And where would Lucas be in this picture? An adviser, “my Yoda on my shoulder,” in Kennedy’s phrase. The “keeper of the flame” of Star Wars. The old Jedi in a cave whom the warrior turns to when her question is too important and all other options have been exhausted. Would this mean that Lucas was to still be, in some shadowy way, in charge of the Star Wars saga? Ponder how many of the events of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi could be said to be Yoda’s doing, and there you’ll have your answer. (Not a lot—just the training that led to the key moment.)
Lucas, fascinated by education, is uniquely suited to the task of mentoring younger directors. It was what he had done for Dave Filoni on The Clone Wars; it was what he would do again, in far more of an advisory capacity, for J. J. Abrams. Kennedy would recruit Abrams away from the Star Trek franchise in January 2013 with four simple words: “Please do Star Wars.” Abrams, the once and future Star Wars nerd, pulled strings at Paramount so he could comply. Later in 2013, Jett Lucas would reveal that his father was talking to Abrams “all the time.”
That doesn’t make Abrams the next Richard Marquand. He’s more strong-willed and far more experienced than the Welsh director, for one thing, and for another, Lucas has genuine reason to want to step back gracefully into the shadows, back behind the scenes at last, and to sit, quite literally, in the back row. Perhaps the most touching moment in the PR film comes when the old Jedi reveals the great price of his mastery: he never had a chance to see his epic the way most of us did. “The one thing I missed in life is that I never got to see Star Wars,” he said. “I never got that moment when I walked into a theater and was blown away, because I already knew it was nothing but heartache and problems.” George James Sr., Navajo Code Talker, and George Lucas Jr. had something in common, then: neither of them had ever really seen this classic film.
After the New York Stock Exchange closed on Tuesday, October 30, 2012, this announcement was pushed out on Disney’s website: “Disney to Acquire Lucasfilm Ltd.” It offered a few obligatory paragraphs of hyperbole, and the rest was written in standard press-release-ese. “Acquisition continues Disney’s strategic focus on creating and monetizing the world’s best branded content,” read the subhead. The galaxy far, far away became just another piece of branded content, belonging to the world’s largest media company.
The price was exactly $4.05 billion as of that day’s Disney share price. The terms of the deal were half stock, half cash. $2 billion in a virtual suitcase and forty million Disney share certificates, all of it handed to Lucasfilm Ltd.’s one and only shareholder, George Walton Lucas Jr., son of a stationery store owner. $4.05 billion: Star Wars was not worth as much as the $7 billion for Pixar, then, and only a hair’s breadth more than the price paid for Marvel. $4.05 billion is more than the GDP of Fiji. And yet it may seem a somewhat deflating number to appraise this property at, given the $30 billion of revenue Star Wars generated in its first thirty-five years.
Like Lucasfilm, Disney had made a video, and it got its version out first. Iger had prepared a speech for the film, after which Lucas responded to offscreen questions. In the video, Iger pointed out that his $4.05 billion was paying for seventeen thousand characters (the number Leland Chee had determined resided in the Holocron)—though he neglected to say that the vast majority of them were minor characters in novels.
Iger also sought to reassure investors about the wisdom of dropping such a hefty sum on a single company by soothingly mentioning his other new crown jewels: ILM and Skywalker Sound. On a conference call the day of the announcement, he played up the smart financial aspects of the deal. Those forty million shares he had granted Lucas? Iger would be issuing them anew and intended to buy back that many shares before the new Star Wars arrived in 2015. He didn’t mention that Disney had had $4.4 billion sitting in the bank and investors demanding they do something with it. Only $2 billion of that had gone to Lucas in cash; the rest was delivered in stock. Disney still had the capacity to swallow another Lucasfilm whole.
Investors weren’t so sure about the whole deal. Disney stock fell amid heavy trading the day after the announcement, to $47 a share. In the immediate aftermath of the news there seemed to be a certain sense of dazed dismay in the mainstream media and in Star Wars fandom. “I felt a great disturbance in the Twittersphere,” I tweeted at the time, “as if a million childhoods suddenly cried out and were silenced.” But it didn’t take long for me to realize I was wrong: the deal made sense, even for fans. There would be more Star Wars, funded by some very deep pockets. Look at how Disney treated Pixar and Marvel: reverentially. Look at who would be directing the next movies: not the director of the prequels. I wrote “Star Wars Just Got a New Lease on Life,” the first positive op-ed piece published in the deal’s wake. The next day, it was shared twenty thousand times on Facebook alone; it seemed I wasn’t the only fan to feel a mounting sense of excitement once they weighed everything up.
Lucas, unusually for him, was more upbeat than that. He even cracked a smile. In his interview, the Creator emphasized that he’d been a big fan of Disney “from when I was born.” He offered his final rationalization for abandoning his hopes of making more experimental films: “I couldn’t drag my company into that.” (A company that, by the way, was like a “mini-Disney . . . constructed similarly.”) “Disney is my retirement fund,” he said dryly. Which was something of an understatement: Lucas was now the second-largest private shareholder of Disney stock after Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. The kid who got to go to Disneyland on day 2 in 1955, who had revered Uncle Scrooge, who wanted Disney to back Star Wars in the first place, who had kept two Mickey Mouse bookends on his desk all these years, now owned 2 percent of the company.
The retirement fund would continue to rise and fall for the next two months, as Disney was buffeted by uncertainties in the market. But in January 2013, as Wall Street learned that J. J. Abrams was about to be announced as Episode VII director, the company’s stock began a remarkable rise. On May 14, 2013—Lucas’s sixty-ninth birthday—Disney stock would hit a high of 67.67. The present for the man who had everything? Stock that was worth $840 million more than when he first received it.
It was an end of an era, to be sure—but Star Wars was living on, and not just in the bank account of its Creator. In the PR video that Disney had released around the time of the acquisition announcement, Lucas talked about the future of Star Wars films. He casually referred to episodes VII, VIII, and IX collectively as “the end of the trilogy”—by which he presumably meant the trilogy of trilogies, which hadn’t really existed until he’d finally decided to send over some treatments. “And other films also,” he added—as usual, casually dropping a twist into the whole narrative at the last minute and, as usual, choosing wonderfully wooden words. This was the first mention of stand-alone Star Wars movies that would hit screens in the years between episodes.
“We have a large group of ideas and characters and books and all kinds of things,” said the Creator. “We could go on making Star Wars for the next hundred years.”
CONCLUSION: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
If George Lucas is right about how many stories there are left to tell in the Star Wars universe—and he hasn’t been proved wrong on that score yet—future generations of fans will still be lining up outside cineplexes to see the adventures of future Solos and Skywalkers in 2115. If we’re going according to Disney’s current schedule, that’ll be Episode LXXXVII. For all we know, it will be screened as a giant IMAX hologram.
Sound ridiculous? Maybe it is. Then again, there was a time—forty years ago—when the very notion of space fantasy movies sounded ridiculous. And Star Wars still has plenty of new worlds to conquer. It’s not just that the franchise and its acolytes are embracing whole new languages like Navajo. They’re also continuing to expand into countries around the world that were not swamped by the original wave of Star Wars mania.
Take Turkey. Until very recently, it was a lonely thing to be a fan of Yildiz Savasla
ri—that is, Star Wars in Turkish. But Ates Cetin, born in 1983, was hooked from the moment he watched a dubbed version of The Empire Strikes Back on TV as a kid during the late 1980s. He began looking for ways he could play in this universe he had just discovered.
Sure, the original trilogy had screened at theaters around Turkey. But so did Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), an adventure film from 1982 that liberally plundered Lucasfilm’s cinematic property for special effects scenes. The Millennium Falcon and the Death Star were reused. No one in the country seemed to notice, or much care. Today, the movie is commonly known as “Turkish Star Wars” and is a cult favorite; back then, it was panned and vanished without trace. “I’ve seen it a few times,” says Cetin, “and I still don’t understand the plot.”
Star Wars merchandise was scarce back in the 1980s in Turkey. All you could find were the infamous Uzay bootleg action figures, the ones that thought they could get around copyright by changing one letter around in the names of their “Starswar” line. (Steve Sansweet cherishes his Uzay “stormtroper” and “C-PO” figures; the 501st Legion has built a costume of the Uzay “Blue Star” snowtrooper.)
The real Lucasfilm-licensed toys started to enter the country in 1997, in time for the Special Editions. But not everyone was buying. In 1999, Cetin saw reports from America about the long lines outside theaters showing The Phantom Menace, and was subsequently dismayed when only one or two people showed up in the entire theater for opening day in Istanbul. The small crowds were to be repeated for the rest of the prequels. Turks, it seemed, just didn’t take to the idea of Star Wars the way people had in other countries.
The day Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, a collector friend dressed up as a Stormtrooper and loaned Cetin a Darth Vader costume; they walked around Taksim Square, the most crowded and famous public area in Istanbul, testing the waters, trying to gauge reactions. Darth Vader, it turned out, was practically anonymous, even here in the cultural center of one of Europe’s largest cities. “Only a few of them recognized the character,” Cetin says. “Most of them thought I was Shredder, from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Robocop, or a fireman. One old lady called me ‘the man from the mountains’; the meaning remains a mystery.”
The police, meanwhile, were more apprehensive of the Dark Lord. Cetin had to hastily explain to an officer that he was in a stage play, and he seemed on the edge of being arrested, on suspicion of being suspicious, when his friend bundled him into a cab.
Cetin speaks softly, but he has a quiet persistence about him. In 2008, he founded a Turkish outpost of the 501st Legion; in 2011 he cofounded Turkey’s own Rebel Legion. He watched Adidas launch Star Wars–themed shoes and jacketsin the country; he welcomed The Clone Wars to Turkish TV screens. Friends started playing the latest Star Wars video games. Facebook arrived, and brought Star Wars memes with it. Cetin noted that humor columns in newspapers began to make Star Wars references. Slowly but surely, something was changing.
Fast forward to July 2013, when Taksim Square was the center of a very different kind of police action. Citizens started gathering after police had tear-gassed a peaceful protest against the demolition of a local park, which was supposed to make way for a shopping center in the style of an Ottoman-era army barracks. Cetin decided he’d join the protests, dressed once again in the full Vader costume. His message: “even the most evil film character is on the side of the people.”
Of course, if the Vader costume had been provocative last time, this time Cetin would really be risking arrest. But he couldn’t resist. At the last minute he left his lightsaber at home and carried the Turkish flag instead; perhaps that would endear this mystery figure to the crowds. It turned out he didn’t need it. In just eight years, Star Wars had gone from being a largely unknown, bootlegged curiosity to common cultural meme. “From [ages] seven to seventy, they all called ‘Darth Vader,’” Cetin told me. “‘Go Vader! Go get them! Show them!’ After a few such cheers, you almost feel like you are really Darth Vader.” To his astonishment, wherever he walked, the protestors started to follow—humming the Imperial March.
Star Wars is an increasingly global phenomenon, perhaps the first mythos all cultures can get behind without hesitation. Even its film sets have become shrines. In 2011, a small group of largely European fans discovered that the Lars homestead, that single white dome-like dwelling where we first meet Luke Skywalker in the first ever Star Wars film, was moldering away in the desert in Tunisia. On Facebook, the fans asked for $10,000 in donations to restore the building to film quality with plaster and paint; they promptly raised $11,700. The permits from the Tunisian government took a little longer, but the team completed the job in a few weeks. Tears streamed down their cheeks as they screened a video of the restoration effort at Star Wars Celebration Europe, to a packed house and rapturous applause.
Japan is probably the most Star Wars–crazed country in the Eastern hemisphere, if not the world. It was home to the “George Lucas Super Live Adventure,” a bizarre and largely Star Wars–based arena show that toured the country in 1993. This is the country where you can watch Darth Vader hawking Pacific League baseball, Nissan cars, and Panasonic electronics. You can visit Nakano Broadway, a six-floor mall in the heart of Tokyo, and find rare Star Wars toys and trinkets for sale on every floor. When George Lucas came to open the original Star Tours at Tokyo Disneyland in 1989, he was chased around the park by hordes of Japanese schoolgirls. Then forty-five, he joked that he wished he were twenty years younger. Schoolgirls (and the occasional boy, but mostly schoolgirls) are still there, lining up in greater numbers for the new Star Tours, which I found to be the most popular exhibit in Tokyo Disneyland. As they line up, Threepio welcomes them to the ride in Japanese, once again sounding prissy and girlish in a foreign language.
South Korea was relatively unaffected by Star Wars, so much so that Harvard academic Dong-Won Kim presented a paper looking into the reasons why Episodes I through III had been seen by (gasp) fewer than two million Koreans. Even in Seoul, however, you can watch Darth Vader in ads for Korea Telecom or catch a performance of Stormtroopers filming a video—a K-pop hit by a group called the Wonder Girls. I found a shop in the heart of the Hongdae district formerly called Star Wars Coffee (tagline: “May the froth be with you”). It still sold knock-off artwork of Warhol-style Darth Vaders, and vast canvases of classic trilogy characters arranged around the table in the style of the Last Supper.
The list goes on and on. Visiting the island of St. Maarten in the Bahamas? You’ll want to stop in at the Yoda Guy Movie Exhibit, run by one of the creature shop artists who worked under Stuart Freeborn on The Empire Strikes Back; it’s one of cruise line Royal Caribbean’s most popular destinations on the island. In Australia, a man named Paul French did a charity walk across the entire Outback, 2,500 miles from Perth to Sydney, in a skin-chafing Stormtrooper costume. Why a Stormtrooper? Because, French said, it would “create a bit more attention.” He raised $100,000.
Such anecdotes are amusing in isolation, but together they speak volumes about the incredible reach and power of the shared culture that is Star Wars, a universal language of tropes and characters that sparks instant attention everywhere it goes. The language was born in 1977 and received significant upgrades in 1980 and 1983. It appeared to die out, but marinated in millions of memories until 1997, when the world was shocked to discover how many of us still spoke it, and a new generation of speakers started chattering excitedly. Another branch of the language opened up in 1999, a dialect that plenty of speakers vowed they would never speak but that entered the lexicon anyway. In 2002 and 2005, the latest language upgrades were delivered around the world simultaneously. By 2014, the steady buzz of anticipation for the next addition to the mother tongue had become a roar heard around the world. We all speak Star Wars now.
Perhaps the only humans on Earth who seem relatively unenthusiastic about the prospect of more Star Wars are those focused on getting off the planet.
The Creator
has long been a strong advocate of real, as well as fictional, outer space missions. He grew up in the dawn of space exploration and eagerly followed the progress of Apollo missions in the 1960s. Armstrong landed on the moon shortly before Lucas started filming THX 1138. The Viking 1 lander touched down on Mars in July 1976, less than a week after Lucas wrapped shooting on Star Wars. Later that year, it was erroneously reported that Viking had found traces of organic life in Martian soil. Hal Barwood remembers Lucas coming to his house one day during the editing of the first movie and being very excited about the news. “He thought it was a good omen for Star Wars,” Barwood recalls.
The moment it became clear that the film was a huge hit, Lucas started talking about how it might influence the space program. “I’m hoping that if the film accomplishes anything, it takes some ten-year-old kid and turns him on so much to outer space and the possibilities of romance and adventure,” he told Rolling Stone in 1977. “Not so much an influence that would create more Wernher von Brauns or Einsteins, but infusing them into serious exploration of outer space and convincing them that it’s important. Not for any rational reason, but a totally irrational and romantic reason.”
“I would feel very good,” he continued, “if someday they colonize Mars when I am 93 years old, and the leader of the first colony says: ‘I really did it because I was hoping there would be a Wookiee up here.’”
Up until the end of his career, Lucas was expressing the same hopes for the effect that his creation would have on the international effort to explore outer space. In 2010, he told Jon Stewart, “My only hope is that the first guy who gets to Mars says ‘I wanted to do this ever since I saw Star Wars.’” Lucas’s most expressive, political version of this wish had come in 1981, when he waxed lyrical to Starlog:
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 56