Talking Culture: 'The Last Jedi' bashing, angry fanboys, and the Star Wars franchise

(C) 2017 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Dolby Labs

Today's question is: 

Why do a lot of fanboys hate ‘The Last Jedi’?

I’m probably going to get a lot of flak from some of the angry fanboys that this question is about, but since I am a Star Wars fan of the 1977 Generation, I’ll give you my two credits’ worth.

Star Wars fanboy angst is not a new phenomenon. It’s probably been around since the first movie premiered 40 years ago (Oh, See Threepio is too silly!). I first became aware of it when fans who were 10, 11, or even 12 when Star Wars came out in 1977 and didn’t notice some of the kid-friendly humor in it suddenly became aware of the kid-friendly Ewoks in 1983’s Return of the Jedi…and started grousing that Lucas had invented the “teddy bears” just to sell more toys. (There were other issues that fans groused about, but Ewok-hate was the trendy topic among the angry-fanboy crowd.)

(C) 1983 Lucasfilm Ltd (LFL)

Before Jar Jar Binks, Wicket and his pals were the targets of fanboys’ ire.

Of course, back then the Internet was just something that only a relatively small fraction of Americans (mostly academics and government officials) used, so the “bashers” didn’t have a national, let alone global, soapbox on which to stand.

Special Edition posters (C) 1997 Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Artwork by Drew Struzan

By the time Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace rolled out, though, the Internet was a powerful Force in the culture and in our daily lives. Forums and BBS’s gave fans of all stripes that global soapbox on which to stand. So when The Phantom Menace premiered on May 19, 1999 and showed the world George Lucas’s story about a nine-year-old slave boy named Anakin Skywalker and his first encounters with the people who would shape his destiny - for good or ill - the disenchanted angry voices now had venues where they could figuratively (and if they use video or audio clips, literally) shout their vitriol-laced George Lucas ruined Star Wars and raped my childhood spiel.

The Lucas-bashing had actually started two years earlier, when the creator of Star Wars and producer Rick McCallum released the Star Wars Trilogy - Special Edition for the franchise’s 20th Anniversary.

I didn’t have Internet access in 1997, so I was relatively oblivious to the backlash about the editorial changes made by Lucas and the digital artists to the original trilogy.

Oh, sure. Some of my friends, especially those who were just a little younger than I am, were vexed by the changes, especially the “Greedo-shoots-first” bit in A New Hope, the removal of “Lapti Nek” in favor of a new CGI-heavy ‘Jedi Rocks” in Return of the Jedi, a similar substitution of “Ewok Celebration” (the “yub nub” song) by a new John Williams composition called “Victory Celebration,” and a somewhat clumsy reinsertion of the deleted Jabba-Han Solo confrontation in Mos Eisley’s Docking Bay 94 in A New Hope.

My position at the time (which still stands) was, Some of those changes were not well done or even necessary from my point of view. Nevertheless, Lucas is the creator of the Star Wars franchise. It’s his baby, and if he feels he needs to change things that he doesn’t like, it’s not my place to tell him otherwise.

The angry fanboy constituency that coined the infelicitous phrase “George Lucas raped my childhood” had a fit.

Like I said, I was spared most of the anti-Special Edition fury in 1997, but as anyone who hangs out in any social media Star Wars group can tell you, the angry fanboy grousing over the changes made to the Original Trilogy is still going strong 20 years later. Every time 20th Century Fox and/or Buena Vista Home Entertainment drop a new home media reissue of Lucas’s original six films or the new Disney/Lucasfilm offerings, you’ll see questions/comments/rants along these lines:

When will Disney (or Fox, or Lucasfilm) release the original, non-Special Edition versions of the Original Trilogy?

Get the Harmy’s De-Specialized editions of the Original Trilogy!

George Lucas RUINED Star Wars with his Prequel Trilogy!

Disney RUINED Star Wars with the Sequel Trilogy!

Now, the angry fanboys are going to use the “Lucas fell in love with CGI and overused it” and the “Lucas created the original trilogy with a team that curbed his wildest excesses, but when he made the prequels, he was surrounded by ‘yes-men’ and ruined the series with his excesses” arguments. They’ll bring up the “Jar Jar Binks was a character created for kids, and Star Wars has always been for adults” argument.

They will even say that Lucas (and now Disney) don’t know anything about telling a story or even care about telling a story. It’s all about making money.

Hogwash.

In my opinion, as well as that of others on Quora, the “haters” that bash everything that is not the Original (pre-1997) Trilogy are motivated by several factors:

1. Star Wars was a huge part of their childhood, especially if they saw it before they reached puberty. They seek the same emotional experiences they had as children in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When they can’t achieve that, they get upset
2. Long time fans also had long periods of time when there were no new movies or even Expanded Universe (EU) stories, so they imagined different scenarios for a post-Return of the Jedi galaxy, as well as their own takes on a nebulous Prequel Trilogy
3. The EU provided fans a licensed (but non-canonical) look at a post-Battle of Endor New Republic and its protracted conflict with the remnants of Emperor Palpatine’s Galactic Empire. Fans wanted that EU to be the basis for the Sequel Trilogy

Also, it’s also true that there is a trend, prevalent in the Internet-connected culture, that makes it tres chic to bash popular movies, even if the movies that get “critiqued” earn rave reviews from professional film critics and industry insiders.

But, yeah, in a nutshell, most of The Last Jedi bashing comes from “fans” who didn’t get the story they wanted.