Opinion writers are wisely advised to avoid the prelapsarian pleasures of the whistling milkman. Simpler times. Playing jacks in cobbled laneways. Humbugs in brown-paper bags. The milkman whistling as he clinks bottles on to well-scrubbed front steps. All that rubbish.
It is, however, hard to avoid comparing the launch of Star Wars in 1977 with the imperial rally that took place at the ExCeL centre in London last weekend. George Lucas’s durable, unpretentious space opera – the film that, whatever the nerdisphere demands, we shall not be calling Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope – was certainly launched with some hoopla in the United States. But it was just one film among many challenging for summer bucks in a busy market. Nobody felt the need to slot Star Wars into an infinitely complex matrix of codependent modules (though George did have plans). The film appealed to all ages. No prior knowledge was required to get on board. It’s not as if anyone watching the old Flash Gordon series ever worried about lore.
Where do I begin with a summary of the announcements at Star Wars Celebration 2023? Appropriately for a franchise that kicked off one episode with a text “crawl” concerning tax arrangements on the planet Bongo, the official text comes across like the longer summary of an intricate budget announcement from a diligent finance minister. This measure will facilitate this other proposal. There will be no further comment at this time on the Ewok contingency. All looks sunny ahead.
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy had the information to hand. Ending the Star Wars vacuum in cinemas that followed the release of The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, a new trilogy will soon kick into production with the energetic James Mangold, director of the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, initially at whatever they call the bridge in this universe. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the first film began. It seems we’re going further back still to “tell the tale of the first Jedi to wield the Force and harness it as a liberating power in an era of chaos and oppression”.
The second film, directed by Dave Filoni, creator of some Star Wars animation series I have not watched, touches on “the escalating war between the Imperial Remnant and the fledgling New Republic”.
The third film, with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy at the helm, takes place 15 years after The Rise of Skywalker and brings back Daisy Ridley as the punchy Rey.
That’s a lot to take in. But we are nowhere near finished. A teaser trailer was unveiled for an imminent new series called Ahsoka. “Set after the fall of the Empire, Ahsoka follows the former Jedi knight Ahsoka Tano as she investigates an emerging threat to a vulnerable galaxy,” we are told. The always welcome Rosario Dawson plays the eponymous protagonist.
The Acolyte, another series for Disney+, is apparently set before the events of the existing Star Wars films. There will be a second series of the well-reviewed Andor. A trailer was unveiled for Star Wars: Visions season two. Obi-Wan Kenobi might be on its way back. The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett are still out there somewhere. Isn’t there something called The Bad Batch? What was Tales of the Jedi again? Why no mention of our own Star Wars Island?
The Star Wars series increasingly requires viewers to have some knowledge of other incarnations to properly appreciate the yarn currently being flogged. The Rise of Skywalker would make little sense if you hadn’t seen the previous two films in that trilogy (some would argue it still didn’t make much sense, but that’s an argument for another decade). The Marvel Cinematic Universe – sibling to Star Wars beneath the Disney banner – now launches characters in TV series that later become prominent in the theatrically released films.
The vast groaning interdependency will surely end up repelling as many as it attracts. The beauty of Star Wars was its simplicity. Boy meets princess. Boy and princess boff bad guy in black helmet. Would that film really have become the highest grossing ever if potential attendees worried they needed to see four TV series, watch eight films, play two games and endure three cartoons before turning up at the cinema?
Mind you, the narrative armada is now so huge it really may be too big to fail. It is easy to forget that The Rise of Skywalker was far from an unqualified success. Reviews were mixed. Though it did accumulate more than $1 billion, it made less than the previous two episodes. Some rethinking has taken place, but you may as well seek to cancel the United States after disappointing results for one prominent conglomerate. Star Wars is now more than a franchise. It is a culture. It is an industry. It is a nation. Soon everything that is not Marvel will be Star Wars. That cup. That table. That budgie. Then the two will merge and everything, everywhere will be Marvel Wars. Even Philip K Dick never saw this.
Never mind. That new Indiana Jones film looks fun. There’s a whiff of the whistling milkman about it.
