A sinister figure, clad in black armor, wielding a red lightsaber. The Millennium Falcon zooming through space. As he delivers the monologue, we see image after image that riffs on fans' nostalgia for the original trilogy. They're real," says Harrison Ford in a trailer for The Force Awakens. So how did Star Wars: The Force Awakens win the people back? By politely ushering Lucas off the stage and picking up the story at the end of the original trilogy again, with the characters longtime Star Wars fans cared about in the first place. This is all the more remarkable when you look at the aggrieved backlash to George Lucas' prequel trilogy - intense enough that it inspired an entire documentary titled The People vs. Who wouldn't feel some sense of personal stake in the series? For the vast majority, it was sometime during their childhood, which can only increase the sense of wonder. If you're a fan, it's because you felt some point of connection, to a movie or a toy or a game you simply made up in your head. Or maybe your memories of the movies are secondary to your experience with the dozens of Star Wars video games, or hundreds of Star Wars novels, or thousands of Star Wars toys.īut it doesn't really matter how you found Star Wars. Maybe you first watched it on VHS in 1985, or Laserdisc in 1993, or DVD in 2004, or Blu-Ray in 2011. Maybe you first watched Star Wars when the remastered "Special Edition" came out in 1997. Maybe you first watched Star Wars when it hit theaters in 1977. And Disney has wisely recognized that what separates Star Wars from Avengers and Transformers and Hunger Games is the fandom's intensely personal feeling of connection to the franchise. But it's also deeply, uniquely personal to its millions and millions of fans. You don't get to be a multibillion-dollar franchise without a healthy dose of mass appeal.
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