By now you, along with the rest of the internet have said more than your piece on The Walt Disney Company’s recent purchase of Lucasfilm for 4.05 billion dollars. There have been plenty of jokes made and paranoid rumors thrown out, but surprisingly, not much has been said of George Lucas, the man who held sole ownership of Lucasfilm and created Star Wars, easily the company’s most profitable franchise. Of course we all know that doesn’t mean no one has anything to say about the man, as a decade’s worth of online bickering can attest to the contrary.
Ever since the perceived disappointment of The Phantom Menace back in 1999, Lucas’ status as a nerd culture god has progressively descended to the point of a fallen idol. Even the most ardent of Star Wars fans will willingly compare him to the Emperor. It’s hard to separate the man from the modern myth he has created, but it seems as if George Lucas wants nothing more than to be stripped of the Star Wars legacy completely. For a perspective on this theory one has to look no further then Lucas’ inspiration for the Star Wars saga.
The original Star Wars film(before it was saddled with the subtitle A New Hope) was originally meant to be less serious space opera and more of a throwback to the pulp sci-fi serials of the 40’s and 50’s Lucas grew up on with a little influence from Akira Kurosawa films thrown in. Knowing his inspiration it’s easy to see tongue in cheek playfulness present in A New Hope, however when the film was released in 1977 it exploded into a world-wide phenomena, one that cast a shadow George Lucas couldn’t escape. Remember, Star Wars was only the third studio film Lucas had ever made, the first being the poorly received sci-fi film THX 1138 followed by American Graffiti.
After the success ofStar Wars Lucas had originally planned to create a haven for independent film making, using the iconic film he had created as a means of financing. This of course did not come to pass as even a cursory glance at George Lucas’ IMDb page shows not much outside of Star Wars and Indiana Jones from 1977 on to the present, painting a picture of a man trapped by his own creations.
It would be monumentally difficult to defend George Lucas as a great director, after all the two best films in the Star Wars saga, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, are also the only two not directed by him. However to say he deserves the amount of venom thrown his way online from “devoted fans” of Star Wars since nearly the inception of the internet would be beyond hyperbole. No one over the age of twelve actually likes the prequel trilogy, and the steady stream of reissues Lucas produces are just as damaging to his film making legacy as it would be to Francis Ford Coppola if he added a talking CGI frog to the Blu-Ray cut of Apocalypse Now.
George Lucas is a prime example of a man who suffers from Paul McCartney syndrome. He is a man praised for even the worst of ideas out of the fear of telling him his ideas are terrible, simply because he created something brilliant in the past. He created the prequel trilogy in a bubble where every idea that came out of his head was praised because why wouldn’t you? The guy created Star Wars after all. A more systematic take down of the prequels has been done by much better men though, specifically Red Letter Media.
However the collective outcry and threats every time Lucas tampers with his films far outweigh the deserved reaction. Notice the qualifier “HIS” used before films in that last sentence, that’s an important detail that may be hard to swallow. The fact of the matter is, Star Wars as a franchise and film series belongs to George Lucas (or at least it did until a few weeks ago). He created the series and no matter how much it means to your childhood, he owes just as much to you as he did back in 1977, which is nothing. An argument can be made though that the Star Wars films are important as art and a piece of the fabric of our culture. This is true and is why the original theatrical cuts of the first two films are placed on the National Film Registry. They will always be there in some form and, Disney willing, will eventually become available again to the masses.
George Lucas has been so easily cast as a villain for the past decade that it’s hard to see him as anything else. He has done himself no favors in the public opinion of course but he is more accurately a tragic hero in the same light of the character he built the Star Wars universe around. This is a man used to adulation for a film he directed three decades ago, a film he didn’t expect to have to devote so much of his time and creativity to.
Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm is the best thing that could happen to both George Lucas and Star Wars fans at large. The new Star Wars films Disney will be releasing will be helmed by young directors with passion and a drive to redeem the series they love so much and as a result, the man who created it. Lucas is free from being heavily involved in the Star Wars franchise and the most ardent of fans can breathe a sigh of relief and hopefully extend and olive branch to that bearded guy who created the universe you love so much. He deserves it after all these years.