On the Mystery Box

Back in the 80s, George Lucas used to say in interviews that he originally conceived of the Star Wars saga as one complete story, but then he realized he had too much for just one movie so he split the story into multiple parts. Kids of my generation believed him.

Of course, as we got older and started delving into the various behind-the-scenes books and early script drafts we realized that Lucas and his collaborators were just making everything up as they went along, and the whole nine-episode master plan was just a myth. But we kept getting fooled by other storytellers who sold us the same bottle of snake oil.

In 2004 we believed J.J. Abrams and his cohorts had all of Lost's mysteries plotted out in advance. Later that same year, when Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica reboot told us that the Cylons had a plan, we thought that Moore and his writing staff knew what it was. So of course we were disappointed when it became clear that the writers of both shows had no idea how to resolve the mysteries they spent several TV seasons setting up, and had to scramble to tie everything together unconvincingly in their final episodes.

The truth is that it's a lot easier to set mysteries up than it is to pay them off. I'll show you what I mean:

"Oh Thad, where have you been?" Doreen said. "And where did you get that scar on your forehead?"

Thad remained outwardly impassive, even as the intensity of what had happened to him seethed just beneath the surface. "November 4th, 2006," he replied.

Doreen's eyes widened with shock, and she knew.

I have no idea what happened to Thad, or what the significance of November 4th, 2006 is, or what it is that Doreen suddenly realized. But to the reader, it looks like I've got it all figured out and I'm just stringing them along to build tension. But I've got to keep it going somehow, and the best way is to pile more mysteries on top of the already-existing ones like this:

At last, answers! Doreen thought as she opened the folder labeled MISSION REPORT: 11/04/2006. But her frustration only built as she leafed through pages of blacked-out text and the Agency's heavy red REDACTED stamp.

"You won't find the truth that way," Agent Ramsey said as he stepped out of the shadows behind her.

Doreen whirled to face him. "Then how do I find the truth, Phillip? Do you know?"

Ramsey shook his head. "Only one man alive knows what happened on that mission: Frank Cullen."

"The former Director?" Doreen gasped.

"His memory's not what it was," Ramsey warned. "But seeing you? It may bring back some things."

And then I just keep it going with a plot twist that adds yet another mystery:

"Director Cullen doesn't usually accept visitors," the nurse said as she led Doreen to the former spymaster's room at the retirement home. "But anybody connected to Thad Bronson--well, they're practically family."

The nurse opened the door, and Doreen realized to her horror that Frank Cullen wouldn't be giving her any answers that night--or ever again. The former Director's was slumped over in his chair, dead.

The nurse gasped. "Poor thing! Must've had a heart attack!"

But Doreen doubted that Director Cullen's had died of natural causes, inasmuch as his severed head lay halfway across the room.

She raced to the open window, and saw a black-clad figure run across the darkened lawn and get into a waiting car. She could only watch helplessly as the getaway car--and her answers--sped off into the night.

I can't stress strongly enough that I have no idea who any of these people are or what's going on. But a halfway-decent screenwriter could wring an entire movie or a season or two of television out of this basic outline. All you have to do is keep building the mystery. With each new twist in the narrative, the writer makes himself look more like a master storyteller who has the whole thing planned out in advance. Your viewers/readers will breathlessly speculate about how it'll all turn out, all the while believing that your final resolution will be even better than what they've imagined.

Of course the whole thing has to come to an end eventually. You'll tie everything together in a hurried climax, and then your viewers or readers will hate you because your ending could never measure up to the imaginary one that exists in their heads.

I mention all of this because in less than an hour I'll be settling into my seat for The Rise of Skywalker. I haven't read any spoilers, but I know that already a portion of the Internet is enraged because the ending isn't "perfect", whatever that means.

The thing about mystery box storytelling is that it's great until you inevitably have to open the box. All you can do is enjoy the ride.

The Star Wars Universe Strip-Mining

As I write this there are two kinds of movies virtually guaranteed to make a billion trillion zillion dollars at the box office: Marvel Comics movies released by Disney, and Star Wars. But a funny thing is happening to Star Wars: the last movie (Solo) only made a billion trillion dollars as opposed to the expected billion trillion zillion. YouTube is full of people eager to look into a webcam and lecture at length about exactly why this is. Depending on who you listen to, the reasons are:

1. Dumb stupid Disney and dumb stupid Kathleen Kennedy aren't doing what "The Fans" want. ("The Fans" being defined as the person in the YouTube video and the ten people who subscribe to their channel.)
2. "Franchise fatigue" due to Disney releasing new Star Wars movies at a rapid clip, sometimes less than six months apart.

While I respect the right of the first group to like or dislike whatever they want, I wish they'd get over themselves and stop throwing Internet tantrums because a giant media conglomerate won't bow to their will. I somewhat agree with the second group, but "franchise fatigue" is not the whole story. As of this writing there are twice as many Marvel Studios films as there are Star Wars movies, and there's no signs that anyone is getting tired of them. So why does Star Wars seem to be losing steam? Here's my take:

It was never designed to be a continuing franchise.

You have to remember that when George Lucas started to develop Star Wars in the 1970s, he didn't set out to create a "cinematic universe" because movies didn't yet work that way. He was trying to make one movie. In the beginning he didn't have a firm idea for a story, so to jumpstart his creative process he made lists of characters and planets and their backstories to flesh out the setting for his swashbuckling space epic. He didn't do this with an eye toward setting up sequels; it was all part of the effort to make this one movie.

The seemingly-limitless backdrop of the Star Wars films is like a background painting:

The Yellow Brick Road looks like it leads to a whole world of story possibilities, but it's just a device to make a Hollywood soundstage look like the land of Oz. The depth is imaginary, and if you really went skipping down that path you'd bonk into a wall.

One of the reasons the Marvel films work so well is that they're based on comic books, and comics are by their very nature a continuing narrative. But with Star Wars, the seeming depth of the universe is an illusion created to make George Lucas's original movie and its two sequels look like they were happening in a real place. So a person (or international media conglomerate) looking to tell new Star Wars stories can basically take one of two approaches:

1. Make sequels to the original films, and expand the narrative by introducing new characters and situations.
2. Make prequels set in the years between the first two trilogies, or between the original trilogy and the second trilogy--basically, any point in the Star Wars timeline where you can have X-Wings and TIE fighters and stormtroopers and AT-ATs and all the fun toys that Star Wars fans love.

We've been down both of these roads with the Expanded Universe. First, we got sequels to the original trilogy. In the beginning, it was fun to get new adventures with Luke, Leia, and Han, but as the narrative moved farther into the future and the cast of supporting characters ballooned the stories started to lose that Star Wars flavor.

The tales set during the Original Trilogy were bad for a different reason--they strip-mined even the tiniest elements from the films in a desperate attempt to come up with new stories. Remember Darth Vader's glove? You don't? Well, it turns out it's called a "Mandalorian crushgaunt" and it has it's own backstory that you can read all about on Wookieepedia. Or what about IG-88, the robot bounty hunter who appeared on screen for like 20 seconds of The Empire Strikes Back? The Expanded Universe gave him a insane story wherein he developed a huge crush on Darth Vader and uploaded his mind into the second Death Star. Basically any object, person, or creature, that you see in the Original Trilogy was given its own ridiculously detailed backstory that connected it to everything else in the Star Wars universe. The franchise was on the verge of collapsing into a black hole of self-referentialism.

I'd hoped that Disney's decision to wipe the Expanded Universe slate clean would signal a different direction, but it's pretty obvious now that there is no different direction to go in. You either take the franchise into the future and let it morph into something that isn't quite Star Wars anymore, or you endlessly cannibalize the past.

The Internet Pessimism Dysfunction

There are two surefire ways to get attacked on the Internet. The first one is to be a woman. Whereas a man can tweet "I had a bagel for breakfast" and everyone will just ignore it, when a woman does the same thing several men will take it as an invitation to make crude sexual comments, and perhaps send her a picture of their personal region. And God forbid if a woman should express an opinion, like "The bagel I had for breakfast was delicious." In addition to the crude sexual comments, her statement will attract the attention of self-important guys who will proceed to mansplain to her that bagels aren't nutritious, and they're not really delicious, she only thinks they are because of her small female brain, and if she wanted to be really smart like them she'd eat whatever they eat for breakfast.

The other way to get attacked on the Internet is to express optimism about something the Internet has already decided will be bad before anyone's even seen it, like the latest DC cinematic universe movie. What the Internet really likes to do is decide in advance that something will be bad, list all the reasons why it'll be bad, and then after it comes out pronounce it to be bad for those reasons even if the finished movie, TV show, or video game doesn't reflect them. Why is the Internet like this? Like many things, it's someone else's fault. Specifically, this guy's:

No, not former NBA player John Salley, but the guy he's holding very uncomfortably by the crotch: everybody's pal George Lucas. Now, George Lucas is an objectively good human being. He donates generously to charity. He says he wants to be remembered, not as a great filmmaker, but as a good father. But he's responsible for a lot of this Internet meanness, because he spent the back end of the 1990s making a experimental little indie movie. You know the one I mean:

In 1999 everyone was hyped for The Phantom Menace. Heck, I spent all of 1999 under a cloud of ever-worsening depression and even I was excited. We all knew it would be the greatest movie of all time. Darth Maul would be the scariest villain ever, there was something called a "pod race" that was sure to be the most amazing and exciting sequence ever seen on film, and we'd get to see young Anakin Skywalker before he became Darth Vader! That Jar-Jar character looked he might be mildly annoying, but he couldn't be any worse than the Ewoks, right? The Internet was in its infancy then, but nobody on message boards and newsgroups even considered the possibility that Episode I would be bad. That seemed farfetched and crazy, like, I don't know, Donald Trump becoming President!

And then the movie was released. And it was . . . not good. although it took most of us a while to realize it. But by the end of 1999 we had to confront the hard truth that the movie we'd spent years hyping ourselves up for and extolling the virtues of was just not that great. George Lucas was the High Priest of Geekdom, and he'd made us look like gushing idiots in front of everybody.

I really believe that the failure of Star Wars: Episode I was a formative event in the culture of the Internet. Sure, every fanbase has always had a lunatic fringe that proactively hated things before they came out; in the early '80s a group of angry Star Trek fans took out an ad in Daily Variety threatening to boycott Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to protest the death of Mr. Spock. But those folks were always just that--a lunatic fringe. These days, they seem to be the dominant voice in many fandoms. Anyone who dares to express optimism for something these people have proactively decided to hate: the Justice League movie, Star Trek: Discovery, risks being shouted down. 

If you could time travel back to May of 1999, I think you'd see find these same folks enthusiastically camped out in line for The Phantom Menace giddily clutching their plastic lightsabers. I think that the failure of that first Star Wars prequel (and its two siblings) to live up to peoples' hopes and dreams turned some of them into irredeemable cynics. Now it's almost impossible to make a new Superman or Star Trek without attracting an army of proactive Internet haters because these people care about those properties a lot more than they care to admit. They want to like them, but they got burned by The Phantom Menace. And so they proactively hate on them, imagining this makes them look like wise Internet sages who are immune to slick Hollywood marketing.

Sometimes I wonder if some corners of the Internet might be a little kinder if The Phantom Menace had been the magnum opus we all thought it would be during those first few months of 1999. Maybe not. But we'll never know.

The Mary Sue Misapplication

Mary Sue (n): An idealized, practically perfect character in fan fiction, almost always created as a way for the author to insert themselves into their favorite fictional universe. Mary Sues often upstage the universe's established characters, winning their respect and sometimes even their romantic interest.

Believe it or not, in the early years of Star Trek fandom the fanbase was predominately female. In fact, without the passion of the mainly-female fans who organized conventions and published fanzines during those years when Star Trek was nothing more than a cancelled TV show, we never would've gotten 13 feature films and five spinoff television series. Kind of makes those dudes who accuse female fans of being "fake geek girls" look like even more voluminous douchebags, doesn't it?

Anyway, fanzines were fan-published magazines that contained fanfic, poetry, and essays--the kind of things you see on the Internet today. In the second issue of the Menagerie fanzine published in December 1973, author Paula Smith coined the term "Mary Sue" to describe the type of Star Trek fanfic featuring the youngest officer in Starfleet history who comes aboard the Enterprise and instantly wins the admiration (and possibly romantic affections) of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, even as she upstages them all by effortlessly saving the day with her brilliant genius. It goes without saying that a "Mary Sue" character could also be male, it's just that the vast majority of fanfic authors in that first decade of Trek fandom were female and therefore the nickname that was coined for any wish-fulfillment author-stand-in character was a female one. At least it should go without saying. In actual practice, female fanfic authors quickly found that any female character they created, no matter how well-drawn and realistic, was dismissed by male readers as a "Mary Sue". But it gets worse:

Until pretty recently, I never heard the term applied to any characters outside of fan fiction. The only exception I can think of was Star Trek: The Next Generation's Wesley Crusher, (a youthful super genius who often improbably saved the day and who Gene Roddenberry admitted was somewhat based on himself). But then a funny thing happened. Female protagonists started to show up with increasing frequency in sci-fi and fantasy, and suddenly male fans were loudly denouncing every one of them as a "Mary Sue".

Case in point: Rey from The Force Awakens. Google "rey mary sue" and the number of results is depressingly more than zero. But why? The main reason the (always male) proponents of this argument give is that she has "unrealistic abilities". Well duh. Most every story you love features a character with superpowers or super awesome fighting skills or genius-level intelligence that helps them solve complex mysteries or invent incredible things that defy the laws of physics. News flash: those are all unrealistic abilities. Here are some other reasons why Rey cannot by definition be a Mary Sue:

1. The Force Awakens is not a fanfic. Maybe it's not exactly the Star Wars Episode 7 you imagined in your head after the disappointing prequels, but the fact is that The Force Awakens is an official entry in the Star Wars canon. and one of the things it's designed to do is introduce a new generation of characters like Poe, Finn and especially Rey. 
2. Rey is not an author stand-in. The Force Awakens was written by Lawrence Kasdan and J.J. Abrams. I'm 99% sure neither of those guys is a young woman, and I can't prove it, but I'm fairly certain none of them fantasizes about being one. At least it's never come up in their other work.

Since basically forever the entertainment industry has been catering to white guys like me by giving us heroes who look like ourselves. But now Hollywood is slowly starting to realize that women have money, too, and they're more likely to spend it on movies where the characters who look like them are treated like real people and not just a talking prop or a trophy given to a male hero for saving the day. Only an idiot would feel threatened by this. Or Max Landis. But I repeat myself.

So knock it off, guys. Stop trying to disguise your sexism as thoughtful artistic criticism. Your genitals aren't going to fall off just because traditionally male-dominated franchises are starting to get more female heroes.

The Star Wars Universe Reset

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Star Wars Episode VI: The Force Awakens, which has been out for almost a month now and has been seen at least once by everyone in the Western world.

A big complaint some folks have about The Force Awakens is that it takes away the happy ending we saw in Return of the Jedi. In what seems to be kind of a trend these days, the movie has a ton of backstory that's only addressed in ancillary material (books, comics, etc). Supposedly, after the events of Return of the Jedi, our heroes reestablished the Republic and spent a good many years kicking the Empire's butt all over the place. But eventually a newly-armed Empire reinvented itself as the First Order and came roaring back with a vengeance thanks to the New Republic's complacency.

I have no idea what historical parallel they're trying to draw here

In the movie, the First Order destroys the Republic's seat of government and space fleet with their totally-not-a-Death-Star, so now our heroes are essentially back where they started in the first trilogy: part of a tiny resistance against a more-powerful Empire, and some fans are not happy about this.

My question to this upset group of fans is: what did you think would happen when Disney announced that they were making a sequel trilogy and that Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and Harrison Ford were coming back? Did they think we'd get three movies full of Luke, Leia, and Han reveling in how trouble-free their lives are now? That the new trilogy would be named Episode VII: Life Is Good, Episode VIII: No Problems Over Here and Episode IX: Let's Take The Rest Of The Day Off?

When Disney decided to move ahead with this new Star Wars trilogy, they had three basic options:

1. Set the story a hundred years or more after the original trilogy when the original characters have all died.
2. Have our heroes face a completely new threat that's not the Empire.
3. Have the Empire rise again and spoil Return of the Jedi's happy ending.

Any of these options would have let to some kind of fan complaint. In this day and age, unfortunately, being a "fan" of something too often means complaining on the Internet about how much you hate the newest iteration of it. 

If Disney went with Option 1, the fans would have complained that they missed a golden opportunity to bring back Luke, Han, and Leia.

If they went with Option 2 and ditched the Empire altogether, the fans would have complained that the new movies didn't feel like Star Wars.

But maybe you're saying: "I'm not mad they brought the Empire back, I just don't like how they did it. It should've been more like the Thrawn Trilogy: everything's going well and then the Empire shows up. They didn't need to break up Han and Leia or have Luke exile himself after his students got killed."

I sympathize, but I think the way things were ultimately handled is far more compelling. Part of the fun of The Force Awakens is figuring out the new status quo. We're thrown into the middle of things and have to figure out what's going on.  And I like how the mystery of Luke Skywalker drives the plot along,  making his final reveal a very powerful moment.

As for Han and Leia, it was never going to have a happy ending, anyway. As soon as we knew Harrison Ford was definitely returning, I knew Han Solo was going to die. Both Ford and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan wanted it to happen in Return of the Jedi thirty years ago, and I assumed Ford would insist on it as a condition of returning. Han and Leia breaking up over their son's fall to the Dark Side of the Force may not be very happy, but it does feel very real.

Also very genuine is Luke's failure with Ben Solo (a.k.a. Kylo Ren) and the destruction of his new Jedi Order. Remember, Luke barely had any Jedi training, and most of what he did get came from Yoda, whose rigidity was a big reason why the Jedi in the prequels were blind to Palpatine's machinations until it was too late. And I have a feeling that Luke's failure will be more understandable once we learn more about Supreme Leader Snoke.

I certainly understand why some longtime fans are upset with The Force Awakens, and they're entitled to their feelings. But I found it to be a pleasant reset of the Star Wars universe, and I'm excited to see what comes next.

NOTE: Because the topic of the post before this one is very controversial within a certain Internet fan community that rivals the Westboro Baptist Church in its tiny size and irrational hatred for anyone who even slightly disagrees with them, I've enabled comment moderation for the time being. Thank you for understanding.

The Star Trek Youth Problem

Star Wars movies will always be more popular than the Star Trek films.

I know what you’re thinking: “Wait, what? I thought you were a die-hard Star Trek nerd!” And I am. But since 1979 Paramount Pictures has been trying to do the impossible: cram the arrowhead-shaped peg of Star Trek into Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon-shaped hole. And it just hasn’t worked. It was never going to work.

It’s no secret that the success of Star Wars (and Close Encounters of the Third Kind later in 1977, which proved that there was an ongoing demand for sci-fi films) was the main reason that Star Trek: The Motion Picture got the green light. Now, there are tons of reasons why the first Star Trek film wasn’t a Star Wars-level hit, and most of them revolve around how boring and slow-paced it was. (Full disclosure: I actually like The Motion Picture) But there’s an even bigger reason that Star Trek was never going to be a worthy big-screen competitor to Star Wars. Let’s compare the two movies’ main casts and see if we can spot what it is:

Do you see it now? No, it’s not that the Star Trek cast is wearing 1970s space pajamas, or that their “Big 3” are all male (although it doesn’t help). When the first Star Trek film premiered in 1979, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were 48 years old. DeForest Kelley was 59. On the other hand, when Star Wars premiered in 1977 actors Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher were 35, 26, and 21 years old respectively.

The original Star Trek TV series was popular for a lot of reasons, and one of them was that the show positively crackled with youthful energy. Sure, at the end of each episode Captain Kirk was usually able to persuade the antagonists of the week to talk out their differences, but only after an hour of running, jumping, and fisticuffs. By the time it hit theaters in 1979, a full decade had passed since Star Trek’s TV adventures. The actors, who had been been young or middle-aged in the late 60s, were now middle-aged or elderly. Even if The Motion Picture had told a more action-oriented story, it’s hard to believe that the cast could’ve believably pulled it off. (Yes, I know William Shatner did a lot of physical stuff on T.J. Hooker in the 80s, but the sight of Shatner running has always been more hilarious than exciting.) And you could hardly expect the young Star Wars audience that identified so strongly with Luke Skywalker’s youthful yearnings to do the same for Captain Kirk’s midlife angst.

So why didn’t the studio simply reboot Star Trek with a younger cast? Because the show’s hyper-devoted fans who’d spent the past decade fiercely lobbying for its return would’ve revolted. Thirty years later when the Star Trek fanbase was more of a known quantity Paramount was comfortable taking that risk, but not in 1979. Interestingly, before The Motion Picture was greenlit Paramount was going to resurrect Star Trek as a TV show entitled Star Trek: Phase II. The original cast would’ve returned (sans Leonard Nimoy) but they would’ve been augmented by three new young characters: First Officer Decker, the Vulcan Lt. Xon, and the exotic Lt. Ilia. Besides giving the show a much-needed injection of youth, these characters would also be insurance in case William Shatner or any of the original cast became too expensive or left to do other things. But, the return of Nimoy rendered the Xon character unnecessary, and although the Decker and Ilia characters were included in The Motion Picture, the story conveniently disposed of them before the end credits.

With Star Trek II, producer Harve Bennett and writer-director Nicholas Meyer again tried to inject some youth into the cast with the characters of Lt. Saavik and Kirk’s son David. But David was killed off in the next movie, and Kirstie Alley’s failure to return as Saavik dealt a serious blow to that character. She lived through Star Trek III but was never seen again after a brief scene in Star Trek IV.

Meanwhile, the franchise was rebooted for TV. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s ensemble cast reflected a Battlestar Galactica-inspired approach. You had the wise, older “Captain” character (Adama/Picard) acting as the father figure to a group of younger characters who did all of the action-adventure stuff. (Apollo, Starbuck, and Boomer in BSG; Riker, Data, LaForge, Yar, et. al. in TNG) There was even a kid to pull in the really young viewers (Boxey in BSG, Wesley Crusher in TNG).

^{Why are they all looking in a slightly different direction?}

The Next Generation reinvigorated the franchise and enjoyed seven successful years on TV, but when they made the jump to the movies they ran into the same problem as the Original Series: those characters who were so young in 1987 were now middle-aged. For the first couple films it wasn’t too noticeable. In fact, 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact was the kind of enjoyable action romp that the Original Series movies could never have delivered. But after that the wheels started to come off pretty quickly. In 1998’s Insurrection it was painfully obvious that TNG’s aging cast of TV actors just couldn’t deliver believable action scenes, with the possible exception of Patrick Stewart. And if Insurrection was painful, 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis was excruciating.

^{It’s never a good sign when the groom has to wear a wig}

Once again, Star Trek was stuck with a cast that had nobody to appeal to young audiences. And after Nemesis tanked harder than a Pauly Shore biopic, Paramount finally pulled the plug.

Producer-director J.J. Abrams eventually came onboard and gave Star Trek a top-down rethink. In addition to fast-paced Star Wars-style action, 2009’s Star Trek featured the youngest cast the franchise ever had.

^{Star Trek: The College Years}

But this created a whole new problem. Star Wars can justify its young protagonists because they’re either people with some kind of innate power that gives them a special destiny (i.e. Luke or Anakin Skywalker), royalty (Queen Amidala or Princess Leia), or a tremendously skilled person on the fringes of civilized society (Han Solo). It can even give them leadership positions in the Rebel Alliance, because it’s a ragtag organization that needs all the help it can get.

But Star Trek’s protagonists are the senior staff of a spaceship that belongs to a futuristic NASA-Navy hybrid. The idea that those positions would just be given to a handful of twentysomethings who haven’t even graduated from Space College strains credulity way past the breaking point. Rationalizing it by trying to paste a Star Wars-style “heroes’ journey” on top of it is even sillier. The only way to believably incorporate younger characters is to go the Next Generation route and have an older Captain overseeing a group of younger junior officers. But although that approach works great on TV, it’s impossible to do on film because two hours is not enough time to service all the characters in a large ensemble cast.

What I’m trying to say here is that Star Trek, done properly, is not a billion-dollar film franchise like Star Wars or The Avengers. It’s a TV show. There’s no shame in that. No one’s trying to turn Breaking Bad or The Wire into movies. Sure, a big feature film budget can give us the kind of sci-fi eye candy that Trekkers like me salivate over, but Star Trek is not about eye candy. Like any other good drama, it’s about the characters. And those characters are best served on TV.

Hopefully CBS and Paramount will one day be able to untangle the issues surrounding their shared ownership of the franchise enough to bring Star Trek back to the small screen, where it belongs.

The Expanded Universe Overreaction

Sometime last week, in a secret bunker deep beneath Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas pressed a big red button labeled EXPANDED UNIVERSE SELF DESTRUCT as Disney CEO Bob Iger looked on approvingly. All around the world, Star Wars fans cried out in terror as all their Expanded Universe novels, comics, video games, and action figures vanished in a puff of smoke.

Wait, that is what happened, right? Because otherwise all the Internet outrage about Lucasfilm “nuking” the Expanded Universe would be kind of silly. You know what, why don’t I just read the official announcement so I don’t jump to any conclusions. Hang on, this should only take a few minutes:

Lucasfilm’s official announcement on the Expanded Universe.

I realize that a large portion of the Internet can hardly be bothered to read a sentence fragment superimposed over an amusing picture of a cat before taking to their online commenting forum of choice to vent their extreme anger and outrage. So let me explain in as few words as possible what the announcement basically means:

The Expanded Universe is cool, but the new movies are going to do their own thing.

No rational person would have a problem with this.

After all, back when the Expanded Universe really got going in 1991 with Timothy Zahn’s novel Heir To The Empire, Star Wars was pretty much dead. George Lucas had moved on to other things, like rolling around in giant piles of money, and the Star Wars universe was an abandoned sandbox full of cool toys that nobody was playing with. The success of Zahn’s “Thrawn trilogy” opened the floodgates for a whole series of novels, comics, and video games all set in the same continuity. Some of it was good, but a whole lot of it was crap, as pointed out by veteran Internet comedian Lore Sjöberg:

Does anyone really believe that J.J. Abrams or the folks at Disney would allow their new movies to be bogged down by 25 years of largely awful continuity? Not only is a lot of it just plain bad, it’s also terribly convoluted and downright weird. Over the years, as story has built upon story, the Expanded Universe has drifted farther and farther away from that classic Star Wars “flavor” and kind of become its own thing. And, whereas a casual Star Wars fan could pick up one of Timothy Zahn’s early Star Wars novels and instantly enjoy it, the newer stuff is totally incomprehensible unless you’re versed on a quarter-century of earlier novels, comics, and even video games.

Of course, some folks on the Internet don’t see it that way. One comment I read (either on Twitter or the comments section of an article on the subject, I can’t remember which) sternly reproved Lucasfilm for not “remaining true to the source material” the way Marvel films do. Here’s the problem with that line of thinking: the Expanded Universe stuff is not source material. The characters in the Marvel films first appeared in comics. Star Wars began as a series of movies. The six Star Wars movies are the source material here. All the other licensed fiction, be it novels, comics, or video games is just ancillary stuff based on that source material.

I’m sure that the premiere of Episode 7 in 2015 will give all us People of the Internet plenty of legitimate things to complain about. But the decision to cut things like Lord Heathrir, Darth Vader’s magic glove, Bendorion the Jedi Hutt, or Wilford Brimley’s character from that one made-for-TV Ewoks movie out of the official Star Wars universe? That’s cause for celebration.

The Star Wars Canon Kerfuffle

Recently, news began to circulate that Disney had tasked Leland Chee and Pablo Hidalgo-the Lucasfilm employees who serve as the keepers of the Star Wars canon-to simplify and redefine that canon, meaning that a lot of the stuff in the licensed novels, comics, and video games would presumably cease to be part of the “official” Star Wars universe. Predictably, the Internet reacted to this as though it actually mattered. Well, guess what? It doesn’t.

I realize this may seem shocking. A sci-fi geek saying that the canon of a fictional universe doesn’t matter is a bit like a Supreme Court justice saying that the Constitution doesn’t need all those amendments. To illustrate where I’m coming from here, let’s take a look at the other most famous science fiction franchise: Star Trek.

After the release of the first Star Trek film in 1979, there was an explosion of officially licensed Star Trek novels, comics, roleplaying sourcebooks, and technical manuals. All of these things purported to define parts of the Star Trek universe that had never been seen on screen. But there was no official Star Trek Canon Policy from Paramount that explicitly said whether or not these things were a part of the “real” Star Trek universe. As long as the various licensed novels, comics, and other books didn’t try to make any wholesale changes to the Star Trek universe or directly contradict what had been seen on screen, they were free to do what they wanted. The result was a wonderful run of creativity. Novels like The Final Reflection, The Romulan Way, The Entropy Effect, and Strangers From The Sky really pushed the limits of what Star Trek could be and became bestsellers in the process.

Meanwhile, the people making the films mostly ignored the licensed material and did their own thing. Some of the pictures from the Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph showed up as display graphics on the Enterprise bridge set, but that was as far as it went. So what happened to Star Trek without an Official Canon Policy? Chaos? Panic in the streets? Dogs and cats living together? Nope. Star Trek fans happily read their novels, comics, and technical manuals while waiting for the next movie to come out, and if that movie contradicted something they’d read in a piece of licensed fiction, they just rolled with it. Meanwhile, Star Trek’s popularity continued to grow. In fact, it was so successful that Paramount decided to create a new spinoff TV show to premiere in the fall of 1987 and guess who they hired to produce it?

^{No, it’s not John Lassetter’s dad}

Right around the time Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, Gene Roddenberry used his newfound authority over the franchise to impose Star Trek’s first-ever official canon policy. (Roddenberry was effectively fired by Paramount after the poor performance of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. His return as showrunner for The Next Generation was the first time he’d had any control over Star Trek since 1979) Under Roddenberry’s decree, only live-action onscreen Star Trek productions could ever be considered “canon”. Everything else-the animated series, the novels, the various tech manuals and roleplaying sourcebooks-was not considered “real” Star Trek. Now, it’s one thing for the creator and executive producer of a TV show to impose guidelines on his writers. It’s part of his job, in fact. And Gene’s canon policy pretty much just codified what the guys who worked on the film series had been doing all along. But Roddenberry’s authority also extended to all licensed products, like novels and comic books, and here’s where it caused a problem.

You see, explosion of creativity in the Star Trek novels of the early-to-mid-1980s led to a deepening and enrichment of Star Trek lore. It also led to Gene Roddenberry getting questions at conventions about when various popular characters and elements from these novels might make it into onscreen productions. And this irked him. Ever since he started doing convention appearances in the 1970s, Roddenberry had been downplaying the contributions to the original Star Trek TV series by people like Gene Coon or D.C. Fontana and promoting the idea that he was the sole creator of Star Trek and all the good ideas came from him, and him alone. But it was harder for him to downplay the contributions of an author like Diane Duane when her name was on the books where those contributions appeared. And he really hated it when Duane was referred to as “creator of the Rihannsu”. In Gene Roddenberry’s mind, he was the One True God of Star Trek, and to call someone else the “creator” of some Star Trek-related thing was blasphemy.

My point here is that Roddenberry didn’t just impose an Official Star Trek Canon Policy to serve as a guideline for writers on his show. He did it to expunge from the Star Trek universe those elements that other people had created without his input. It was his way of hiking his leg and marking his territory, and it was ultimately counter-intuitive and bad for the franchise. Many of the best authors were driven away by the restrictive decrees that were enforced-often in the most dictatorial and counter-intuitive way imaginable- by Roddenberry’s manservant, Richard Arnold. (Do a Google search if you’re interested in the particulars) Sure, a few good books managed to make it through the canon minefield (Doctor’s Orders by Diane Duane, for example) but overall the quality of Star Trek novels took a sharp dive in the late 1980s and didn’t recover for about a decade.

Not only that, but the canon policy meant that this was a “real” part of Paramount Pictures’ most valuable tentpole franchise:

As was this:

But not these:

 

   

It would have been best if the studio had stayed away from trying to define and maintain an official Star Trek canon. The arrangement that prevailed throughout most of the 1980s, where the movie people did their own movie-specific thing, the novel people did their own book-specific thing, and the comics people did their own comics-specific thing, was perfectly fine.

And this is the same path I believe the folks in charge of Star Wars should take, as well. Rather than inserting themselves into silly debates about the “real” nature of a fictional universe, they should simply have smart, dedicated people in charge of the movies, TV shows, books, comics, video games, and so on, and let them do the best work they can in their chosen medium. The fans will pick and choose what they like and what they don’t.

Isn’t that what entertainment is all about?

The Tony Baxter Main Street Window Significance

Recently longtime Disney Imagineer Tony Baxter was honored with his own window on Disneyland’s Main Street.

^{Tom Staggs’ smile is about as convincing as Marv Albert’s toupee}

This is a very big deal. Tony Baxter’s contributions to the Disney theme parks are akin to those of Curt Swan to the Superman mythos or Tinker Hatfield to Nike; hugely important, but largely unknown outside the fan community. So it’s great to see him getting public recognition in the form of his very own window on Main Street in Walt’s own park. There’s scarcely a higher honor that the company can bestow on an employee. It’s tempting to look at this as the company (and its executives) formally recognizing and even celebrating the accomplishments of one of the finest Imagineers ever. But make no mistake: what looked like a “thank you for your years of service” ceremony was actually the company’s way of putting Mr. Baxter out to pasture.

Tony Baxter, you see, was a relic from the old days when Disney actually cared about the quality of its offerings. I’m not saying that back in The Good Old Days the company was a nonprofit charity that would never dirty its hands with money. Heck, plenty of people accused Walt Disney of crass commercialism during his lifetime. But Walt imbued his company with a sense of passion for the things it worked on. They didn’t simply make, for example, a movie about Cinderella or a theme park attraction with singing Animatronic birds because a financial analysis said those things would be profitable. They made them because they liked them. There was a visible commitment to quality in everything with the Disney name on it, and that’s perhaps the main reason why Disney is one of the world’s most-loved brands. But that passion and commitment to quality that Walt and the first-generation Imagineers passed on to people like Tony Baxter just isn’t shared by the company’s executive leadership anymore. I’m not just saying that because I’m still grumpy that they tore down Horizons. It’s a demonstrable fact.

Take that piece of news last week that CEO Bob Iger is insisting upon a Summer 2015 release date for the next Star Wars film despite the fact that 2014 is less than two months away and the movie is still in pre-pre-production, with no cast and not even a completed script. It’s virtually guaranteed that the film is going to be a rush job at this point, and it’s really hard to make sure a movie is good when you’re just scrambling to get it out on time. Logically, if Mr. Iger genuinely enjoyed Star Wars and had a firm commitment to making sure that anything with Disney’s name on it was as good as it could possibly be, he’d agree to postpone the film’s release to 2016. Whatever money this decision cost Disney would surely be recouped when J.J. Abrams and friends delivered a finely-tuned Star Wars film for 2016 that didn’t have to share the spotlight with Avengers 2 and the Superman/Batman movie in 2015. But instead he’s sticking to his guns and demanding a summer 2015 release. Why? For two reasons:

1. Star Wars movies always make a lot of money regardless of how good or bad they are.
2. 2015 is Bob Iger’s last year as CEO.

Since the next Star Wars is guaranteed to be a financial success regardless of its quality, and Iger won’t be able to take full credit for that success if it happens in 2016, Episode 7’s release will not be postponed no matter how grotesquely behind schedule it is. It could get to the point where there’s no time to do anything other than have J.J. Abrams and a production assistant act the movie out with action figures and make lightsaber noises with their mouths, and Iger would refuse to budge. Short-term profit and political things like who gets credit for what are infinitely more important to today’s Disney executives than putting out a quality product.

My point is that there is no longer any place in today’s Walt Disney Company for people who do things the way Tony Baxter and the first-generation Imagineers who mentored him did. It’s very telling that the newest, most technologically advanced theme park attractions in Florida belong to Universal Studios, a Disney competitor. Meanwhile, the newest thing at Walt Disney World (aside from the annual price increases, of course) is a crowd management/data mining system that makes vacation planning more difficult and attraction lines longer. Tony Baxter was a troublesome reminder of a time when it was heresy to suggest closing a ride or skimping on maintenance to increase profits at an already-profitable theme park. And now he’s gone.

Yes, he has a window on Main Street, along with Walt Disney and the artists and Imagineers who helped him transform “Disney” from some guy’s last name into beloved symbol of childhood innocence and human progress. And just like them, he has no share in directing the company. There are still good people there, of course, and maybe one day they’ll get their names in Main Street windows, too. Meanwhile the marketers, finance guys, and ex-TV weathermen at the helm of today’s Walt Disney Company will continue to slowly run it aground.

The Star Trek Action Figure Deficiency

The merits of Star Trek and Star Wars have been debated by their respective fanbases since the beginning of time. Not many people know this, but the famous prehistoric cave paintings in France are actually an ancient debate about which was “better”, Star Trek or Star Wars. Of course, thanks to the Internet we can now engage in these kinds of trivial debates without having to leave our house to commit cave graffiti. But one thing that I think everyone can agree on is that Star Wars has the better toys.

Like most kids in the 1980s, my toy chest contained lots of things from Kenner’s original Star Wars action figure line. It was really a toy industry game-changer. There was an action figure for nearly every character and background alien in the movies. Each figure came with one or two accessories, and their hands were sculpted in such a way that most figures could hold most of the accessories that came with other figures. Even better, the toy line also included almost every vehicle that appeared in the films (and a few that didn’t) and the fairly uniform size of the action figures meant that any figure could fit in any vehicle. The characters and vehicles were as faithful to the film versions as was possible with late ‘70s-to-early-1980s manufacturing methods, and the toys were a blast to play with.

^{This kid seems strangely okay with being trapped in a featureless orange void without his lower body.}

Naturally, other toy companies scrambled to copy Kenner’s winning formula, often by making toys for the various sci-fi movies and TV shows that studios began releasing in the late ‘70s to capitalize on the success of Star Wars. For example: Star Trek licensee Mego.

The now-defunct toymaker Mego must have have thanked their lucky stars in 1978 when Paramount Pictures announced a big-budget Star Trek film. After all, they had passed on the Star Wars license before that movie was released (their executives reportedly said that Mego couldn’t be bothered to make toys for every sci-fi B-movie that came along) and Star Trek had a highly enthusiastic fanbase that would buy just about anything with with the Star Trek name on it.

^{Case in point}

Yes, Mego’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture action figure line was as close to a guaranteed success as you could get. The only way it could fail is if the toys were lame or the movie was boring. Of course, what happened was that it failed because the toys were lame and the movie was boring. First, let’s look at the toys themselves. The entire action figure line consisted of a respectable 12 figures: 6 members of the Enterprise crew and 6 aliens, including a Klingon.

^{Image from cooltoyreview.com}

Unfortunately, the alien characters were only widely available in Canada and Europe. This meant that if kids in the US were sufficiently excited by Star Trek: The Motion Picture to want to play with its toys, only the six “good guy” figures were available to them. Even worse, none of the characters came with any accessories (by which I mean plastic weapons). Also, there weren’t any vehicles available, partially because Mego didn’t know what it was doing and partially because the Star Trek movie didn’t have Star Wars’ assortment of landspeeders and fighter craft. There was an Enterprise bridge playset, but it was nothing but a piece of cheap vacuform plastic with stickers on it. Basically all you could do was have the characters do was stand around and talk to each other. Just like in the movie!

You see, although Paramount probably wanted Star Trek: The Motion Picture to be a rollicking Star Wars-like adventure, under Gene Roddenberry’s influence it turned out to be a glacially-paced exploration of the human condition. Also, unlike the younger cast of Star Wars, Star Trek’s group of middle-aged TV actors probably weren’t up for a lot of running and jumping anyway. This made for an intelligent film, but to a kid it was about as exciting as C-SPAN. Even if the Star Trek: The Motion Picture toy line had been handled by a company that knew what it was doing it still probably wouldn’t have sold well.

Fast forward to 1987. With the end of the Star Wars trilogy three years before, the Kenner toy line had dwindled away. Star Trek, however, was just getting started with the premiere of a brand-new TV series. As a kid, I was incredibly excited for Star Trek: The Next Generation. As part of the marketing blitz that accompanied the new show, Cheerios ran a promotion where you could enter a contest for the chance to appear as an extra in an episode. (Check out this amazing article on Trekcore for more info about the Cheerios promotion) 75,000 runners-up received a small plastic Enterprise as a consolation prize, and it came with this promotional flyer for a new toy line from Galoob:

^{Image from Trekcore.com}

According to the flyer, Galoob had all kinds of great things in store for us. Action figures! A bridge playset with animated viewscreen images and a transporter room playset with some kind of cool effect to make your figures seem to disappear! And there was more to come!

Sure enough, just a few months later Galoob’s Star Trek action figures started to appear in stores. Wave 1 included all the characters mentioned on the promotional flyer:

^{Photos from Dork Dimension}

And they were the only ones we ever saw. There was an extremely limited second wave that included two background aliens from a forgettable first-season episode, a Ferengi, and Q in his Queen Amidala makeup, but they were impossible to find. There was also a die-cast Enterprise with detachable saucer section that was very nice and widely available, but the only two vehicles released for the action figures were a Starfleet shuttle and an apocryphal Ferengi Fighter. (This great article on Trekcore has pictures and background info on them) I don’t know how widely-available they were, but I never saw them in any of the stores in my area and to this day I’ve never seen one in person. By the time that Star Trek: The Next Generation started to get good in its third season, the Galoob toy line was dead.

So what happened? Sure, you can point to problems with the toys themselves (making the figures unable to hold accessories by having a phaser molded into one hand and the other molded into a closed fist was a problem) the utter lack of marketing the line received (there were, as far as I know, absolutely no TV commercials or magazine advertisements for it) or the fact that some of its’ best items were either very rare or never went into production at all:

^{This Enterprise bridge playset appeared in a dealer’s catalog, but was never produced. (Image from the forums on megocollector.com)}

But there was another, more basic reason for the failure of the Star Trek toys of the 1980s. If you look at the successful toy lines from that period, like Star Wars, Transformers, G.I. JOE, or He-Man, they have one thing in common: they’re centered on a narrative of “hero” and “villain” characters locked in a never-ending battle. Star Trek was always more complex than that, even in the Original Series days where Captain Kirk got into at least one hilariously choreographed fight per episode. Even the really great Star Trek productions of the ‘80s like The Wrath of Khan or The Voyage Home just don’t easily fit into the “good guys shooting at bad guys” format that made for good toys aimed 5-to-10-year-old boys.

Also, Star Trek: The Next Generation was simply not a very good show for its first two seasons. Gene Roddenberry was adamant that it reflect his utopian 24th century ideals, so there would be little or none of the crowd-pleasing action (fistfights, etc.) that shows like Knight Rider or The A-Team featured. Just to be clear, I think Roddenberry’s aversion to violence-as-entertainment was laudable. But it didn’t help that the show was often a talky, preachy bore with cringe-inducing dialogue and flimsy plots. One can imagine how thrilled the people at Galoob were to get the Star Trek license, as well as their growing horror as the show’s disastrous first season unfolded. I think the only thing that saved the show from cancellation those first two years was that the cancellation of the Original Series had come to be seen as perhaps the greatest blunder in television history and no executive wanted to be seen making it a second time.

Having missed out on the 1980s action figure boom, Star Trek would have to wait until the 1990s to have a successful line of toys. But why did the Playmates line of the ‘90s succeed where the Mego and Galoob lines of the ‘80s failed? Timing had something to do with it, since the Playmates line came at a time when Star Trek was experiencing unprecedented mainstream popularity. But I think the collecting craze of the 1990s was the main reason. Before the ‘90s, toys were simply children's’ playthings. But when the public noticed that old baseball cards, comic books, and other items aimed at children were worth thousands of dollars, there was a run on modern-day collectibles with the expectation that they, too, would be valuable in the future. Of course this didn’t pan out, since the reason a Babe Ruth baseball card or a copy of Action Comics #1 is so valuable is because it’s exceedingly rare and the comic books, sports cards, and action figures produced in the 90s are not.

In the end, I guess Star Trek and Star Wars are something of a trade-off. Star Wars inspires better toys that people in my age group have fond childhood memories of. But Star Trek has inspired people to become scientists, engineers, and doctors. This didn’t necessarily make for good action figures, but I think it’s a tradeoff that most people associated with Star Trek’s various incarnations are glad to have made.

The Lucasfilm Announcement Stream-Of-Consciousness Reaction

Tuesday afternoon. Think I’ll check Twitter, see what’s going on.

Hey, look! Somebody tweeted that Disney acquired Lucasfilm! Ha ha! What a hilarious joke! Now other people are tweeting it, too. Hmm, I sure hope they realize it’s not true, otherwise a giant false rumor could get started.

Wait, one of the tweets has a link to a press release. A Disney press release.

Holy crap, it’s true! Disney acquired Lucasfilm. That means they own Star Wars. Disney owns Star Wars.

Disney. Owns. Star Wars.

Wow.

Well, I wonder what this means. Probably nothing. There’s already a Star Wars ride in the parks, after all. And they already sell Star Wars and Indiana Jones merchandise in the parks. Probably all this means is that Disney just gets a piece of all the money Lucasfilm makes. They’re not going to do anything major, I’m sure.

Hey, somebody tweeted that there’s going to be a Star Wars Episode 7 in 2015. Okay now, that’s just stupid. There’s no way that one’s true. In fact, let me read over the press release. There’s just no way Disney’s going to make another-

Sweet Mother of Optimus Prime, they are! They’re making Episode 7! What? WHAT?!

No. No no no no no NO NO! No. Uh-uh. Nyet. No more Star Wars movies! The prequels were bad enough! The last thing we need is more wooden acting, long conversations about politics, and racially insensitive CGI comic-relief Muppets! More of THAT please!

On the other hand, maybe it could be good. I mean, if Lucas isn’t directing, and the people involved are fans of Star Wars it could work. Right?

Holy Mr. T’s Mohawk, I can’t believe this. I must be having some kind of a fever dream. Did somebody spike my Pepsi with a hallucinogen?

Disney owns Star Wars.

There’s going to be more Star Wars movies.

Holy William Shatner’s Toupee.

Holy Wesley Crusher’s Rainbow Sweater.

Look, only 50 people have made the “I guess Leia is a Disney princess now” joke. And every one of them thought it was original and funny. Sometimes I think the Internet is making it where we all think alike. This is probably how the Borg Collective got started.

More Star Wars movies, wow. This was not what I expected when I got out of bed this morning.

Star Wars. Disney. Star Wars is Disney.

Holy Richard Simmons’ Afro.

Holy Superman’s-Red-Underpants-That-He-Doesn’t-Have-Anymore-In-The-New-52-Continuity.

Wow . . . .