What is Star Wars?
Well, it’s Star Wars Month again. And once again it seems the franchise is in no better shape than it was last May. Though, season 2 of Andor hit Disney+ recently, and from what I hear, it’s off to a pretty strong start. But it hasn’t been without controversy, and I guess that’s kicked off another discussion about what is and what isn’t Star Wars.
Which seems like it would be a fairly easy question to answer. I mean, Star Wars is Star Wars. If it’s got the trademark label on it, it’s Star Wars. Right? Whoever owns the copyright creates Star Wars and is therefore the sole arbiter of what is and what isn’t Star Wars.
And for many people, it’s as cut and dried as that. If Disney creates a show and says it’s Star Wars, a certain segment of the fanbase will show up and consume the product. But does it just come down to ownership of IP?
Many have argued that what Disney produces and calls Star Wars is no different than fan fiction. Expensive fan fiction but fan fiction nonetheless.
A Matter of Ownership
A YouTuber critical of Disney Star Wars proposed this scenario to illustrate the point.
Say you buy a ticket to go see Metallica. The band takes the stage, and they start playing “Enter Sandman”, and you think That doesn’t look like Metallica. And then the singer starts singing, and you think That doesn’t sound like James Hetfield. And the longer you look and the longer you listen, you slowly realize that none of the guys on stage are the guys from Metallica. No Hetfield, no Lars Ulrich, no Kirk Hammett, etc. So you go to the promoter and say “Hey, dude, I paid to see Metallica, and this is some shitty cover band!” And the promoter says “No way, dude. That is Metallica. These guys bought the rights to play the Metallica songs as Metallica. So they are Metallica.”
By now I’m sure you can see where he’s going with this. If none of the people involved with the creation of the original thing are in the thing, is it really still the thing? Is the thing just a costume anyone can put on, or is there something more to the thing than that?
And I think there’s a lot of merit to this argument.
But I actually think it’s a little more complex than that, and I’m going to stick to the music analogy to make my point.
Not The Police We Were Looking For
Years ago The Police did the unthinkable, something Sting said he would never, ever do: the band reunited and went on tour together. On hearing this, one of my best friends and I decided to get tickets. We were big fans, but had been too young to’ve had the chance to see them in concert in the 80s when they were still together and in their prime.
So we get our tickets and we drive a couple hundred miles to another city to see them. And we’re pumped. I mean, a thing we never thought would happen was about to happen. So we’re excited and filled with a ton of anticipation.
A few hours later, we walk out of the venue completely deflated. Not because of personnel changes we were unaware of. No, all three of the original members were there on stage, doing their thing. Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland. But the thing is, they didn’t sound like The Police. They played The Police songs. But they sounded different. Slower. And more idiosyncratic somehow. And not in a refreshing, cool way. We wanted The Police from the 80s. But this was something different.
So what happened? Well, time happened.
22 years had passed since the band peaked and broke up in 1987. The guys were older. Andy, being ten years older than Stewart and Sting, was 65 when the band reunited. Sting had recorded 7 solo albums in the ensuing years since leaving The Police. Stewart Copeland had gone on to carve out a pretty decent career for himself as a TV and film music composer, scoring music for Talk Radio, Wall Street and the television show The Equalizer (great score, by the way). Andy Summers followed a similar path, composing the music for Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Weekend at Bernies and also launched a successful photography career in between musical projects. Each of the members started families, and a few went through divorces along the way.
Time passed. And Sting, Andy, and Stewart changed. But the world had also changed with them.
Between their breakup and reunion, New Wave, Metal, and Grunge had come and gone. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union collapsed. The internet was born and the world watched the Twin Towers fall on TV. Two new wars had begun to take the place of the Cold War, and the United States was about to elect its first black president.
Over two decades had passed, and the culture had moved on from where it had been in the late 80s when the band parted ways. Somehow all of those factors affected the band’s performance that night. And from our perspective, not for the better. Despite having had no personnel changes, the band just didn’t sound like The Police. Not The Police we’d grown up with anyway.
Prequel Fever
I had a similar experience when The Phantom Menace landed in theaters in the summer of 1999. Once again, something I never thought would happen was about to happen. I was going to sit in a theater and watch a brand new Star Wars movie.
16 years had passed since Return of the Jedi concluded the greatest movie trilogy of all time. I’d grown from a boy to a man. Moved out of my parents’ house. And had a boy of my own. We stood in line together, he and I. Man, we were excited.
A few hours later, I walked out of the theater with a very excited 5 year old and a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach that what I had just watched did not feel like Star Wars.
But how could this be? George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, had written, financed, and directed the movie. He had been involved with every aspect of production, even hand-picking the concept designs that would end up on screen. If the man who invented Star Wars had been that directly involved with the movie, how could it not feel like Star Wars. According to Stewart (the YouTuber referenced above), this is the primary condition for determining whether a thing is still a thing. It should follow that Star Wars is George Lucas.
But just as the members of The Police had changed, so had George Lucas. He’d gone through a bad divorce with Marcia Lucas (the person often credited with saving Star Wars in the editing suite), was raising three kids on his own, and managing several hugely successful and influential companies. And, again, the world had changed.
By the time the mid 90s rolled around and the Gen Xers were coming into their own, the mood of the country would once again shift toward gloom and pessimism.
Now some might argue that just as Metallica is more than one of its members, Star Wars is more than just George Lucas. After all, lots of people put their creative energies into Star Wars.
Would the original Star Wars be the Star Wars we know without Ralph McQuarrie’s designs or John William’s score or Ben Burtt’s sound design? Would it have been Star Wars without all of the talented people that formed ILM and brought McQuarrie’s designs to life? Would it have been Star Wars without Harrison Ford, James Earl Jones, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Alec Guiness, Billy Dee Williams, Peter Mayhew, Frank Oz, and Anthony Daniels?
Still, a good chunk of those people were involved with The Phantom Menace and the other prequels. Williams returned to compose the score, Burtt once again crafted the soundscape of the films, and even some of the actors from the original films appeared in the prequels, including Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz, and, most prominently, Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine.
The Sum of its Parts
In his video, Stewart (the YouTuber referenced above) concedes that some of the individual parts that make up the thing can be switched in and out for other parts and still be the thing. Sticking with the rock band analogy, when people think of Journey, they think of the 70s and 80s years with Steve Perry as the lead singer. But that era was actually the second iteration of the band and lasted for less than a decade. The band is still touring and recording, but Neal Schon is the only original member still with the band, and has been tied up in a court battle between current and former members over trademark since 2020. The band has been touring with Steve Perry soundalike Arnel Pineda for 18 years–twice as long as the actual Steve Perry era–and yet when people think of Journey, no one thinks of the current version.
The same is true for another popular 70s and 80s band–Fleetwood Mac. The version of the band everyone knows and loves is the version comprised of Lyndsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Christine McVie despite the fact that, technically speaking, Mick Fleetwood was the only founding member of the band from that lineup. John McVie is the “Mac” in the band’s name, but he initially declined an invitation to form the band in favor of another band he was playing with at the time. Though he did join shortly after their first show. Christine McVie (nee Perfect) signed up in 1968, a year after the band was originally formed by Peter Green (who left two years later in 1970). Buckingham and Nicks didn’t join the band until December 31, 1974, nearly seven years after the band was formed.
Buckingham left the band in 1987 and Nicks departed in 1991. The band added new members to replace the ones that left and limped along for a few years before finally disbanding. Members came and went over the years, before the Rumours lineup of the band, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lyndsey Buckingham, reformed in 2014. Me, my wife, and some friends saw them in March of 2015, and to this day it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever attended, despite the fact that Fleetwood Mac was more from our parents’ era than our own. And that tour, On With the Show, ranks as the 6th highest grossing worldwide tour of all time.
By now, I think I’ve established that the parts that make up the whole aren’t the only critical variable in determining whether a thing is a thing or not. It’s certainly important, but there are definitely other variables.
But what are they?
But this doesn’t feel like Star Wars!
To bring things back around to Star Wars, the one thing people almost always say when this discussion comes up is “That just doesn’t feel like Star Wars.” People have spent 25 years articulating why they think the Prequels are flawed or inferior to the Original Trilogy. And many of them have made compelling arguments. The acting was weak, the dialogue was stilted, they were too reliant on CGI, the plots were too complicated, Lucas did a poor job directing. And while all of those may be true to one degree or another, to me, what I didn’t like about them was less tangible than that. To me, the Prequels just didn’t feel like Star Wars.
Would I have preferred the Prequels were made the same way as the Originals, using practical effects instead of computer generated ones? Sure. Might the movies have been better if Lucas had farmed the directing work out to someone else? Probably. Could the writing have been better if Lucas had been the big idea man and brought someone in to mold those ideas into something more coherent and polished? Yes.
But even if some of those what ifs could be reversed, I don’t think it would matter ultimately.
Yay, More Star Wars!
A decade and a half after The Phantom Menace was released, what I thought was impossible once again was about to happen. I was about to sit in a dark theater and watch a brand new Star Wars movie. This time, there would be no waiting in line because in the intervening years movie ticket purchases had migrated from the physical box office to the internet. At the appointed time, I got online, picked my seats, and clicked “purchase”. Once again, I’d be seeing this new Star Wars with my son, who was now an adult.
When the credits rolled up on The Force Awakens, I was happy. I’d just had an experience I never thought I would have again. But once again, there was some inner turmoil. A barely audible voice that asked Did that feel like Star Wars?
But I didn’t want to hear from this voice. So I tucked it away and pretended I hadn’t heard it whispering to me.
But when The Last Jedi came out two years later, I was in my seat, once again with my son, on opening day. This experience, however, was totally different. This Star Wars had all of the visual familiarity of the previous entry, but long before the credits rolled, the inside voice that had quietly asked if The Force Awakens felt like Star Wars was petulantly shouting “This does not feel like Star Wars!”
Lots has been said about The Last Jedi in the near decade since that movie was released, and I don’t have the space or time (or interest) here to rehash all of that. I think it would be fair to say that some hated it, some loved it, and probably as many or more people thought it was fine. But the argument that followed that movie’s release was loud, and the conclusions Disney seems to have drawn from dissenting fan’s reaction was to hit us with even more familiarity. More familiar characters, more familiar ships, more familiar lightsabers–more, more, more!
Needless to say, that didn’t quite work either, and The Rise of Skywalker went down as the second worst performing movie (coming in slightly ahead of Attack of the Clones) out of the twelve film saga. As much as I hated The Last Jedi, I felt nothing but disdain and antipathy for The Rise of Skywalker, and to this day I’ve only seen it once. Most of the time (and this is not hyperbole), I can’t remember the title of it.
The Zeitgeist
So what went wrong? I mean, these movies had practical effects. They had X-Wings and Tie Fighters and Luke and Han and Princess Leia and C3PO and Chewbacca and R2D2, and Yoda. But still that voice insisted This doesn’t feel like Star Wars.
But how do you quantify a feeling? And I think the answer to that is that you can’t. But I think when fans talk about what does and does not feel like Star Wars, we are talking about more than how we feel about Star Wars. Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s a factor. But I actually think how we feel about something like this is only a part of something bigger. And there’s actually a word for it.
It’s called zeitgeist.
Oxford defines zeitgeist as “the general mood or quality of a particular period of history, as shown by the ideas, beliefs, etc. common at the time”. And Merriam Webster defines it as “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era”. I think either of these describe the common use of the word, but Zoomers would probably just call it “the vibe”. And I think that works too.
But when we apply it to the question I asked at the beginning–What is or isn’t Star Wars?–I think the answer is obvious. Star Wars is three movies: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. Everything else is…something different.
I imagine this is going to irritate a lot of people, and I am probably going to get accused of being nostalgic, biased, stuck in the past, and of being an “old man yelling at cloud”. And those things may be true. But I’ve thought a lot about this, and it’s not a conclusion I’ve come to frivolously.
Here it is: Star Wars can’t be separated from the era it was created in. It’s that simple.
The culture of the late 70s and early 80s was so specific that if you move too far forward or backward on the timeline, it’s distinctively different. It’s a thing that I think is very hard to discuss because culture is so big and amorphous that if you just discuss it as a whole, you can’t be specific enough to really make a point. But if you start looking at the individual parts that make up the whole, you miss a part of the picture too, and you probably get bogged down in too many details.
Spencer Gifts
I’ve written and rewritten this section a couple of times now, because I’ve done both of the things I just described. I went too broad at first and then overcorrected and got mired in too many examples with too many details. And after thinking about it, I thought of an example that I think sort of encapsulates what I’m trying to describe.
Imagine you could step back in time to the early 1980s and walk into any Spencer Gifts in any mall across America. Walk around the store. Look around. It’s kind of dark, maybe a little musty. The clerks are teenagers managed by a nerdy guy with glasses, probably in his mid 30s. Throughout the store you’ll find things like whoopie cushions, coffee mugs with amusing (and probably R rated) sayings on them, t shirts for movies and TV shows, lava lamps, those sparkly stone dragon statuettes, a whole section of “over the hill” stuff, fake poop, crystals and other woo woo items, black lights, and then in the back of course you have the posters. Some of these are from movies, some are of semi nude babes, and some are fantasy related (often also of semi nude babes). And some are made for black lights that are fantasy related and also feature semi nude babes. A lot of the gifts you find are related to pop culture, but fantasy is a prevalent theme, and a lot of it is of a weird or bawdy nature.
But if you could actually go through the scenario above, you would basically be standing in the physical manifestation of the late 70s–early 80s zeitgeist. Which is hard to understand as individual pieces, but collected in the same place, I think it would gel and make sense in sort of the same way that Marty McFly probably understood the zeitgeist of his parents era when he went back in time to 1955.
But I think it’s worth mentioning some individual pieces of art and entertainment from the era as reference points, and I think that might create a picture of its own. If you haven’t seen many of these, it might not help. But if you have, I think it will make sense.
Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards and The Lord of the Rings, John Boorman’s Excalibur, Time Bandits, Heavy Metal, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, The Dark Crystal, Krull, The Last Starfighter, The Black Cauldron, and Labyrinth; Battlestar Galactica, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Thundercats, The Smurfs, Fragglerock, She Ra: Princess of Power, Alf, Dr. Who, Star Blazers, and Transformers; the Prog Rock of Rush and Styx, Heavy Metal bands like Black Sabbath and Rainbow, the visual art of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and John Berkey–all of these things went into the stew that made up the cultural zeitgeist of the time.
Of course, when thinking about the zeitgeist of an era, you have to consider the people who were most responsible for creating it. Which would mostly be the Baby Boomers. These people were all of a certain age and probably at a certain stage of life. People in their 20s and 30s, just marrying and starting families. People who were eager to invent and build things and make their mark. If the previous era had been characterized by cynicism and pessimism, this new era they were heading into would be defined by optimism and energy and possibility.
Holywood keeps trying to recreate this feeling. And they think if they just get the visuals right or bring back the right actors and maybe CGI them the right way or use just the right old music that it will feel just like something from the 80s again. But it never does.
Everybody’s Star Wars is Different?
Now there’s just one more argument I gotta address before I wrap this up.
As I mentioned before, I took my son to see the Prequels when he was little. I also took him to see the Special Editions. To him, they’re both Star Wars. To some people The Mandalorian is Star Wars. And if you’re one of those people, fair enough. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it or say that you are wrong.
But if we are trying to answer the question of what is Star Wars definitively and try to understand why some things simply don’t feel like Star Wars, I think it’s impossible to ignore that it’s is imbued with the spirit of the era it originated in, and the two things simply can’t be separated. That is why there’s dissonance at times with new stuff, even when the new stuff is made in the spirit of the old stuff. It’s always going to feel slightly wrong or different. If they lean too hard into trying to emulate the style (The Rise of Skywalker), it comes off as phony and insincere. But if you go too far in the other direction, you end up with something like The Last Jedi or Andor. And don’t get me wrong, plenty of people like those last two things, but many have argued that neither feels much like Star Wars.
At the end of the day, Star Wars was created in the 70s and 80s. The thing is so of that era that it’s easily apparent when you go back and rewatch the original films in 2025–especially if you show them to a modern teen. And while Rey may be Star Wars to some people or Mando or Ahsoka or Mace Windu, ultimately, those things came along decades after the original films. None of that was responsible for why Star Wars endures, why it lasted through the long years when there was not even the hope of new Star Wars. No, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi are why Star Wars became a franchise and a cultural juggernaut that has lasted nearly 50 years.
And I think it’s worth pointing out that the franchise at this point was cohesive. Sure, it evolved and changed over the years as Lucas was creating the story and the tech to make the movies on the fly. But if Star Wars is a house that has been added onto at various times, at least those first three movies were all done by the same architect and builder. It all fit together. Now, it’s been added to and subtracted from so many times and by so many people with competing visions that it no longer seems like an organic, whole world. It feels more like a few different puzzles that look alike that someone tried to fit together to make one big puzzle. But it just doesn’t quite work.
Final Thoughts
I follow a popular Star Wars YouTuber that goes by Thor Skywalker, and he routinely gets questions like “If Disney does X, do you think Star Wars will be restored to the cultural juggernaut it once was?” This particular YouTuber is an optimistic type. He has his criticisms of Disney Star Wars, but he has hope that it can always get better again. But the truth is, Star Wars will never, ever be what it once was. And in truth it was only that for about a decade during a very specific cultural moment.
You can’t separate Star Wars from the era it was created in. And even though there may be Star Wars shows and movies and books and games and comics that come and go that are good or even very good, Star Wars will always be three movies.
I have spoken.
Your Thoughts
But what are your thoughts? What is Star Wars to you? Tell us down below. I look forward to reading your comments.
