Star Wars Franchise Research Articles

‘There is more than one sort of prison, Captain’: A popular criminology of prisons and penal regimes in Star Wars

In this paper we emphasise how science fiction, as a projection of the possible, can forewarn of dystopic dangers in emergent and future penal regimes. In this popular criminology we explore three archetypes of the prison as they have appeared across the Star Wars franchise: the panoptic prison; the labour camp; and the smart prison. The panoptic prison of the Galactic Republic invokes reflective nostalgia; prompting critical discussion of the deficiencies of the modern prison. Under the Galactic Empire prisons become labour camps, recalling the horrors of the Gulag as violent and cruel manifestations of underpinning ideology. Whilst the fall of the Galactic Empire signalled a return to governance based on democratic values, the representation of the smart prison in the New Republic continues to resonate as a techno-Gulag, reading as an allegory for a deeper crisis of liberal democracy. Analysed as such, prisons in Star Wars exist at the intersection of the past, present and possible futures of penal regimes, and in our current political climate can be a resource for resistance to technological trends and dystopic dangers. Star Wars, we conclude, and science fiction more broadly, is well-positioned to inform a radical re-imagining of future prisons and penal regimes.

Making the Fantastic Real

This study - Making the Fantastic Real - provides research into the subject of design fiction, science fiction fandom, sharable digital media content on the one hand, and the design of real-life engineering artifacts on the other. This study has selected the case of The Hacksmith to understand the space of meaning (science, fiction, co-creation, and design) created by the production of “the fantastic” by this specific acknowledged Canadian Youtuber.
 
 The Hacksmith Industries is the trademark name of the YouTube channel The Hacksmith (https://www.youtube.com/c/theHacksmith/featured) created by Canadian engineer James Hobson in 2006. One of the signature elements of Hobson’s interests is the lightsaber and the Star Wars franchise. But Hobson explores many other dimensions of popular culture, ranging from nerf wars shooters to superhero artifacts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His focus is on how to make elements or objects of the fantastic real, as his slogan goes, not to change any storyline, story arc or franchise world, but to see how far the innate human capability of play and creation can be taken from the fictional realm to reality.

Play Is a Child’s Work (on Instagram)

Play Is a Child’s Work (on Instagram)

The Heroic Myth in Modern Times. The “Star Wars” Franchise

Symbolic language is a particular system of expression that renders an individual’s feelings, and emotions, as well as one’s accumulated psychological experience, as sensorial experience manifests in the outer world. Understanding symbolic language serves as an important tool in understanding the significance of dreams as well as that of archetypal narratives such as myths, be they archaic or modern. Modern artists have searched for new ways of updating the universal content (and implicitly the narratives) in order to present role models that would enable modern individuals to access the transcendent. One such example is the Star Wars franchise and the soundtrack created for it by John Williams from which I choose to analyze „Duel of the Fates”.

Fostering a Dark Side: The Role of Adopting-out in Contemporary Portrayals of Abandoned or Lost Children in Star Wars

abstract: The following paper draws attention to a lesser-studied subject in Critical Adoption Studies: foster care. I argue that this lack of attentiveness towards systems of care and the experiences of fostered children mirror a societal trend in which traditional ideals of the biological family and more recent post-biological ideals in the form of adoptive practices have created an ideological construct in which foster subjectivities are seen as identity-less. That is, the two poles of "biological family" and "adoptive family" support a particular normativity centered on a nuclear family ideal which then excludes foster families/children from membership—stereotyping foster care as inherently incapable of providing children a full and meaningful life. Ultimately, this ideological system prefers adoption, presenting it as the solution to all experiences of fostered and orphaned children. And nowhere is this ideology more present than in our society's most revered cultural productions—where orphans and foster children are continuously disparaged or misrepresented. My target for analysis in this paper will be the monumental Star Wars franchise, and in particular its three main trilogies, The Skywalker Saga . I will show how its most recent trilogy (2015–2019) embodies the transition from a biocentric normativity excluding all nonbiological families, to a status quo which has normalized adoptive-family making. Alongside a traditional biological familial ideal, adoptive families are regarded as a conventional family , and are thus capable of offering otherwise down-and-out children with meaningful lives and full identities. As this new ideological structure (what I refer to below as the ideological dyad ) becomes more entrenched in our culture, little room is left for an alternative understanding for how the systemic issues associated with a system like foster care might be addressed.

Scaling up? Remaking Kurosawa’s The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress

What accounts for the huge success of the Star Wars franchise and conversely also for the failure of some attempts at replicating its achievement? This article argues that focusing on four concepts – making things right, scalar replication, the transcultural and transnational – can help us to understand why the 50th anniversary remake of Kurosawa Akira’s Kakushitoride no Sanakunin (The Three Villains of the Hidden Fortress, 1958) was not a success. There are various ways in which Kakushitoride no Sanakunin, The Last Princess (The Hidden Fortress, The Last Princess, Higuchi Shinji, 2008) works to answer questions thrown up by the original – to make things right – as well as a clear attempt at scalar replication. Moreover, this remake endeavored to capture the magnitude not just of the original but also of Star Wars IV: A New Hope – which had long acknowledged Kurosawa’s influence – and its sequels. It clearly aimed to produce, if not a franchise, then at least a sequel. The poor box office takings in Japan and the few international distribution deals for Higuchi’s remake reveal just how tough it can be to successfully translate and transmute a narrative, as well as how difficult it can be to create an economically successful and thus transnational franchise series.

Security politics and techno-securitisation in Star Wars: from the Fall of the Jedi to the Reign of the Empire

ABSTRACT The Star Wars franchise – and in particular the ‘in-universe’ period from the Fall of the Jedi to the Reign of the Empire – represents germane ground for the critical analysis of security in both everyday life and extraordinary circumstances. Although beginning with the films of the ‘prequel trilogy’ (1999, 2002, 2005) this period has most recently been covered in the animated television series Star Wars: The Bad Batch (2021 –). Deepening the contribution of criminology towards a diverse and critical transdisciplinary field of security studies, this paper conducts a multimodal critical discourse analysis of season one of The Bad Batch. In doing so it describes how, in its depiction of a newly established Imperial regime, the Star Wars franchise has continued to engage with the politics of security through its exploration of the processes and practices of techno-securitisation. The Bad Batch thus acts as an ideological critique of developments in the late-modern securityscape. The discussion section reflects upon how the persistence of politics in the ‘Disney era’ of Star Wars storytelling, and of security politics in particular, indicates the limits of ‘Disneyfication’. The paper concludes by emphasising the value in bridging divides between distinct disciplinary approaches in the study of security.

Lissette Lopez Szwydky. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.

Lissette Lopez Szwydky. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.

Making and remaking the Galaxy Far, Far Away

This article examines West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, first published in 1987, and its foundational role in the worldbuilding process of the Star Wars franchise (1977-). In producing the game, West End Games contributed significantly to defining and organizing the storyworld, refining and expanding the scope of Star Wars by integrating some earlier transmedial extensions while excluding others. Coming at an early point in the franchise’s history, before Lucasfilm exerted as much control over its licensees, The Roleplaying Game offers an opportunity to examine the role that licensed game designers can play as architects and gatekeepers of transmedia worldbuilding, codifying what is and is not remembered within the storyworld. The Roleplaying Game has often been reduced to a footnote in both the popular and academic history of Star Wars transmedia, but beyond adapting the Galaxy Far, Far Away to a setting for imaginative tabletop roleplaying, The Roleplaying Game is also a foundational document for the last three decades of the Star Wars franchise, serving as the early ‘story bible’ for the Expanded Universe, the intercon­nected network of Star Wars paratexts codified by the licensing department of Lucasfilm during the 1990s. The hundreds of Star Wars novels, comics, games and other transmedia productions that came with the franchise’s dramatic rebirth in the 1990s bear the stamp of the worldbuilding labour of West End Games.

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage

Leadership, circuition, and shift in tabletop wargaming community

The following paper seeks to address the idea of a player community’s life cycle in a holistic way by shedding light on key issues related to the creation of wargaming groups, sustaining these groups and their mechanisms of decay. It encompasses a variety of ethnographic data, gathered from the communities of: Flames of War, Warmachine & Hordes as well as the Star Wars franchise. Bearing in mind that the research is ongoing, the paper incorporates various data gathered in the course of the last three years, including participant observation, fieldwork notes, player interviews, and online discussions.

Performing science-fiction fandom through debating controversy: Communicative leisure, collective memory and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, below the line at The Guardian

Star Wars has become one of a handful of science-fiction franchises that have defined and shaped what Adorno calls the modern culture industry. The original trilogy challenged the way Hollywood financed and marketed its movies and made George Lucas incredibly rich. Star Wars fans bought tickets for re-releases, special editions and the notoriously egregious prequels, as well as a seemingly endless range of merchandise. When Lucas sold the franchise to Disney new movies were promised, including what became the stand-alone prequel Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. In this article, I am interested in exploring how people react in publicly accessible online spaces, as these are key spaces for the performativity of digital communicative leisure. Specifically, I am interested in how fans of the original trilogy and the Star Wars franchise critiqued or defended the film and Star Wars more broadly through a detailed analysis online comments below the line reacting to review by film critic Mark Kermode published in a middle-class, liberal newspaper: the UK-based The Guardian. This review and its comments below the line represent a snapshot of what middle-class liberals might feel able to write about the film and their own Star Wars fandom. This analysis will also be extended to critiques made by people seeking to distance themselves from Star Wars and all that Star Wars fandom may entail, as a performativity of anti-fandom. I will show that for fans collective memory is used to try to construct authenticity and ownership of Star Wars, but that collective memory is only ever temporarily negotiated.

Significados e representações em produtos utilitários geek

Este artigo apresenta pesquisa sobre as qualidades semânticas e semióticas de produtos geek. O método de análise qualitativa incluiu a investigação dos produtos na dimensão semântica, com foco na função utilitária, e na dimensão semiótica, com foco na função simbólica. O texto define o que caracteriza as duas dimensões e descreve a análise de dois produtos da franquia Star Wars. Os resultados indicam que o método de análise pode favorecer a compreensão da interação significante dos usuários com os produtos.

Translating Jedi and Sith. Proper names in early translations of Star Wars novels to German, Polish and Russian

The presented paper argues the importance of proper names in fantasy and science fiction in general but focuses primarily on the highly successful Star Wars franchise. Worldwide popularity of George Lucas’ creation resulted in the need of translation of Star Wars materials to other languages. Translators were given a task, among others, of creating a glossary of proper names essential to the overall story, including such as Jedi and Sith. This paper is an analysis of translation of these proper names in Star Wars novels released before the year 2000 in German (61), Polish (39) and Russian (18). It presents all variants proposed by the translators before the final one was canonized and comments on their choices and used strategies. The analysis shows that while German and Polish translators usually retained use of previously established versions, Russian translators proved to be less consequent in this matter.

Women, sf spectacle and the mise-en-scène of space adventure in the Star Wars franchise

This article explores the gendered work of the Star Wars franchise within the generic frame of sf. In the context of this special issue around women in space, I explore here the mise-en-scène of adventure in the Star Wars franchise, focusing on The Force Awakens (2015) and Rogue One (2016). Space and the juxtaposition of planets with spacecraft provides one of the series’ recurrent establishing shots, indicating points of arrival and departure; along with the representation of light speed through a vanishing point, such shots serve to signal distance in both spatial and temporal terms. Although narrative and thematic elements are important aspects of the argument presented here, the article elaborates the centrality of setting and landscape in the twenty-first-century films, notably the construction of multiple worlds as sets for melodramatic action. Female heroism is staged in the films I explore here in a cinematic space of visual effects and spectacle across diverse settings including desert and forest landscapes, mechanised interiors and, of course, space itself. I argue that these spectacular settings are important both visually and thematically, elaborating key themes of freedom, loss and redemption in and through the ground, the environment and space.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-apocalypse: Classics—New Tendencies—Model Interpretations

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-apocalypse: Classics—New Tendencies—Model Interpretations

Weaponizing the haters: <em>The Last Jedi</em> and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation

Political discourse on social media is seen by many as polarized, vitriolic and permeated by falsehoods and misinformation. Political operators have exploited all of these aspects of the discourse for strategic purposes, most famously during the Russian social media influence campaign during the 2016 presidential election in the United States and current, similar efforts targeting the U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020. The results of the social media study presented in this paper presents evidence that political influence through manipulation of social media discussions is no longer exclusive to political debate but can now also be found in pop culture. Specifically, this study examines a collection of tweets relating to a much-publicized fan dispute over the Star Wars franchise film Episode VII: The Last Jedi. This study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments. The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society. Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the U.S. alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation. The results of this study show that among those who address The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson directly on Twitter to express their dissatisfaction, more than half are bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists using the debate to propagate political messages supporting extreme right-wing causes and the discrimination of gender, race or sexuality. A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls. The paper concludes that while it is only a minority of Twitter accounts that tweet negatively about The Last Jedi, organized attempts at politicizing the pop culture discourse on social media for strategic purposes are significant enough that users should be made aware of these measures, so they can act accordingly.

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno‐Marvels: Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Blind Warriors, Supercrips, and Techno-Marvels : Challenging Depictions of Disability in Star Wars

Joseph Campbell Goes to the Movies: The Influence of the Hero’s Journey in Film Narrative

The influence of Joseph Campbell and his monomyth model on film narratives and motifs first became apparent forty years ago with the release of the first film in George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise in 1977. This article traces the wide adoption of Campbell’s ideas as tools for shaping movie stories and characters, due to the popularity of Star Wars and other fantasy adventure franchises cast in the Campbell monomyth mold, and the growing awareness of screenwriters, directors and studio executives that the hero’s journey is an effective tool for story development in any genre. Campbell’s original statement of the monomyth is compared with Christopher Vogler’s model of the hero’s journey, specifically designed for screenwriters. The article establishes that in either form, the monomyth/hero’s journey has been widely adopted by screenwriters, playwrights and designers of games and theme park rides to give their creations some of the epic feeling of myths. Key work in which Campbell’s hero’s journey was consciously applied are discussed, and criticisms of the hero’s journey as a narrative template are addressed. Some reasons for the pattern’s enduring appeal for audiences are suggested.

“May the Force be with Katie”

Responding to the 2010 media discourse around Katie Goldman—a ten-year-old Star Wars fan bullied for her interest in something perceived to be “for boys”—this essay investigates the relationship between industrial logics of media franchising, postfeminist culture, and the vernacular participation of social media users in regulatory ideologies of gender and sexuality. Reading mediated public performances of support for Katie against the hyper-feminized, industrially-produced “princess” media culture she seemingly rejected, as well as the sci-fi fashion shop HerUniverse that opened up a feminized space of fan subjectivity in the marketing of the Star Wars franchise, we can see how the transgression of normative consumer ideals by girls became re-inscribed within postfeminist and heteronormative gender roles. While celebrating unruly girl science fiction consumers as “different,” both industry and vernacular media cultures repositioned these figures in relation to beauty, princesses, heteronormative romance, and other postfeminist (but traditionally feminine) ideological frames.