CONCLUSION: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

If George Lucas is right about how many stories there are left to tell in the Star Wars universe—and he hasn’t been proved wrong on that score yet—future generations of fans will still be lining up outside cineplexes to see the adventures of future Solos and Skywalkers in 2115. If we’re going according to Disney’s current schedule, that’ll be Episode LXXXVII. For all we know, it will be screened as a giant IMAX hologram.

Sound ridiculous? Maybe it is. Then again, there was a time—forty years ago—when the very notion of space fantasy movies sounded ridiculous. And Star Wars still has plenty of new worlds to conquer. It’s not just that the franchise and its acolytes are embracing whole new languages like Navajo. They’re also continuing to expand into countries around the world that were not swamped by the original wave of Star Wars mania.

Take Turkey. Until very recently, it was a lonely thing to be a fan of Yildiz Savaslari—that is, Star Wars in Turkish. But Ates Cetin, born in 1983, was hooked from the moment he watched a dubbed version of The Empire Strikes Back on TV as a kid during the late 1980s. He began looking for ways he could play in this universe he had just discovered.

Sure, the original trilogy had screened at theaters around Turkey. But so did Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World), an adventure film from 1982 that liberally plundered Lucasfilm’s cinematic property for special effects scenes. The Millennium Falcon and the Death Star were reused. No one in the country seemed to notice, or much care. Today, the movie is commonly known as “Turkish Star Wars” and is a cult favorite; back then, it was panned and vanished without trace. “I’ve seen it a few times,” says Cetin, “and I still don’t understand the plot.”

Star Wars merchandise was scarce back in the 1980s in Turkey. All you could find were the infamous Uzay bootleg action figures, the ones that thought they could get around copyright by changing one letter around in the names of their “Starswar” line. (Steve Sansweet cherishes his Uzay “stormtroper” and “C-PO” figures; the 501st Legion has built a costume of the Uzay “Blue Star” snowtrooper.)

The real Lucasfilm-licensed toys started to enter the country in 1997, in time for the Special Editions. But not everyone was buying. In 1999, Cetin saw reports from America about the long lines outside theaters showing The Phantom Menace, and was subsequently dismayed when only one or two people showed up in the entire theater for opening day in Istanbul. The small crowds were to be repeated for the rest of the prequels. Turks, it seemed, just didn’t take to the idea of Star Wars the way people had in other countries.

The day Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, a collector friend dressed up as a Stormtrooper and loaned Cetin a Darth Vader costume; they walked around Taksim Square, the most crowded and famous public area in Istanbul, testing the waters, trying to gauge reactions. Darth Vader, it turned out, was practically anonymous, even here in the cultural center of one of Europe’s largest cities. “Only a few of them recognized the character,” Cetin says. “Most of them thought I was Shredder, from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Robocop, or a fireman. One old lady called me ‘the man from the mountains’; the meaning remains a mystery.”

The police, meanwhile, were more apprehensive of the Dark Lord. Cetin had to hastily explain to an officer that he was in a stage play, and he seemed on the edge of being arrested, on suspicion of being suspicious, when his friend bundled him into a cab.

Cetin speaks softly, but he has a quiet persistence about him. In 2008, he founded a Turkish outpost of the 501st Legion; in 2011 he cofounded Turkey’s own Rebel Legion. He watched Adidas launch Star Wars–themed shoes and jacketsin the country; he welcomed The Clone Wars to Turkish TV screens. Friends started playing the latest Star Wars video games. Facebook arrived, and brought Star Wars memes with it. Cetin noted that humor columns in newspapers began to make Star Wars references. Slowly but surely, something was changing.

Fast forward to July 2013, when Taksim Square was the center of a very different kind of police action. Citizens started gathering after police had tear-gassed a peaceful protest against the demolition of a local park, which was supposed to make way for a shopping center in the style of an Ottoman-era army barracks. Cetin decided he’d join the protests, dressed once again in the full Vader costume. His message: “even the most evil film character is on the side of the people.”

Of course, if the Vader costume had been provocative last time, this time Cetin would really be risking arrest. But he couldn’t resist. At the last minute he left his lightsaber at home and carried the Turkish flag instead; perhaps that would endear this mystery figure to the crowds. It turned out he didn’t need it. In just eight years, Star Wars had gone from being a largely unknown, bootlegged curiosity to common cultural meme. “From [ages] seven to seventy, they all called ‘Darth Vader,’” Cetin told me. “‘Go Vader! Go get them! Show them!’ After a few such cheers, you almost feel like you are really Darth Vader.” To his astonishment, wherever he walked, the protestors started to follow—humming the Imperial March.

Star Wars is an increasingly global phenomenon, perhaps the first mythos all cultures can get behind without hesitation. Even its film sets have become shrines. In 2011, a small group of largely European fans discovered that the Lars homestead, that single white dome-like dwelling where we first meet Luke Skywalker in the first ever Star Wars film, was moldering away in the desert in Tunisia. On Facebook, the fans asked for $10,000 in donations to restore the building to film quality with plaster and paint; they promptly raised $11,700. The permits from the Tunisian government took a little longer, but the team completed the job in a few weeks. Tears streamed down their cheeks as they screened a video of the restoration effort at Star Wars Celebration Europe, to a packed house and rapturous applause.

Japan is probably the most Star Wars–crazed country in the Eastern hemisphere, if not the world. It was home to the “George Lucas Super Live Adventure,” a bizarre and largely Star Wars–based arena show that toured the country in 1993. This is the country where you can watch Darth Vader hawking Pacific League baseball, Nissan cars, and Panasonic electronics. You can visit Nakano Broadway, a six-floor mall in the heart of Tokyo, and find rare Star Wars toys and trinkets for sale on every floor. When George Lucas came to open the original Star Tours at Tokyo Disneyland in 1989, he was chased around the park by hordes of Japanese schoolgirls. Then forty-five, he joked that he wished he were twenty years younger. Schoolgirls (and the occasional boy, but mostly schoolgirls) are still there, lining up in greater numbers for the new Star Tours, which I found to be the most popular exhibit in Tokyo Disneyland. As they line up, Threepio welcomes them to the ride in Japanese, once again sounding prissy and girlish in a foreign language.

South Korea was relatively unaffected by Star Wars, so much so that Harvard academic Dong-Won Kim presented a paper looking into the reasons why Episodes I through III had been seen by (gasp) fewer than two million Koreans. Even in Seoul, however, you can watch Darth Vader in ads for Korea Telecom or catch a performance of Stormtroopers filming a video—a K-pop hit by a group called the Wonder Girls. I found a shop in the heart of the Hongdae district formerly called Star Wars Coffee (tagline: “May the froth be with you”). It still sold knock-off artwork of Warhol-style Darth Vaders, and vast canvases of classic trilogy characters arranged around the table in the style of the Last Supper.

The list goes on and on. Visiting the island of St. Maarten in the Bahamas? You’ll want to stop in at the Yoda Guy Movie Exhibit, run by one of the creature shop artists who worked under Stuart Freeborn on The Empire Strikes Back; it’s one of cruise line Royal Caribbean’s most popular destinations on the island. In Australia, a man named Paul French did a charity walk across the entire Outback, 2,500 miles from Perth to Sydney, in a skin-chafing Stormtrooper costume. Why a Stormtrooper? Because, French said, it would “create a bit more attention.” He raised $100,000.

Such anecdotes are amusing in isolation, but together they speak volumes about the incredible reach and power of the shared culture that is Star Wars, a universal language of tropes and characters that sparks instant attention everywhere it goes. The language was born in 1977 and received significant upgrades in 1980 and 1983. It appeared to die out, but marinated in millions of memories until 1997, when the world was shocked to discover how many of us still spoke it, and a new generation of speakers started chattering excitedly. Another branch of the language opened up in 1999, a dialect that plenty of speakers vowed they would never speak but that entered the lexicon anyway. In 2002 and 2005, the latest language upgrades were delivered around the world simultaneously. By 2014, the steady buzz of anticipation for the next addition to the mother tongue had become a roar heard around the world. We all speak Star Wars now.

Perhaps the only humans on Earth who seem relatively unenthusiastic about the prospect of more Star Wars are those focused on getting off the planet.

The Creator has long been a strong advocate of real, as well as fictional, outer space missions. He grew up in the dawn of space exploration and eagerly followed the progress of Apollo missions in the 1960s. Armstrong landed on the moon shortly before Lucas started filming THX 1138. The Viking 1 lander touched down on Mars in July 1976, less than a week after Lucas wrapped shooting on Star Wars. Later that year, it was erroneously reported that Viking had found traces of organic life in Martian soil. Hal Barwood remembers Lucas coming to his house one day during the editing of the first movie and being very excited about the news. “He thought it was a good omen for Star Wars,” Barwood recalls.

The moment it became clear that the film was a huge hit, Lucas started talking about how it might influence the space program. “I’m hoping that if the film accomplishes anything, it takes some ten-year-old kid and turns him on so much to outer space and the possibilities of romance and adventure,” he told Rolling Stone in 1977. “Not so much an influence that would create more Wernher von Brauns or Einsteins, but infusing them into serious exploration of outer space and convincing them that it’s important. Not for any rational reason, but a totally irrational and romantic reason.”

“I would feel very good,” he continued, “if someday they colonize Mars when I am 93 years old, and the leader of the first colony says: ‘I really did it because I was hoping there would be a Wookiee up here.’”

Up until the end of his career, Lucas was expressing the same hopes for the effect that his creation would have on the international effort to explore outer space. In 2010, he told Jon Stewart, “My only hope is that the first guy who gets to Mars says ‘I wanted to do this ever since I saw Star Wars.’” Lucas’s most expressive, political version of this wish had come in 1981, when he waxed lyrical to Starlog:

           There were certain underlying ideas when I started: one was to tell a fairy tale, which is what it is—a fairy tale in space guise. The reason it’s in a space guise is that I like the space program, and I’m very keen on having people accept the space program. We’ve grown up in what is the flowering, and maybe the apex, of the space program, and Star Wars was made during that time when everyone was saying, “what a waste of time and money.” I was hoping, and still am hoping, that if 10 years from now it comes up for a vote that people will be a little more prone to saying “yes, this is important and we should do it”. . . . If suddenly the space program gets a lot of money 15 years from now then I’ll say “Gee, maybe I had something to do with that. . . .” But it’s hard to tell at this point whether Star Wars will have any effect or not.

By the mid-2010s, the United States was leaning toward “not.” We haven’t exactly been tripping over ourselves to send humans to Mars, whether in search of Wookiees or otherwise. As a share of the federal total, NASA’s budget has declined to less than 0.5 percent. The agency’s emphasis for the past two decades has been on unmanned spaceflight. Barack Obama, lightsaber-wielding, Death Star petition–responding, Threepio-welcoming Jedi Knight, cut funding for a future manned Mars mission. Before that happened, NASA’s administrator suggested the agency plans to send humans to Mars in 2037—which, coincidentally, is the year Lucas will turn ninety-three.

We may have to wait even longer than that to find out what inspired the first person on the Red Planet—but if any fictional universe is inspiring the folks at NASA at the moment, it is that of Star Trek, not Star Wars. “My whole love of space is from Star Trek,” says Bobak Ferdowsi, also known as Mohawk Guy, flight director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The engineer who helps control the Martian rover Curiosity, Ferdowsi told me he prefers Trek over Wars. “There’s the hope that we’re progressing toward that Star Trek future,” he said in an earlier interview, “that maybe it will be less about individual countries and more about a global organization.” He’s not alone; you’ll find many Trek-quoting fans at the laboratory, which has on occasion described itself as the nearest thing Earth has to the Starfleet of the Trek universe.

Call it the final revenge of Star Trek fans, who for decades have been struggling with their feelings about the rival “star” franchise. (The latest perceived slight: director J. J. Abrams, who rebooted the Trek franchise in 2010, upped and left it for Star Wars at the first opportunity.) Trek’s focus on rational exploration over galactic mysticism is a natural fit for NASA. Ferdowsi’s fellow social media star, astronaut Chris Hadfield, is also a Trekker, as is astrophysicist and host of the Cosmos TV show Neil deGrasse Tyson. “I never got into Star Wars,” Tyson said. “Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.” Tyson’s predecessor on Cosmos, the late, great Carl Sagan, also took issue with Star Wars. His son Nick Sagan told me he remembers watching the original movie on VHS with his dad, who loved Flash Gordon–style serial adventures, but let out a giant sigh after Han Solo made his boast about doing the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. Both knew what was wrong with that statement: a parsec is distance, not time. “Dad,” protested Nick, “it’s just a movie.”

“Yes,” said Sagan, “but they can afford to get the science right.”

So much for the space fantasy approach to inspiring the Einsteins of the future.

Still, America’s space industry is not without its Star Wars homages, which mostly can be seen in the names of its space-bound systems. Take for example NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program, dubbed C3PO. Chris Lewicki, the former flight director for NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, is about to blast an even geekier, more obscure Star Wars reference into space. Lewicki’s private space company Planetary Resources, which plans to mine space rocks for precious metals, is launching an asteroid-hunting telescope called the Arkyd in 2015. That’s a name you’ll only know if you’re schooled in the Expanded Universe; Arkyd Industries was a major manufacturer of droids and spacecraft in the Old Republic; when conquered by the Empire, it made the probe droids that we see landing on Hoth at the very beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. “We’ve got lots of Star Wars lore built into the company,” Lewicki told me. Unlike Tyson, Lewicki was at least kind of inspired the way Lucas intended: “Star Wars was my gateway drug to hard science fiction,” he said.

The agency’s (and an astronaut’s) greatest homage to the franchise came on November 3, 2007. That’s the day when the Star Wars theme was played in space for the first time, thirty years after it first thrilled audiences back on planet Earth. It was a wake-up call broadcast by NASA to the crew of shuttle mission STS-120, then in its twelfth day aboard the International Space Station. In particular, it was directed at Mission Specialist Scott Parazynski, a rare Star Wars fan among the few humans who’ve made it into orbit and beyond. (His son, whom he had named Luke, was ten years old at the time; he had been born around the time of the release of the Special Edition.) “That was a great, great way to wake up,” Parazynski told Mission Control. Then, for his son, he performed the first known Darth Vader impression outside of planet Earth: “Luke, I am your father,” he said. “Use the Force, Luke.”

As if the scene couldn’t get any geekier, the shuttle that had transported the crew to the International Space Station had been carrying a special Star Wars payload: the very lightsaber Mark Hamill had used in Return of the Jedi. Space Center Houston officials had come up with the idea to fly it, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the original movie, and Lucas had readily agreed. The lightsaber had been delivered to NASA officials in a ceremony at Oakland Airport, with Peter Mayhew (the actor who played Chewbacca) handing it over. Flown from Oakland to Houston, the lightsaber was received by R2-D2 and Stormtroopers from the Texas 501st. Lucas was onsite, watching the shuttle launch that blasted his prop into space.

That was NASA’s greatest staged homage to Star Wars—but another, less intentional one occurred some four years later, in 2011, when the agency’s astronomers used the Kepler telescope to discover, for the first time, a planet orbiting two suns. Officially, the planet was designated Kepler 16(AB)-b. Unofficially, astronomers at NASA and around the world gave it another name: Tatooine. This was something of a victory for Lucas: when Star Wars first came out, astronomers had declared it highly unlikely that a planet like Luke Skywalker’s could exist so close to two suns. In the two years after Tatooine was discovered, another nineteen double-star-system planets showed up. NASA was moved to offer an official apology to Lucasfilm. ILM’s John Knoll, speaking on behalf of Lucas, accepted the apology: “The very existence of these discoveries cause us to dream bigger, to question our assumptions,” he said. Or as Einstein put it, imagination is more important than knowledge. Sometimes, when you’re just trying to make space fantasy, it turns out you can be accidentally ahead of the curve of science.

George Lucas may have spent much of his career with his eyes fixed on the heavens, but in his post–Star Wars life he would be preoccupied with more terrestrial, prosaic battles.

On the domestic front, everything seemed blissful for Lucas in 2013—the closest a person can get, perhaps, to happily ever after. Retired at last, he wasted no time proposing in January to Mellody Hobson. They were married in June at Lucas’s own never-never land, Skywalker Ranch. Lucas’s friend Bill Moyers was the officiant. Friends remarked, as they had remarked for a number of years, how much slimmer and happier Lucas seemed since he’d been with Mellody, how much better dressed. The media were far from the gates of Skywalker, faked out by rumors that the wedding was going to take place in Chicago. Minimal press attention, an elite crowd, and a utopian setting: just the way Lucas likes it. And there was even happier news on the horizon. Melody and George were pregnant with a first biological child, Everest, via a surrogate. The world would not find this out until Everest was born in August. The following year, in May 2014, Lucas threw yet another Skywalker Ranch celebration, inviting far-flung friends such as Laddie and Fred Roos to celebrate his seventieth birthday.

But Lucas’s first few years of retirement didn’t go so well. This was especially true when it came to preserving and controlling his legacy. Sure, he built a nice park for his neighbors in San Anselmo, where he unveiled statues of Yoda and Indiana Jones, marking the icons that were created nearby. But his eyes were on the glittering prize of the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum. This was his legacy project: a vast and vastly expensive edifice in the Beaux Arts style, near the gold-domed Palace of the Legion of Honor, in the Presidio of San Francisco, it would make the San Francisco skyline look a little more like Naboo. It would be steps from the Disney Museum, where the life of the other creator to birth a globally admired mass entertainment was celebrated. The LCAM, as it was known, would contain all the storytelling art Lucas had been collecting, funding, and dreaming about since he was a child—Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish jostling for space alongside Scrooge McDuck creator Carl Barks and exhibits on CGI.

But Lucas hadn’t counted on a couple of roadblocks on the way to the LCAM. The first one was called the Presidio Trust. This body of local grandees were appointed by the president of the United States to manage the national park, and as part of the deal they had forged with Lucas back when he had moved Lucasfilm into the Presidio in 2005, the trust asked Lucas for a quid pro quo: that he would someday build a “world-class cultural institution” in the Presidio. When a retail chain called Sports Basement vacated a building down by the waterfront, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, it seemed a given that Lucas would take it over. This was prime real estate for a memorial to any global icon, let alone one who had taken San Francisco values—the US military is an evil technological empire; corporations and bankers will destroy the republic—and turned them into two trilogies of the most fantastic world-conquering legend in history.

But Star Wars itself was also a road block to the LCAM, in a way—and perhaps also to Lucas’s dreams for his own legacy. Lucas once confessed to Disney’s Bob Iger that he knew the first line of his obituary would read “George Lucas, creator of Star Wars,” no matter what he did, even if he sold the company, and that he had come to terms with that. Try as he might, Lucas couldn’t shake the impression among certain concerned citizens of San Francisco that what he was building was essentially a Star Wars museum—one they feared would instantly become the most popular destination in the city and bring half the population of the world driving and tramping through their parkland waterfront.

Despite the fact that Lucas had an agreement with the Presidio Trust to build the museum (not to mention a hand-picked board and millions in escrow waiting to pay for construction), the trust decided at the last moment to open the museum space up to a competition and extensive public debate. Nancy Bechtle, chair of the Trust, was a well-to-do, fourth-generation San Franciscan, the former chief financial officer of an international consulting giant, the president of the San Francisco Symphony, and a George W. Bush appointee. It’s also fair to say that she was not a huge fan of Star Wars. Before he knew it, Lucas the billionaire—who was offering to fully fund the museum—found himself competing against a museum proposal from the National Park Service, which didn’t have funding but helps manage the Presidio and has strong ties to Bechtle and the Trust.

Lucas pulled political levers as adeptly as Chancellor Palpatine. He got the support of San Francisco mayors, past and present; both California senators; a letter of support was signed by a hundred Star Wars–loving luminaries of Silicon Valley, from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to Steve Jobs’s widow. After conveying his displeasure to her on a number of occasions, Lucas even got Democratic leader and San Francisco congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to work the phones for the LCAM.

Bechtle wasn’t moved by any of this, so Lucas next tried a carrot and stick approach. The stick came first, in the form of a New York Times interview in which Lucas declared that the Trust members “hate us” and that his opponents’ proposals were “a jar of jargon”; he also threatened to move the LCAM project to Chicago, Mellody’s hometown, where “Rahm”—Mayor Rahm Emanuel—was waiting to offer Lucas a space.

The carrot came a few days later, at the only Presidio Trust meeting Lucas attended. Clearly nervous—he was still, as his sister said, a “behind-the-scenes guy”—he spoke haltingly about how the Presidio was the birthplace of digital arts (along with Marin County, he added quickly), and thus would be well suited as the site of the museum. He apologized for using the word “hate,” a word he said he told his children not to use. But he couldn’t help himself needling the Trust over the broken deal. “Plus the idea [of LCAM] was to help fund the Presidio, to, you know, pay the bills here,” he said in conclusion. “You never know, they might need the extra money.” He sincerely wanted to inspire kids, to promote the digital arts, to celebrate the “shared myth” of storytelling, and to give his traveling Star Wars exhibits (of which there have been a good half dozen since 1993) a home near his home. But that was Lucas’s closing argument for the museum: cold, hard cash.

After several meetings in which Presidio residents made their distaste for Lucas’s proposal known, Bechtle announced that the Trust had reached a “unanimous” decision: the prized real estate would go to none of the competitors and would be turned into parkland instead. But the Trust still hoped Lucas would build a museum “somewhere in the park.” Lucas was furious. He was subsequently offered a much smaller plot of land close to the Letterman Digital Arts Center, and at time of this writing he was investigating a spot for the museum on the lakefront in Chicago.

Lucas had overcome every obstacle in his life; he had survived a crash that should have killed him, and he’d completed every creative project he ever set his mind to. He’d broken free of Hollywood. He’d made himself a millionaire and then a billionaire. He’d invested himself and his money and his passion and his research into his Flash Gordon fan project, pursuing perfectionism relentlessly until it exploded in a light show that burned itself into billions of imaginations. He’d built an Empire out of the dreams that resulted, spun a century’s worth of stories, tapped almost by accident into deep spiritual notions and mythologies, shattered our visual expectations, transformed the meaning of merchandise, and changed our perception of the universe forever.

He’d accomplished so much. But when it came to building a suitable temple to house his vast legacy, George Lucas’s plans were interrupted by not-quite-so-rich-folks who didn’t like new money—or at least, not the kind of new money that came from a popular space fantasy epic.

Whatever one thought of Lucas’s epic, by 2014 it seemed to be never ending. The seventh episode in the trilogy was approaching, and Lucasfilm was maintaining an even greater, tighter, more maniacal level of secrecy than ever before. Not a detail about the film’s contents, its cast, or even its shooting locations was to be leaked by anyone working on the production or even slightly affiliated with it. A Hasbro toy merchandising executive tweeted the fact of his visit to the set in Pinewood Studios 20 miles west of London in February 2014; he didn’t give away a single detail, but weeks later his Twitter account was inexplicably deleted.

Star Wars movie productions had been secretive before, but this was something else. It took Lucasfilm until March 2014 to “reveal” that the movie would be set thirty years after Return of the Jedi and would star “a trio of new leads alongside some very familiar faces,” and until May 2014 to confirm what Lucas had let slip in an interview more than a year earlier: that the familiar faces belonged to Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford, not to mention Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, and Peter Mayhew.

When the company couldn’t entirely suppress negative details, they were expertly buried in a slew of positive news. For instance, screenwriter Michael Arndt left the project under mysterious circumstances, to be replaced by director Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan; rumor had it that Arndt didn’t like spending a lot of screen time on three “very familiar faces” and wanted to get straight to the trio of new leads; Abrams and his boss, Kathleen Kennedy, felt that more homage was due to the old crew. Lucasfilm managed to deflect stories about Arndt’s departure by announcing a significant number of the movie’s behind-the-scenes big names: it wasn’t just Kasdan helping to create Episode VII now, but also sound gurus Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood and composer John Williams, then eighty-one.

Social media rushed to fill the vacuum purposefully created by Lucasfilm. A thousand amateur artists posted their ideal Episode VII posters to Twitter and Facebook. So many popular tweets were posted speculating about the movie and its rumored stars that to cover them properly would require an entire other book.

But for the most part, what fans and commenters contributed were Star Wars jokes, reflecting once again the franchise’s propensity for loving spoofs. Comedian, actor, and Star Wars nerd Seth Rogen tweeted that Episode VII should open with a line that suggested nothing at all had happened in the thirty years since Jedi: “Damn, those Ewoks can party. Now what?” Fellow comedian Patton Oswalt went Rogen one better. Appearing in an episode of Parks and Recreation on NBC, Oswalt was asked to ad-lib a filibuster for the show’s town council meeting. What he came up with was over-the-top brilliance: an eight-minute rant filled with his nerdiest heart’s desire about what should happen in Episode VII. It featured Wolverine and the other superheroes of the Marvel Universe, based on the principle that Marvel and Star Wars were both now owned by Disney. The Oswalt ad-lib barely featured in the episode, but it found new life online, with three million YouTube views to date. The Nerdist channel added another million views simply for producing an animation of Oswalt’s storyline. Fans would likely burn down Disney HQ in Burbank if the company ever merged its franchises the way Oswalt was proposing, but they couldn’t get enough of his idea of Star Wars.

Disney was, if anything, sealed up tighter than Lucasfilm when it came to details about the latest movie in the franchise. Several years out, Disney reps explained that this was a long-term and deliberate strategy: “We’re just going to let Episode VII speak for itself,” one told me.

Disney president Alan Horn, a recent transplant from Warner Brothers, spoke about Star Wars Episode VII for the first time at CinemaCon, the annual confab of theater owners in Las Vegas, on April 17, 2013. It was the fortieth anniversary of the day George Lucas had sat down to write the first full Star Wars treatment, though neither Horn nor Kathleen Kennedy was aware of that fact. That day Star Wars fans were busy laughing at the Oswalt video, which had been released that day, and also mourning the death of Richard LeParmentier, who had passed the previous night. Le Parmentier was a fixture on the convention circuit, an actor known worldwide for a single scene on the Death Star. His character, Admiral Motti, is Force-choked from across the room by Darth Vader. “Every time we find someone’s lack of faith disturbing,” Le Parmentier’s family said in a statement, “we’ll think of him.”

The theater Horn spoke in might as well have been an homage to Motti’s workplace. If there was a screening room aboard the Death Star, it would have looked like the Colosseum, the $95 million theater at Caesars Palace. Cavernous, in black and red, it boasts 4,298 seats, 120-foot ceilings, one of the largest indoor HD screens in the United States, and one of the largest stages in the world. While Horn addressed the CinemaCon attendees, red lights blinked just above the screen, which meant a system called PirateEye was scanning the audience and running the feed through algorithms aimed at detecting the outline of someone holding up a smartphone. An announcer told us—I was one of those being scanned—that security teams with night-vision goggles would be patrolling the crowd throughout the presentation. I hoped Disney had hired the 501st Legion to do this job, but it turned out the company doesn’t have that kind of sense of humor when it comes to piracy.

Horn, who was mostly there to sell theater owners on the forthcoming (and future flop) The Lone Ranger, seemed relatively uninterested in talking about the Star Wars franchise. Fifteen minutes passed before he told a folksy story about visiting Lucasfilm HQ in the Presidio for the first time: “It’s not uncommon for someone at the end of a meeting to say, ‘May the Force Be With You.’ Well, what do you say to that? I said, ‘And also with you, my brother.’” A smattering of laughter came from the owner-filled audience—not quite the old cusses with their big cigars that Charley Lippincott remembered, but clearly the descendants of that bunch. Later, Horn mentioned that Disney was going to release one Star Wars movie each year, with spin-off movies coming in between the Episodes.* This was not news to anyone paying attention; Iger revealed that schedule when he bought Lucasfilm. But Horn was the first to use the words “every year.” The pens of every journalist in the room started moving on notebooks. Stories were posted online within the hour.

The relationship between Horn and Kathleen Kennedy—his direct report—is still shrouded in mystery. But we do know that the release date of Episode VII was a bone of contention. That day in April 2013, Horn announced that Episode VII would be released in Summer 2015. But Kennedy wasn’t so sure. “We’ll see,” she said through gritted teeth on the red carpet at CinemaCon that night, when I asked her if that seemed likely. As it turned out, the date would be pushed back—to December 18, 2015.

The release date wouldn’t be the only thing that Kennedy slashed. The LucasArts games division was laid off in its entirety in 2013, and its unfinished, highly anticipated game Star Wars 1313 was banished to the same shelf where the Underworld TV show on which it was based also sat unproduced. Clone Wars was cancelled in 2013, the show’s fans assuming that Disney didn’t want a show that was screened on a rival subsidiary, Cartoon Network.

With every bout of bad news, fans laid the blame at Disney’s doorstep—without considering the fact that Lucasfilm had a new and steely Hollywood-based boss named Kennedy; itwas no longer under the wing of a benign billionaire dispensing bags of cash to his passion projects. Star Wars simply didn’t have the financial backing it once enjoyed. With a slew of new movies for which to budget and an expensive Hollywood director to fund, the budget of roughly $2 million per Clone Wars episode was simply not viable, given the ratings. In the end, the decision to cancel that series, at least, came down to money.

Kennedy wasn’t down on the idea of televising Star Wars, though. She may have decimated the animation group, but she retained animation supervisor Dave Filoni and his key talent. She arranged for the remaining Clone Wars episodes to be polished and placed on Netflix. And Filoni’s second animated TV series, which arose from the ashes of Clone Wars, looks to be simultaneously cheaper and better than its predecessor. Star Wars Rebels, Filoni’s new show on the Disney XD Channel, is still under wraps as of this writing. (“Difficult to see,” as Yoda says. “Always in motion is the future.”) Rebels is set fourteen years after the events of Episode III and five years before the events of the original Star Wars. It stars a motley group of anti-Imperial youths on the planet Lothal, recently occupied by the Empire. Kanan Jarrus, voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr., stars as a moody renegade Jedi who escaped the Order 66 massacre; the crew of his ship Ghost consists of Ezra, Zeb, Sabine, Hera, and the grumpy astromech droid Chopper. There’s a Jedi-hunting Inquisitor after Kanan, and it doesn’t take a Star Wars genius to guess which tall, black-armored, masked man in a cape is the Inquisitor’s boss.

This is ripe, virgin territory in the Star Wars Universe: the height of the Empire and the rise of the Rebel Alliance. It’s the same period Underworld was supposed to cover. Not even the Expanded Universe touched this period much, a hangover from the fact that Lucas was reserving all the time in his galaxy prior to Episode IV for the prequels.

As if to signal the old-school, original-trilogy fans that it’s safe to come back, Filoni based all his concept art for Rebels on the paintings and sketches of that prime posse member, the man without whom Star Wars would not have been made, Ralph McQuarrie. When Filoni revealed the first batch of concept art from Rebels at Celebration Europe in July 2013, he did so surrounded by a squadron of 501st Legion members dressed not as the Stormtroopers we know, exactly, but as the McQuarrie concept versions, back when the space soldiers carried laser swords. “Ralph’s designs are as real a part of Star Wars as anything that existed on screen,” gushed Filoni.

Kennedy sees the work of the writers and the artists to whom George Lucas has passed the torch—whether on Rebels, Episode VII, or the first of many spin-off movies—as inviolate, paramount, beyond the control of any corporate strategist or marketing executive. “Imagination drives innovation,” Kennedy told fans in Germany in 2013, before drawing wild applause for suggesting that Episode VII’s special effects would use models and puppets as much as CGI. “We’re going to use every single tool in the tool box to create the look of these movies,” she said (and this was confirmed the following year, when Abrams filmed a charity video from the Episode VII set in Abu Dhabi; it was quite deliberately interrupted by a giant pupper that looked like it had wandered in from Dark Crystal.) Discussing how unnamed other big budget movies had lost their way, she added: “if you don’t pay attention to the foundation of these stories—and spend the time you need to find unique stories, complicated stories—after a while, the audience gets tired.”

Kennedy’s most important contribution to the future of Star Wars was to found the Lucasfilm Story Group in 2012. This shadowy organization is led by Kiri Zooper Hart, a writer, producer, and veteran of the Ladd Company and Kathleen Kennedy’s production outfit. It consists of Leland Chee, keeper of the Holocron, plus representatives of the licensing group, brand communications team, and business strategy department. Their main day-to-day task is to coordinate between all of this new Star Wars content bursting onto our screens and to lay down the law on what can and can’t be done—in other words, to approximate Lucas’s intentions in the absence of Lucas. More importantly, the Story Group moved agressively to retire the Expanded Universe.

No longer would the Holocron contain a confusing division between movie canon, TV canon, book and comic book canon, and the lowest form of content, S-canon. There would only be the Story Group’s stamp of approval, and everything else would be rebranded “Star Wars Legends,” effectively banished to the Universe of It Never Really Happened. In May 2014, the Story Group’s decision was announced: nothing had the stamp of approval except the six movies, plus The Clone Wars. This was a power not even George Lucas dared wield: the power to cull everything that has ever been said or written about the galaxy far, far away into a single, coherent Lucasfilm-approved narrative. Star Trek, the Marvel and DC superhero universes: all of these long-running franchises have had moments when the sheer amount of content spun out of control and started to contradict itself. Their custodians were forced to start all over again in an alternate universe, in effect—the dreaded moment known to fans as a “reboot.” What the Story Group did was more an extremely drastic series of amputations. Star Wars authors would have loved to not be considered part of the infected limb. In 2013, Timothy Zahn pointed out to me, rather hopefully, that all of his books fit in the years between Episodes VI and VII. They didn’t have to be wiped out, he said, because they don’t affect the future trajectory of the franchise. But Zahn fell into line soon enough, and was quoted in the Expanded Universe–killing announcement praising Lucasfilm for its vast canvas.

The power to determine what gets painted where on that canvas has in effect been handed to a Star Wars fan. He’s probably the most knowledgeable leader of the Story Group, and his job is to know and help steer everything about the future content of the saga—every movie, every game, every TV show, every book. A scary-smart superfan who wrote the book on Star Wars books and effectively explained Star Wars intellectual property enough to satisfy Disney. A man who, if Star Wars is around a hundred years from now, may well be responsible for the fact. A guy who is living the fanboy dream: Pablo Hidalgo.

Pablo Hidalgo, thirty-nine, is original Star Wars generation. He claims to have been spurred into his career because he was belittled for not drawing TIE fighters right—at the age of four. Born in Chile and raised in Canada, Hidalgo read the 1979 Star Wars novel Han Solo at Star’s End until the pages began to fall out. In the mid-1990s, he started writing for the Star Wars role-playing game. In 2000, he was snapped up by Lucasfilm as an Internet content developer and moved to California; within a year, he was managing editor of StarWars.com and much more besides. “He wrote more of the Star Wars encyclopedia than I did,” admits Steve Sansweet. In 2011, Hidalgo became “brand communications manager”—in other words, Lucasfilm’s explainer in chief, a rare example of a total nerd who speaks mainstream-ese.

Hidalgo was the guy Lucasfilm tapped to help explain the Star Wars franchise to Disney before they bought it. In a similar feat in August 2013 he gave an hour-long version of his presentation to Disney’s fan conference, D23, at the airy Anaheim Convention Center steps from the original Disneyland. It’s called “Crash Course in the Force.”

First, addressing the Star Wars fans rather than the Disney fans in the audience, Hidalgo acknowledged that intense speculation had been raging over Episode VII. “I can reveal exclusively,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “that that’s not . . . what . . . this . . . panel’s . . . about.” He laughed. “Let’s pause for all the bloggers to walk out of the room. If you’ve got your smartphone out, you can relax.”

I was laughing until I noticed that a sizable number of people, maybe a hundred, were actually walking out.

This is Hidalgo, at once the consummate Lucasfilm insider and utterly savvy about today’s social-media-networked, blogging-on-hyperspeed culture. His mind can encompass the seventeen thousand characters that appear in Star Wars novels; he wrote the comprehensive 2012 guide, The Essential Reader’s Guide to the “Star Wars” Universe. He is known for documenting every appearance in Lucasfilm movies of an old sound effect from the 1950s favored by Ben Burtt called “the Wilhelm screen.” But he can talk with ease and poke an affectionate kind of fun at fandom at the same time. The previous day at D23, when Bob Iger had told a crowd of thousands that he was “speechless . . . and am going to remain speechless” about everything Lucasfilm, his remark had been met with boos. Earlier that day, when Alan Horn had repeated his stump speech about visiting the Lucasfilm campus—“And also with you, my brother’”—some in the audience had laughed, but still Horn got booed, both in person and on Twitter, for moving on without discussing Lucasfilm product. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could say more. It will come soon.” Some major newspapers reported the boos as news; Disney’s communications department flew into a rage.

Hidalgo’s response to all this? Posting this dry tweet after his talk to a capacity three-thousand-person crowd: “Heads up. No Star Wars announcements scheduled for the California Dental Association Convention, 8/15-8/17.” (Don’t bother searching for the post; in February 2014, overwhelmed by how much of a time-suck it was, Hidalgo left Twitter and deleted his widely followed account.)

In his “Crash Course on the Force,” Hidalgo admitted that there are numerous entry points for explaining what Star Wars is about. His way is not to introduce George Lucas, nor even to talk about Episode IV. “Star Wars is about Jedi Knights,” he said, bringing pictures of multiple Jedi up on the big screen behind him. “Guardians of peace and justice. Also we”—there’s a Freudian pronoun—“own one of the coolest weapons known to the galaxy, the lightsaber. Any lightsabers here in the audience?” Hundreds of many-colored fluorescent sticks wave in the air.

Star Wars, Hidalgo added, is also about the conspiracy by Sith Lords to bring down the Jedi. He got audience members with red Sith lightsabers to wave theirs. “These are bad folks,” he said. “Not team players.” The Sith kept losing, he explained, because they kept fighting each other. So one of them decided it was just going to be a conspiracy of two, and they retreated into the shadows, finally brought down the Jedi, subverted democracy, and created the Galactic Empire. Someone cheered. “We’ve got a very sinister individual here applauding oppression and tyranny,” laughed Hidalgo.

Star Wars is about the Rebellion against that Empire. It’s about soldiers—“you can’t have a war story without soldiers,” Hidalgo said. “Then, there are the scoundrels.” The audience erupted in cheers as Han Solo and Lando Calrissian appeared on the screen. “They could care less about intergalactic battles, Sith Lords, Jedi, whatever. They’re just trying to survive and make a buck.”

Then Hidalgo outlined the first six films—running through them not in the order in which they were released, but rather in the order of their internal chronology. “Let’s start with Episode I, Phantom Menace,” he said, which elicited disgruntled murmurs from the crowd. A picture of Jake Lloyd got Hidalgo his first proper boo. He pressed on, showing how Anakin’s growing-up story contrasts with the fall of the Republic and ultimately causes it. Then he reached Episode IV, “which for many of us is also the first movie.”

The audience cheered, with a palpable sense of relief. The folks I spoke to afterwards were uneasy with what Hidalgo was doing: putting the three weakest and most recent movies first, reordering the history of Star Wars as the public encountered it. In this, Hidalgo was simply following the guidelines laid down by the Creator of the franchise before his departure: Star Wars is a single twelve-hour saga that covers the tragedy of Darth Vader in chronological order.

Still, what Hidalgo said next is very telling and beautifully phrased; you might call it the best description of fandom’s idea of Star Wars yet to emerge from Lucasfilm. “As Star Wars fans will tell you, it’s not about what happens; it’s how the stories are told, with exquisite detail and texture,” he says. “It’s set in a universe that’s very convincing. You can believe it’s real. It has a history. It’s lived in. It’s alive. It’s a place you want to revisit again and again.” Hidalgo went on to rhapsodize about the “mind-blowing visuals” and “kinetic high-speed action sequences, exquisitely edited,” and stepped into Joseph Campbell territory by describing Star Wars “archetypes that reach back into our collective history as storytellers.” But then he brought it all down to Earth:

           It’s not so deep and mythic that it’s not accessible. It’s about human characters, human emotions, human relationships. It’s stuff we can relate to: friendship, camaraderie, love. Star Wars isn’t afraid to have fun. In addition to telling deep stories and dark stories, it finds humor in character, and circumstance, and sometimes in the most unexpected places.

I mused on what Hidalgo had said as I walked back into the Anaheim sunshine past costumed Disney fans wearing Chewbacca-themed backpacks. I took pictures of a Sleeping Beauty arm in arm with a Princess Leia and noted more “Darth Mickey” caps than I’d seen that morning. I checked in on Facebook and Twitter, and saw more Star Wars products and memes filling my feeds than ever. I saw fan art with Darth Maul dressed as the Joker from Batman; I saw a photo of a Star Wars-themed crib with “I am a Jedi like my father before me” painted on the wall between two lightsabers. I saw BBC newsreaders dressed up as Boba Fett and a Stormtrooper to celebrate news of an open casting call for Episode VII. Planet Star Wars certainly isn’t afraid to have fun.

Had Kathleen Kennedy done it, I wondered? Had she steered Lucas’s Rebel Alliance of a company to safety, hidden in plain sight under the protection of a giant benign media Empire? Had she tapped exactly the right person, a fan who defined and defended the idea of Star Wars more precisely than its Creator could, to control the overarching structure of its future? Had that fan grasped the basic principles that would unite the fandom fractured by the prequels—words that spoke for all the Star Wars generations?

In the history of Star Wars, 2013 and 2014 will go down as landmark years. A new conductor was tapping her baton, calling for a moment of quiet and reflection before summoning up a new symphony with a new melody but familiar themes. Lucasfilm’s silence during this spell, its distinct lack of content between Clone Wars and Rebels, was all part of a greater plan. Suspense and speculation have always been good offscreen complements to Star Wars movies. Only in 2014, fans weren’t wondering how Han was going to get out of that carbonite or whether Luke really was Vader’s son. We were wondering about every single last detail of the movie to come. It was a silence in which to contemplate the pure idea of Star Wars: the richness, the possibility, and the endless expanse of the universe itself.

The moment would come soon enough when the uncertainty wave collapsed, and we found out whether Schrodinger’s Cat was alive or dead in its box. Kennedy’s canniness, Hidalgo’s knowledge, J. J. Abrams’s experience: all of these could yet conspire to produce a turkey. Difficult choices about the directions of a limitless franchise would have to be revealed. When they were, a world of fans lay in wait, preparing to pick apart every detail. At least one Star Wars fan predicted stormy weather ahead. “It’s a complicated cultural icon,” George Lucas said in 2013, when asked about his advice for Kennedy and Abrams. “You’re always going to be in trouble no matter what you do. So the best thing you can do is just plough forward and try to do the best story you can.” In private, he urged Kennedy and Abrams to remember that the movies worked best when they were both aspirational and retained a sense of humor.

But we won’t know for sure whether the franchise’s new stewards have told that best of all possible stories, not until that glorious and terrifying day in 2015, when we’ve all filed, finally, into a packed theater, filled with excited murmuring and plastic lightsabers. The house lights will dim, and an electric cheer will go up. Some version of “When You Wish Upon a Star” will play, incongruously, over a Lucasfilm logo. The screen will go black. Then up will come ten familiar words in blue: “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away . . .” Then silence. Blackness again.

Then an orchestra will explode in B-flat major, and the largest logo you’ve ever seen will fill the entire screen. And no sooner has it appeared than it will immediately begin to recede, slipping away, pulling back into the stars as if daring you to give chase.

________

* Despite online rumors to the contrary, the spin-off movies would not be based around well-known Star Wars characters.