight indigo and a lightning storm started to crackle in the distance, I met George James Sr., Iwo Jima veteran and Star Wars virgin. It was as if I’d just been introduced to a unicorn leaping over a double rainbow. It had to be too good to be true. I ran through a list of names: Skywalker. Solo. Lucas. Wookiee.
James shook his head at all of them, uncomprehending.
I pointed out the tall guy in the black helmet, who was now dealing with a line of guys pointing and tapping their throats: they wanted to take a picture for a popular Internet meme called Vadering, where you leap in the air and pretend to be force-choked by the Dark Lord. James was perplexed. He genuinely had no idea why the kids from his tribe were doing battle with glowing sticks. When Wheeler got up to introduce the local Navajo voice talent, I had to tell James that no, this is not the Mr. Lucas I had just been talking about.
Then, just before the floodlights dimmed and the Twentieth Century Fox logo appeared on the screen, something occurred to James. He had seen something on someone’s TV one time, he remembers, a clip from a movie set in space. “I saw wild birds,” he says.
Wild birds in space? What could that be? I think for a second. I hold my arms up and then down at 45 degrees. “Like this?”
James nods; his eyes light up in recognition.
“Wild birds.”
X-wing fighters.
Even eighty-eight-year old George James Sr., who lives in the mountains and sleeps under sheepskin in a home so remote that it is blockaded by snow for months at a time, was carrying inside his head a piece of Star Wars code—just like you and I and pretty much everyone else on the planet.
The Twentieth Century Fox fanfare ended, the screen went black, and an electric cheer went up from the crowd. Familiar blue letters appeared on the screen—but this time, for the first time in history, the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” was rendered in words so alien they had once been banned by the US government, so unfamiliar to the rest of the planet that they were used in World War II cryptography:
Aik’idaa’ yadahodiiz’aadaa,
Ya’ ahonikaandi . . .
That’s all it took. The crowd roared so loud that I could barely hear the blast of the theme’s opening chord. And Star Wars casually conquered one more Earthling culture.
This book is a biography of the franchise that turned Planet Earth into Planet Star Wars.
Its goals are twofold. First, to provide the first complete history of the franchise from its fantastical origins through Disney’s $4.05 billion purchase i
n 2012 of Lucasfilm, the studio that created the movies. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, the book aims to explore the other side of the relationship: how Star Wars has affected, and been affected by, its planet of fans.
The story of the Star Wars franchise itself shows creativity at its most powerful. It is the tale of how something titled The Journal of the Whills, a couple of pages of impenetrable Flash Gordon fan fiction scribbled in pencil and then abandoned by its creator, transmogrified into a vast universe that has sold $32 billion (and counting) worth of merchandise around the globe. (Taking into account ticket sales, licensing, and other revenue streams, it’s likely that Star Wars generated more than $40 billion between 1977 and 2013.) Much of that success had to do with the hard work of a small posse of dedicated believers whose names were not George Lucas. But Star Wars has millions of extremely devoted acolytes far beyond this initial cabal: collectors and costuming collectives, droid builders and lightsaber lovers, spoofers and satirists—and most of these groups have, in unexpected ways, become part of the franchise itself.
Even Lucas himself, at his most messianic, recognized that he was responsible for, at most, a third of what we talk about when we talk about Star Wars. “I am the father of our Star Wars movie world—the filmed entertainment, the features and the television series,” he said in 2008. “I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I’m the father; that’s my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and all that other stuff. I call that the son—and the son does pretty much what he wants. Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father’s world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.”
Since Lucas spoke those words, the father has gone his own way, too. Lucas entered retirement after the Lucasfilm sale, and while new Star Wars features are barreling toward the cineplexes of Earth, they’re doing so under the watchful eye of the franchise’s stepmother, veteran film producer Kathleen Kennedy. When the next Star Wars film hits the big screen, it will be the first in history to emerge without the helicopter parenting of the Creator* himself.
With Star Wars poised to enter a new phase in its long history, it’s an appropriate moment to pause and take stock of this creation. In particular, it’s worth pointing out that behind the scenes, the world of Star Wars has never been as unified as Lucas’s holy trinity metaphor suggests. The more you fall in love with the franchise, it seems, the more you recognize how rickety its space-fantasy foundations are. The greatest fans of the Expanded Universe (the collective name for the hundreds of Star Wars novels, thousands of Star Wars comics, and countless video games and other media that have developed characters and storylines outside of the Star Wars films themselves) are the first ones to tell you how much of it is self-contradictory and just plain sucks. And many lovers of Star Wars are intensely partisan about—and protective of—the films themselves. Fans of the original trilogy (Episodes IV to VI, released 1977 to 1983) have stewed obsessively over every change in Lucas’s upgraded versions (tweaked for rerelease in 1997, 2004, 2006, and 2011) and remain bitterly divided over the prequel trilogy (Episodes I to III, released 1999 to 2005.) These twin passions, love and hate, are as constant companions to Star Wars fans as Jedi and Sith, or as the twin suns of Tatooine.
In 2005, a twenty-year-old in Vancouver called Andrey Summers witnessed the deep schisms within Star Wars fandom firsthand when he attended a midnight screening of Episode III. The screening was preceded by a costume contest, and Summers was shocked when, in the course of it, older fans actually started booing the homemade costumes of younger fans. “That’s when I realized,” Summers told me, “these fuckers aren’t into joy. They’re into canonical accuracy.” He went home and penned a column for an online magazine called Jive, titling it “The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom.” Like most of Star Wars itself, it was intended half-humorously but written in earnest.
The conceit was that Summers was having a hard time explaining fandom to his girlfriend, because true fans hate everything about Star Wars, from the whiny delivery of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the original trilogy to the CGI pratfalls of Jar Jar Binks in the prequels. “If you run into somebody who tells you they thought the franchise was quite enjoyable, and they very much liked the originals as well as the prequels, and even own everything on DVD, and a few of the books, these imposters are not Star Wars fans,” he wrote.
Jive magazine is now defunct, but Summers’s column went viral; translated into multiple languages, it bounced around the Internet on forum after forum. He was bombarded by emails from amused fans who got the point and angry ones who didn’t. Summers was clearly onto something when he pointed out that love and hate are twin virtues of every true Star Wars fan—and though he didn’t know it, his column was an echo of something that was said in the halls of Lucasfilm itself.
“To make Star Wars, you’ve got to hate Star Wars”—this is a maxim I’ve heard from more than one veteran of Lucasfilm’s design department. What they mean is that if you’re too reverential about what came before, you’re doomed. You’ve got to be rebellious and questing. The franchise must constantly renew itself by pulling incongruous items out of a grab bag of outside influences, as Lucas himself did from the start. Likewise, fandom must constantly renew itself with new generations of viewers brought in by the prequels, by more recent additions to the canon like The Clone Wars and Rebels animated TV shows—and, soon enough, by the sequels to the first two trilogies.
Just as new fans are essential to keeping Star Wars alive and healthy, jaded old fans must renew themselves by going back to the thing that gave them joy in the first place. “To be a Star Wars fan,” said Summers in his column, “one must possess the ability to see a million different failures and downfalls, and then somehow assemble them into a greater picture of perfection. Every true Star Wars fan is a Luke Skywalker, looking at his twisted evil father, and somehow seeing good.”
“We hate everything about Star Wars,” Summers concluded, before offering a line every fan in the world could agree with: “But the idea of Star Wars . . . the idea we love.”
In Window Rock, lightning forked in the distant hills, but few in the audience seemed to notice or care. The people were cheering like crazy for the roll-up at the start of the movie, every word of it in Diné. Once the dialogue started, there was laughter for the first fifteen minutes straight—not laughter at the film or the performances, but the joyful laugh of a people seeing a movie in their own language for the first time.
To a viewer like me who had grown up watching Star Wars in its original English, a surprising amount of the movie sounded the same. Lucas loved cool sounds and sweeping music and the babble of dialogue more than he cared for dialogue itself. Much of the movie is either free of speech or filled with foreign chatter from aliens and droids. Think of Artoo, of the Jawas: intentionally unintelligible, and we love them for it. Think of how much time is filled with back and forth blaster fire or the roar of TIE fighters (actually a slowed-down elephant call) or the hum of lightsabers (a broken TV, an old projector). When I first learned that Wheeler’s team of translators had been able to translate the movie from English to Navajo in just thirty-six hours, it had seemed a superhuman feat. In fact, there just isn’t as much English in Star Wars as you might remember.
Some words are untranslatable and remain in English. “Princess Leia” has the exact same title, since Diné contains no concept of royalty. Likewise “Imperial Senate” and “Rebel Alliance.” (The Navajo are so inherently egalitarian that the US government had to force them to set up a governing body it could deal with.) And while the translated dialogue is something of a mélange—the translators speak three different dialects of Diné—this turns out not to matter at all. After all, it doesn’t sound weird to English speakers that half of the actors in the film are British and half American. (Carrie Fisher seems to be playing both accents, but we’ve grown
to embrace that too.)
Humor translates differently, of course. The audience seemed to laugh at every word Threepio says. This may be partly because the droid is a drag act: voice actress Geri Hongeva-Camarillo matches his prissy tones perfectly. (Some months later I told Anthony Daniels, the original Threepio, about this gender switch. “The Navajo must be a very confused race,” he said in his best clueless Threepio voice, before winking and reminding me that concept artist Ralph McQuarrie—one of the largely unsung heroes of Star Wars—had originally envisioned Daniels’s character as a waif-thin female robot.)
The biggest laugh of the evening, however, goes to Leia’s line aboard the Death Star: “Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I came on board.” There’s a kind of earthiness to the phrase, it seems, that sounds especially hilarious in Navajo, even though Fisher found it one of the hardest lines of the movie to sell: Peter Cushing, who plays Tarkin, “actually smelled of linen and lavender,” she said.
How strange it was to watch Star Wars in a foreign language and still get sucked in. I marveled once again at how flawlessly the story flows. Then came the CGI monsters of Mos Eisley, the shot from Greedo, the incongruous appearance of computerized Jabba, and I winced. I was reminded that, in approving this adaptation, Lucasfilm had required Wheeler to use the latest, highest-quality Special Edition version.
The movie starts to drag a little around the trash compactor scene. The kids in particular seemed distracted, preferring to play with their lightsabers in the aisles; they were caught up in the idea of Star Wars more than Star Wars itself. Families got up and left before the Death Star trench run, eleven pm being way past kids’ bedtime. But for the hundreds who remained when the lights came up, the movie created its own little cult of celebrity, just as it has in every other culture it has ever invaded. There was a cast signing afterwards with the main seven voice actors, and the line to meet them coiled around the stadium. The actors are all amateurs (Darth Vader, for example, was played by local sports coach Marvin Yellowhair) and had been chosen from out of 117 people who had auditioned for the roles; they had been selected for their passion in performing, not for their knowledge of Diné. It worked: their exuberance, plus their familiarity with the subject material, carried the day.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 2