Two big things happened in the world of Star Wars this week, one that has a direct impact on work we’ve covered here and another that will likely shape the next decade or three of the beloved space opera story universe.
As not only NoPro’s publisher but inarguably our number one Star Wars fan, amongst a crew laden with serious Star Warriors*, it is my duty and privilege to talk about them both. We start, naturally, with the changes coming to Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland.
In case you are late to the party: Disneyland Galaxy’s Edge is fully abandoning the largely already abandoned launch day vision of the land as a place where one day was lived out and everything that happened there — including what guests did — was part of of Star Wars canon.
This was always downstream of far more elaborate plans for the land that had the same mission but enabled it with aliens and droids wandering about, a stunt show that did get performed on a few social occasions, and gameplay elements that were ultimately spun off into our beloved and largely misunderstood Galactic Starcruiser which was too pure for this world.
In many respects the fate of Galaxy’s Edge was determined by the tricky corporate relationship that exists between Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney parks operations. Every designer knows that most brilliant designs in the world are only as good as the people who are charged with executing them are willing to do the wild thing that's been envisioned.
The Dream That Was
Those of us who love Galaxy Edge as it stands today, and who look on the changes coming at the end of April have largely done so with caveats. We’ve been in love with the feeling we had the first time we stepped inside and found ourselves in a physically fully realized Star Wars port town. One that didn’t try to tell you how to feel about it in every moment by pumping in nostalgic music but just was.
Clocking in at 14 acres, which is four times the size of New Orleans Square yet featuring the same number of major attractions — two — what is there is brilliant but feels largely empty save on the Star Wars Night takeover when Disney lifts its rules on adult guests in cosplay and the land floods with characters familiar and exotic.
On those nights, or during Chewbacca’s strange little Life Day procession, or when one stumbles across a cast member (that’s a Disney park employee for the uninitiated) who has set up a little mat to teach guests how to play sabacc — the complex and addicting Star Wars hybrid of poker and blackjack — there’s a spark as we get a glimpse of the land as originally advertised and seemingly as it was architected.
This was a space meant to be a grand stage, and as any theatre kid can tell you a stage is nothing without actors.
Theme parks are, in their DNA, nostalgia machines. Physical manifestations of longing for places that were or that only existed in our collective dreams. The idea for Galaxy’s Edge was originally to deepen that through play, by inviting guests to embrace their agency and have the world around them be responsive to that agency. That was largely shoved into a smartphone app.
The Galaxy’s Edge we got was, one could say, magical on a technicality.
Yes, the app allowed for interaction. Yes, the Hondo Ohnaka** and Doc Ondar animatronics are aliens, and, yes, so is the free roaming Chewbacca. Yes, the cast members used greet you with local sayings and some still do.
But any eight year old can sense when the mall Santa doesn’t have his heart in it, and while you can still find pockets of that around the land it’s an echo at best.
Playing For Pure Sabacc
Of course the biggest issue was the gamble that was made when the concrete was poured. In the wake of The Force Awakens, which just had its tenth anniversary last month, building a whole theme park land around what is still the number one movie at the American box office (yes, STILL) was a no brainer.
Rey, Kylo Ren, Finn, Poe, and BB-8 printed money. You would have been a fool to not realize you had lightning in a bottle and do whatever you could to build your stories around these characters interacting with each other. And to their great credit the storytellers at WDI understood the assignment better than others charged with guiding those characters did.
The two sequels to that movie still earned ridiculous amounts of money, but both became flashpoints in America’s culture war. Disney itself became a front line in a battle that has metastasized in the atrocities we see this very month in Minneapolis and which seem to be presaged by the most politically charged piece of work to ever come out of a series whose roots lie in a Northern California boy’s moral abhorrence of the Vietnam War: the Disney+ series Andor, which itself is a fluke of a now lost era of television making.
Yet all of this — a living land tied to the current stories being told that have real meaning — flies in the face of the nostalgia machine nature of theme parks. Not, mind you, that I think what a theme park can be can’t evolve. It’s just that evolution requires commitment to the bit, and on the operations side of the ledger that commitment is obviously gone as the outcomes are not perceived to be worth the effort by the metrics they use.
Which has left Galaxy’s Edge feeling increasingly stale along with feeling empty. It’s not much fun to walk around 14 acres of theme park and think about all the things that you can see in the making of book they sold you which never will be.
It’s for this reason that I accept and even welcome the changes coming. All of which felt inevitable as the park dabbled with walk around characters who don’t fit inside the previously unified timeline of the land. Trying something is better than nothing, and this way we have some hope of bringing real life to Black Spire Outpost.
What remains to be seen is if park operations commits to the bit and has the original trilogy characters actually showing up and being themselves in all their messy glory. Because who wouldn’t want to try and hustle Han Solo out of the Millennium Falcon over a couple of Jet Juices at Oga’s Cantina?
That’s the thing: if the park commits to the bit of letting us play with rather than just look at the cast then it doesn’t really matter which era we are in. Nor does that need to lead to some grand adventure involving scanning lots of QR codes around the port: bantering with Leia or giving Darth Vader bad directions can be enough. If it all culminates in something legible for everyone in Black Spire at that moment? All the better.
Just try something.
Because the gorgeous land that was built deserves some life breathed into it. Not just a nostalgic soundtrack that tries to tell me how to feel while I’m looking at a statue of a gonk droid.
The Rise of The Wolf
The other big news in Star Wars this week is that after 14 years of running Lucasfilm super producer Kathleen Kennedy is leaving the top post to get back to just producing movies — something that her track record speaks of for itself — and stepping into leadership are two Lucasfilm vets.
Heading up the business side will be 27 year Lucasfilm vet Lynwen Brennan, and having the reigns on creative will be current Chief Creative Officer and long time George Lucas heir apparent Dave Filoni.
This was the worst kept secret in Hollywood, so it doesn’t come as a shock, and if nothing else it signals that it may finally be time for Lucasfilm to move past its post-pandemic paralysis and get down to the business of taking some big swings again.
While both The Mandalorian & Grogu (which will get the Galaxy’s Edge ride Smuggler’s Run dedicated to to this year) and Director Shawn Levy’s Starfighter staring Ryan Gosling and a killer supporting cast, have both wrapped principal photography and are moving towards their release dates, Star Wars’ live action slate has mostly been in carbon freeze since Covid.
Deductive reasoning suggests that this transition will let the new bosses decide which of the in development projects — of which there are some half dozen — get green lit.
A trilogy helmed by Simon Kinberg, Filoni’s partner on the beloved Rebels, feels like a safe bet and is rumored to be handed the Episode X moniker, signaling the continuation of the storytelling spine of the franchise. That's all rumor, however, which can be turned up in any Star Wars subreddit.
Oddly enough Kennedy mentioned the Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver developed The Hunt for Ben Solo project which got fandom chattering when it broke cover last year, during her exit interview with Deadline.
Filoni has, as an old clip from the Happy Sad Confused podcast that is circulating about, indicated that he sees value in making work for the audience that has grown up with Star Wars and wants more sophisticated material while also wanting to make sure that there’s a way for kids to get into a galaxy far far away.
Like his mentor, George Lucas, before him one suspects that Filoni is more interested in telling those stories for kids. Which isn’t a bad thing, I just hope that he really does see the value in a multi-generational approach to the storytelling for a world that will be turning half a century old next year. (To be frank: I think he does.)
Where I get any hesitation, well that requires a deep cut. So apologies but I’m about to speak a level of Star Wars nerd that can usually only be followed by those who have lost their padawan braid and have earned their place in the Order.
The Ones
Mortis.
Freaking Mortis, man.
The returning to the Mortis “Gods” concept from the Clone Wars animated show has been signposted for the Filoni led Ahsoka series that has its second season this year, and honestly that whole deal makes me sick to my stomach.
Basically the “Mortis Gods” add something that’s halfway between the Greek Pantheon and the Christian Holy Trinity into the mythology of The Force.
There’s a way in which this can be a not Bad Thing, and a good chunk of work that Filoni has had influence over contains the kind of animism and syncretic pan-theism that is part of the mystery of the Force that’s been lying at the heart of Star Wars for 50 years, but sometimes…
Look: the Force isn’t something that should be “solved.” There should never be a “real answer” or an “ultimate truth.” A Jedi should not be able to meet God. Something claiming to be a God? Something that seems to be a God? Sure.
But for the Force to stay a living metaphor, it has to remain a mystery much in the same way that actual spirituality in our world remains a mystery.
Because whether you’re a born again Christian or a fully committed atheist, a follower of Mohammed or an adherent of the teachings of Gautama Buddha you don’t really, factually, unequivocally KNOW where that sense of the divine or lack thereof comes from. You can only have faith in your convictions.
In fantasy worlds you can have hard answers to these metaphysical questions. But what’s made Star Wars such a deep pool, despite its pop sci-fi surface, is that while the Force is it doesn’t have a fundamental ground. It’s a mystery that each character touched by it must strive to understand.
Take that away and it becomes inert. Because then the stories are no longer about our own experience of the great mysteries of life but become about a specific stack of lore.
Reducing The Force to a specific stack of lore and declaring that this was the canonical truth would rob it of its power.
One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this is because Star Wars is what led me to read pretty much the complete works of Joseph Campbell when I was teenager and this perspective was burned into my brain.
So yes, I fear the “Mortis Gods” because they have the power to create a canonical truth that extinguishes the mysteries of The Force. That makes it mortal. Yet they also have the potential to illustrate this exact conundrum around manifestations of mystery and the greater mystery itself.
And if Dave Filoni pulls off that trick?
Well, I’d follow him anywhere he wants to go.
Punch In The Coordinates
I didn’t come to Star Wars until the run up to Return of the Jedi, but it’s been with me as a surrogate family ever sense.
My immediate family has all passed on, and so Star Wars is that which has been closest to me the longest. Which has shaped the paths I’ve explored in this life since I was six years old. It is my religion, as much as I have one, and I’m clever enough to know both how absurd that is and how much that’s not different from the role religion plays in others lives. (Sacrilege to many, but if you couldn’t tell, I’m all about the mystery, not the answers.)
I know Star Wars means too much to me, but that doesn’t blunt the fact that I’m more than a bit scared of where it may go now. More than a little excited that it might thread the needle just like in Beggar’s Canyon back home. But mostly scared that I’ll have to say goodbye if it goes places I cannot follow.
To bring it back around to Galaxy’s Edge and our whole immersive thing:
I don’t expect the park to embrace the kind of close up immersive interactivity that is actor driven overnight. I don’t expect park operations to start aggressively implementing whatever ready to roll guest interactivity that WDI has cooked up in a back room. I don’t even expect to see one of the empty interior spaces converted into a sabacc parlor where we can test our luck against Captain Solo and the legendary gambler Lando Calrissian. (It’s right there though, y’all.)
But I do hope that they start trying out something that will get us closer to the original promise of the land, if not the hype that built up to opening. That some interactivity comes in and that branch of immersive design is worked up into Black Spire Outpost. The land is so big and such a grand canvas, that letting it just lay fallow is a waste of space. Even if all we get are some more limited time special events or nights. Something — anything — to start rewarding park guests for showing curiosity and a willingness to play into the fantasy rather than just staying locked into their phones checking wait times on other rides, making food orders, and watching livestreams on their phones while they are actually in an attraction. (All of which I saw the last time I was at the park, on Pirates of the Caribbean of all things.)
Because if there’s no attempt to foster that spirit, no attempt to develop the audience, then the magic of the park as a whole — from Main Street to the top of Toontown — could also become just another piece of nostalgia we long to properly remember.
And if we ever needed some real magic, it's now.
*There's a deep cut in more than one way.
** One day I'll tell you all about Ohnaka Entertainment Solutions, which was cut for length from this.
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