The news broke yesterday that Disney has bought Lucasfilm
from George Lucas for $4.05bn (roughly £2.5bn), taking on all of the related
companies such as Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), LucasArts and Skywalker
Sound. Lucas was already planning to
step down from the company and had positioned Kathleen Kennedy (who produced a
lot of Steven Spielberg films through the 80s and 90s, including the Indiana
Jones films) to take over and she will continue to run Lucasfilm, with George taking
on a creative consultant role for new Star Wars films.
Yes, new Star Wars films.
The plan is for a new one, episode seven, to be released in 2015 which
will be followed by episodes eight and nine, than a new movie every two or
three years.
Lucas was quoted as saying “It's now time for me to pass
Star Wars on to a new generation of film-makers”. A treatment for episode seven has already
been written by Lucas, with outlines in place for episodes eight and nine.
In Skywalking, Dale Pollock’s excellent biography of George
Lucas, the evolution of the Star Wars saga is thoroughly detailed and my
understanding of it was that seven, eight and nine would deal with the heroes
of the original trilogy, after the Empire had been vanquished. I can’t really see them rounding up the
original cast and the “expanded universe” has worked on events after “Return Of
The Jedi” (including the Timothy Zahn novels that kicked everything back off in
the early 90s), so I’m not sure what they’ll be about but I imagine that
there’ll be a lot of CGI bangs, bashes and crashes.
I should state that I’m a fan of the original trilogy. It opened in this country in December 1977,
so I would have probably seen it in early 1978 making me eight or nine, the
perfect age to fall in love with this spectacular space saga. And I did fall for it, in a big way, to the
extent that I still rank “Star Wars” as my favourite film and I’m now busy
collecting vintage toys to share with my own little boy.
Does this news worry me?
When I saw the article yesterday, that thought did cross my mind. I wasn’t a fan of the prequels (I didn’t like
Jar Jar Binks, I wasn’t overly impressed with the CGI onslaught) but then, was
I really the target audience? Did George
owe it to me and my generation to make a film that we wanted, rather than a
film that would appeal to everyone including kids who weren’t even thought of
when the original films came out? At the
time, I did feel like that, I felt like he’d sold out the whole saga, filling
it with stupid characters and events that almost derided the quality of the
original trilogy. But did it? Of course, the answer is no - I still love
the first three films, the first three films still exist (in various different
formats) and nothing can remove that.
Does it worry me that people associate Star Wars with Darth Maul or the Clone
Troopers now (well, the latter does because I love the look of the
Stormtroopers, but hey…)? Not any more
because the prequels were there for other people, the kids who’d missed out the
first time and could buy into the hoopla this time around.
I will admit to a vague worry that since Disney now has it,
the film will become more of a testing ground for merchandising opportunities
and that is a concern, but all they’ll do is exploit what’s there. Imagine “Return Of The Jedi” being made
today, the gallery of grotesques in Jabba’s Palace would be a goldmine for soft
toy manufacturers (whereas at the time, we had the Palitoy figures to collect -
and collect them we did).
My love for “Star Wars” hasn’t been diminished by the
prequel trilogy, the expanded universe or the Clone Wars cartoon and so it won’t
be diminished by whatever comes in the future.
But how about, for a change, a fan of the original trilogy looks for the
positive? This news means that there
will be at least three more Star Wars films made and I’ll watch them, even if
they don’t touch me in the same way. But
I’ll be able to take Dude to the cinema to see them, we’ll be able to share
that universe together (and he will obviously know the history of it all too) and
if it opens up a whole new generation of fans, then my beloved Original Trilogy
will live on even longer - and that can’t be a bad thing.
source - BBC News
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