Introduction: Star Wars from Big Screen to Small

Abstract

Despite the increasing importance of TV to the Star Wars franchise, there is still relatively little scholarship focused on the shows. Previous academic work on Star Wars has focused on the films while charting the Campbellian mythic arcs, political representations, and fan reaction associated with individual texts. The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV takes a transmedial approach to the material, recognizing that the TV projects interact with and relate to other Star Wars texts. While the chapters in this volume take different approaches to the subject matter, they take as a basic premise that the televisual entrants into the Star Wars transmedia storyworld are both important texts in the history of popular culture and also key to understanding how the Star Wars franchise—and, thus, industry-wide transmedia storytelling strategies—developed. The book expands previous work to consider television studies and sharp cultural criticism together in an effort to bring long-running popular series, long-ignored texts, and even toy commercials to bear on the franchise’s complex history.