After the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 (dir. Irvin Kirshner), George Lucas was fined by both the Director ’s Guild (DGA) and the Writer’s Guild (WGA) for using the company name Lucasfilm as the sole opening credit , without mention of director Irvin Kirshner and writer Lawrence Kasdan. The Guilds perceived Lucasfilm to be a personal credit , despite Lucas’s protests that ‘my name is not George Lucasfilm any more than William Fox’s name was Twentieth Century-Fox’. Lucas resigned from the DGA, WGA, and Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, moved his Los Angeles production offices to Northern California, and hired non-guild signatories to write and direct the next Star Wars film (Harwood 1981; Lucas and Kline 1999: 139). Lucas’s grand gesture of cutting ties with the Hollywood establishment not only allowed him to escape the orbit of meddlesome studios as he built a media juggernaut, but also asserted a distinct authorial identity and legacy for his company Lucasfilm.

Star Wars is one of the most prolific and lucrative entertainment franchises in the world, extending from a core series of enormously popular movies into a dizzying empire of toys, television , games, literature, and other merchandise . In fact, for every $1 of box office revenue generated by a Star Wars film , the franchise has grossed as much as $8 via its other revenue streams. 1 From 1980–2012, Lucasfilm built Star Wars into the epitome of the modern synergistic media franchise .

The history of the Star Wars franchise is rife with conflicts over creative authority and canonicity among Lucas, Lucasfilm, Fox, and Star Wars fans. Three interrelated arenas of conflict in particular—intellectual property ownership , distribution , and home video —help define and illustrate the complex interactions between conflicting models of authorship and canonicity. Although this essay primarily focuses on George Lucas’s time at Lucasfilm, the relevance of these issues to the 2012 merger with Disney will be briefly considered.

Licensing, Ownership, and Authorship

Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise was structured on a crucial anomaly in the film industry : its intellectual property rights were entirely owned by an individual creator rather than a studio -distributor. After the release of Star Wars (dir. Lucas, 1977), Lucasfilm grew into an independent licensor and production company with an unprecedented level of autonomy away from an increasingly conglomerated Hollywood . In its consolidation of intellectual property ownership and creative control, Lucasfilm strictly limited the roles of its TV and film distributors to distribution only, cutting partners like Twentieth Century-Fox and Cartoon Network out of decisions about production and licensing.

By consolidating intellectual property ownership and creative control, and by restricting Twentieth Century-Fox exclusively to distribution , Lucasfilm pioneered influential new paradigms for transmedia authorship and licensing. George Lucas cast himself as a cultural icon and creative figurehead. In practice, Lucas’s day-to-day involvement in the Star Wars franchise was largely limited to the feature films and, to a lesser extent, television animation. Lucasfilm’s licensing division coordinated a complex network of employees, contractors, and licensees to administrate a cohesive ‘expanded universe’ of narrative Star Wars texts, spanning hundreds of books, comics, television programs, and video games. Despite the deeply collaborative nature of Lucas Licensing’s creative structure, Lucasfilm’s marketing and publicity texts would frequently evoke George Lucas’s authorial presence to legitimize the transmedia worlds and characters spiralling out from the films.

As ‘Hollywood ’s first billion-dollar franchise ’ (Schatz 2008: 20), Star Wars helped inaugurate ‘a blockbuster-oriented new Hollywood’ (Lewis 2003: 61) in the 1980s. Its success with licensing, sequels, and spinoffs modelled for studios how licensing and merchandising their own franchises could become more profitable than ever thought possible (Schatz 2008: 20). By the end of the 1980s, Hollywood studios had taken synergistic vertical and horizontal integration to the logical extreme of forming massive multimedia conglomerates (Mickelthwait 1989). The conglomerated media industry of the 1980s and 1990s provided the economic context for modern franchising practices and logics (Johnson 2013: 4).

Although Star Wars significantly influenced Hollywood ’s evolution in the 1980s, its impact needs to be contextualized within industry transformations that were already in motion. As Jon Lewis suggests, policies and practices of ‘conglomeration, multinationalization, and vertical and horizontal integration’ were ‘already taking form at the very moment’ when filmmakers like Lucas and Spielberg came along to exploit the system (Lewis 2003: 64). Justin Wyatt notes that Star Wars —initially developed by George Lucas with toys in mind—was particularly influential in establishing the ‘mature period of merchandising’. Studios integrated merchandising so completely into their development processes that new projects were ‘conceived with the merchandising hooks as a primary marketing focus’. Wyatt also shows, however, that the merchandising success of Star Wars fit into a larger arc of innovative and profitable licensing programmes for other films like The Great Gatsby (1974), King Kong (1976), and Superman (1978) (Wyatt 1994: 153). Star Wars, rather than inventing the blockbuster franchise wholesale, helped validate and accelerate existing trends of production, distribution , and licensing.

Twentieth Century-Fox received very little of the Star Wars franchising profits in the long term; through a series of negotiations, Lucas took sole ownership of virtually the entire franchise . In negotiations for the original 1977 film , Fox held onto the film’s copyright in perpetuity, but Lucas leveraged a pay cut in exchange for sequel rights , substantial control over merchandising, and a 50–50 split of licensing revenue with Fox (Rinzler and Lippincott 2007: 234–270). By 1980, Lucasfilm’s licensing relationship with Fox had deteriorated into ‘an adversarial proceeding’ with ‘endless delays and frustrations’. Lucas’s lawyers started renegotiating to bring all merchandising rights ‘back under one umbrella’, threatening to take the Star Wars sequels to another distributor. Ultimately, Lucasfilm secured full control of merchandising for Star Wars and its sequels, with a formal transfer of intellectual property rights , while Fox would receive ten percent of licensing profits going forward (Rinzler 2013: 78–99). Fox still retained permanent distribution rights to the original film , but for the two sequels, self-funded by Lucas, Fox obtained only temporary theatrical and video distribution rights . In the end, these deals ensured Lucasfilm’s independence and limited Fox involvement exclusively to distribution .

Although at the time, Fox’s negotiations reflected a rational appraisal of the typical value of what were then called ‘garbage rights ’, in retrospect the studio had made a costly mistake. In 1997, Tom Pollock, Lucas’s attorney for the deal, explained that ‘from a studio standpoint, it was one of the major mistakes of all time. … It essentially took a billion dollars away from the studio and transferred it to George’ (Matzer 1997). In 2015, Pollock revised the sum upwards: ‘it’s not just about the $4 billion that came later from Disney , but all the money that was made in between that can be traced back to this decision’ (Fleming 2015).

Did Lucas see a diamond in these ‘garbage rights ’ or was he merely driven by an obsessive ethos of creative control? Lucas’s own self-mythologizing in recent decades has slanted toward the latter. In 2007, for instance, Lucas explained, ‘Everyone thinks I’m really smart and I really wasn’t. I was just simply trying to make sure that I was able to make all three films, and that I wasn’t going to have someone controlling what happened’ (‘George Lucas Introduces Star Wars : A New Hope’, 2007). In 2015, Lucas claimed he wanted licensing rights to ensure he could make posters and t-shirts to advertise the film in case the studio wouldn’t—‘I was really just protecting myself’—and that toy deals came only after the film was released (Stern 2015).

During the production of Star Wars , by contrast, Lucas clearly anticipated some potential profit in merchandising. In 1976, Lucas expressed an idea to Star Wars marketing executive Charles Lippincott that Star Wars ‘could be a type of Davy Crockett phenomenon’, referencing the 1954 licensing sensation around Disney ’s tentpole TV miniseries. By February 1977, Lippincott had started approaching toymakers, and he struck a deal with Kenner in April, one month before the film’s release (Taylor 2014: 196–207). Just days before release, Lucas told the Los Angeles Times, ‘In a way, this film was designed around toys … I actually make toys. I’m not making much for directing this movie. If I make money, it will be from the toys.’ In the same interview, Lucas pitched Star Wars as mainstream commercial fare comparable to various licensing franchises in popular culture : it was like The Lone Ranger (at its peak the most successful licensing brand in America), and ‘a movie Disney would have made when Walt Disney was alive’ (Rosenfield 1977). A few months after release , but still before its toys had hit shelves, Lucas told Rolling Stone that he had been motivated to direct the film because he ‘figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking’ (Scanlon 1977).

Lucas’s motivation to consolidate ownership of franchise rights , then, seems to blend equal parts Frances Ford Coppola and Walt Disney —both a deep impulse for creative autonomy and an expansive vision for ancillary exploitation. Whatever Lucas’s initial motives, his deals with Fox brought him both immense personal wealth and a singular degree of authorial control over Star Wars as an expanding intellectual property franchise . Lucasfilm thus centralized authorial control in two ways: Lucas himself became the central creator figurehead for the franchise , and Lucasfilm the company became a uniquely independent corporate author integrating both production and licensing outside the control of a studio distributor.

Lucasfilm maintained a consistent relationship with Fox for theatrical and home video distribution of the first six Star Wars features. The first Star Wars related home video release (aside from some niche 8 mm excerpt reels) was the 1977 ABC TV behind-the-scenes special, The Making of Star Wars . It came out on VHS in fall 1979 via Magnetic Video , a company Fox had purchased earlier that year (‘Tape/Audio/Video: Videocassette Top 40’; ‘Videocassettes: Fox Launches Home Movies’; Lichtman 1979). In 1982, after Fox reorganized Magnetic Video into Twentieth Century-Fox Home Video, it released Star Wars on VHS and Betamax. The two sequels were later released by (the once again reorganized) CBS/Fox Home Video in 1984 and 1986. Fox and Lucasfilm coordinated various home video re-releases in the ensuing decades; a discussion of how these releases sustained claims of authorship and authenticity around Lucas and Lucasfilm will follow shortly.

Lucasfilm’s film production activities branched out beyond Star Wars , and by 1988 the company had worked with every major studio distributor in Hollywood . 2 Although Fox had contractual right of first refusal for any theatrical sequels, Lucasfilm gave Fox no favouritism when it came to distributing the Star Wars television spinoffs. When the first made-for-TV movie, The Ewok Adventure, aired on ABC in America in November 1984, Fox secured international distribution rights for a 1984–1985 theatrical run and subsequent home video release . Before Fox could secure a US home video release for The Ewok Adventure, however, MGM/UA swept into replace Fox as Lucasfilm’s new preferred distributor. MGM/UA not only claimed the American home video rights for The Ewok Adventure (retitled Caravan of Courage for video), but also became the sole worldwide theatrical and home video distributor for its sequel TV movie, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (ABC, 1985). Fox released VHS compilations of two ABC animated TV series, Ewoks (1985–1986) and Droids (1985–1986) in the UK in 1988. Fox, however, failed again to get US video rights , which went to a small independent media company called J2 Communications in 1990.

Even when Lucasfilm returned to Fox for the 1997 Special Edition trilogy and the 1999–2005 prequel trilogy, Fox’s activities were limited to distribution , marketing, and leasing production facilities, with their 7.5% distribution fee a mere fraction of industry norms (Chang 1999). When Lucasfilm developed two TV animation spinoffs in the 2000s, Fox took little interest in the first and eventually declined involvement in the second. In 2003, Lucasfilm coproduced with Cartoon Network Studios a 2D animated ‘micro-series’ Star Wars : Clone Wars (2003–2005). Episodes were broadcast by Cartoon Network (a division of Turner Broadcasting, owned by media conglomerate TimeWarner), but also released online at Starwars.com. Fox’s only involvement was distributing the series on DVD in two volumes.

Then in 2007, Lucasfilm pitched its next project to Fox Broadcasting: the 3D animated series The Clone Wars (TV, 2008). Fox Broadcasting rejected the new series. Cartoon Network wasn’t interested either. When Lucas decided to produce a companion theatrical film —also titled The Clone Wars (Dave Filoni, 2008)—Warner Bros. Pictures was interested in the potential conglomerate synergies (Itzkoff 2008). Warner Bros. Pictures was, like Cartoon Network, also a part of TimeWarner, and soon convinced its sister cable network to reconsider. Soon Lucasfilm and TimeWarner announced a distribution partnership to do ‘something unprecedented’ by ‘marrying TV series and theatrical release ’ (Garrett 2008). TimeWarner companies handled all distribution for the sub-franchise The Clone Wars across broadcast, theatrical , and home video .

Fox would never get Star Wars back. When George Lucas eventually decided to sell Lucasfilm, he never even approached Fox for a bid. Fox had gone from the sole financier, distributor, and owner of the original 1977 film , to an increasingly expendable distribution partner at Lucasfilm’s convenience. Independence from Fox enabled Lucasfilm’s ever-expanding licensing enterprise for Star Wars and positioned Lucas atop the company’s authorial hierarchy. Lucasfilm itself comprised multiple smaller companies with differing degrees of autonomy. Lucas Licensing, Lucasfilm Animation, and video game developer Lucasarts existed primarily to exploit Star Wars intellectual property. But other subsidiaries—Skywalker Sound, Industrial Light and Magic, and THX—mainly subsisted on self-sustaining revenue streams unrelated to Star Wars. Other titles, such as Indiana Jones, also provided a much smaller degree of fodder for licensing and media production, but Star Wars was always their bread and butter.

Lucas, as sole owner of Lucasfilm, was frequently willing to heavily fund speculative projects which, from the perspective of a major studio like Fox, might seem like overly risky investments. Before unsuccessfully pitching Fox on The Clone Wars in 2007, Lucasfilm had already nearly completed an entire first season, with firm plans to continue making at least 100 episodes regardless of ratings (Itzkoff 2008). Lucasfilm’s experimental culture also fostered innovative coordinated licensing programs, such as the transmedia event Shadows of the Empire (1996), which bridged the story between The Empire Strikes back and Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983). Envisioned as a ‘movie project without the movie’, Shadows of the Empire comprised comics, a novel, a video game, a music soundtrack , toys, cards, a junior novelization, and even a behind-the-scenes book (Vaz 1996).

Canon and Authorship in the Expanded Universe

Beginning with novel and comic tie-ins for the original 1977 film , George Lucas authorized licensing programmes to invite other writers to tell new stories in the Star Wars universe. But were writers of licensed texts working in the Star Wars universe, or a Star Wars universe? Competing models of canon and continuity developed over time between George Lucas, Lucas Licensing, and Star Wars fan communities. These models would influence how various texts in the franchise were both produced and received. George Lucas’s personal ownership of the franchise’s intellectual property allowed him to claim ultimate authorial privilege above the expanded universe of Lucasfilm-licensed works.

To use J.P. Wolf’s definitions, continuity is ‘the degree to which world details are plausible, feasible, and without contradiction’ (Wolf 2013: 43), whereas canon is the authoritative demarcation of ‘what is “official” for a world or franchise ’ (Wolf 2013: 271). Modern franchise owners typically make efforts to define and police the rules of canon and continuity for their story -worlds. These centralized efforts need to be considered from the standpoint of both production and reception . On the production side, continuity managers institute basic rules of canonical unity to prevent multiple creative collaborators from contradicting one another. Anything established in a previous author’s text becomes immutable history for the next author .

On the reception side, individual readers will construct personal canons about which texts they accept or reject as binding in their imagined version of the story -world. Communities of fans, too, may form their own consensus canons through discussion and debate. Henry Jenkins describes this latter model of canon as ‘the group of texts that the fan community accepts as legitimately part of the media franchise and thus “binding” on their speculations and elaborations’ (Jenkins 2006: 281). Franchise creators and administrators employ discourses of authenticity and authority in communications with fans to attempt to establish, enforce, and modify ‘official’ doctrines of canon . Fans may choose to defer to these communications for guidance in issues of continuity and canon. In practice, however, the canons of creators do not always align with those of fan communities and individual readers. In the case of Star Wars , two competing models of canonicity developed within Lucasfilm: George Lucas himself held to one, and Lucas Licensing to another.

From the original film’s release in 1977, up until Disney’s takeover in 2014, the ever-growing Star Wars Expanded Universe weaved an immense tapestry of interlocking stories, characters, worlds, and technologies. At first, Star Wars licensing managers in the late 1970s and early 1980s paid little attention to establishing a unified continuity between novels, comics, and films. Frank Rose describes this era as a ‘confused jumble’, explaining, ‘If it wasn’t Marvel conjuring up a giant bunny, it was Luke Skywalker in the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye getting affectionate with Princess Leia—who five years later, in Return of the Jedi, would turn out to be his twin sister’ (Rose 2011: 71).

Lucasfilm’s licensing efforts in the late 1980s, headed by Lucas Licensing president Howard Roffman, refreshed the Star Wars franchise with a new wave of novels and comics, this time with a team of coordinating story editors that could consult Lucas with questions (Rose 2011: 73). In 2000, Leland Chee became head continuity manager for Lucas Licensing, maintaining an internal database called the Holocron with ‘more than 30,000 entries coded for levels of canonicity, with the highest level—“G” for George—standing as the word of God’ (Rose 2011: 75). Although Lucas Licensing’s Holocron was a binding resource for its own affiliated authors and creators, its non-public nature meant that fans were largely on their own to resolve various inconsistencies by inventing their own complex rules and hierarchies of canonicity.

As Wolf argues, Lucasfilm exemplifies how ‘levels of canonicity’ tend to correlate to concentric ‘circles of authorship’. The most canonical works typically come from ‘the innermost circles of authorship, which surround the originator and main author of a world’ (Wolf 2013: 271). In the Lucas Licensing Holocron, only texts to which Lucas himself claimed authorship—consisting of the 6 live -action feature films and the animated feature The Clone Wars—were considered entirely authoritative ‘G-Canon ’.

Anything Lucas said could be instantly canonized. During an on-stage interview at a fan convention in 2010, comedian Jon Stewart asked Lucas the name of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s home world. ‘This is one of the first things I wrote in the very first script’, Lucas playfully replied, ‘He comes from the planet Stewjon’ (Lucas 2010). Leland Chee immediately added Stewjon to the Holocron as G-Canon (Chee 2010).

T-Canon (Television Canon), the second tier, comprised the 129 episodes of The Clone Wars, which moderately involved Lucas’s oversight. Next came C-Canon , Lucasfilm’s hundreds of licensed novels, comics, and video games of the ‘Expanded Universe’ (EU), which maintained a relatively high level of internal continuity. Older texts and details which contradicted C-canon in some way were lumped into S-canon (secondary canon). At the bottom, entirely outside of canon , came N-canon (non-canon). Various unauthorized fan creations were left out of the Holocron canon hierarchy entirely.

Although Lucas Licensing advocated one paradigm of continuity—‘a continuous and unified history of the Star Wars galaxy’ encompassing all levels of canon (Rostini 2001)—George Lucas held to another fundamentally different standard. To George, only the few productions he personally oversaw were part of the ‘official’ Star Wars universe: the six live action films and the TV series The Clone Wars. Everything else from Lucas Licensing’s EU happened in a ‘parallel universe’ separate from Lucas’s own film continuity. Lucas freely gleaned bits of the EU in subsequent films – he owned everything, after all—but disregarded or contradicted much of the existing history . Lucas explained his personal concept of continuity in 2002:

There are two worlds here … There’s my world, which is the movies, and there’s this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe – the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don’t intrude on my world, which is a select period of time, [but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don’t get too involved in the parallel universe. (Smith and Sotolongo 2002)

George Lucas and Lucas Licensing established conflicting models of canon to determine which texts among various authors and media could be considered authentic pieces of the Star Wars continuity. Similarly, competing notions of canon would emerge around the core Star Wars films themselves, including scrutinizing the source of authority for different versions of the same texts. Lucas used home video releases to assert his authorial ownership , while some fans challenged Lucas’s authority by creating their own transformative home video experiences.

Canon and Authorship on Home Video

Periodically from 1982 to 1995, Lucasfilm and Fox found ways to create slightly updated variations of the Star Wars trilogy on Betamax, VHS , and finally Laserdisc . At a basic marketing level, each rerelease offered consumers an incentive to re-purchase more authentic experiences of films they already owned, touting promises of ever-upgraded visual fidelity, continually restored and remastered soundtracks, widescreen letterboxing, THX digital mastering, and so on. With time, packaging increasingly featured Lucasfilm branding and reinforced Lucas’s claim to authorship. Some releases included extensive behind-the-scenes paratexts with Lucas as the focus. For instance, the 1992 Special Letterbox Collectors Edition VHS set included From Star Wars to Jedi (dir. Schickel, 2012), a fawning hour-long making-of documentary originally aired on PBS. The cassette’s cover depicts a large portrait of a confident Lucas, arms crossed, dwarfed by a warehouse full of Star Wars props and miniatures. It also came with a slick full-colour book, an abridgement of the semi-official Lucas hagiography, ‘George Lucas, The Creative Impulse’ (Champlin 1992).

This re-release pattern culminated in the 1995 VHS release , billed as the ‘last chance to own the original Star Wars ’ before it was to be superseded by the 1997 Special Edition . This VHS set perfectly illustrates Jonathan Gray’s suggestion that paratexts function to construct both authorial figures and auras of authenticity for the texts they promote (Gray 2010: 81). References to Lucas and Lucasfilm saturate the packaging to guarantee the films’ unprecedented authenticity to their original versions. Branding for Lucasfilm and its subsidiary THX are displayed prominently on the spine, and a callout sticker touts the set’s exclusive new interviews with George Lucas. A personal message bearing George Lucas’s signature graces the back cover : ‘I am pleased that for the final video release of STAR WARS in its original version , we can present it with the best sound and picture quality yet available, thanks to THX digital mastering.’ In actuality this final ‘original ’ release of Star Wars (1977) featured the second iteration of the film ’s image track (incorporating changes made for the 1981 theatrical re-release), and the sixth distinct iteration of the soundtrack , mixed in 1993. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (dir. Marquand, 1983) had likewise been subtly altered through multiple iterations since their theatrical release (‘List of Changes in Star Wars Re-Releases’; Moth3r 2013). 3

To argue that these tapes do not indeed contain the ‘originals’ is not to split hairs, but rather to recognize authenticity as a discursive construction animated by marketing, publicity, and other paratexts. Star Wars home video releases and their included paratexts cast Lucas as the purveyor of authenticity for the franchise —a paradigm that would be challenged by many fans’ reaction to the radically altered 1997 Special Edition .

The most drastic, and widely known, changes happened for the 1997 Special Edition . First released in theatres before its longer life on home video , this re-release of the Original Trilogy integrated previously deleted scenes, newly shot sequences, reimagined special effects, and a new sound mix. Most infamously, Lucas modified a sequence of the original film set in the Cantina, drastically altering its original meaning. Originally, Han Solo surreptitiously shoots and kills the bounty hunter Greedo without warning or provocation. In the Special Edition , however, Greedo shoots first and misses; a split second later Han returns fire in self-defence. The original version of this sequence was essential to Han’s overall character arc; Han begins the film as a morally ambiguous, pragmatic scoundrel but by the end of the film, his sense of moral duty overcomes his drive for self-preservation. As Will Brooker eloquently argues, ‘The construction of Solo as someone who only shoots in self-defence seems to be an act of retrospective continuity, bringing him in line with his Jedi role as a romantic hero , but it weakens the drama of his progression from a cynical smuggler to a rebel with a cause’ (Brooker 2002: 76). The Special Edition doesn’t only alter one character’s motivation in a single sequence; it deflates the moral order of the entire film . For various reasons, many Star Wars fans grew to see the Special Edition as a misguided corruption of the original films, rather than the authentic culmination of an authorial vision as claimed by Lucas.

Lucas saw home video as the primary tool by which the Special Edition would be established in history as his definite authorial vision of the film , over the ‘rough draft’ version shown in theatres. Prior to the Special Edition’s release , Lucas committed Fox to permanently withdrawing the previous versions of the Star Wars trilogy from home video and theatrical distribution . In 1997 Lucas explained his long-term strategy:

So what ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that’s what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of  Star Wars  out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition] , and you’ll be able to project it on a 20’ by 40’ screen with perfect quality . I think it’s the director ’s prerogative, not the studio ’s to go back and reinvent a movie. (Magid 1997: 70)

In 2004, Lucas once again replaced the Special Edition with a slightly updated version for DVD . As Derek Johnson and Will Brooker suggest, Lucas used this release to reinforce his claim to authorship, and to remind fans that ‘he owns it and he can do what he wants with it’ (Johnson and Brooker 2005: 42). When asked by a reporter why he didn’t release the original versions alongside the new 2004 edition , Lucas explained that legitimizing the originals through a restoration treatment would undermine his perceived authorial rights :

The special edition , that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS , if anybody wants it. … I’m not going to spend the, we’re talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. … [Fans] all have very strong ideas about what should happen, and they think it should be their way. Which is fine, except I’m making the movies, so I should have it my way. (The Associated Press 2004)

In 2006 Lucasfilm released limited DVD editions of the Original Trilogy films with bonus discs featuring the ‘original theatrical versions’ (Snider 2006). At first glance, Lucas seemed to have perhaps reversed his commitment to letting the unaltered theatrical version deteriorate in obscurity. In reality, however, this DVD edition carefully positioned the theatrical versions as inferior curiosities through deliberately substandard presentation. Rather than spending money on a full restoration, or even a new scan, Lucasfilm reused the 1993 telecine transfer it created for Laserdisc and VHS releases (Hunt 2006). This resulted in a jittery, muddy, low-resolution image, especially when compared to the sharp, colourful overall visual quality of the 2004 remaster. The original discs’ soundtracks also reused the 1993 remasters, which did not accurately reflect any of the original theatrical mixes.

Lucasfilm president Jim Ward justified the discs’ low-quality presentation by insisting George Lucas still clung to the definitive status of the revised versions. ‘It is state of the art , as of 1993, and that’s not as good as state of the art 2006’ (Snider 2006). Lucas himself cynically mused that releasing obsolete transfers of the original versions would validate his preferred version in the eyes of fans:

It’s just the original versions, as they were […] We didn’t do anything to it at all. But we’re not sure how many people want that. […] Now we’ll find out whether they really wanted the original or whether they wanted the improved versions. […] It’ll all come out in the end. (Vineyard)

In 2011, Lucasfilm released yet another new edition of the films on Blu-ray , and once again original theatrical versions were off the table. Lucas’s refusal to restore the original theatrical versions buttressed his claims of authorial legitimacy for the newest versions. Releasing the originals on Blu-ray , according to Lucas, would have been ‘kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good’ (Itzkoff 2010). As of early 2017, perennial fan rumours of an official restoration of the theatrical versions under the Disney regime have never panned out. Lucasfilm’s fan liaison Pablo Hidalgo has strongly insinuated that a new restoration release cannot happen without Lucas’s blessing (Hidalgo 2017). Whether this continued deference to Lucas’s authority comes from his institutional clout or from contractual stipulations made during the Disney sale is still unclear.

Although Lucas has successfully ensured that his approved authorial version of the films remain the only version in mainstream circulation, many rebellious Star Wars fans consider the original versions to be canon . By creating various forms of their own altered home video experiences, Star Wars fans have resisted Lucas’s canonical authority. Some fans developed new viewing orders for watching the episodes, such as the Machete Order—IV, V, II, III, VI—excising Episode I entirely (Fuchs and Phillips 2006: 223). Other fans went further, creating numerous fan cuts (mainly of the prequels) and circulating the bootlegs via VHS , DVD , and the Internet. Editor Mike J. Nichols’s widely circulated The Phantom Edit, for instance, cut 18 min from Episode I: The Phantom Menace (dir. George Lucas, 1999), including almost every scene featuring the character Jar Jar Binks. Such fan edits, according to Forrest Phillips, ‘assert that fan authority is on par with that of a work’s original creator’, thus subverting Lucasfilm’s claims over determining canon (Phillips). Several fan restoration projects, such as Harmy’s Despecialized Edition , and Team Negative1’s Silver Screen Edition, circulated HD versions of the ‘original ’ Original Trilogy online and through bootleg Blu-rays. The fan editors behind these releases painstakingly compiled various sources—including scanning various rare collector-owned film prints—to produce high-quality versions intended to match the original theatrical film prints and soundtracks as closely as possible (Fuchs and Phillips 2006: 225–229). As Michael Fuchs and Michael Phillips argue, producing alternate forms of home video reception allows unruly fans to ‘challenge Lucas’s authority to dictate the terms of the films’ authenticity’ (Fuchs and Phillips 2006: 229).

Conclusion: From Independent to Conglomerate

The previous instances of conflict over authenticity and canonicity illustrate that, despite Lucas’s legal ownership of the Star Wars intellectual property, the substance and meaning of authorship are always negotiated through cultures of production and reception . Lucas’s initial independence from Fox provided a structural foundation for the Star Wars franchise , and its phenomenal merchandising success accelerated Hollywood on a historical course toward the modern media landscape of massive conglomerates and synergistic franchises. Lucasfilm’s independence, also, somewhat ironically, made it a particularly attractive acquisition target for Disney .

Disney saw Lucasfilm as a neatly self-contained package of valuable intellectual property. The very independence that made Lucasfilm a purchasable item, however, meant that the company’s assimilation into the Disney conglomerate would require fundamental upheaval of Lucasfilm’s systems of authorship, media production, and narrative continuity.

When George Lucas sold his legacy to Disney in 2013—even with his hand-picked successor, Kathleen Kennedy, at the helm—could he have anticipated the immediate challenges that lay ahead for Star Wars ? First, Lucasfilm’s hard-won independence from the studio system was over; now Star Wars was to be integrated into the most synergy -obsessed company of all media conglomerates. And second, George Lucas’s own mantle of authorship would need to be publicly transferred to Lucasfilm’s new generation of collaborators to maintain an aura of authenticity for new additions to the franchise .

The full consequences of the Disney merger are beyond the scope of this essay. But core issues of independence, creative control, authorship, and canonicity have repeatedly emerged at Lucasfilm under Disney . Lucasfilm made a drastic decision to deboot the canon of the Star Wars Expanded Universe and revamped its media production activities to synergize with Disney’s branding and distribution enterprises. Lucas’s original treatments for episodes 7, 8, and 9—a centrepiece of the Disney deal—were quickly scrapped in favour of an entirely new story for the films. After seeing The Force Awakens (dir. J.J Abrams, 2015), George Lucas publicly expressed regret over the direction of the franchise , describing his retirement from Star Wars as a ‘divorce’. Selling Lucasfilm to Disney , he said, had been like selling his own children into prostitution (CBS News 2015).

Notes

  1. 1.

    Hard numerical breakdowns of revenue vary widely, with suspect statistics being widely circulated. Box Office Mojo’s worldwide box office numbers total 4.6 billion, while journalist Chris Taylor provides a convincing estimate of total franchise revenue at $42 billion (both as of 2015, before The Force Awakens). See: Taylor Chris. 2014. How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. Basic Books; and: “‘Look at the Size of That Thing!’: How Star Wars Makes Its Billions. ” The Telegraph, May 4 2016.

  2. 2.

    Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels at Paramount; Twice Upon a Time (1983) at The Ladd Company; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) at Warner Bros.; Latino (1985) at Cinecom Pictures; Howard the Duck (1985) at Universal; Willow (1988) at MGM.

  3. 3.

    Fans at originaltrilogy.com and Wookiepedia have constructed meticulously documented histories on the variations of different Star Wars releases.