##OMG, SOULLESS CORPORATIONS OWN OUR MYTHS!!! WE MUST RECLAIM THEM WITH SHITTY AUTHORIZED STORIES AND EVEN SHITTIER FANFIC!!!
George Lucas loved the world of Flash Gordon created by Alex Raymond. Growing up he wanted to make the ultimate Flash Gordon movie. After getting a couple of films under his belt as an adult he sought permission from King Features (or whoever the current rightsholder was) to make a feature-length Flash Gordon movie, but he couldn’t get it.
Lucas decided to move ahead with his dreams even if it meant using different characters in a different fictional universe. The end product still managed to kick ass - and he got to control all of the licensing.
I’m really interested in how fandom has clashed with corporations regarding what directions popular culture has moved. It really gets to an interesting place about who “owns” culture and what it means to do so.
And now, of course, people see Lucas as the big bad guy regarding cultural ownership… or I guess Disney now.
And @Donald_Petersen, I’m not suggesting that people are unhappy with the films, but that there are struggles over ownership (which has two distinct definitions, I’d argue) between corporate entities (and the people that represent those entities) that own these franchises and the fans. Star Wars (and Star Trek) have solid fan bases which feel a great deal of ownership over the stories, despite not having an economic stake in them. And while the all the movies were popular, changes Lucas made in the re-releases were hotly debated among the fandom. And of course, there was some subset of the fans who were not happy with all the people of color and women that suddenly populated the universe after the most recent star wars movie.
Excellent points. And of course Disney has a very long history of being litigiously, zealously possessive over its ownership of (even historically Public Domain) intellectual property.
Yeah. That’s going to be problem in the future, I’d guess. But it seems to me that there is a much less active fandom for Star Wars, in terms of writing fanfic, making fan films, etc, then there is for Star Trek (maybe I’m just unaware of it, as Star Wars isn’t really my fandom). I seem to remember some clashing between Lucas and the Star Wars fans years ago.[quote=“daneel, post:111, topic:78677”]
Hahahaha, just kidding. I know the answer is never.
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Yep. Maybe when our society collapses in on itself for its inability to leave behind the stupid?
I’m on the fringes of both fandoms and don’t follow the goings-on of the more active elements of either, so couldn’t say with any degree of authority, but my impression has been the opposite. In the past few years since the Disney acquisition, there’s been a sizable uptick in the generation of Officially Licensed SW content, aimed both at young kids and arguable adults… the ongoing books and comics and video games but also a new infusion of TV shows and now movies again. It’s really in the public consciousness now, front and center, whereas the official Trek content has been a bit more moribund. I mean, no new TV episodes in over a decade, and the most recent movie wasn’t widely beloved. I think these of-the-moment states of the franchises do affect the current states of their respective fandoms, and though Trekkers are famously droughtproof when it comes to this issue, they do, I think, tend to age. Trek isn’t aimed at kids in the way SW is, for one thing, and so doesn’t attract a steady stream of new young fans in the years between movies in the way that SW does. It could be argued that Trek fanfic and fan-films are generally more sophisticated than SW ones on average, if only because there are so many young kids like mine ginning up SW fan films on their mom’s iPhone, compared to the content generated by the somewhat narrower demographic of Trek fans who do something similar.
But I dunno. As far as I know anything, there might be tons more Trek fanfic out there. But if so, it’d kind of surprise me.
It’ll get undone in a few issues or whenever outrage at one of the most unambiguously good people in the marvel verse has gotten their entire legacy shat on receives enough backlash.
There might be lots of Star Wars fanfic about that I’m not aware of… but it also seems that the Trek fan content has reached nearly cottage industry proportions at this point, largely because people were unhappy with the gaps and with the reboot films. Just look at the dust up over the Axanar film for example. But yeah, maybe there is just a higher level of sophistication in the Trek fandom?
