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

by Taylor, Chris

  Ironically, the concept for Star Tours was based on an idea for a ride related to Disney’s Star Wars clone from 1979, The Black Hole. The total cost of what was to be the first version of Star Tours, $32 million, was twice the original cost of Disneyland itself and exactly the budget of Return of the Jedi.

  Outside of Disney Parks, however, the whole Star Wars machine was creaking to a halt. The power in the toy world now resided with Mattel, which was still smarting from its failure to pick up the Star Wars license in 1976. Starting in 1981, Mattel did a reverse George Lucas: the company came up with the toy line first and then built a story around it. The toy was called He-Man. To create a story around the character, Mattel turned to Lucas’s former friend, Don Glut. Working from Polaroids of the toys, Glut created the whole concept of Castle Grayskull, a mysterious location called Eternia. The result was called Masters of the Universe, and inferior as it was, it would steal a good deal of the Star Wars universe’s thunder.

  Similarly, in 1982, the GI Joe franchise had been revived as a series of Star Wars–sized figures, together with a whole mythology, a Marvel comic, and a brand new enemy, the evil Cobra Force. Once again, it was the Star Wars playbook, but this time married to a muscular Reagan-era patriotism. GI Joe was Stallone’s Rambo writ small. He-Man seemed more like Arnold Schwarzenegger writ small (with so much similarity that Mattel had to fight off a lawsuit brought by the owners of Conan the Barbarian).

  Kenner, which was still using the tagline “Star Wars is Forever,” saw the writing on the wall as early as 1984. Sales of action figures had dropped off precipitously after Return of the Jedi; the movie had so much finality to it that there was nowhere left for kids to go. Darth Vader and the Emperor were definitively dead—what stories could you act out without the bad guys? (An avid action figure director at the age of ten, I remember getting around this problem for a while by claiming the Emperor had been cloned—but got bored and packed my Star Wars figures away in the attic by the age of twelve.)

  Desperate to keep Star Wars alive, Kenner designer Mark Boudreaux led a team effort to come up with a whole story that would follow on from Return of the Jedi, and they kitbashed some prototype action figures using spare parts. The concept was called “The Epic Continues.” The idea was that the Emperor’s death had allowed a “genetic terrorist” called Atha Prime to return from the galactic exile he’d been banished to after the Clone Wars, bringing with him a whole bunch of Clone Warriors. Simultaneously, Grand Moff Tarkin was to return, revealing that he had somehow survived the destruction of the Death Star and lead resurgent Imperial forces, and Luke and Han were to enlist the help of a bizarrely named new species from Tatooine called the Mongo Beefhead Tribesmen.

  Boudreaux gave the presentation to Lucasfilm, fully aware that the future of Kenner could hang in the balance. Years later, he still vividly remembered Lucasfilm’s response. “They said, ‘Thank you very much, you guys have done an awesome job, but for now we’d like to do some other awesome things.’” He wasn’t to know that Lucas was jealously guarding his vision for the Clone Wars—or that in the perfectionist universe of the Creator, there was no room for Mongo Beefhead Tribesmen. Kenner, Lucasfilm’s longest-running licensee, shut down its Star Wars line in 1985, and General Mills spun the company off the same year.

  Marvel had been running into similar problems in its attempt to keep the Star Wars comic book relevant. The writers found a way to place Luke and friends in the throes of conflict with an alien invasion of the galaxy following the events of Return of the Jedi, but they could only keep that going for three years. The art looked tired, despite its attempts to keep up with the times: Luke Skywalker sported a mullet, a headband, and six-pack abs. After nine years, the comic ceased publication with its 107th issue in May 1986. The newspaper comic strip had shut down two years earlier.

  In the mid-1980s, you were more likely to read about Star Wars in a political context than anything else. The popular moniker for President Reagan’s new missile defense system was first used by the Democrats and intended as an insult, but the name stuck, and Reagan didn’t correct it until after his reelection. For Lucas, a lifelong liberal, it was the ultimate irony, given the fact that the prime evil of the Star Wars galaxy had been based on the previous two-term Republican president. Lucas, as you may remember, wrote the original movie in the shadow of Vietnam and with Apocalypse Now buzzing around his brain. The Empire is granted the superior technology of the United States and a Nixonian leader we barely see, and the first draft of the script sees its space fortress brought down by creatures inspired by the Viet Cong. By the time those creatures make it onto the screen in Return of the Jedi, they have been deliberately disguised as cute teddy bears. (The signs Lucas stuck up around ILM at the time—“dare to be cute”—suddenly take on new meaning.) The Nixon character, Emperor Palpatine, is cloaked in the garb of a Sith, but did you notice something about the room in which we meet him on the second Death Star? As Lucas pointed out to Ian McDiarmid on set, Palpatine’s office is oval.

  By the time the classic trilogy had wrapped up in 1983, Lucas’s original intent had become so buried under layers of interpretation that Washington Post reviewer Gary Arnold praised his feel-good epic for helping to “close some of the psychological wounds left by the war in Vietnam.” Other reviewers at the time, and cultural critics since, have made the same mistake: how clever of Lucas to put America in the underdog position, they said. Arnold was nearer the mark when he said that the franchise “tapped into inspirational depths that transcend political allegiance. It reflected politically uncomplicated yearnings—to be in the right, to fight on the side of justice against tyranny.”

  No one knew this better than Reagan, who had been elected in the same year Empire won the box office.* Reagan had described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” in a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals in March 1983, a month after the first US screening of Star Wars on HBO and two months before the release of Return of the Jedi. The full quote is “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” Reagan’s chief speechwriter Anthony Dolan says no Star Wars reference was intended; there have, after all, been one or two empires throughout history, evil or otherwise. What the world heard, however, was a reference to a fictional galactic empire.

  There was a similar situation later that month, when Reagan unveiled the concept of defensive systems that could intercept intercontinental missiles during a half-hour live TV address on the defense budget. He left the details hazy, probably because the notion of space satellite X-rays powered by nuclear explosions may have made the technology seem as incredulous as it in fact was. (In terms of its feasibility, Reagan had been sold a bill of goods by Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove.)

  The front page of the next day’s Washington Post carried a rebuttal quote from the lion of the Left, Senator Ted Kennedy, blasting Reagan’s proposals as “misleading Red scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.” Perhaps realizing that a “Star Wars scheme” sounded a little too exciting to pin on his opponent, Kennedy threw a few other, less appealing and more preposterous metaphors into a speech at Brown University in June: Reagan was proposing a “supersonic Edsel,” a “Lone Ranger in the sky, firing silver laser bullets and shooting missiles out of the hands of Soviet outlaws.” But it was too late. The “Star Wars” nickname stuck. Cartoonists showed Reagan introducing his latest advisers, Artoo and Threepio. Time magazine had a cover story about Reagan and defense in April; it was only the second occasion the words “Star Wars” had appeared on the cover of Time. (The first was its cover on Empire; that vital review in 1977 had only said, “Inside: Year’s Best Movie.”)

  Reagan was suspiciously slow to defend his Strategic Defense Initiative against the Star Wars comparison: he waited two years. It evidently didn’t
hurt him in the 1984 election, which he won in one of history’s greatest landslides. Finally, in March 1985, the president gave a speech before the National Space Club. “The Strategic Defense Initiative has been labeled ‘Star Wars,’ the president said, “but it isn’t about war, it’s about peace . . . and in that struggle, if you will pardon me stealing a film line, the Force is with us.” It was a masterful piece of political jujitsu on the Great Communicator’s part—but pedantically speaking, that wasn’t the line Reagan was looking for. “The Force is with us” was not used in a Star Wars movie until Attack of the Clones in 2002, when it was spoken by a Sith.

  Meanwhile, the Soviets were doing their best to pin the evil empire label back on the United States. The movies would not be shown in Russia until the 1990s, but the Washington bureau chief for TASS, the Soviet Union’s centralized news agency, did his best to put a political spin on his Return of the Jedi review. “Darth Vader in America now,” said the reviewer, “is not only a cosmic brigand in an iron suit.” An unnamed “local journalist,” he said, had “pinned the same tag on President Reagan.” The magic mirror of Star Wars always reflected your enemies as the Imperial evildoers.

  Lucasfilm took pressure groups on both sides of the political debate to court for using the words “Star Wars” in ads for and against the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its argument was that a real-life conflict damaged a franchise built entirely on imaginary warfare. The company ultimately lost the case, with the judge arguing that those two words were way too common in the English language for him to grant the plaintiff relief. “Star Wars, your honor, is a fantasy,” complained Lucasfilm lawyer Laurence Hefter. “It’s something that doesn’t exist.” By the time he said that, it was starting to feel like the franchise didn’t exist either.

  As the tenth anniversary of the original movie approached, there was little left of the franchise but nostalgia. The Star Wars fan club sent out its final issue of the Bantha Tracks newsletter in February 1987 and promptly shut down. Dan Madsen, the kid from Colorado who had replaced his Star Trek posters with Star Wars posters in 1977, was now running the Star Trek fan club. Lucasfilm contacted him in early 1987, brought him out to Skywalker Ranch, and asked him if he would also run the successor to the Star Wars fan club. It was to be called the Lucasfilm Fan Club, and it would focus on non–Star Wars movies on the Lucasfilm docket. “I definitely got the feeling he was trying to step away from Star Wars,” Madsen says. “It was hard to be a Star Wars fan at that moment.” Disappointed, he nevertheless accepted the offer: “I just had fun covering the other movies and bided my time.”

  Starlog magazine, at least, couldn’t let the tenth anniversary of the first Star Wars release pass without commemoration. That May, it threw a convention at a hotel near LAX; ten thousand fans showed up. George Lucas was the guest of honor and gave a speech after being presented, by R2-D2 and C-3PO, with a giant birthday card, signed by thousands of fans. He was surprised by how much Star Wars had taken off, he said, and someday—no promises—he hoped to get back to it. That got a loud cheer.

  Then there was a surprise Madsen had helped arrange: Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, bounded onto the stage. Lucas wasn’t one for surprises—and looked shocked. Roddenberry, a big bear-hugger of a guy, enthusiastically grasped the arm of the quiet, reserved Lucas, who was about a foot smaller. It was the one and only time these giants of the geek world were to meet. Madsen was the only one who thought to snap a picture.

  Also speaking at this first tentative Star Wars convention was Howard Roffman, the new vice president of Lucas Licensing. Roffman, an ambitious and accomplished young lawyer, had joined the company in 1980 at age twenty-seven, the week Empire Strikes Back came out. He was quickly promoted to general counsel. In 1987 he had been given the seemingly impossible task of fighting the power of He-Man and GI Joe. Could Star Wars toys be revived without any Kenner-like plan for new stories? “It was not a great time to get that job,” Roffman remembered in 2010:

  But I thought, “I’ll show them. I’ll be the greatest salesman who ever lived.” I went out to every retailer, every licensee, trying to convince them to restock Star Wars, and to a one they told me, “Kid”—I did look like a kid back then—“Star Wars is dead.”

  I had to go back to George Lucas and deliver the news. That was a meeting I wasn’t looking forward to. I thought it was going to be a situation where he presses a button and your chair falls through the floor and into a tank of piranhas.

  I’ll never forget it. . . . He looked at me and narrowed his eyes and said:

  “No it’s not dead; it’s just taking a rest. A lot of kids really love those movies. Someday they’re going to grow up and have kids of their own. We can bring it back then.”

  That was the moment I realized that George Lucas really is Yoda.

  Meantime Roffman, and Lucasfilm, focused their attention on other brands. The company had a couple of notable failures in 1986 with Howard the Duck and Labyrinth, both produced by Lucas (and directed by Lucas friends Willard Huyck and Jim Henson respectively), but Lucasfilm had high hopes for its movies in production: a fantasy called Willow, starring Warwick Davis, who had played the lead Ewok, Wicket, in Return of the Jedi; a Coppola biopic of automaker Preston Tucker; and the third Indiana Jones film. There was also Lucasfilm Games, a profitable new division that was later renamed LucasArts. It produced a string of hits such as Maniac Mansion, an adventure video game with a TV show tie-in, and had many more titles in the works. Ironically, the one thing the games division couldn’t produce at the time was Star Wars games, for which Atari, and later JVC, held the license.

  There was one form of Star Wars game that Roffman’s team was able to license, however, and it was the geekiest version of them all. The Star Wars role-playing game, made by a tiny company in Pennsylvania called West End Games, launched in October 1987. For the next three years, it would be about the only thing going on in the Star Wars universe. Those Dungeons & Dragons players who switched to playing Star Wars would be like the Irish monks who saved civilization by copying ancient scrolls through the Dark Ages.

  It’s an apt metaphor, since the role-playing game wasn’t just preserving the memory of Star Wars. It was cataloging and enhancing it. To create the sourcebook for all those dungeon masters out there, West End Games editor Bill Slavicsek had to invent names for all the alien races, all the ships, all the weapons and droids. He had to figure out the nuts and bolts of how Lucas’s universe worked, and fill in all the gaps that the Creator hadn’t bothered to think about.

  At the time, it seemed about the nerdiest thing you could possibly do. But Slavicsek’s work—and the contributions of writers who came after him—would prove incalculably important to the coming Star Wars revival.

  ________

  * The question of whether a couple of uncomplicated, feel-good, California-made movies nudged voters toward this uncomplicated, feel-good, California-made movie actor candidate is one I’ll leave to the psephologists, though the very idea would horrify the liberal Lucas.

  19.

  THE UNIVERSE EXPANDS

  The Expanded Universe, it was called, and what a universe it was. Some 260 novels; dozens of short stories; 180 video games; more than 1,000 comic books. More than 120 book authors alone who got to contribute their own little piece to Star Wars legend. So much creativity—and according to the internal rules of Star Wars canon, any bit of it could be overwritten by Lucasfilm’s on-screen work at any time. Indeed, Episode VII has already banished the Expanded Universe to the universe next door.

  Like so much of Star Wars, the Expanded Universe was dominated by activity in the 1990s and 2000s. But it actually got its start in 1976—earlier than the original movie—courtesy of Alan Dean Foster. The world wouldn’t see the result of his labors until February 1978, but the ghostwriter’s Star Wars contract demanded a second book. So once he’d spent two months writing up the original Star Wars novelization and mailed it off to Lucas’s lawyer, Tom Pollock, Foster
turned right back to his IBM Selectric typewriter, loaded another piece of blank paper into it, and started work on the first ever Star Wars tale not created by George Lucas. No biggie.

  Before the world even knew who Luke and Leia were, then, Foster packed them off to the fog-shrouded, cave-filled planet of Mimban. It was fog-shrouded and cave-filled because one of the few directions Lucas had given was to write something cheap. The novel was little more than an insurance policy. If Star Wars only broke even, or made just a tiny bit of profit, he could use Foster’s book as the basis for a screenplay and make a quick sequel on a Roger Corman budget while the sets were still lying around. When Foster wrote a thrilling battle in space for Chapter 1, Lucas nixed it. No doubt the massive cost overrun at ILM was weighing heavy on his mind. In the potential future of the cheap Star Wars sequel, there’d be no more Dykstra-driven headaches.

  “Make it work as a Sergio Leone Western,” Lucas suggested to Foster in one of their two meetings to discuss the book. “It can go more into the middle of nowhere where these really slimy creatures live. Essentially, space can be boring. . . . Now that we’ve established the space fantasy, we can move away from that.”

  The book Foster produced was called Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, and it was shaped by more constraints than just Lucas’s presumed budget. Only Luke and Leia were in the book, because Harrison Ford was not signed up for a sequel. Only Vader’s face was on the Ralph McQuarrie cover, with Luke and Leia seen from behind, because Lucas did not at that point have the rights to use Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher’s faces. The plot was a movie Foster constructed in his head out of spare parts Lucas had left lying around. Luke and Leia meet Halla, a Force-sensitive old woman, and go off in search of the Force-enhancing Kaiburr crystal—something Lucas discarded after the third draft of Star Wars as he felt it turned the Jedi into hard-to-root-for superhumans. Darth Vader, alerted to their presence, meets them there. He and Luke have their first lightsaber showdown, but not before Leia has taken Vader on with a lightsaber herself. In an odd reversal of what would come to pass in Empire, Luke slices Vader’s arm off. Vader falls down a deep cave shaft. At the end, though, Luke senses Vader is still alive.