The End of Days: Part Two
It would seem that even the keepers of the flame - the hard core fan boys - have begun to see the franchise for what it now is: a tired beast of burden dragging itself on trailing hindquarters through the swamps of Dagobah, heading toward the elephant’s graveyard of myths.
On Aintitcoolnews, the web site where we have all grown older over the years, there is a distinct sense of mid-life crisis. Founder Harry Knowles opines: I hated that I left a theater hating the movie so much that I couldn’t take my nephew’s glee of Star Wars and share it with him. Arch Star Wars fan Moriarty has become so disappointed with Lucas’s attempts to stage-manage fan reaction via controlling possibly unfavorable advance reviews that he has decided: I am done writing about STAR WARS. No more. No reviews. No retrospectives. No news. No coverage at all.
For these guys the sense of disgust seems to lie with something even bigger than the aesthetic failings of what (by all accounts, I haven’t seen it) is a cut-price product that infuriates traditional fans with poor animation, sloppy storytelling, paper-thin ‘characters’ introduced mainly to sell more merch to 8 year olds; it lies with a sense of bemused betrayal, something common to the aging process that they maybe thought they were going to escape? Unlike the rest of us, who also littered our school books with stickies of Jawas and Wamp Rats and wore out the record needle with Meco’s disco Star Wars theme, but moved on, the Star Wars fanatic tends to view the Lucas canon as some kind of benign corporate Dorian Grey portrait in their collective attic; that if they continued to invest in it, clicked their ruby-red slippers together three times fast, and flew around the room like Peter Pan, they could live forever in some state of suspended wonder and grace.
To be continued…
The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:
You may think you have deleted your old “John Kerry Get Out the Vote” local ward spreadsheets, or those pictures of your ripped t-shirt phase, but this stuff can still turn around and bite you in the ass. Peter Warren in The Guardian writes about Why deletion fails to protect your private data.