Captain Couch Potato Ponders "Canon" as a Flawed Concept for Use in Modern Multimedia Franchises

I never got around to seeing Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens in a movie theater. I'll see it eventually, when it comes out on DVD, but its release was not for me the watershed moment that it was for so many other lifelong Star Wars fans. Initially, my reasoning, which I used when discussing it with various friends who couldn't understand why I wasn't more excited--and who, without exception, reassured me¹ that the movie was worth seeing--was that the Star Wars franchise had ceased to be important to me as a living entity. Claims, in the '90s and '00s (with the release of the "special edition" versions of the original trilogy, plus the three almost universally disappointing prequels), that George Lucas had "raped" the childhoods of original Star Wars fans was not just an exaggeration (to say nothing of a gross misuse of a word) but also ridiculous. I wondered if the minds of fans were really so impressionable that a distinct two-hour movie could be irreversibly tainted by a slightly altered version of that movie, or even by a different two-hour movie. To me, the original Star Wars remains Star Wars, regardless of some other version where Greedo shot first, or of what happened in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, to say nothing of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, or Revenge of the Sith--which don't even focus on the same main characters.²

But this is where the concept of canon comes in. To the more devoted fan, Star Wars is not just a movie, but a universe. And for a franchise as old and lucrative as the Star Wars franchise is, the universe matters far more than the primary source material.³ (This is true with other franchises as well, such as Superman and Batman, where the initial source material is of even less practical value⁴ than subsequent iterations.) This is why The Phantom Menace upset so many fans. As part of the larger Star Wars universe, it wasn't just a bad movie; it was a bad movie that diminished the quality of the Star Wars universe as a whole. In a franchise situation like this, the parts of the whole are important primarily for their contribution to (or contamination of) the larger entity.⁵ Just as The Phantom Menace is reviled, so is The Empire Strikes Back lauded as the best of the Star Wars movies, despite the fact that it doesn't really have a beginning or an end in the traditional, dramatic three-act structure sense. Instead, it is Empire's contributions to the overall franchise that earns it its esteemed place in the canon: the (live-action) introduction of fan-favorite Boba Fett, the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke's father, Han Solo's burgeoning romance with Princess Leia, Yoda's pseudo-Eastern philosophic ramblings, etc.

So it is the ideas, characters, and potential contained within the Star Wars universe that Disney bought and which matter most to fans. But to do anything of note with these ideas and characters, Disney has to be able to create movies, comic books, novels, etc., that matter to the dedicated Star Wars fan. And to matter, these products need to be directly related to the source material that inaugurated the franchise.

To achieve this, Disney essentially "erased" thirty years of secondary material, from Timothy Zahn's popular Admiral Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars novels to the hundreds of Star Wars comic books published by Dark Horse since 1991. What had been considered "expanded universe" material (which, by Lucasfilm's canon algorithm, meant a secondary, but still "official" level of canon) was now known as "legends" material, which is essentially the same as professionally published fan fiction. Meanwhile, Disney and its media conglomerate subsidiaries, such as Marvel Comics, would create movies, comics, etc., that are all equally part of the official Star Wars canon.

This is all fine. But as more and more material is generated and sold to the public, the canon becomes more and more muddled (as the Star Wars canon already did with the proliferation of comics and novels of the last twenty years that Disney just swept under the rug). At what point will Disney need to wipe the slate clean a second time in order to re-engage a new generation of fans without the burden of too much ancillary material to keep straight? One of the many things that bothered me about the prequels is that much of the story took place offscreen. The Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) cartoon filled in the story gaps between The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith to the point where its final episode led straight into the action of Revenge of the Sith, with Chancellor Palpatine being kidnapped in the episode's final moments.

A lot happens in between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, but the audience is left to infer the missing story from the dialogue in the second film. For instance, Han Solo mentions a bounty hunter who almost captured him for Jabba the Hutt. But there's no cartoon or comic book that illustrates that encounter. Yet by the time the prequels came around, there was so much ancillary material that it was nearly impossible to take the films at face value because, if you did, you wouldn't have a clue what the hell was going on.

I'm not saying that Disney is in immediate danger of hopelessly convoluting the Star Wars franchise, but the rate at which they're churning out movies and comic books leads me to believe that, eventually, the casual fan will be lost once again. When that happens, today's canon will be tomorrow's apocrypha.

So to get back to my initial paragraph, why wasn't I excited about The Force Awakens? Because the Star Wars canon isn't what was important to me. What was important to me was George Lucas. I believe in André Bazin's auteur theory, which holds that a work of art should represent its creator's personal vision. Granted, he wasn't talking about a piece of fluff like Star Wars when he developed this theory with his fellow French film critics, and Lucas's film is hardly a masterpiece in the way that François Truffaut's The 400 Blows is a masterpiece, but the fact remains that Star Wars was Lucas's personal vision. Moreover, it's a film that he struggled to complete because literally no one around him at the time believed that it was anything other than a cinematic dog turd in the making.⁶ Oddly enough, Lucas had similar problems when overseeing The Empire Strikes Back. He was not the director or the writer of that film, but he was still its resident visionary. The prequels, as bad as they are, were also Lucas's vision--and for that reason alone they interested me. The Force Awakens, on the other hand, is just an action movie. It's about as exciting to me as was Terminator 3.

Star Wars is not the only franchise with a problematic canon. The movie version of Spider-Man, for example, has been rebooted three times in the last fifteen years. Batman movies have been rebooted twice in ten years. And although the Star Trek reboot made an effort to keep its canon glued together with the appearance of Leonard Nimoy as Spock in the 2009 movie, it's impossible to pretend that the original '60s TV show has more than a superficial link to the current film series (and I'm not just referring to the fact that the cast is played by different actors; Gene Roddenberry's vision is nowhere to be found in J. J. Abrams's films). Likewise, DC Comics' tone-deaf Before Watchmen project needlessly "extend[ed] a groundbreaking work into a glossy but lifeless franchise." Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen needed a prequel about as much as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four needed a sequel.

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Pointless Footnotes

¹ Reassurance being an important thing when it comes to post-original Star Wars trilogy movies.

² By which I mean that Anakin Skywalker, Obi-wan Kenobi, Yoda, C-3PO, and R2-D2 were supporting characters in the original trilogy. Besides, even though the "protagonist" of the prequels, Anakin Skywalker, becomes Darth Vader, the villain of the original trilogy, they're still pretty much two completely different characters (at least until Darth Vader shows up at the tail end of Revenge of the Sith).

³ It's worth noting here that when Disney bought Star Wars for $4 billion, it bought the franchise but not the original movies themselves, which Fox continues to own through the year 2020.

⁴ As opposed to nostalgic or collectible value. Sure, a mint copy of Action Comics 1 (the issue in which Superman first appeared) recently sold for $3.2 million on ebay. But the latest Superman movie, Man of Steel, which wasn't even that good, grossed $668 million. The character is worth infinitely more than the first, primitive Superman story Siegel and Shuster wrote and drew in 1938.

⁵ In the '70s, at least, George Lucas was a creator who well understood the value of collaboration and market saturation. He practically invented the idea of effective movie licensing, the kind that enriches rather than merely exploits the brand. Take the first Star Wars comic book series, published by Marvel beginning in the late '70s. In the eighth issue, writer Roy Thomas and artist Howard Chaykin introduced Jaxxon, a six-foot-tall anthropomorphic green bunny. Lucas usually took a hands-off approach to the comic book license, but in the case of Jaxxon he told Marvel to axe the character, who disappeared completely by issue sixteen. Thomas and Chaykin, it seems, hadn't yet grasped the strengths of the Star Wars franchise, and had accidentally created a character that didn't jibe with the Star Wars universe. Sure, the movie was for kids, but not toddlers. Lucas knew that Jaxxon would degrade the franchise, however slightly, so he demanded that Jaxxon be removed. Simple as that. Of course, in the '90s, the very same man who nixed Jaxxon approved Jar-Jar Binks. Jaxxon may have looked goofy, but at least he was a laser-gun-toting badass. Jar-Jar, on the other hand, was simply goofy. (In fact, if Disney's Goofy were a space alien, he would be Jar-Jar.)

On the flipside of the same coin, although I'm not quite cynical enough to suggest that Lucas inserted Ewoks into Return of the Jedi strictly because he knew the action figures, plush toys, and cartoon would sell like gangbusters, they were definitely one of the marketing highlights of the third Star Wars film. I'm not a big fan of them now, in my forties, but at the ages of seven and ten, respectively, my brother and I thought they were awesome, as did pretty much every other kid on earth.

⁶ See John Seabrook's New Yorker article, in which he recounts Lucas showing the rough cut of Star Wars to Steven Spielberg, Alan Ladd, Brian De Palma, a few other friends, and some Fox executives. Their communal reaction was muted, to say the least.