How Star Wars Conquered the Universe

There was a time between the trilogies when Star Wars lived on the geeky fringes of society. No longer.

but in the crimson of a setting desert sun he seemed almost timeless.

the elusive spirit of 1977, just for a moment?
Well, not exactly

palpable

Star Wars had become the one movie series for which it is always perfectly acceptable in modern society to discuss spoilers. (Vader, by the way, is Luke Skywalker’s dad.)

I am the father of our Star Wars movie world—the filmed entertainment, the features and the television series,” he said in 2008. “I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I’m the father; that’s my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and all that other stuff. I call that the son—and the son does pretty much what he wants. Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father’s world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.”

here-and-now, yet also

but in the crimson

When he was seventeen, James was drafted and became that rarest of World War II veterans: a Code Talker.

he greatest fans of the Expanded Universe (the collective name for the hundreds of Star Wars novels, thousands of Star Wars comics, and countless video games and other media that have developed characters and storylines outside of the Star Wars films themselves) are the first ones to tell you how much of it is self-contradictory and just plain sucks. And many lovers of Star Wars are intensely partisan about—and protective of—the films themselves. Fans of the original trilogy (Episodes IV to VI, released 1977 to 1983) have stewed obsessively over every change in Lucas’s upgraded versions (tweaked for rerelease in 1997, 2004, 2006, and 2011) and remain bitterly divided over the prequel trilogy (Episodes I to III, released 1999 to 2005.) These twin passions, love and hate, are as constant companions to Star Wars fans as Jedi and Sith, or as the twin suns of Tatooine.