How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  “Well, kid,” said Laddie, “what do you want us to do?”

  Weise had no hesitation. “I want you to show this with Star Wars. You know, make fun of your own movie!”

  “I’ll get back to you,” Laddie said.

  “And I’m sure he will,” Weise said, decades later.

  The closest Lucasfilm ever got to getting litigious over a parody came in 1980. Mad Magazine had mined Star Wars for material, exactly as Lucas had predicted. Now artist Mort Drucker and writer Dick De Bartolo had produced their send-up of the sequel, The Empire Strikes Out. Perhaps because there had been such a culture of secrecy around certain revelations in the plot of the original film, Lucasfilm’s legal department sent a cease and desist letter, demanding that Mad turn over all profits made from the issue. Mad just smiled and sent back a copy of a letter from Mad’s number 1 fan: some guy named George W. Lucas.

  “Special Oscars should be awarded to Drucker and DeBartolo, the George Bernard Shaw and Leonardo da Vinci of comic satire,” Lucas had written. “Their sequel to my sequel was sheer galactic madness.” He couldn’t resist pointing out a gaping inconsistency in the parody—Han Solo appears in the Millennium Falcon several panels after he has been frozen in carbonite. “Does this mean I can skip Episode VI?” Lucas wrote, which was probably more of a cry for help than the magazine realized. “Keep up the good Farce!”

  Lucasfilm’s legal department never wrote Mad again. One of its members, Howard Roffman, told the magazine many years later the incident happened because no one in the legal office, then based in LA, had talked to anyone in San Anselmo about it. Charley Lippincott, meanwhile, had been actively sending Mad some Star Wars gags of his own. “I wrote them and said I didn’t think they went far enough,” Lippincott said. He chuckled at the legal department’s temerity. “You can’t sue Mad Magazine.”

  Like Star Wars itself, the parodies seemed to pretty much die out after the original trilogy ended in 1983. The one notable exception—Mel Brooks’s feature-length Spaceballs in 1987—seemed outdated on arrival. “It should have been made several years ago, before our appetite for Star Wars satires had been completely exhausted,” wrote Roger Ebert. “This movie already has been made over the last 10 years by countless other satirists.” (A handful of the jokes, such as the princess’s hair buns turning out to be ear warmers, arrived direct from Hardware Wars.)

  But again, like Star Wars, the spoofs came roaring back in 1997, bigger and better than ever. That was the year a character designer at the Fox Kids Network named Kevin Rubio unveiled a film at San Diego Comic-Con called Troops. It was Star Wars meets Cops, the ride-along reality show known for its theme tune “Bad Boys,” which Rubio also used.

  Cops, not Star Wars, was the parody target of Troops: witness the Stormtrooper with the Minnesota accent who likes the “small town feel” of Tatooine and resolves domestic disputes with the world-weary diplomacy of local lawmen everywhere. Instead of being a send-up of Star Wars, Troops affectionately imitates the films as closely as possible. We get Stormtroopers on speeder bikes and brief shots of Imperial ships landing that wouldn’t look out of place in the original trilogy. The CGI era had dawned, and far more was possible on a tight budget than in the Hardware Wars days.

  If anything, Troops gets more immersive as it moves along. The ten-minute short turns out to be an elaborate alternate explanation for what happened to Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Without the Cops layer, it would be an earnest fan film—which in some senses it still is. “I couldn’t do a serious piece,” lamented Rubio—for want of budget, he meant, not for want of trying. “The only person who can do a serious piece is George.”

  Troops was an instant sensation and inspired hundreds of other filmmakers. In 2010, it topped a Time list of the top 10 Star Wars fan films. Lucasfilm decided to embrace the genre and established the Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards; Troops won the “Pioneer Award.” Other categories included best comedy, best mockumentary, and best parody of a commercial. Even the winners of the ultimate trophy, the George Lucas Selects Award, tended to be on the spoof side.

  As Lucas embraced the parodies, the parodies embraced back. George Lucas in Love was a 1999 short by Joe Nussbaum, a recent USC graduate, and his fellow grads. Once again, the comedic target was something other than Star Wars: the recent Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love and the way it imagined the play-wright’s inspirations to be constantly in front of his face. Set at USC in 1967, and filmed on the campus, it showed Lucas struggling to write an agricultural fantasy called Space Oats, while a stream of influences surround him unheeded: a dorm-room rival breathing like Darth Vader with an asthma inhaler; a large, hairy, car-fixing friend; a Yoda-like professor. Finally there’s his muse, Marion, who leads the “student rebellion,” wears her hair in buns, and in a twist ending turns out to be Lucas’s sister.

  The short launched Nussbaum’s directorial career after Steven Spielberg got hold of a copy and sent it to Lucas, who sent Nussbaum an approving letter commending him for doing his research (he’d spotted a line from American Graffiti.)

  There’s a kind of mutual love affair between Lucas and spoofs that feature him as a character. He is never the target; he is the sage one does not cross. A 2007 short called Pitching Lucas stars a Lucas look-alike who is offered three Star Wars live-action TV show ideas by sleazy Hollywood executives (variations on Six Million Dollar Man, CHiPs, and Charlie’s Angels); Lucas dispatches each executive to a variety of grisly endings. “And that,” he concludes, “is why I always write my own scripts.” Pitching Lucas won the George Lucas Selects stamp of approval from the Creator himself, as did the 2004 short Escape from Tatooine, which ends with Boba Fett crash-landing on an alternate Earth where Lucas has been enshrined in a giant statue at the Lincoln Memorial.

  It was surprisingly late in the day, the mid-2000s, before parodists started to explore the possibilities of putting Darth Vader in mundane situations. Perhaps they were taking the lead of Lucas, who had by then fleshed out all of Vader’s backstory; perhaps they were simply waiting for the rise of YouTube. In 2007, users of the nascent online video service were treated to Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager, in which a Vader-like character (said to be the Dark Lord’s brother) has to manage recalcitrant employees at a very Earth-bound supermarket. The pilot episode was seen twelve million times; the show went on for thirty-eight episodes split into four seasons. British comedian Eddie Izzard imagined Darth Vader attempting to navigate the Death Star canteen; a stop-motion version of the Izzard skit starring Lego Star Wars figures now has twenty-one million views on YouTube.*

  There was, it soon became clear, comedy gold in treating Vader—a Jedi-killing, child-murdering, daughter-torturing, son-amputating man-machine—as a fragile, everyday kind of fellow. “He’s like the most evil guy in the galaxy, but there’s a part of you that wants to know what that feels like,” says Jack Sullivan, the thirty-two-year-old, Boston-based asset manager who runs @DepressedDarth, one of Twitter’s most popular Star Wars parody accounts. Sullivan started the account in 2010 to promote a YouTube short he was planning to make of Vader walking around Boston begging for spare change. The short never got made, but the account gained more than five hundred thousand followers thanks to a steady diet of sad Vader jokes and Star Wars puns. Sullivan is already making a respectable $5,000 a month from selling ads on his Depressed Darth website and is considering retiring from the financial industry to go into full-time tweeting.

  Perhaps the most telling Vader spoof, for an aging generation of parents who’d grown up on Star Wars, is Jeffrey Brown’s New York Times best-selling volumes, Darth Vader and Son (2012) and Vader’s Little Princess (2013). This was Vader at his most mundane, facing the challenges of single parenthood with Luke and Leia respectively in a series of heartwarming cartoons. Every modern mom or dad who’d identified with Luke or Leia in the 1970s, only to grow up and find themselves the Vaders of their households, could relate.

  When everyone wants in on the joke, an
d the source material is this widely recognized, what you get is endless iterations of everything the franchise could possibly be. The first Star Wars spoof to win a Primetime Emmy—the epic Star Wars Uncut—could not have been more collaborative. The brainchild of twenty-six-year-old web developer Casey Pugh, Star Wars Uncut chopped the original movie into 473 segments lasting fifteen seconds each and then let fans sign up online to reshoot each segment in their own way—each with the no-budget earnestness of Hardware Wars, and each given roughly the same amount of time to shoot it (thirty days). It was so heavily oversubscribed that Pugh added an extra step, letting fans vote on the best versions of each segment. Stitch them together, and you get two hours of nonstop gut-busting hilarity—humor born of the shock of recognition (it’s basically the same movie) as well as the gleefully earnest recreations by delightful amateurs.*

  So there are certain common elements in this litany of Star Wars spoofs. They either add to the myth in some subtle, subversive way, or they lovingly replicate it; they add a layer of something else in pop culture or put Star Wars concepts in incongruous, mundane situations. But the idea of Star Wars is always respected. The franchise’s reality is unsullied; if anything, it is boosted by the flattery. Star Wars, it turns out, is a broad church, able to absorb all laughter.

  Is any comedian truly capable of getting under the skin of Star Wars, skewering it more than wallowing in a version of it? There have been a few attempts. In 2007, a couple of friends with animated TV shows—Seth McFarlane, creator of Family Guy, and Seth Green, cocreator of Cartoon Network’s Robot Chicken—began to use their respective platforms to produce some epic Star Wars meta-next-level spoofs. It’s fair to say Green had the idea first (as his character, Chris, complains on the Family Guy spoof, “Blue Harvest”*). It’s also fair to say, as McFarlane’s character shoots back, that Family Guy has the larger viewership.

  “Blue Harvest,” which got the greatest audience share of any Family Guy episode to date, goes the route of layering its Griffin family humor over a Star Wars animated homage. It does have a few moments of true satire—such as the opening crawl, which marvelously manages to both spoil and belittle the entire classic trilogy:

  It is a time of civil war, and renegade paragraphs floating through space.

  There’s cool space battles, and the bad guy is the good guy’s dad, but you don’t find that out ’til the next episode.

  And the hot chick is really the sister of the good guy, but they don’t know it, and they kiss. Which is kind of messed up. I mean, what if they had done it instead of just kissed?

  After that, there is the occasional joke aimed squarely at the holes in Star Wars logic, such as the laser operators on the Star Destroyer who let R2-D2 and 3-CPO’s escape pod go because there were no life forms on board: “Hold your fire? What, are we paying by the laser now?” But McFarlane seems to lose interest in attacking the franchise at that point, falling back on his usual winning blend of toilet humor and pop culture callbacks. His Star Wars references for most of the feature-length episode consist of lovingly recreated, animated homages to iconic special effects scenes from the movie, such as the Millennium Falcon taking off from Mos Eisley. One of the most irreverent popular satirists of our age, it turned out, could little more attack the franchise than throw a chair through a stained-glass window. For the “Blue Harvest” DVD release, McFarlane traveled to Skywalker Ranch and conducted an unusually fawning interview with Lucas.

  Green’s stop-motion puppet show Robot Chicken kept its satirical knives out for the franchise itself far longer than McFarlane did, even though its spoof was supposed to be a one-off sketch. In “The Emperor’s Phone Call” (three million YouTube views), Emperor Palpatine is informed of the destruction of the Death Star (there it is again, the most humorous object in the universe) via collect call from Vader. The conversation that follows skewers both Star Wars and Return of the Jedi. “I’m sorry, I thought my Dark Lord of the Sith could protect a small thermal exhaust port that was only two meters wide. That thing wasn’t even fully paid off yet!” yells the Emperor, voiced by McFarlane. “Oh, just rebuild it? That’d be real fucking original!” It was as if Mad had finally gone far enough for Charley Lippincott.

  To Lucasfilm’s great surprise, Lucas—encouraged by his son Jett to watch the show—adored the Robot Chicken parody. The Creator brought Green and his cowriter Matthew Senreich to Skywalker Ranch. The pair got Lucas to not only agree to two full-length Robot Chicken Star Wars episodes, but to participate as voice talent—his first professional acting role. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Lucas, as his doll reclined on a couch in a therapist’s office, on his decision to let Robot Chicken do a special. But Lucas’s participation didn’t preclude the sketches from pointing out more previously unseen flaws in the movies. Take the moment Luke sits down in the Millennium Falcon after escaping the Death Star, and Leia puts a blanket over his shoulders as he mourns Obi-Wan Kenobi. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” says Luke. Instead of sympathy, the Robot Chicken version of Leia offers this: “Oh, did the eighty-year-old man you met yesterday just die? Sorry if I didn’t notice. I was just busy thinking about my entire family and the other two billion people from Alderaan who were just vaporized into dust about three hours ago.” Leia’s voice was provided by Carrie Fisher, who read it like she’d wanted to say that for a long time.

  No matter how edgy the pair got, it didn’t seem to matter. Green and Senreich soon found themselves the court jesters of Lucasfilm Animation. They collaborated on a new project, which they and Lucas announced to fans at Lucasfilm’s Celebration convention in 2011, called Star Wars Detours, aimed at more of a family audience. Six trailers were released online. Fans didn’t take to it. “It seems the show is really just Robot Chicken neutered,” sighed Badass Digest, one of the few news sites to cover it. After Disney bought Lucasfilm, Detours was put aside. Those six trailers were taken down from YouTube. Nearly forty episodes had been completed, but at time of writing, remained unseen. Said Green: “We didn’t think it made any sense, in anticipation of these new movies coming out, to spend the next 3 years with an animated sitcom as kids’ first introduction to the Star Wars universe.” Especially not if the humor of that sitcom was to fall flat with the Star Wars–loving adults who would invariably watch it.

  That’s the danger with Star Wars spoofing—you’re always just one step away from widespread derision if you say something jarring, or if you don’t quite catch the elusive effervescent giddiness of the movies. Obama may be the Star Wars president, but even he messed up a month after the Death Star petition response, mangling his franchises in a later speech, joking that he wasn’t going to “somehow do a Jedi mind-meld” on Congress. Millions of Star Wars geeks and Trekkers suddenly cried out in anguish: the president had conflated “Jedi mind trick” with “Vulcan mind meld.”

  Which brings us to the coda to the whole Centives affair. In December 2012 Sean Goodwin tried another whimsical Death Star post suggested by a commenter: How long would it take to mop all the floors on the Death Star? Sean did the math on the floor space—359.2 million square kilometers, roughly the area of the Earth—and figured it would take 11.4 million years’ worth of hours to mop it all. To get the job done in a year would take forty-eight million workers; if they all took minimum wage, the mopping would cost $723 billion a year.

  The article went nowhere. No one cared about mopping the Death Star. Why had it failed while its predecessor succeeded? “Suspension of disbelief,” suggested Anjan. “People could just about imagine building a Death Star, but not keeping it clean. They assumed robots would do it.”

  Their brush with intergalactic greatness was over. Sean and Anjan handed the keys to the Centives blog over to a new generation. Anjan became a management consultant in New York, and Sean taught English in Bangkok. They fondly remember the days when their ridiculously impossible idea went all the way to the White House, but they don’t really claim too much credit. “We were inspired by the Death
Star because it’s the Death Star,” Anjan said. “What really sparked it all was the fact that Star Wars made a difficult concept seem real.”

  ________

  * And this wasn’t even the first time the Creator had jokingly changed Star Wars canon on the fly to flatter a late-night talk show host. Chatting with Conan O’Brien in 2007, Lucas claimed that the full name of Death Star admiral Motti, the first Imperial to be force-choked by Darth Vader, was Conan Antonio Motti. The writer of the Lucasfilm novel Death Star, who had decided to give Motti the first name “Zi” in the book, had to scramble to change it.

  * YouTube also offers some wonderfully surreal Dadaist cutups of the source material itself. The Vader Sessions (which has more than five million views) took every one of Vader’s scenes in the original Star Wars—which amounted to a mere ten minutes—and dubbed in James Earl Jones quotes from other movies, modulated Vader-style. “I know you have been inconvenienced, and I am prepared to compensate you,” Vader now says to the dead rebel troops in the corridor of the Tantive IV, in a line from Coming to America. “Shall we say one million American dollars? Very well then, two million!”

  * I was particularly amused to discover a couple of my friends had made it into the movie. The husband played Han Solo. The wife, eight months pregnant, played Jabba the Hutt.

  * Named for the undercover title for Return of the Jedi.

  10.

  STAR WARS HAS A POSSE

  By December 1975, the month the Fox board met to decide the fate of Star Wars, George Lucas had all his difficult concepts in place. He was wrapping up the fourth draft and knew how most of the pieces would fit together. He had explained the Force in twenty-eight words. The Stormtroopers now carried blasters, not lightsabers (though the lightsaber-carrying tubes on the back of their costumes would last into the movie, like a vestigial tail). The Death Star came into focus, no longer eclipsed by long scenes on Alderaan.