Something Is Different About Star Wars Under Disney And It’s Palpable

We've all just witnessed perhaps the most disappointing San Diego Comic Con Hasbro presentation ever. A lot of you are upset with Hasbro, but if you will allow me to slant a popular colloquialism, don't shoot the licensee.

We here at Bantha Skull tend to run our operation avoiding anything that could be considered divisive. The reasoning is simple. For us, divisiveness sucks all the fun out of doing this, and fun is the only reason that the proprietors and staff members are motivated to contribute. We want to share the fun and love of our collective hobby. Arguments that split the community and foster divisiveness are simply not fun for us, so we avoid them.

Let me clearly state that this is not meant to be a passive aggressive dig at any of our contemporaries. Any comments below that throw shade at our friends and fellow fan sites will immediately be deleted. This is simply how we choose to operate our little niche here. We’re not saying it’s “right” or “better”. It’s just the way we prefer to do things.

Of course, two paragraphs of prefacing can only mean one thing. We’re going to do a 180 jump cut, and do the exact thing we just said we avoid. And I’m not only going to simply touch the third rail, I’m going to run up and lick it while Mr. Nomadscout live streams it on Instagram. Here we go:

Disney is ruining “Star Wars”.

Hopefully you will have picked up that I put "Star Wars" in quotes. I’m not talking about the movies. I don’t personally love the new media. They're alright. After the initial afterglow, I would rate the moves somewhere between “meh” and “meh plus.” They’re not bad, but I won’t be watching these movies 10 years from now (except for maybe the 3rd act of Rogue One). I could pretty much say that about any popcorn movie made since Terminator 2. But I can’t argue against OVER FOUR BILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF TICKET SALES! The movies are doing just fine. Arguing otherwise is ignoring a gargantuan mountain of “you’re just wrong” evidence. The general population enjoys these movies. Distilling Solo’s poor performance down to “fan backlash” is self-selecting one possibility out of hundreds to fit your worldview. If The Rise of Skywalker flops (and it won’t), then we can start to talk about fan backlash. And don’t talk to me about the sparse crowds at Galaxy’s Edge in Anaheim. Every single theme park insider has said this is more about the sharp rise in the price of annual passes than anything else. Yes there is a backlash among the hard core-iest of hard core fans, but guess what? There’s simply not enough of those fans to make any big impact. A few thousand fans can't affect the kind of swings we're seeing.

No, I put "Star Wars" in quotes because the reason it became a cultural and historic phenomenon transcended the silver screen, and it’s actually a point of derision with Star Wars detractors: merchandising. For us, that means the toys. I’ve often said that during the original trilogy, Star Wars toys and Star Wars movies were inextricable. Neither would have been as successful without the other. The world-building Kenner toys allowed us to keep the narrative alive during the interminable three year wait between chapters. Furthermore, the toys added to the hype and hysteria. Some younger people are baffled by the fascination with Boba Fett when they consider his minimal impact on screen. Trust me, Kenner did a masterful job of building up the mystique of the first new Star Wars character we ever saw, and was aided by the urban legends of a product recall and the Holiday Special. Lucas Film wasn’t worried about spoilers then. They leaked this character almost two full years before it would appear on screen AND IT HELPED BUILD A LEGEND! The easily divulged early glimpses through the merchandizing helped build the suspense and anticipation. You’d wonder what this awesome new character did and what they could possibly do to warrant action figure enshrinement. Sometimes it was nothing much; they just looked neat. But it was a self-feeding hype machine. It even extended into the Prequels. Gasgano? What does this weird arachnid do? Super Battle Droid? What makes them so super?
Now that’s all gone.

Disney’s secrecy and news embargoes are sapping some of the fun out of Star Wars in the bigger picture. There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for this. The Star Wars licensees are legion. Perhaps if Disney allowed Hasbro to show a new character it would effectively "scoop" one of the other licensees, and they're trying to make sure the news is more egalitarian across all licensees. The way much of the Sith Trooper merchandise was revealed via a centralized article on the Official Site certainly lends credence to that prospect. Perhaps the reasoning is more sinister, but without any evidence to support that, I'm not going to start hurling baseless accusations. Regardless of the reasoning, the net result is the same.

We just witnessed a San Diego Comic Con Hasbro panel presentation that left us all completely sapped of enthusiasm for all things Star Wars. There is a pall over the community, and it exists at the exact time we should be getting whipped to a fevered pitch. Episode IX is just five months away and we’ve been shrouded under a wet blanket. But what could Hasbro possibly have done? At the onset of the presentation, Hasbro said that they couldn’t divulge anything from Triple Force Friday. That date, October 4th, is less than three months away. Hasbro was effectively silenced. It’s much too soon to discuss “spring 2020” and Disney’s embargo took “fall 2019” off the table. They were essentially handcuffed. It even felt like LFL’s presence on the panel was nothing more than the equivalent of a network television censor.

One trickle of information or tease is all it would have taken to start the enthusiasm engines going, but we got nothing. Show us silhouettes as a throw back to the vintage Kenner days and Disney wins the nerd news cycle in a positive way.

What is perhaps most bitter is that this news blackout occurred at a convention that is, at its heart of hearts, a fan convention. While San Diego Comic Con has developed more of a corporate feel in recent years, it is absolutely not. It's a non-profit and their mission statement reads:

The SAN DIEGO COMIC CONVENTION (Comic-Con International) is a California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation organized for charitable purposes and dedicated to creating the general public’s awareness of and appreciation for comics and related popular art forms, including participation in and support of public presentations, conventions, exhibits, museums and other public outreach activities which celebrate the historic and ongoing contribution of comics to art and culture.

Star Wars has existed in the public realm for so long, it feels more like a public trust. I know that's not true. It's a property owned by Disney, and they are free to do with it what they want. However there is a very wise expression that says, just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you have to. There would have been some beauty inherent with allowing news to be more freely shared at something as democratic as a non-profit fan convention. Placing an embargo on the event, by reasons either well-meaning or motivated by something less altruistic, has an end result that feels, for lack of a better word, icky. It feels corporate. We all know "Star Wars" is a business, but we don't need to be reminded of it. I think it's at the root of the fans' sense of being severed from that thing they cherished. It's adding opacity to the 4th wall that as kids we thought was completely transparent.

Companies usually make acquisitions of this size to fill in a blindspot. They’re buying a company which does something that the acquiring company does not do well. Microsoft and Facebook acquire smaller tech companies which do things that broaden their own product offerings as opposed to reinforcing their existing vertical. Facebook didn’t buy My Space, which was doing the same thing as them. Instead, they beat them into the ground. Facebook bought Instagram because Instagram had something Facebook didn’t. So it always amazes me when companies make an acquisition and then make changes to that acquired company that undermine the exact point of the acquisition. In retrospect, the thing Lucasfilm probably had that Disney didn't was the independent filmmaker spirit, the charm that comes with not always being purely professional, and the like-ability that comes with not taking yourself too seriously. It's the thing that corporate behemoths like Disney lack. To overly simplify, a soulless corporate giant was trying to buy a soul, and yet their actions are stripping all the soul out of LFL.

To quote Sgt. Hulka, "Lighten up, Francis." The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems slip through your fingers.

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