The Dark Side of the "Star Wars" Fandom

 

Fandom is a community of people with a shared appreciation of a particular area in popular culture, usually deriving from a book series, film or television series, and/or video games. There are varying degrees of fandom, from the ‘casual’ fan who has a mild or passing appreciation of a work or collection of works, to what might be called a ‘diehard’ fan, whose fierce appreciation can be considered as being near-obsessive. There are also varying degrees to positivity within fandoms to members of its own fandom and to those outwith, the more extreme and negative of these fans often condemning the fandom as a whole with a ‘toxic’ label. But while fandom is often considered to be a one-sided affair, with members of the public showing a deep appreciation of a piece of popular culture made by creatives and the creatives existing to create, it is far more accurate to say that fandom is the driving force behind creative expression that results in more popular cultural works that in turn inspire fandoms. A major example of this would be the Star Wars franchise, originally created by George Lucas in the 1970s and has evolved to become one of the biggest cultural touchstones of the last fifty years. The Star Wars franchise was inspired by earlier films and movie serials like Flash Gordon and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and in turn has created one of the largest and potentially the most divisive fan bases currently in the world, and has inspired others to create works in a similar vein to Lucas.


George Lucas began developing what would become Star Wars in the early 1970s after the disappointing critical reception of his first feature film, THX 1138 (1971), which he has attributed to its darker and bleak tone, which made him decide to make his future projects more optimistic and would take inspiration from one of his favourite series from when he was a child, the Flash Gordon serials and comics, on which he said;


“I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials … Of course I realise how crude and badly done they were … loving them that much when they were so awful, i began to wonder what would happen if they were done really well.” (Macek, 2013)


This passion for the original Flash Gordon would lead to George Lucas trying to make a Flash Gordon film of his own, but ultimately he failed to buy the rights, so he would work on developing a “Flash Gordon-inspired” film, beginning with looking at what had inspired the creation of Flash Gordon in the first place;


“I discovered that he’d [Alex Raymond, creator of the Flash Gordon comic strips] got his inspiration from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (author of Tarzan) and especially from his John Carter of Mars series books. I read through that series, then found that what had sparked Burroughs off was a science-fantasy called Gulliver on Mars, written by Edwin Arnold and published in 1905. That was the first story in this genre [space fantasy/opera] that I have been able to trace. Jules Verne had got pretty close, I suppose, but he never had a hero battling against space creatures or having adventures on another planet. A whole new genre developed from that idea.” (“American Cinematographer”, 1977: 1)


When first developing the first drafts of what would eventually become Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), Lucas first modelled it The Hidden Fortress (1958) by Akira Kurosawa, who had attracted many admirers among American filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Lucas’s future collaborator Steven Spielberg. Future drafts would also take cues from other science fiction books, films and comics, as well as influence from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, which Lucas would cite as a major influence on the final product, as he found himself “following classical motifs” subconsciously. When the final draft of the script was completed, Lucas said to American Cinematographer;


"What finally emerged through the many drafts of the script has obviously been influenced by science-fiction and action-adventure I've read and seen. And I've seen a lot of it. I'm trying to make a classic sort of genre picture, a classic space fantasy in which all the influences are working together. There are certain traditional aspects of the genre I wanted to keep and help perpetuate in Star Wars.” (1977: 1)


The film would be met with critical and commercial success, and became an unprecedented cultural phenomenon, producing sequel and prequel films over the preceding decades, along with television series, comics, novels, video games, et criteria, et criteria. And for the first twenty years of Star Wars, the massive fandom that spawned initially from the Original Trilogy (Episodes IV to VI) were content and happy with the materials available, but this contentment would change in the late 1990s.


The Special Editions of the Original Trilogy was released on VHS in 1997, which included numerous changes and additions to the original versions, either by re-introducing previously deleted content, adding more effects using modern technology, or most infamously, alterations to already existing footage, such is the case with the Han Solo/Greedo scene in the Mos Eisley Cantina. This change came when, in every version of the film post-Special Editions, Greedo makes the first shot, instead of Han, who shot first in the original. Many fans believed that this was a betrayal of Han’s character and takes away from his anti-hero to hero arc, by removing his moral ambiguity from his earliest scenes. In 2015, George Lucas commented on the reasoning behind this change;


“Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.” (Stuever, 2015)


The fan outrage over this point has been exacerbated further over the years by more changes being made to the scene, the latest of which first becoming known in 2019 when Episode IV: A New Hope was added to the Disney+ streaming service. This was the addition of a line of dialogue delivered by Greedo immediately before shooting, which has been transcribed as either “maclunkey” or “ma klounkee”, which has been interpreted to be a threat in the Huttese language, though the meaning hasn’t been made clear, as there is no English subtitles for this one line. It has been reported that this last change was made by Lucas at some point before the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012.


In the 1990s, and into the early 2000s, divisions would become to form with the release of the Prequel Trilogy (Episodes I to III), which generally were not received as favourably as the original films, with much of the criticism directed at the writing, characterisation and the performances of Ahmed Best and Jake Lloyd as Jar Jar Binks and young Anakin Skywalker respectively. The backlash has been so intense that the negativity created by what has since been dubbed “The Fandom Menace”, that it has even pushed Ahmed Best into contemplating suicide. This level of negativity would be considered an extremely “toxic” area of the fandom, as Rachael Lefler wrote;


“Usually, toxic fandom involves not just obsessiveness, but becoming a danger to others in some way, or just really mean and intolerant toward people the toxic fans disagree with.” (2018)


This toxicity and division has continued to be felt in the Star Wars fandom as more of the Prequels were released, and again after the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm and the Star Wars content produced since 2012, in particular Episode VII: The Last Jedi (2017), which has polarised the entire fandom, with those feeling negatively about it criticising the mishandled characterisation of Luke Skywalker and the wasted potential of Rey and Snoke, who were considered to be underdeveloped and unsatisfying.


Toxic fandom is not, however, the only side of the Star Wars fandom. On the contrary, there is still a positive, “non-toxic” side of the fandom, though in recent years, it seems to have been drowned out by the vocalness of the “toxic” fans. And just as George Lucas took inspiration from his favourite pieces of media like Flash Gordon, Star Wars has proven to be a source of inspiration for future creatives, some of whom have gone on to contribute to the latest Star Wars canon, such as Gareth Edwards — the director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — and J.J. Abrams — the writer, director and producer of The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker. Similarly, other creatives who were directly inspired by Star Wars are Seth McFarlane, the creator of Family Guy, and Seth Green — one of the co-creators of Robot Chicken; both shows have had three dedicated episodes to satirise and parody the franchise, with the former recreating the Original Trilogy starring the Family Guy characters, and the latter being a series of sketches inspired by the six films of the Skywalker Saga made at the time, with members of the original cast returning for different episodes, including Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Billy Dee Williams, and was made with the blessing of George Lucas and Lucasfilm. The Robot Chicken specials in particular have received much critical praise, with Dan Iverson from IGN.com saying that it was; “… head and shoulders above the hit and miss nature of the regular episodes of Robot Chicken.” (2008). Two years after the Disney acquisition, there was also a Phineas and Ferb parody special made, depicting the events of Episode IV: A New Hope from the viewpoints of the show’s regular characters transplanted into the Star Wars universe, which was spawned by co-creator Dan Povenmire doodling a picture of regular Phineas and Ferb character Doofenshmirtz dressed as Darth Vader. He would go on to say at the announcement panel; “May the ‘Ferb’ Be With You and with all of us who for decades have dreamt of a chance to work with the great characters and stories of Star Wars.”


Outside of creating or recreating Star Wars material, the franchise has inspired other science fiction films, with Ridley Scott and James Cameron adopting the “used future” aesthetic that Star Wars pioneered in their sci-fi, such as Blade Runner, the Alien franchise and the Terminator franchise. Other directors who have cited Star Wars as an influence are Christopher Nolan, referring to Inception, and Peter Jackson, who said that the concept helped him add a sense of realism and believability to The Lord of the Rings. This shows that the fandom of Star Wars is not necessarily restricted to solely appreciating the films themselves, but can be a driving force in the creation of other works.


In conclusion, while fandom is not inherently good or bad, the Star Wars fandom is the perfect example of the dichotomy of the extremes of a good, productive fandom, and a negative, “toxic” fandom. Having been originally created through the fandom of Flash Gordon and the works of Akira Kurosawa helped George Lucas create Star Wars in the first place, the fandom for Star Wars has in turn helped other creatives make their works in future film and television projects. On the other hand, a vocal minority of the fan community can and will tarnish the reputation of the fandom as a whole, which is informed by the supposed “betrayals” of the franchise, and can have an adverse effect on those involved with the thing that these same “fans” are supposed to enjoy. But this dichotomy is unavoidable, as art is always subjective, and it would seem that we have to accept the good with the toxic in our shared appreciation of the adventures set a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.




Bibliography


Location: University of Stirling

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