Force Fed: A Reflection on the Good and Evil of Star Wars (Part II)

The corporations own our fairy tales. Recent letters to the Wildcat editor complain about the proliferation of advertising on the campus mall, but the root of the problem runs much deeper in our society. The movie, "Star Wars," the re-release that everyone is lining up to go see this week, is the result of the pure monetary muscle of Rupert Murdoch's sprawling Fox News corporation and brilliant marketing on the part of George Lucas and his Lucasfilm Ltd.

As such, "Star Wars" is essentially a two-hour infomercial for itself. I thought it was insipidly stupid, poorly acted and way over-hyped. But look . . . I'm even willing to concede that "Star Wars" is the greatest movie ever made. I see this as a part of a larger, more disturbing trend than my disagreement with the population at large. Bad taste isn't the issue here - the commercial mythology of "Star Wars" is.

George Lucas is not the benevolent storyteller he pretends to be - he's a businessman. A very successful one. He's The Man. George Lucas wrote the book on corporate synergy, the art of re-using the same story over and over in different media and different venues.

According to the New York Times, the "Star Wars" brand name has earned Lucasfilm approximately $4 billion, placing it second only to Disney in earnings. Not just one Disney film-all of Disney. The home video release of a scant two years ago sold 33 million copies. According to estimates, Hasbro shipped $100 million in action figures last year, while Galoob Toys moved another $75 million in "Star Wars" vehicles. These numbers are just for 1996 - "Star Warstm" earned $20 million and change at the box office this weekend, and there are no figures yet for this year's sales of CD-ROMS, coffee table books, Christmas ornaments, soundtracks, and mock light sabers.

To a large extent, corporate synergy like this explains why we've seen so many movie remakes lately. Conglomeration, the act of corporations merging together, has made strange bedfellows of disparate media companies. These new mega-corporations are now realizing that they own the rights to huge numbers of old shows, scripts, and related intellectual property - and why create something original when you can just dig into the vault, repackage it a little, and sell it as new (a "Special Edition")? They know it works and that a pre-existing audience will already be anxiously awaiting its arrival. Brand name recycling takes a lot of the guesswork out of what can be a costly business, and merchandise licensing bolsters the performance of the overall product line.

Enough already. Enough "Flipper," "Mission Impossible," "Lost in Space" and "Brady Bunch" remakes. Make something new, dammit! "The Little Mermaid" is being re-released this summer. Oliver Stone is said to be working on a "Planet of the Apes" update. See it again for the first time! Your kids will love to see it over . . . and over . . . and then buy the toys, books, home videos, lunch boxes, video games and clothes.

If you watch closely, the advertising for "Star Wars" isn't really even aimed at kids this time - they don't spend money. Besides, any petulant adolescent worth his or her salt knows that this summer's "Independence Day" had better special effects, acting and sound design. Seeing "Star Wars" again 20 years later showed exactly how deeply flawed the film is, in ways that an extra scene with an animated Jabba can't fix.

So when The Man can't make a passable film, he takes a different tact: "Remember how cool life was when you were a kid? See our movie and recapture the magic of being a seven-year-old!" Although cable channles like TV Land were the first to capitalize on the recycling movement, Lucas and Fox have taken it to the next level.

One weekend down, eight billion left to go. Lucas intends to string you along forever - or at least well into the next millennium, when the much-ballyhooed new trilogy will finally be released.

But this isn't some Jedi mind trick, it's marketing. The degree to which "Star Wars" has infiltrated our culture is disturbing. The references are everywhere. You no doubt recognized the typeface of the headline and the good vs. evil iconography of the light saber battle. And that's OK, you should be culturally literate. But Lucas has managed to convince us that "Star Wars" isn't just a part of pop culture, it's a part of ourselves - a manufactured myth controlled, not by the Brothers Grimm, but by two very large corporations.

The problem isn't that they're selling it to us, and it isn't the fact that people like "Star Wars." Even if "Star Wars" does take you back to some happier time, you should respect those memories as moments that can never be re-lived. You can never buy your innocence back. There's something kind of sick about Lucas digging into those childhood feelings and selling them back to us 20 years later-as if there was $7 surcharge on your photo album.

If "Star Wars" is all that connects you to your childhood, that's sad, because you've sold Lucas and Murdoch your soul. And not only that, you've paid them for the honor.