“May the Fourth” has always seemed like a particularly fake corporate holiday because “Star Wars Day” is like the conspicuously missing Children’s Day: Isn’t that every day? Do we really need a day set aside to further honor the space-fantasy franchise that accounts for 12% of the 50 biggest-grossing movies in North America, including a current number-one spot that seems likely to go unchallenged for another bunch of years?
We do not. But it arrives anyway, especially when there’s a new Star Wars movie to sell. Maybe this would seem more crass if Star Wars under its original master George Lucas wasn’t already a merchandising, multimedia bonanza (and, for what it’s worth, the “original” May the Fourth celebrations were unsanctioned, fan-created, pre-Disney affairs). Or if the actual Star Wars movies and TV shows weren’t, by and large, pretty good. Sometimes great. And far more fun to experience than their oft-toxic fandom would have you believe.
It may seem untoward that live-action Star Wars has gone from six Lucas-overseen movies (plus a couple of Ewoks spinoffs) to about a dozen films and nearly 100 TV episodes, all since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. But as idiosyncratic as Lucas’s overall (and, between the original trilogy and his controversial prequels, technologically and thematically ever-shifting) vision for the series has been, these productions were too expansive in their imagination, and too logistically complicated in their production, to be truly confined to a single brain. It’s a series that resists stripping down and going back to basics; even when that happens, part of the process inevitably involves assembling a dive bar’s worth of weird alien creatures to gawk at and possibly buy in action-figure form.
Moreover: As easy as it’s been to slam Disney for mishandling of the series, the post-Lucas era has arguably produced nearly as much great work as before—and, yes, some misfires of various forms. Look at it this way: the nerd business of expressing preference through rankings has gotten way more interesting now that there are more than six movies to play around with.
So, before we get to the nerdiness at hand, some ground rules: A Jedi shall not know anger. Nor hatred. Nor animation. I’m especially serious about the first two: If Star Wars makes you angry, probably this list will make you angry, because I don’t hate any of the Star Wars movies or shows I’ve seen. I’m not saying that a true fan lets anything slide, but I am saying that despite the best efforts of Disney execs (and, for that matter, fan wishes, or terrible Mark Hamill brainstorms), Star Wars has yet to make its Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or Captain America: Brave New World. Pre-Disney—well, there is some stuff I dredged up for the token last-place slot, without even resorting to the out-of-circulation holiday special.
And to be clear, I don’t hate the animated stuff, either. It’s just that with the litany of episodes of The Clone Wars, Rebels, The Bad Batch, and so on out there, the animated side feels like a whole separate universe, with highs and lows too numerous to line up easily against feature films or relatively short-season TV shows. So we’re keeping this to live-action projects. I can only imagine that this will immediately clear up the only possible controversy this inarguable and definitive ranking will bring rushing to mind.
19-20. Caravan of Courage: The Ewok Adventure (1984) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985)
ABC/Everett Collection
Source:
www.gq.com
