You may not have asked for it. But you’re sure as heck getting it. Another Star Wars article! (Hey, at least this time I tied it to screenwriting)
The Mandalorian Season 3 is just around the corner. And the most recent trailer has gotten me thinking about Star Wars.
I actually liked the trailer. As of today, The Mandalorian remains the closest we’ve gotten to Lucas’s original vision since Disney took over Lucasfilm. And a big reason for that is that Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni understand something about Lucas that many of these other people who have gotten Star Wars movies and shows don’t have a clue about.
Whimsy.
“Whimsy” just means playful, quaint, fanciful humor. It’s a surface-level component of storytelling. There’s no deeper meaning to it. But the more you watch Star Wars, the more you realize that whimsy is its secret sauce.
A perfect example of whimsy is the MSE-6 mouse droid, the thing that scoots away in the Death Star when Chewbacca roars at it. Another would be the giant frog creature outside of Jabba’s hut that snaps up kitten sized creatures with its tongue.
These things don’t have any deeper significance to the story. But they subconsciously make the world feel richer, which, in turn, tricks the mind into thinking these alien civilizations really do exist. Not to mention, they add that element of weird fun that differentiates Star Wars from all the competition.
It’s why you get the shot of Salacius B. Crumb’s cousin up there in the tree in the newest Mandalorian trailer. These guys understand the importance of Lucas’s obsession with whimsy.
But The Mandalorian is still Star Wars Lite. Which is scary when you consider that it’s the best thing Star Wars has to offer post-Disney acquisition.
Why do I call it “Star Wars Lite?” Because what are the stakes? They used to be getting Baby Yoda to safety. But they got him to safety, and apparently, safety gave him back. So what’s so important about this latest journey? I’m sure the writers will come up with something. But stories never work well when you have to add stakes retroactively. The stakes need to be baked into the concept.
This is what made the original Star Wars! Stakes. There was a planet-destroying moon run by an evil Emperor going around the galaxy blowing up planets. How do stakes get any bigger than that?
That’s been a curse Star Wars has been unable to outrun. They’ve had to consistently come up with stakes that match or exceed the Death Star. And so far, they’ve failed.
Indeed, it is why Obi-Wan was such a dud. At least The Mandalorian could claim that Baby Yoda was the secret to the future of the Force throughout the galaxy. The only stakes in Obi-Wan seemed to be to get an annoyed Baby Leia back home before dinner.
Yet another reason Star Wars continues to flounder is the archetype problem.
For those who don’t know, George Lucas built the original Star Wars around Joseph Campbell’s, “The Hero’s Journey.” It’s actually quite astounding the way that material inspired him because he basically wrote the original Hero’s Journey and just crossed out the characters’ names and replaced them with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. It’s a reminder of how getting the right inspiration at the right moment can be the key to writing something great.
But the thing about The Hero’s Journey is that each character plays a very specific role. There’s the hero, there’s the mentor, there’s the trickster, there’s the guardian. Those characters are constructed to fit a very narrow purpose in the story. The mentor, for example, is there to offer guidance and wisdom to the hero.
Therefore, when you try and extrapolate these smaller side-characters into their own shows and movies, with these bigger storylines and larger character demands, it never quite works. Maybe this is a weird analogy but I just made cookies last night, so go with it – it would be like making cookies, only for you to realize after you cooked them that you forgot to add sugar, so you then went and sprinkled sugar all over the cookies. No matter how much sugar you add, they’re not going to taste right.
The Boba Fett show bumped up against this issue head on. Boba Fett was Star Wars’s biggest bada$$. And that’s exactly who they showed us in the teaser for the show at the end of The Manadlorian Season 2. They showed Boba Fett walk into Jabba the Hutt’s palace, heartlessly shoot his successor, Bib Fortuna, then take the throne.
It was the perfect representation of Boba Fett’s archetype. But when they actually had to make a show, and spread Boba Fett’s plotline over six episodes, having a ruthless cold-hearted killer didn’t work anymore. They had to make him softer. So that’s exactly what they did. And, in doing so, THEY MOVED AWAY FROM THE ARCHETYPE.
This is why these characters don’t work in expanded roles. Because you have to move away from the things that people liked so much about them. The same thing happened with Han Solo, albeit on a smaller scale. In Star Wars, Han Solo’s archetype, the Trickster, reveled in its edge. Of course, the character could be edgy because he only had to serve as an accomplice to the hero. As soon as you took him away from that archetype, he lost what we loved about him.
A lack of whimsy, a complex relationship with stakes, and an archetype problem, have placed Star Wars inside an iron lung machine, made it the Bubble Boy of franchises. And it looks like it’s only going to get worse from here. This upcoming Acolyte series is built around what the Star Wars community universally agrees is the worst thing about Star Wars, the High Republic Era. Ashoka is based on a cartoon character who only serious die-hard fans care about. I like Jon Watts but a show built around children (Skeleton Crew) probably isn’t going to cater to long-time Star Wars fans.
The High Republic
And this says nothing about the actual feature film plan, which seems to be non-existent. Kathleen Kennedy keeps scrapping everything she greenlights because she knows the truth – that there is no Star Wars feature film plan. They screwed up the Skywalker saga. So there are no more trilogies to mine from that. Which means you have to make one-offs.
But Star Wars isn’t a one-off franchise. It goes back to stakes. If you’re making one movie in one little part of the universe, the stakes are going to be low and people aren’t going to care. Making some offbeat Taika Waititi Star Wars movie set on the bantha origin planet of CousCoux sounds fine if you’ve got two healthy garguatun trilogies running concurrently. But if The Battle of CousCoux is the only Star Wars movie you have? You’re going to lose Star Wars. You are. Cause people are going to be like, “That’s it? A fun harmless little Star Wars movie? I was expecting more.”
So what’s the solution?
This is where things get scary. There may not be a solution. Star Wars may soon end up being one of those franchises that picks at the bones of its carcasses, like The Terminators and Aliens of the world. It’s hard to write a good story period. But it’s harder to write a good story when all the good stories in your franchise have been used up.
You’ve used up your Hero’s Journey template since you’ve built two trilogies off it. So now what? Can you introduce a Mad Max like hero? Or a Tony Stark like hero? Make them the face of a trilogy? I don’t think you can. Star Wars, at its heart, is about wonder. It’s about having these outsized dreams of doing something bigger with your life, like Luke Skywalker wanting to fight for the Rebellion. And that requires a younger “stars in their eyes” protagonist.
I know one thing for sure, though. You gotta stop making TV shows. Star Wars is using television to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that Lucasfilm is terrified to make movies. They’re terrified because they know if they screw up two more times, Star Wars, as a top tier franchise, is dead. Lucasfilm knows they can better hide failures on the TV side, which is why they keep making all these shows.
But sooner or later, they have to make movies because Star Wars IS A THEATRICAL FRANCHISE. Movies = high stakes. Playing in television is like playing in the kiddie pool. It’s fun and it’s safe. But you’re just treading urine-infested water.
So I’ll ask you again, what’s the solution?
You need to go back to the source. The source is The Hero’s Journey. But since you can’t do a Hero’s Journey anymore, you have to go back even further, to the things that inspired The Hero’s Journey. We’re talking about the wide range of cultural myths and legends from ancient Greece, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native American cultures, that gave you those story components that make up The Hero’s Journey.
A good example is the Star Wars video game, Knights of the Old Republic, which is basically a take on Cain and Abel. Two brothers were raised and each one went off on a different path, one to the Dark Side and the other to the Light. I could see a franchise being built around this dual-protagonist rivalry between brothers. And it would work because its bones are built from the same matter the original Star Wars was built from.
But, look, nobody said this stuff was easy. If I could easily come up with a great Star Wars idea, I’d be busy writing the next Star Wars movie for Lucasfilm (assuming they could get over me ripping them all the time). But I do think the Star Wars franchise needs to be built on top of a feature spine. It’s not a small potatoes franchise. It can have TV shows, but they should be supplementary, not the whole shebang.
You can dance with the TV devil for another year or two. But sooner or later, this franchises collapses if you don’t put a trilogy out there.
