Chat corner, with outsider insights

[annathecrow]

Hello,

the weekly chat post has come again. Do you have something to talk about?

~ ~ ~

In my corner of the world, we're traditionally celebrating that a religion's main dude died but came back (sorta). Nothing to do with Star Wars, but it led to a family visit and a SW-related discussion.

We were talking about LEGO, and my (very opinionated) dad said, roughly: "but they just keep making those Harry Potter and Star Wars sets, it's stupid, it's the same thing over and over".

And... hm. Firstly, I was of course pretty unhappy to hear SW compared to the TERF Financial Support IP. Then... does SW really look derivative from the outside? Hm. I could see it, maybe. Sure, there are new stories, but if you look at general merch it's Vader, Vader, Vader and some Stormtroopers, maybe baby Yoda? Oh, and then Kylo Ren-branded school gear, always installed in a stand right beside the same things with Elsa from Frozen. (What gender is your kid, magical ice princess or genocidal emo?)

Hm.

Comments

[atamascolily]

Hmm, well, I mean, if you want to get technical, SW as a franchise has pretty much always been about the merch (not a coincidence that relatively minor characters like Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters turned up in ESB so they could be marketed as action figures after George Lucas secured the merch rights), so re-creating it in LEGO isn't so different from anything from Hasbro or Kenner in the '80s and '90s. And the whole point of "media mixes" in general is to retell the same story or sets of stories across a wide range of formats as well as merch, so I don't think SW is any different from, say, Pokemon or the Disney princesses or HP, in that particular sense.

For companies like Disney, I think it's safer and more profitable to retell the same stories over and over again (see: the trend of recreating animated movies as live-action) rather than create new stories and characters which may or may not be as popular. So in many ways, we get "the same thing but different" in Star Wars: The Force Awakens hitting the same beats as A New Hope; Djin Djarin and Grogu echoing Boba Fett and Yoda's designs; and merch featuring the most iconic and consistently popular characters (or that Disney wants to be popular - there's a lot more Kylo merch than Rey or Finn, for instance).

Individual creators may have new and interesting ideas and characters, but a corporation like Disney will almost always play it safe and try to cater to as many people as possible rather than take creative risks and that ultimately is reflected in their output.

LEGO Star Wars is an interesting case because it's a collaboration between TWO mega-IPs, so people get 2 for the price of 1. I like many of the SW LEGO films and shorts because they're so often humorous or affectionate parodies; most of them can't exist independently of their source material and they're not really trying to, they're just fun.

I don't know, maybe your dad isn't the target audience?