Talking About 'Star Wars': Is there any way that Star Wars Episode IX will make all Star Wars fans happy?

-

On the questions-and-answers site Quora, somebody asks: 
Is there any way that Star Wars Episode IX will make all Star Wars fans happy?
My reply is:
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding.
The question you ask reflects either the inexperience or naivete of someone who hasn’t been around to experience the Star Wars phenomenon since it began in 1977.
Well, I was 14 when Star Wars (as the original film was originally titled) premiered on May 25, 1977. And I can tell you right now that if there is one truth about the franchise’s fans, it is this:
There is no such thing as a Star Wars movie that will make all fans happy.
It wasn’t possible to please all of the fans in 1977 when some fans thought the tone of Star Wars was too kid-friendly, mainly because of the Laurel-and-Hardy relationship between Artoo Detoo and See Threepio.

It wasn’t possible to please all of the fans in 1980 after The Empire Strikes Back was released; there was a lot of arguing about how inconclusive the ending of the movie felt, whether or not Vader was Luke’s father, or how on Tatooine’s burning sands would Leia ever decide between Luke and Han?

It definitely wasn’t possible to please all fans in 1983 when Return of the Jedi hit theaters. Some fans hated the revelation that Leia was Luke’s twin sister; others hated the fact that Luke didn’t go bad-ass and kill both Darth Vader and the Emperor. And don’t get me started about the Great Ewok Schism of 1983, whereupon many of the older fans (15 and up) hated the Ewoks with a passion, while younger viewers did not.

And this, of course, pales in comparison to the current Internet Fan Outrage Era, which began in earnest when George Lucas (who was testing digital tools to make the Prequel Trilogy) re-released the Star Wars Trilogy in a Special Edition that some fans hate with a passion. This Dark Age for Star Wars fans simply became more polarized with two further schisms: one over the 1999–2005 Prequel Trilogy (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith), then another that began when George Lucas retired as President and CEO of Lucasfilm and sold the company and its intellectual property to The Walt Disney Company in 2012.

In short, Star Wars movies - like any other mass entertainment product - are bound to please large segments of a global audience, while at the same time alienating other segments of that audience.
Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker will not break that paradigm. And, mark my words: It will not please all of the fans. That’s an impossible goalpost to set - so don’t set it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more