If you could pinpoint the moment this divide began, it would have to be May 19, 1999, shortly after midnight at screenings across America—specifically the second the crawl said “turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic,” before the dull reason for that turmoil—taxation of trade routes—crossed the screen. It was, as we know from the Idle Hands story, a beautiful shining moment of fan unity. There’s a reason why director Kyle Newman’s 2007 movie Fanboys, which deals with a group of Star Wars nerds trying to steal an early print of Phantom Menace from Skywalker Ranch in order to screen it for a dying friend, ends at this moment: our heroes, who still haven’t seen Episode I, sitting in the theater on May 19 as the lights go down. One asks another, “What if it sucks?” Fade to black.
Newman is actually pro-prequel, but he wanted Fanboys to recall the positivity and goodwill of that now-fabled era between the Special Editions and the prequels. “People were getting back into it,” he says of the Star Wars franchise. “There was an energy—it was bringing people back together.” After that? “There’s no denying something changed. Fandom divided.” Sure, there had been debates over the Special Editions. Some fans weren’t all that keen on Return of the Jedi. But the crisis that was about to descend on Star Wars fandom would make heated arguments over Ewoks look like a minor disagreement over the finer points of lightsaber coloring.
It wasn’t just that some fans loved the prequels while others loathed them. There were those whose affections shifted one way or another, slowly over months or years, and there were those who were able to convince themselves of the movies’ worth over time. Newman says that a sequel to Fanboys, if he were to film such a thing, would open after Attack of the Clones and mirror this splintering of Star Wars fandom. One of his characters, Hutch, would be angry about everything in the movie; another, Windows, would be the rationalizer, explaining away every questionable plot choice. The third lead, Eric, would play the arbitrator, which is where I sit in the debate: mildly disappointed but curious about whether the rationalizers can make me believe again.
The Hutches of the Star Wars fan world, by their nature, tend to have the loudest voices. You can see their reaction to the prequels by watching Simon Pegg—the British actor later to play Scotty in J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek—in Pegg’s 1999–2001 UK sitcom, Spaced. In imitation of the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, in which Luke Skywalker burns Vader’s corpse on a funeral pyre, Pegg’s character burns his Star Wars collection in his backyard after seeing Phantom Menace. It was played as comedy, but Pegg, a lifelong passionate fan, had a similar reaction to the prequels. In 2010, he called Phantom Menace “a boring, turquid, confused mess of pretentious masquerading as children’s entertainment.”* In Spaced, Pegg wasn’t really acting when he is seen yelling at a child in his comic book store who asks for a Jar Jar Binks doll: “You weren’t there at the beginning! You don’t know how good it was, how important! This is it for you, this jumped-up fireworks display of a toy advert!”
Ah yes, the kids. Newman’s three characters are useful avatars for the different factions of adult Star Wars fandom, but children who love the prequels are an equally numerous, and constantly refreshed, group worth considering. Lucas is keenly aware of this fourth faction. The Creator has in fact simplistically suggested that the only divide in his fandom is along the lines of age. “We know we had a real honest-to-God generation gap with Star Wars,” George Lucas said at Celebration V in 2010, in an interview on stage with Jon Stewart. “Everybody over forty loves [Episodes] IV, V, and VI and hates I, II, and III. Kids under thirty all love I, II, and III, and hate IV, V, and VI.” This caused a commotion in the audience, such that Lucas was nearly shouted down. “If you’re ten years old,” he shouted back, “stand up and fight for your rights!”
But the demographics of Star Wars fandom were never as cut and dry as Lucas suggested. I know a ten-year-old who hates Phantom Menace but thinks Return of the Jedi and Revenge of the Sith are the greatest movies ever. Kids are like that, as Lucas surely knows—unpredictable and picky. They like or dislike movies in the rather more innocent way that Lucas once spoke of, the way you enjoy a sunset, and they tend to change their opinions dramatically as they get older. “It was a magnificent spectacle as a child,” says Liz Lee, star of the MTV high school mockumentary My Life as Liz. “That’s when CGI was still exciting.”
Lee was eight years old at the time Phantom Menace came out; now she’s twenty-one. She’s still enough of a Star Wars fan to get a tattoo representing the Mandalorians, the warrior race who wear the armor of Boba and Jango Fett. “The older I get,” she says, “the more I appreciate the original trilogy, and the more I start to resent the prequels. It’s not like I’m angry about it, but my adult self isn’t as into them.”
Regardless of age, everyone’s reaction to the movies is slightly different. Many fans love one of the prequels and hate two, or love two and hate one—as did Newman, who found nothing at all to like in Attack of the Clones.
Perhaps you’ve wondered, as I have, what to do with your uneasiness about the prequels. Perhaps you too have wondered if it is simply impossible to enjoy any new Star Wars movie if you’re over twenty, or thirty, or forty. We won’t really know until Episode VII repeats the experiment on a planetary scale. In the meantime, a bit of amateur therapy can help to ease the pain—and it begins with working through the five stages of Star Wars prequel grief.
The first stage of grief, of course, is denial: you can take the movies you don’t like and simply declare they don’t exist.
Remember Chris Giunta, the guy who got engaged right before the midnight screening of The Phantom Menace with a little help from Rick McCallum? Fast-forward fifteen years. Giunta is back in Maryland, in a house outfitted with a resin-cast bar that looks exactly like Han Solo frozen in carbonite, a screening room–quality home theater system, and an absolutely firm policy: no prequels, ever. “None of my three kids have seen the prequels or the Special Editions,” he says. “I have the 1996 laser disc of the original trilogy, and that’s all they’ve ever seen. The girls understand that there is other Star Wars, and that Daddy gets mad when it’s brought up. My son is seven; he’s got friends at school who watch the Clone Wars cartoons. He says, ‘Dad, there are other Star Wars movies!’ I say, ‘No, they’re not real Star Wars movies.’”
A less extreme version of the denial response is represented by something called Machete Order. Colorado programmer Rod Hilton came up with this on his blog Absolutely No Machete Juggling in November 2011—hence the name. To Hilton’s surprise, Machete Order became an Internet phenomenon and was widely discussed online throughout 2012.
Machete Order was Hilton’s response to the problem of what order to watch the saga in. After all, watching them in numerical order spoils the biggest surprise of the series—Episode V’s “I am your father”—because a new viewer would learn Luke’s parentage in Episode III. But watch the classic trilogy before the prequel trilogy, and you’re confronted with the elderly Emperor before the young Palpatine, so his character arc is spoiled too. (Not to mention Hayden Christensen’s Force ghost at the end of the post-2004 version of Return of the Jedi: Who the heck, you might wonder, is that guy?)
Machete Order compromises by presenting the saga this way: Episodes IV, V, II, III, and finally VI. This essentially makes the prequels an extended flashback after the parental revelation. The question of whether Vader is telling the truth—and if so, how it happened—adds new tension to Episodes II and III. The identity of the Emperor is preserved. Episode I is omitted altogether, and its loss is not felt because “every character established in it is either killed or removed before it ends,” says Hilton, “or established better in a later episode. Search your feelings, you know it to be true!”
Those who’ve tried Star Wars marathons the Hilton way report a welcome ominous feeling creeping in during the two remaining prequels. “With the Machete Order,” raved the website Den of Geek, “the control of the Emperor over the universe feels absolu
te and tyrannical. His knowledge of the dark side of the force is insurmountable. The end of the Emperor is the greatest day for the universe in 30 years; it gives justification to the scale of the celebrations that follow.”
Would George Lucas object to Machete Order? In one sense, yes: he stands by Episode I. But the creator certainly knows the power of reordering movies in the saga, because that’s what he was intending to do all along with the prequels: to change your perspective on the classic trilogy. “Part of the fun for me was completely flipping upside down the dramatic track of the original movies,” Lucas said. “If you watch it the way it was released, you get one kind of movie. If you watch I through VI, you get a completely different movie. It’s extremely modern, almost interactive moviemaking. You take blocks and move them around and you come out with different emotional states.”
Star Wars fans embraced the interactive possibilities of the series as far back as 2000, when a LA-based film editor called Mike J. Nichols put together a poorly trimmed-down version of Episode I called The Phantom Edit. It was twenty minutes shorter than the original. In Nichols’s version, scenes flashed by at speeds that might give even Land of Zoom supereditor Lucas whiplash (if he ever watched it; Lucasfilm has stated the Creator has no interest in seeing any kind of bastardized version of his work). Much of Jar Jar’s dialogue was removed, making the Gungan more of a Buster Keaton–style silent comedian. Ditto with Jake Lloyd’s dialogue as nine-year-old Anakin.
The edit was distributed anonymously online; it was burned onto DVDs and passed around by hand. Lucasfilm stepped in when it heard that bootleggers—and some video stores—were starting to sell copies of the DVD, which crossed the line from enthusiastic fan edit to copyright violation. “We realized that these were fans having some fun with Star Wars, which we’ve never had a problem with,” Lucasfilm spokeswoman Jeanne Cole said in June 2001. “But over the last 10 days, this thing has grown and taken on a life of its own—as things sometimes do when associated with Star Wars.” Two weeks later, Nichols apologized and said that his “well-intentioned editing demonstration” had “escalated out of my control.”*
The commercial bootlegging would fade away with increased bandwidth speeds and the rise of file-sharing sites—if you could download a high-definition version of something like The Phantom Edit for free, why would you pay a guy on the street for an inferior DVD copy? Indeed, Nichols was only the first in a long line of reeditors. These days you can find hundreds of versions of each Star Wars movie, the original included, fixing dialogue and removing all sorts of perceived errors. (One of the most intriguing, and impossible to find, was an edit of all three prequels into a single eighty-five-minute film by the TV actor and film nerd Topher Grace; Grace only screened it as a “one-time thing,” according to Newman, one of the few who got to see it.) Fan edits are a prime example of “Read/Write” culture as opposed to “Read-Only” culture, according to the theory outlined in Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig’s seminal book Remix. It seems somehow fitting—or terribly ironic—that a perfectionist director whose first student movie was a one-minute collage ripped from magazines should have his most famous work subjected to this twenty-first-century form of collage.
There’s one more denial response worth mentioning: denial of the dialogue, or at least denial of its delivery. Emily Asher-Perrin at the science fiction blog Tor.com decided to take Lucas at his word when he called the prequels “silent films,” and watched the entire prequel trilogy with the sound turned down and John Williams’s soundtrack CD in the background. “It plays on a distinctly different emotional level,” she concluded. “It made me feel I understood what Lucas was going for.”
If you’re baffled and upset at the idea that you might need to watch the prequels on mute in order to truly understand them, you’re probably ready for the next stage of prequel grief. It’s the one that leads to suffering and the Dark Side, if Yoda is to be believed: anger. And there is perhaps no better example of sustained, simmering anger at the prequels than that which can be found in the Mr. Plinkett reviews.
In 2009, a Milwaukee-based filmmaker called Mike Stoklasa produced a comprehensive, vehement, and maniacally obsessive video review of Phantom Menace. The review lasted seventy minutes, so Stoklasa chopped it up into seven ten-minute YouTube videos. As unpromising as that sounds—a review that’s more than half the length of the movie?—the videos were promoted on Twitter by prominent geeks such as Simon Pegg and Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof, and subsequently seen by more than five million people. Stoklasa followed up with ninety-minute reviews of Clones, Sith, and dozens of other movies, also chopped up into digestible chunks. Stoklasa’s YouTube channel, Red Letter Media, has now racked up more than forty-six million views, most of them from the prequel reviews.
What’s the appeal? Stoklasa plays the jester, adopting a character (created by a friend) named Harry Plinkett, the never-seen narrator of the reviews. Plinkett, it emerges, is part film nerd, part serial killer, off his meds, and frequently off topic; he offers several times to mail pizza rolls to his viewers. Stoklasa draws on his Chicago film school education to skewer Lucas’s approach: how Episode I and II lack a real protagonist; how much of Episode III employs the dull editing technique known as shot reverse shot. But by putting it in the Plinkett persona, he is simultaneously parodying the obsessive Star Wars fan. Perhaps the most ironic result of Plinkett’s popularity: one fan decided to blog a rebuttal of everything in Stoklasa’s prequel reviews, point by point. This screed, unintentionally Plinkett-like, ran to 108 pages.
Stoklasa intended to show that the Emperor wore no clothes. “I’m not convinced that George is this genius filmmaker that he’s always been portrayed as being,” he says. “I see him as a guy who had a neat idea to make a space adventure movie in the spirit of the old Flash Gordon serials. Modernize it a little, make it share a lot of visual elements with World War II, add some mythological elements and call it Star Wars. Then get a whole other bunch of people to make it work somehow. . . . He works best when other people take his ideas and work with them. When he writes and directs, it’s disastrous.”
Stoklasa makes this point elegantly in the most oft-cited section of his Episode I review, which has him asking four fans who’ve seen both the original trilogy and Phantom Menace to describe characters from each, without describing their appearance or profession. Han Solo is roguish, dashing, arrogant, a scoundrel, walks the line, has a good heart. Qui-Gon Jinn is . . . Well, Stoklasa’s four panelists have a very hard time coming up with a description until one suggests: “stern?” Threepio is prissy, bumbling, cowardly, anal retentive; Padmé Amidala is . . . The fans cannot come up with a single description that doesn’t mention her makeup, clothes, or royal position, and it seems to be a genuine revelation. “This is funny,” says one. “I get it.”
The most damning words in the Plinkett reviews, however, come from Lucas and McCallum themselves. Stoklasa has done his homework, clipping quotes from DVD extras and documentaries that show the director and producer at their most inane. “It’s like poetry; it rhymes,” Lucas is shown telling his staff of the script, repeatedly. “It’s so dense; every single image has so much going on,” says McCallum. Stoklasa plays this quote in the context of some of the prequels’ profoundly confusing special effects shots, where it isn’t entirely clear whom we’re supposed to be following or why. Suddenly it seems McCallum is describing a movie full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The clips give us the best sense of the exhaustion, creatively and physically, that seemed to dominate the production of the prequels. He shows clips of Lucas slumped in his director’s chair with a large Starbucks cup or surrounded by people whose facial expressions speak volumes. Lucas jokes about not having finished the scripts yet; his underlings smile, while their eyes display the terror of someone trapped on an eternal funhouse ride. To paraphrase something Lucas once said about his father: he is the boss, the one they fear.* We see the actors against green screen with two cameras
, and every nonaction scene looks boringly similar: two actors walk slowly down a corridor or through a room, stop, turn to a window. (As if this isn’t boring enough, Stoklasa points out, nearly all of the important discussions in Sith take place on couches: once you realize this sort of thing about the prequels, it is a hard thing to un-see.)
For all his anger, Stoklasa denies himself some of the easy jabs favored by prequel haters. He doesn’t blame Hayden Christensen’s performance as Anakin: “Even Sir Lawrence Oliver [sic] couldn’t make this shit work,” mumbles Plinkett. As for Jar Jar Binks? “You can make an argument that Jar Jar was the only thing you could understand clearly,” Stoklasa says. “He had some kind of motivation and a character arc. He was annoying, yes, but ironically, he was the most realistic and understandable thing in Phantom Menace.”
Stoklasa is a bête noire for prequel defenders, largely because every Star Wars story and forum now seems to contain comments from people who link to his videos rather than voice their own opinion. But underneath its twisted humor, his is a relatively reasoned and educated take. Other commentators have taken a far cruder approach. In 2005, a band called the Waffles wrote a song called “George Lucas Raped Our Childhood.” Three years later, the creators of South Park went even closer to the bone in an episode in which Lucas is shown raping a Stormtrooper. Hell hath no viciousness like a Star Wars fan spurned.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 51