Star Wars, licensing and Star Wars Remixed

So, my wife took one of my sons and my daughter to DisneyWorld to go see the new Star Wars land.  We'll all be able to see it next year, except that one son.  He just graduated from high school, and will be leaving on his mission in a month.  With two years in Peru, visiting DisneyWorld with the family in 2020 will obviously be out.  Besides I'm all out of vacation, and my youngest son still has to be in school.

Anyhoo, I've seen a lot of discussion among the "Fandom Menace" type guys about how Star Wars Land is failing, and Disney Parks is hurting, and the whole thing is going to come crashing down soon (in fact, I embedded several of them in my last post.)  To counter that, I suppose, I'll say that my family is reporting that Star Wars Land is pretty packed, and they think it's really cool—although the one ride available has had mixed reviews, trending negative (two thumbs down, one thumb up.)  And the droid and lightsaber factory things, while cool, are absurdly expensive.

 That said, I still think that the Star Wars brand is not nearly as strong as it was, obviously.  The new movies, especially The Last Jedi, but also The Force Awakens, were just on the downside of mediocre at best, and actively offensively terrible at worst.  And I have no expectation that the new movie is going to fix it, because Jar Jar Abrams just isn't a good enough film maker.  Plus, he's mired in the paradigms that messed up Star Wars in the first place too much to ever be able to make an actively good movie.  Toy sales are down because nobody really likes or cares about the new characters, because they're so badly done, and everyone's honestly kinda pissed off about what they did to the original trilogy characters; turning them into sad, old losers.  Probably because in Jar Jar Abrams and Rianne Johnson's world, those are the only kind of parent figure people that they know.  Rey simply isn't a stand-in for young Luke; she's a cypher and an egregiously Mary Sue bore.  Kylo Ren isn't a stand-in for Darth Vader; he's just a whiny, entitled bratty little princess.  Oh, he's evil alright.  But not in an engaging way from a story-telling perspective.  He's, again, too much like the creators for that.  The sidekicks characters are marginally likable, but nowhere near Han Solo quality, the weird surrogate Yoda figure with the old African lady voice and her eyes set inside two buttholes is considerably worse than Yoda.  Even BB-8 is a piss-poor bad reflection of R2-D2.  Nothing about the new movies is memorable or even really very good.

I do like the rumor, which I think one of my videos I embedded yesterday referenced, that part of the reason DisneyWars has been so insistent on getting rid of any trace of the Original Trilogy, even going so far as to modify the appearance of the Millennium Falcon (new version; Millennial Falcon in reference to the generation of narcissistic, entitled, bratty little princesses that this movie is targeting?) is because George Lucas still gets royalties from them.  He sold them Star Wars, but not everything Star Wars, so they're trying really hard to replace everything that George Lucas still gets royalties from with something else.  Of course, that's not necessarily a bad idea, but their execution was absolutely freakin' terrible.  And part of that was that they set it so close in time to the original trilogy that it begged a bunch of questions about how stupid and incompetent the rebellion had to have been to allow the Empire to turn into the First Order and how stupid did Luke have to have been to have failed to restart the Jedi Order properly and how much of a loser did Luke, Han and Leia have to have been to turn out to be the people that they did.  Except Leia, of course, because girls always win in Clown World Star Wars.  The Old Republic was better executed (especially in the first game—although there are too many SJWisms buried in there too, it didn't poison the main thrust of the story yet) but more to the point, it was far enough in time from the original or the prequel trilogies that it could stake its own territory without it feeling ridiculous and copied.

I still maintain that my idea of STAR WARS REMIXED is the way that the new movies should have gone.  Go forward in time far enough in the future that you can have the freedom to structure the setting the way that you want it.  Of course, none of that matters if you give even brilliant ideas (and I'm hardly pretending like my idea is brilliant; it's just Old Republic turned around, and then because Legacy did the same thing, I borrowed a few concepts from it there too) to people like Jar Jar Abrams and Rianne Johnson to screw up.  The First Order vs The Resistance with old Han, Luke and Leia isn't a totally unworkable idea if it'd been executed better—although I don't think it was the best idea either.  Timothy Zahn certainly showed that a legitimate sequel with a high quality story could have been made.  Not that Disney could have made those, at least not without recasting, because Zahn's trilogy is set; what, about five years after Return of the Jedi, so actors who have aged more than thirty years in real life since filming Jedi couldn't possibly reprise that role exactly.  But maybe that's kinda the point; as good as Zahn's books were, they didn't need to be filmed, especially in the 2010s.  What needed to be done was to allow the characters to have their assumed happily ever afters and just move on after their long gone.