Star Wars: for all ages, all of the time?

Posted on March 28, 2014by

Star Wars is meant for kids. George Lucas agreeing to take the rights to sell T-shirts and lunchboxes and plastic snowtroopers in lieu of a pay hike is proof of that. Star Wars has always been meant for kids. But it was its ability to draw in everyone else that made it one of the most commercially successful films in history. Adjusted for inflation, only Avatar and Gone with the Wind fare better. Despite its monolithic cultural influence, no other Star Wars movie comes close to beating A New Hope.

Far more intelligent people than I have tried to explain why the prequels were seen by so many as a disappointment, but it was never really the children that it disappointed. There’s a complicated discussion to be had about whether that’s because kids will accept anything as long as it’s shiny or whether adults are just cynical and greedy, but I think it’s fairly uncontroversial to say that the prequels focused more sharply on that younger demographic. The Phantom Menace, in particular, set the tone, with its Roger-Roger tin-can comedy bad guys, a nine-year old protagonist and everything to do with the Gungans. But even Revenge of the Sith, the only movie in the trilogy not to be granted a fully family-friendly rating, spends its opening see-sawing between Artoo’s slapstick cargo bay antics and Anakin’s adventures in dismemberment and beheading. Read More

The Future Lies in the Past: Returning to the KOTOR Era

Posted on March 27, 2014by Cry Havac
The Knights of the Old Republic games — successful, beloved, generally awesome

The current state of the Expanded Universe is unsettled, at best. A cursory look at the upcoming publishing schedules for just about any type of media reveals little on the horizon, as the franchise seems to hold its breath for the sequel trilogy’s arrival. It’s not clear that the Expanded Universe we have come to know will survive. The recent revelation that the films will be set about thirty years after the original trilogy suggest that at least some of the post-Return of the Jedi EU will be lost.

It’s general consensus that the material set before Return of the Jedi is likeliest to survive, because there’s less probability of the sequels contradicting it. Perhaps the least likely sources to be contradicted are those set well before any of the films and essentially unconnected to them. This suggests that the Expanded Universe should be concentrating its efforts there if it doesn’t want them wasted.

Currently, The Old Republic, EA’s massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, is set in the Republic’s distant past, thousands of years before the films. It looks likely to continue on as an important segment of the franchise for the next several years, and it likely can get by due to its setting.

The obvious tack for this article, then, would be to suggest concentrating EU resources on the era of The Old Republic. But that argument pretty much writes itself without my spending any further time on it, and I’d rather make a little bolder suggestion: revive the era of Knights of the Old Republic.

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“You Don’t Know the Power of the Dark Side!” How does it work?

Posted on March 25, 2014by Obiwomble's Outlook

Star Wars has a strange relationship with the Dark Side of the Force. It flits from being full-on satanic influence to distilled psychopathy depending on the story, but there is one common factor – the idea that the dark side lulls the wielder in, that however constructed, it’s always a Faustian bargain at best.

Does this render the dark side power wielding nutcase that invariably results free from any kind of responsibility? Short of outright possession – which has happened – the answer has to be no. What is of interest here is that those few dark side wielding maniacs that have kicked the habit have never played the “dark side made me do it” card that fandom is fond of invoking.

I propose to look at four case studies in how the dark side operates and how the individual responded to it: Quinlan Vos, Anakin Skywalker, Kyp Durron and Cade Skywalker. Each represents a different dark side opening as it were.

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Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V: LucasArts, Inspiration and Appropriation

Posted on March 24, 2014by Feature Articles, Sidelong Glance

Being both a Star Wars fan and an avid video game player has been a rough road in the past few years. The fact that LucasArts, the videogame production arm of Lucasfilm, was closed by Disney shortly after their acquisition of the company, but even the past five or six years before that were disappointment after disappointment. In the last four years, we have Star Wars Angry Birds, The Force Unleashed II, Kinect Star Wars, Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars and The Old Republic. That’s it and all. Going back two or three years more gives us Battlefront: Elite Squadron, Battlefront: Renegade Squadron, The Force Unleashed in both initial release and the “Ultimate Sith” edition, three other Clone Wars tie-in games, and Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga.

Out of that list, only five games not tying in to the Clone Wars TV show made it to the mainstream console market: TFU, TFU II, Lego SW: Complete and Kinect Star Wars. The biggest release by far, however, is The Old Republic, a game developed over a five-year cycle that cost LucasArts, EA and Bioware $200 million to make, more than many blockbuster movies. While an argument can be made for all of these games relative to how fun they are to play or how entertaining they are, no one will argue that any of them are original, exciting and new concepts in the realm of video games. Read More

Go Figure: Force Sensitivity and Population Growth

Posted on March 21, 2014by Feature Articles

Editor’s note—several months ago, during the planning phase for my recent feature Checks and Balances, I asked Go Figure author Michael Lind to explore any existing data he could find on Force sensitivity throughout the ages in the Star Wars galaxy, and to what extent it appeared to be an inherited trait from one’s parents.

While his conclusions veered off somewhat from my original hypothesis—that Force-users were effectively a contagion and would’ve subsumed the regular population of the galaxy if not for the constant warring of Jedi and Sith—they presented a fascinating picture of how Force heritability might actually work; one that drastically changed how I thought about the Galaxy Far, Far Away. My own final piece on the subject can be found here, and below I am proud to present Michael’s original response in its entirety, with only minimal copy-editing, that our readers might be similarly enlightened. – Mike Cooper Read More