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

by Taylor, Chris

  In 1978, the company sold more than forty-two million Star Wars items; the majority, twenty-six million, were action figures. By 1985, there were more Star Wars figures on the planet than US citizens. Then came a lull of a decade, before a new licensee, Hasbro, came along with the “Power of the Force” line; though the figures were derided (by Sansweet, among others) as being ridiculously muscular, they still sold like hot cakes. Hasbro hasn’t left off since.

  After 1977, Lucas started to develop some hard-and-fast rules about the Star Wars brand. The hardest and fastest was that the Star Wars name was not be slapped on any old piece of crap. The movies were made with incredible care and precision; the merch should be too. Sansweet can show you a prime example made by Kenner’s Canadian division in 1977, which hadn’t got the memo: a Batman-style utility belt and a dart gun, with Darth Vader’s image on the box. Lucas was enraged when he saw it. His licensing division, then called Black Falcon, was supposed to ensure that sort of thing never went on sale again. It nixed the Weingeroff jewelry deal. Star Wars was also never to be associated with drugs or alcohol. (There were exceptions to all these rules in the chaotic beginning; Sansweet gleefully shows off a piece of sheet music from 1977, the cantina band theme, that shows Chewbacca with a martini glass.) Until Lucas relented in 1991, there would not be Star Wars–themed vitamins for fear that children might get a taste for pill popping (the maker of THX 1138 still resented drugs).

  Lucas professed to take a hands-off approach to merchandising, but in practice he retained a tremendous amount of control over it. “If you do something I don’t like, I’ll let you know,” he told Maggie Young, Lucasfilm’s vice president of merchandise and licensing from 1978 to 1986. As a management technique, that did the trick: Young was too terrified to make anything but the most conservative choices. There do seem to be a few strange blind spots in the history of licensing: Lucas, a diabetic, held out against sugary breakfast cereals for years (until Kellogg pitched low-sugar 3POs in 1984), even though some of Star Wars’ most long-term partners included sugar water makers Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

  Inconsistency aside, it worked. More than $20 billion of merchandising has been sold over the lifetime of the franchise. That’s half the lifetime sales of the Barbie franchise—quite a feat, considering that the anatomically unrealistic blonde doll had a twenty-year head start. And Barbie is struggling to remain relevant in the modern world; the doll’s sales declined by 40 percent in 2012. Star Wars, meanwhile, is only getting stronger; now that Disney, a publicly traded company, has bought the formerly private Lucasfilm, we know that it generated about $215 million in licensing revenue in 2012 alone.*

  Manuelito Wheeler, Director of the Navajo Nation Museum, with a scale model of the truck-mounted screen he used to show the first movie in the Navajo language: a little something called Star Wars, to which his office is a shrine. CHRIS TAYLOR

  Fascination with the space frontier mixes with nostalgia for an age of chivalry in this publicity still for Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. In the cockpit of their rocket ship, dressed for the region of Arboria, from left: Dr. Zarkov (Frank Shannon), Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe), Dale Arden (Carol Hughes), and Prince Barin (Roland Drew). UNIVERSAL PICTURES

  In 2013, George Lucas made his one and only public homecoming to Modesto for the fortieth anniversary of American Graffiti, down the streets he used to cruise—and here, past his father’s old stationery and toy store. Asked if Modesto was the home of Star Wars, he responded: “not really. Most of these things come from your imagination.” CHRIS TAYLOR

  Albin Johnson, founder of the 501st Legion, is a shy, retiring, behind-the-scenes kind of guy—not that you’d know it from this rare shot of Albin with a couple of what he calls “Trooper Groupies.” ALBIN JOHNSON

  Mark Fordham, then-CO of the 501st and its premiere Darth Vader, shows the power of the Legion at the Tournament of Roses Parade in 2007, with Grand Marshall George Lucas. Both men had ambitions to turn their organizations into franchises. MARK FORDHAM

  The day that changed everything and eventually birthed Star Wars: June 12, 1962. The crash quelled George Lucas’s driving desires, committed him to education, and led to a love of anthropology, sociology, and the visual arts. THE MODESTO BEE

  A rare portrait by photography student Lucas, never before published, shows his love of dramatic lighting. The rock guitarist subject is Don Glut, fellow member of the Clean Cut Cinema Club at USC and future author of the Empire Strikes Back novelization. COLLECTION OF DON GLUT

  Alain Bloch, co-founder of the Golden Gate Knights, teaches a weekly three-hour lightsaber class—a cross between fencing and yoga, with a few moments to meditate on the Jedi Code. Jedi organizations tend to be action-oriented more than spiritual. CRISTINA MOLCILLO AND ROS’IKA VENN

  A fan-made model of Barack Obama as a Jedi, seen at Rancho Obi-Wan. Obama is the first president to have been a teenager when Star Wars hit theaters. He crossed lightsabers with the US Olympic fencing team, responded to a petition requesting a Death Star, and was dubbed a Jedi Knight by George Lucas—then confused a Jedi mind trick with a Vulcan mind meld. CHRIS TAYLOR

  Gary Kurtz, here with Lucas on the throne room set from Star Wars, was four years Lucas’s senior and had the Vietnam experience he was looking for in a producer for Apocalypse Now. But he was also a Flash Gordon fan, and ended up producing a remarkable string of hits for Lucas instead: American Graffiti, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. His level of influence over the early franchise, before his sudden departure from it, is still debated. KURTZ/JOINER ARCHIVE

  Phil Tippett and Jon Berg were recruited to help reshoot the aliens in the Cantina. When George Lucas found out they were also stop-motion artists, he asked them at the very last minute to animate the chess set on the Millennium Falcon. Previously, Lucas had planned to use actors in leotards for the chess pieces. TIPPETT STUDIOS

  The Millennium Falcon, the Dykstraflex, Richard Edlund, and Gary Kurtz at ILM in 1976. The homemade computer-controlled camera was the hidden hero of Star Wars, creating the illusion of multidirectional spaceship motion for the first time—and turning the moribund special effects industry on its head. KURTZ/JOINER ARCHIVE

  The bright, compelling cast that, according to Carrie Fisher, used to jokingly call itself “trick-talking meat”: Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), and Fisher (Princess Leia). KURTZ/JOINER ARCHIVE

  The wait outside the 1,350-seater Coronet in San Francisco on the weekend after opening, May 28, 1977. It took three days after the movie opened for newspapers to start photographing the lines outside theaters across America. CORBIS / SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

  The first Star Wars merchandise ad ever to grace the pages of the science fiction magazine Starlog, in the issue that hit stands July 14, 1977. These vinyl masks (and Chewbacca’s “hand applied hair”) were some of the first products licensed by Twentieth Century Fox, which at this stage had just as much right to sell Star Wars tchotchkes as Lucasfilm did. STARLOG/INTERNET ARCHIVE

  Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, where Threepio, Artoo, and Darth Vader placed their feet in wet concrete in August 1977. The ceremony celebrated the return of Star Wars after a mercifully brief engagement with what was supposed to be the hit of the summer, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. A few hundred attendees were expected; five thousand showed up. KURTZ/JOINER ARCHIVE

  Lucasfilm veteran and ultimate fan Steve Sansweet now holds the Guinness World Record for the largest Star Wars collection ever. His nonprofit museum Rancho Obi-Wan boasts 300,000 items, such as this 8mm one-scene viewfinder, the closest audiences in the 1970s could get to taking the movie home with them. CHRIS TAYLOR

  The author dressed in a Boba Fett costume, hand-crafted by the 501st Legion, wandering the halls of the Salt Lake Comic Con in 2013. CHRIS TAYLOR

  Of all the Star Wars rip-offs, by far the most blatant was Italian cult classic Star Crash, seen here in a Spanish-language version. The movie featured a lightsaber battle and
a planet destroying super weapon; the poster boasted what appeared to be a Star Destroyer and the Millennium Falcon. The title translated to “Star Clashes of the Third Kind.” NEW WORLD PICTURES

  Cinematographer Peter Suschintzky, artist Ralph McQuarrie, Gary Kurtz, and production designer Norman Reynolds discuss an early scene in The Empire Strikes Back over a maquette of the Rebel Base hangar on Hoth. KURTZ/JOINER ARCHIVE

  The Dagobah set at Elstree hosted a few special visitors from their Borehamwood neighbors, the Muppets—and you can see just how little love was lost between The Empire Strikes Back director and his little green star. From left: Miss Piggy, Irvin Kershner, Frank Oz, Yoda, Kermit the Frog, Kathy Mullen, Jim Henson, and Gary Kurtz. George Lucas consciously based Yoda on Kermit; this was their first meeting. Both characters are now owned by Disney. KURTZ/JOINER ARCHIVE

  Jeremy Bulloch, aka the original Boba Fett, poses with two astromech droids at Celebration Europe II. CHRIS TAYLOR

  The main room at Rancho Obi-Wan in Petaluma, California. CHRIS TAYLOR

  Cast members from Return of the Jedi reunite on stage, months before it is announced that four of them would be returning for Star Wars: Episode VII in 2015. At this point prior to his operation, one of the returning cast, Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), is unable to walk without the use of a lightsaber cane. CHRIS TAYLOR

  The only photograph taken of the historic one-time meeting between Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, and George Lucas, creator of Star Wars. At “Starlog Salutes Star Wars,” the tenth anniversary celebration at the Stouffer Concourse Hotel in Los Angeles, May 1987. DAN MADSEN

  The fans who became buddies for life after they camped outside the Coronet theater in San Francisco for what was then a record thirty-three days before the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Most would not look this excited after seeing the film. CHRIS GIUNTA

  Artoo builder Chris James and an army of astromechs. The entirely fan-built droids range from the original-style R2 Unit to the black-domed R4-K5—a dark side droid said to work with Darth Vader in one Star Wars novel. CHRIS JAMES

  Star Wars: the Clone Wars director Dave Filoni shows a picture he drew while an animator on Avatar: The Last Airbender, of that show’s characters in Star Wars garb. A hardcore fan of the franchise from age 3, Filoni almost didn’t get the Star Wars directing job—because when Lucasfilm called, he thought it was a prank committed by friends at Spongebob Squarepants. CHRIS TAYLOR

  Eight years after narrowly escaping arrest for wearing a Darth Vader costume when the character was completely unknown, Turkish 501st Legion founder Ates Cetin finds himself leading a protest towards Taksim Square in 2013 while protesters hum the Imperial March. GIZEM AYSU OZKAL

  The museum that never was: the original rejected plan for the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum or LCAM, permanent home for much Star Wars artwork, on the waterfront of San Francisco’s Presidio. LUCAS CULTURAL ARTS MUSEUM

  Sansweet is quick to correct anyone who might have worried that the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney would lead to a sudden slew of Star Wars Disney products. “People got all upset online and complained they were going to make Darth Goofy,” he says. “Well, guess what—they made it seven years ago, and it was great.” He points to his shelves of Jedi Mickeys, Stormtrooper Donald Ducks, and yes, Darth Goofy—fruits of a twenty-five-year partnership between Lucasfilm and Disney.

  Sansweet’s tour seems unending, and he likes to keep it unpredictable. You never know when he’s going to pick up a plush puppet of Princess Leia in her slave bikini, say, and start talking in a falsetto voice, or threaten you with a felted wool blaster. Often he affects bafflement about the items in his collection, as if he just woke up to find all this stuff here. He will mock unusual objects no matter where they came from, and he’s delighted to show off some of the worst official products ever to emerge from Lucasfilm licensing: a C-3PO tape dispenser where the tape emerges suggestively from between the golden droid’s legs; a Williams Sonoma oven mitt in the shape of the space slug from Empire Strikes Back; Jar Jar Binks candy where you have to open the Gungan’s mouth and suck on his cherry-flavored tongue. Sansweet shakes his head sadly, suppresses a smile. What were they thinking?

  But the officially licensed Star Wars products are incomparable—both in terms of numbers and strangeness—to the paraphernalia that fans and bootleggers have produced. Sansweet can show you some of the earliest bootlegged figures, replicas of which—replicas of bootlegs!—now go for hundreds of dollars. A good chunk of Rancho is given over to fan-made ephemera from around the world. We’re talking a beautiful Bantha piñata and Leia and Han as Day of the Dead skeletons from Mexico; tins of Cream of Jawa soup and potted Ewok; a Stormtrooper painted on a ten-thousand-year-old mastodon bone. There are dozens of tricked-out Stormtrooper and Vader helmets, each one painted by a different artist for the Make-a-Wish foundation. Australian fans studiously ignored Lucasfilm’s alcohol ban and sent Sansweet a bottle of Mos Eisley Space port.

  “The fan-made stuff turns me on more than anything,” says Sansweet. “It shows their passion, their skills, and what sets Star Wars apart from any other major fandom of the last fifty years. I love Harry Potter, but you don’t see people building miniature Hogwarts castles. You don’t see a lot of kit Quidditch teams. People love those movies. They don’t have the same passion for them.”

  Being around Steve Sansweet—here at the Ranch, at a book signing, laughing and backslapping with fans at Celebration—is like living in a Star Wars–themed version of The Orchid Thief. Except that Sansweet’s obsession is more stable, more legal, and more constantly fed than John Laroche’s pursuit of rare flowers. It’s hard not to be jealous of Rancho Obi-Wan—not necessarily of the collection itself, though I have met many people who would kill to own it, but rather of the kind of certainty and focus it reflects. To be immersed in an unrivaled global network of fandom, with merchandising as your MacGuffin. To be the ultimate fan—yet to still retain a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous. To shake your head at the folly and still love every second of it. This is a big part of the idea of Star Wars.

  I have never been a collector of anything—I generally align myself with the view expressed by Dr. Jennifer Porter, the Jedi academic and religion expert, who described the kind of gear she saw at Disney’s Star Wars weekend as akin to “tacky pilgrim mementos from Lourdes” that people have a disturbing tendency to “cherish as contact with the sacred.” Still, Star Wars is about the closest I ever got. I started buying the action figures and receiving them as gifts in 1980, just in time for The Empire Strikes Back. In those days before video rentals, before Star Wars had even been shown on network TV, the figures were a way of taking little pieces of the movie home—even when the figure in the plastic blister pack looked significantly more generic than the actor on the cardboard back of the packaging.

  Just as importantly, the figures were a way of feeding my imagination in the absence of new Star Wars movies. The three-year wait between the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi seemed interminable. There were innumerable ways the cliff-hanger ending of Empire could have worked out. My figures, and millions of others around the world, played out the possibilities. Countless Millennium Falcons chased after Slave-1, the ship owned by Boba Fett, which came with a free Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Who knows how many times Luke Skywalker—the Cloud City version—repeated his showdown with Darth Vader’s figure, demanding to know if what he said about being his father was true?

  One thing that would never have crossed my mind as a kid was keeping the figures pristine in unopened blister packs. That was what I feared seeing at Rancho Obi-Wan: an unhealthy obsession with mint-condition collecting and trading, the joyless commodification of playthings. So I was glad to learn from Hasbro, which bought Kenner in 1991, that the majority of Star Wars consumers don’t take that approach. “About 75 percent of our fans do liberate their figures,” says Derryl DePriest, Hasbro’s vice president of global brand management and chief evangelist for the Star Wars
line, who conducts surveys on these sorts of things.

  DePriest has been liberating his Star Wars figures since the age of twelve. When I first met him at San Diego Comic-Con, he pulled out his smartphone and showed me how he stores his collection at home. They were arranged on dozens of shelves, each shelf representing a major ensemble scene from a Star Wars movie. You could reenact the original trilogy in three and three-quarter inches, right there. (It was the first time I’d seen something Rancho Obi-Wan actually didn’t have.)

  As DePriest thumbed through his photos, I pointed out a shelf full of Stormtroopers surrounding the Millennium Falcon, and recalled that one of the most puzzling things I had done with my collection as a child was to trade a Snowtrooper from the Hoth base in The Empire Strikes Back for a friend’s regular Stormtrooper figure, one that was more beaten up than the regular Stormtrooper figure I already had. It’s hard for an adult to remember what kind of logic was at work there: Aren’t collectors supposed to crave the dissimilarity of collector’s items? But DePriest was able to absolve me and reminded me why I did it: everyone needs a whole bunch of Stormtroopers. “Part of the fun is having the good guys outnumbered by the bad guys,” he said. “The rebels always have to be fighting against an overwhelming force. So we make sure we have those figures in abundance.” Call it the spirit of the 501st in miniature. No trooper should troop alone.