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It’s finally official. Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down as head of Lucasfilm, to be replaced by Dave Filoni on the creative side and Lynwen Brennan on the financial side. Is this change the beginning of a dark new age, or does it signal a new hope? The answer to that question probably depends on your age and when you first started watching Star Wars.
Kennedy came to the job via Lucasfilm founder George Lucas, whom she met through Steven Spielberg and with whom she first started working on 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Filoni was also hired by Lucas, specifically to create the 2008 Clone Wars movie and the series that followed, running seven seasons between 2008 and 2020. If Kennedy represented the Generation X fans who encountered the franchise through the original trilogy, then Filoni represents the millennials who love the prequel trilogy… but will they repeat the previous generation of fans’ mistakes?
Filoni came to Star Wars at its first moment of major change. Fans longed to see an official continuation of their favorite franchise, only further heightened by the 1997 re-release of the original trilogy. Even if some griped about the messy and unnecessary additions that Lucas made to these special editions, they still looked forward to The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars movie on screen in 16 years.
That excitement lasted until about the point that the final credits rolled. Fans hated the stilted dialogue and acting, the overly artificial sets, and especially everything involving Jar Jar Binks. Whether they disliked his observations about stepping in poo-poo or his uncomfortable similarity to racist tropes, Jar Jar did not feel like he belonged in Star Wars, at least not to these viewers. Attack of the Clones, with its 1950s diner and diatribes about sand, didn’t change any opinions. The dark overtones made Revenge of the Sith a bit more palatable to some, at least until Vader let out an embarrassing “Noooooo!”
A particular phrase repeated throughout the initial backlash to the prequel trilogy: George Lucas ruined my childhood. Longtime fans complained that Lucas had taken everything they’ve loved about the movies since they were kids and made a mockery of it, figuratively mocking their younger selves. Nothing captured this position better than a scene from the series two premier of Spaced, in which Gen X nerd Tim (Simon Pegg), ritualistically burns his Star Wars memorabilia in a scene that director Edgar Wright shoots like Vader’s funeral pyre from Return of the Jedi. To Gen X fans, the prequel trilogy was not their Star Wars.
To the defenders of the prequel trilogy, the old fans were absolutely correct. Star Wars wasn’t for these fans anymore because they are adults. Star Wars is fundamentally a sci-fi fairy tale, a story for children. So who cares if the adults of the late-’90s disliked the prequels? Kids at the time loved them. And they loved the prequel trilogies spinoffs, especially The Clone Wars.
For those young fans, themes involving Anakin Skywalker’s struggle against his fate and the clones’ desire to become individuals, plots involving secret cabals and underground resistances were introductions to more complex storytelling. The show represented their first experience of watching something both thrilling and rich, a science fiction primer. So even though the series escaped cancellation once by moving from Cartoon Network to Netflix for an extra season, they still felt cheated by its end in 2014.
The spinoff Rebels (2014-2018) kept the story alive, and Clone Wars even received one last season on Disney+ in 2020. But none of that felt as vindicating as the second season of The Mandalorian, in which Katee Sackhoff reprised her role as Bo-Katan Kryze, the bounty hunter from The Clone Wars and Rebels. Not only did Bo-Katan serve as a harbinger for more returning characters such as Ahsoka Tano and Ezra Bridger, she soon supplanted Din Djarin, as the de facto lead of The Mandalorian. Joining The Mandalorian was The Bad Batch, Star Wars: Tales, Asohka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Skeleton Crew, shows that put prequel trilogy characters and concepts at the center.
Given this re-alignment from the original trilogy to the prequel trilogy, Filoni makes perfect sense as the new head of Lucasfilm. But it’s hard to miss the irony at work here. The kids who were told that their love of Star Wars is more legitimate than that of the crusty Gen X’ers are now old adults in charge. And, it turns out, they’re clinging to their childhoods with just as much tenacity as the people who never wanted to share Star Wars in the first place.
Which raises a question as Star Wars enters a new era under Filoni and Lynwen Brennan: will Star Wars grow under them as it did under Lucas and Kennedy? Or, more precisely, will the Star Wars fans in charge let new fans come in, even if they don’t like the same things? Will people who didn’t meet Bo-Katan and Ezra Bridger when they were five want to find out what these characters are up to now? Or will they want their own characters, demanding to see Kai Brightstar and Nash Durango from Young Jedi Adventures instead?
More importantly, will the current group of millennial fans let them have what they want? Millennial fans had to take the franchise from Gen X’ers who didn’t want to give it up. Will those millennials do better in the Dave Filoni era? Time will tell.
The post Star Wars Is Now Nostalgia for Millennials Instead of Gen X appeared first on Den of Geek.
