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On the wall behind Leland Chee's desk is a portrait of an Ithorian, an alien with a hammer-shaped head that you glimpse briefly in the famous Star Wars cantina scene. In its leathery, foot-long fingers, the Ithorian holds a cube decorated with elaborate metallic tracings, a device known as a holocron. Think of it as a Force-powered hard drive, capable of storing an enormous quantity of information. "It's a piece of Jedi technology," Chee says. "It tells you ... everything."
To Star Wars fans, Chee is the Keeper of the Holocron, arguably the leading expert on everything that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. His official title is continuity database administrator for the Lucas Licensing arm of Lucasfilm—which means Chee keeps meticulous track of not just the six live-action movies but also cartoons, TV specials, scores of videogames and reference books, and hundreds of novels and comics.
Keepin' it canonical: Leland Chee, continuity database administrator at Lucas Licensing, maintains the Holocron — a vast FileMaker database that's consulted to make sure that any new elements added to the Star Wars franchise fit within the existing mythology.
Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross
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Of course, Chee's Holocron isn't a Force-sensitive crystal. It's a FileMaker database, a searchable repository of more than 30,000 entries covering almost every character, planet, and weapon mentioned, however fleetingly, in the vast array of Star Wars titles and products. The Holocron isn't just for fun—when Lucas Licensing inks a deal with a toy company or a T-shirt designer, it vets those ancillary products to ensure they conform to the spirit and letter of the continuity that has come before and will continue afterward. In the past 31 years, Star Wars movies have grossed in excess of $4 billion worldwide. But retail sales of merchandise stand at $15 billion, and 20 percent of that has been earned since 2006, the year after the final film was released. Careful nurture of the Star Wars canon—thousands of years of story time, running through all the bits and pieces of merchandise—has kept the franchise popular for decades.
So Chee spends three-quarters of his typical workday consulting or updating the Holocron. He also approves packaging designs, scans novels for errors, and creates Talmudic charts and documents addressing such issues as which Jedi were still alive during the Clone Wars and how long it takes a spaceship to get from Dagobah, where Yoda trained Luke Skywalker, to Luke's homeworld of Tatooine. The Keeper of the Holocron takes this very seriously: "Someone has to be able to say, 'Luke Skywalker would not have that color of lightsaber.'"
The screening room at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, Lucasfilm's sprawling facility in San Francisco's Presidio District, is as opulent as you would expect—plush seats, wood panels, crystal-clear projection, and a perfect sound system. So when that classic John Williams fanfare begins and the Star Wars logo appears onscreen in that distinctive font, in that distinctive yellow, it quickens the pulse.
It's also when Chee, sitting next to me, tells me that in an early version of what we're watching—a new LucasArts videogame called The Force Unleashed, due out in September—the logo was slightly wrong. "It was off by only a few pixels, but someone in Licensing spotted it and submitted a report."
I grab an Xbox 360 controller and soon I'm striding through the corridors of a satellite that orbits the smugglers' moon of Nar Shaddaa, destroying everyone in my path. My character, Starkiller, is the secret apprentice of Darth Vader, sent here to eliminate a Jedi elder ... and leave no witnesses. I deflect laser blasts from militia troops with my lightsaber and then use the Force to hurl a chunk of metal through a window behind them. The glass shatters, and several foes are sucked into the vacuum of space before a safety wall snaps shut.
I'm beginning to understand the power of the Dark Side.
On the scale of badassedness, obliterating legions of good guys with the Force ranks right up there with leaping Snake River Canyon in a monster truck that can transform into a robot. And it's true that the game's sophisticated physics, combined with clever AI software for characters, means that when you Force-throw a Wookiee into a tree on its home planet, Kashyyyk, the Wookiee writhes realistically and the tree explodes in a botanically accurate cloud of splinters. But that's not what has fans most excited about The Force Unleashed. It's the stuff that happens between the interactive killing sprees: brief cinematic interludes that add new details—new plot points—to the saga.
"The game is set between episodes III and IV," says Haden Blackman, who led the development team. Translation: Play it and you'll learn what happened before the original Star Wars film trilogy and after the prequels, two decades that have been shrouded in mystery. Over the course of the game, players will learn the details of the internecine feud between Darth Vader and his mentor, Emperor Palpatine, and the way these two unwittingly created the very rebellion that brought them down.
The game has yielded a bountiful crop of tie-ins: a book, a graphic novel, a tabletop role-playing game supplement, and several lines of toys. With no more live-action Star Wars films forthcoming (or so we are told), games from the subsidiary division LucasArts are becoming ever more important in expanding the universe—and perpetuating the story-product ecology. And with every narrative beat and plot point, Chee and his dozens of colleagues with Holocron access are there. "Licensing approves everything," he says. "Text, dialog, art ... It all comes through our office." This is where the work of hundreds of writers and artists gets woven into a vast, internally consistent continuum.
The power of the Dark Side: LucasArts' Haden Blackman discusses the story and the technology behind the upcoming game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross
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In his 1932 book Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction, T. S. Blakeney used the term canonicity in reference to the mystery novels and short fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes enthusiasts treat Doyle's work as if the great detective inhabits a coherent and logically consistent universe. Some of the stories written by Doyle were canonical—genuine events in that alternate universe—while others had to be considered apocryphal. (It should come as no surprise that fans would appropriate theological terms. The ecstasy of true fandom can, after all, approximate religion.)
Today, canon and its serial-fiction cousin, continuity, are integral to genres like mystery, fantasy, and sci-fi. The giants of the field are known as world-builders as much as writers. J. R. R. Tolkien supplemented his Lord of the Rings series with hundreds of pages of appendices, genealogical charts, even pronunciation and usage guides for the languages he invented.
Yet in the multiverse of fictional realities, Holmes's London, Frodo's Middle-earth, Buffy's Sunnydale, and Batman's Gotham are mere planetary systems compared with the grand galactic enterprise of Star Trek. When the original series—known to devout fans as The Original Series—went off the air in 1969, acolytes kept the flame alive. They extended the stories with their own fiction. They created technical manuals. Eventually, the series became a movie, and then another, and then another TV series, and a few more after that. Each new iteration produced more canonical information. Spock's death, Kirk's son, Picard's adventures as a cadet ... eventually, the writers' room on a Trek show became a minefield. "Someone would tell you that a Voyager episode last year mentioned a bit of backstory with the Romulans, and now you can't do this over here," says Ron Moore, a writer and producer on several Star Trek shows who went on to create the new Battlestar Galactica. "You'd argue the validity of that, but they'd be, like, 'No, now it's established.'"
Lucas Licensing oversees billions of dollars in merchandise—from pillows to Pez dispensers. Photo: Jeff Minton
But the many strata of Star Trek books, games, comics, and cartoons haven't been well tended. Some events in the movies and even later TV shows contradict preexisting lore. (A backward change like that is called a retcon, short for "retroactive continuity.") Gene Roddenberry himself, creator of Star Trek, was known to second-guess his own pronouncements about what was and was not canonical. After a while, the retcons and inconsistencies can become off-putting to fans and render once-beloved universes impenetrable to newcomers.
One solution: a reboot. Start from scratch, like Moore did with Galactica. Clever preservation of original story elements retains the old fans, and streamlining and modernizing lets newbies spend their hard-earned quatloos, too.
To Chee, the orderliness of the Star Wars canon is what sets it apart, what makes it feel more real than all those other franchises. "Look at James Bond," he says. "What's real in the James Bond world? What year does it take place in? It's not grounded in a real timeline." The Star Wars chronology, on the other hand, marks time from the Battle of Yavin, the assault on the Death Star at the end of the original Star Wars. Luke Skywalker was born in the year 19 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin). It says so in the Holocron.
Back in his office, Chee asks his database what else it has on young Skywalker. The result contains scores of fields covering lineage, favorite vehicles, the planet he's from, how to write his name in the Aurebesh alphabet. "Oops," Chee says, blocking the screen with his body until he has minimized the window. "There are things in the Holocron that aren't public knowledge, stuff coming down the pike two or three years from now." He won't say whether those secrets relate to upcoming books, movies, games, or toys. Probably all of them.
Merch and more merch: Movies, games, comics, and novels are the tip of the iceberg. Leland Chee shows off more Star Wars goods, like Yoda skateboards, Wookiee slippers, and Darth Tater. Beware the Jar Jar lollipop!
Producer: Annaliza Savage, Editor: Michael Lennon, Camera: John Ross
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Lucasfilm has to plan ahead and think long term. "We don't reboot. We don't start from scratch," Chee says. "When Chewbacca died, he died." (Poor Chewie yowled his last yowl in 25 ABY, when he was stuck on the planet Sernpidal as it collided with its moon, Dobido, in the novel Vector Prime, the first book in the New Jedi Order series. His death is now canon.)
"The thing about Star Wars is that there's one universe," Chee says. "Everyone wants to know stuff, like, where did Mace Windu get that purple lightsaber? We want to establish that there's one and only one answer."
Star Wars was the number two toy brand aimed at boys last year, behind only Transformers. But toys account for less than half of the revenue for licensed merchandise. The Lucas Licensing office is positively drowning in other merch. Bedspreads, window blinds, pillowcases, wastebaskets, guitars, chairs, baseball caps, beach balls, jewelry, lunch boxes, cookie jars, and kites all added up to $3 billion in retail sales in 2006 and 2007.
That figure includes big-ticket items aimed at adults. An R2-D2 DVD projector. A stormtrooper golf bag. A high-end fashion line created with superstar designer Marc Ecko, including $300 Star Wars jeans and a replica of the poncho Han Solo wore on the ice planet Hoth. There was even a $3,000 suit of Darth Vader-style samurai armor. "We realize that our fans have different levels of disposable income," says Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, who joined the company a week after the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. "The kids who played with the toys have grown up."
Leland Chee strolls the San Francisco campus of Lucasfilm.
Photo: Jeff Minton
There have been some egregious missteps, like the Jar Jar lollipop. It looks like a plastic bust of the hated character, but push a button and it opens its mouth and sticks out a hideous candy tongue for children to suck on. "The tongue had bumps on it," Chee says, wrinkling his nose.
Chee's sense of what is correct in the Star Wars universe has been a lifetime in development. He saw the original movie at the Coronet Theater in San Francisco at age 6. He got his first plastic Star Wars action figures—R2-D2 and that lame C-3P0 look-alike, Death Star Droid—for his seventh birthday and from there steadily enlarged his collection, storing them all in a case shaped like Darth Vader's head (which he still has). Chee even kept the cardboard they were mounted on. "The packaging had great visuals, plus, like, a paragraph of backstory on the character," he says.
It's easy to forget that before Star Wars, licensed merchandise was a different, less profitable business. All the big toymakers turned down the rights to make Star Wars action figures; upstart Kenner didn't sign on until a month before the film's release. The earliest product tie-ins were novels and comics—Marvel published an adaptation of the movie a month after it hit theaters, then continued with its own stories. Soon Marvel had smugglers Solo and Chewbacca teaming up with questionable characters like Jaxxon, a furry green creature with big floppy ears who wisecracked like Bugs Bunny.
"The idea of continuity was alien at the time," Roffman says. "We let Marvel Comics do the stories they wanted as long as it didn't interfere with the upcoming movies, and they went in some bizarre directions."
The first Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, was published in 1978, before anyone knew that sequels would be filmed, much less that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia would later turn out to be siblings. "Luke and Leia get ... affectionate," Chee allows. "It's very wrong."
The success of the movies led to more products: TV specials, a Saturday morning cartoon show, newspaper comics, a board game, a D&D-style tabletop role-playing game, simple arcade and console videogames. Young Chee bought as much as he could, including the sheet music for the iconic theme song, which he played at his first organ recital.
After the release of Return of the Jedi, in 1983, Lucasfilm assumed that interest would wane. But the merch kept selling. And then, Chee remembers, the novel Heir to the Empire was published. "Wait, was it 1990?" he says, tapping a search into the Holocron. "I need to get this date right."
It was actually 1991 when Hugo Award-winning writer Timothy Zahn released the novel, set five years after Return of the Jedi. The book spent 19 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and proved to Lucasfilm that even without new movies, it still had a market. "I was in college at UC Davis by then, but that book brought me back into Star Wars," Chee says.
Without movies at the core, though, Lucas Licensing couldn't afford to be lackadaisical—no more Jaxxons, no more incestuous flirtations. "We set parameters," Roffman says. "It had to be an important extension of the continuity, and it had to have an internal integrity with the events portrayed in the films." Closely tending the canon was paying off with fans. Essentially, all the new comic books, novels, and games were prequels and sequels of one another. If you wanted to know the whole story, you had to buy them all. Neither Lucasfilm nor its licensees will divulge just how much money Lucasfilm gets for each item; suffice it to say the percentage is substantial.
Chee applied for a job as a software tester at LucasArts shortly before Star Wars: Special Edition was rereleased in 1997. The film was an updated version of the 1977 original, with new visual effects and added scenes. (The special edition proved that the canon is vulnerable to retcons. In the most egregious example, an f/x tweak now has alien errand boy Greedo, not Han Solo, shooting first in the cantina duel. This made Solo a more simplistic character.) Chee scoffed at the fanboys who waited in line for three days outside the Coronet to see a movie they already owned on VHS. He had the self-restraint to wait until 5 am on the day of the release to queue up.
When Chee got home from the movie, there was a message on his answering machine. He had the gig. "That was the last time I had to wait in line to see a Star Wars movie," he says.
At first, his job entailed identifying and logging game bugs. His uncanny command of Star Wars lore and his organizational skills allowed him to rise quickly to the role of lead tester, which eventually led him to work on the 1998 title Behind the Magic.
Magic wasn't so much a game as an interactive CD-ROM of Star Wars trivia, a treasure trove of data for überfans that included a timeline, a searchable glossary, scripts, and deleted scenes. Assembling it revealed inconsistencies in the canon. "There were differences in the layout of the Millennium Falcon between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back," says Blackman, who, in addition to being project lead on The Force Unleashed, also wrote and did research for Magic. "The continuity fix is that Han Solo made some modifications to the ship's interior."
Around 2000, Chee moved from LucasArts to Lucas Licensing, where he was tasked with creating an even more detailed version of Magic for internal use. "We had several game-design teams, several comic book writers, and dozens of novelists," Roffman says. "We needed a reference for everyone who was playing in our sandbox."
Chee was the perfect person for the job. "I've been amassing Star Wars knowledge my whole life," he says. "My friends were always like, what the heck are you ever going to do with all of that?"
Chee's answer: Create a FileMaker doc similar to the ones he had used to track game bugs. He started transferring information from Magic, from binders, and from the stream of new novels and comics. "You don't know how much you don't know until you get here," he says. "Like, I'd never heard the radio dramas."
In a forum on StarWars.com, PiccoloKenobi poses a question that we've all wondered about at one time or another: Are the Low Altitude Assault Transport gunships used by the Grand Army of the Republic spaceworthy, or are they limited to traveling within a planet's atmosphere?
"LAATs can be sealed to operate in the vacuum of space," Chee decrees in a response post. "But the standard LAAT is not equipped for long-distance space travel."
In the world of continuity maintenance, Chee is something of an anomaly. Most geek-friendly franchises rely on volunteerism—while Chee was building the Holocron, fans of other canons were working outside official imprimatur. Babylon 5 has a fan-created database. The Buffyverse has several. In fact, the best source for Star Wars information on the older stuff that Chee hasn't logged yet is an online database created and maintained by a community of fans that Chee views with wary respect. It's called, inevitably, the Wookieepedia.
Naturally, some fans chafe at the Lucasfilm pronouncement-from-on-high approach. Take Curtis Saxton, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK. Beginning in 1995, he released a series of amateur technical commentaries on TheForce.net, a Star Wars omnibus site, that sent shock waves through the fan community.
A fan-made video critiquing Curtis Saxton's theory of the Endor Holocaust.
Video: The Endor Holocaust
Saxton wasn't writing fan fiction—it was more like fan physics. He started out by estimating the size and power of various Star Wars vehicles and weapons, including the Death Star's planet-destroying superlaser (2.4 x 1032 joules to blow up the planet Alderaan). His numbers didn't jibe with those in the Lucas Licensing-approved tech manuals. But he persisted.
And that's what led to the Endor Holocaust. At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Death Star II explodes while orbiting a forested moon called Endor, populated by cuddly creatures called Ewoks. Saxton considered the Death Star's orbit, the power output of its hypermatter power source, and the sheer tonnage of debris its destruction would have generated, then concluded that the climactic battle must have rained death and nuclear winter onto the teddy-bear tribe. He wrote: "The mass-extinction event at Endor is an inevitable physical consequence of the circumstances at the end of Return of the Jedi. As such, it indirectly enjoys canonical status, even though it was not clearly portrayed in the film." In other words, science says the Ewoks are dead.
You can't posit the genocide of the Ewoks without igniting a backlash. In the forums, debates raged between self-described Saxtonites and their foes. This willingness of some obsessives to go deeper into the fictional world than its original creators did is a mainstay of fandom. "It goes back to Hugo Gernsback, the father of modern science fiction, who encouraged readers to dig into his stories, expand on them, and critique the science," says Henry Jenkins, a sci-fi fan and MIT media-studies professor.
Despite Saxton's heretical notions, he later worked on four official technical manuals. And the notion of an Endor Holocaust has been incorporated into several comics—as foul propaganda spread by Imperial loyalists. But the fact that official Star Wars products even addressed the idea shows how influential writing like Saxton's can be. It's called fanon—fan-generated canon—and it's still a controversial notion to the priesthood at Lucasfilm. "I don't like the term," Chee says. "There's no such thing as fan continuity."
Yet even within the Holocron, not all reality is created equal. Chee coded a pulldown menu that lets him categorize entries. S, for example, stands for secondary continuity—early unvetted works, such as The Star Wars Holiday Special. Sure, it introduced fan-favorite character Boba Fett to the continuity. But it also featured Princess Leia singing a carol to celebrate the Wookiee ceremony of Life Day, and Harvey Korman in drag playing a cooking instructor making Bantha Surprise.
Princess Leia serenades Wookiees on their homeworld Kashyyyk. From the quasi-canonical Star Wars Holiday Special.
Video: Star Wars Holiday Special - Leia sings
And then there's the very top level of canon, the inviolable, infallible level of Truth, marked GWL—George Walton Lucas. It's the divine word of the Creator who stands outside his universe and is not subject to the rules that govern it. Lucas approves every important addition to the canon. The ambitious story beats contained in the new game The Force Unleashed were permitted only after he signed off—and spent hours talking to the developers about the relationship between Darth Vader and the Emperor.
Yes, he'll accept outside ideas. The novel Heir to the Empire introduced the planet of Coruscant, capital of the Old Republic, which Lucas later incorporated into the prequels. But he also used those prequels to retcon the hell out of Chee's otherwise well-integrated universe. Anakin Skywalker built C-3P0? GWL. Yoda knows Chewbacca? GWL.
"George's view of the universe is his view," Chee says with a slightly grudging tone. "He's not beholden to what's gone before."
The careful tending of the Star Wars continuity has yielded great wealth, but the key to a productive farm is to leave some fields fallow. A complete Holocron would leave little room for fantasy—for fans who, as Jenkins says, "love unmapped nooks and crannies, the dark shadows we can fill in with our imagination."
That's something that GWL understands. For instance, the origins of the Jedi master Yoda, his species, and his home planet are off-limits. The backstory isn't even in the Holocron. "It doesn't exist, except maybe in George's mind," Chee says. "He feels like, 'You don't have to explain everything all the time. Let's keep some mystery.'"
But ... what about the Holocron?
"We work around him," Chee says.
Senior editor Chris Baker (chris_baker@wired.com) wrote about the return of Futurama in issue 15.12.
Read about the latest Entertainment News on Wired.com, including art, technology, films, animation, music, web video, tv, podcasts, and blogs. {...} Published: August 21, 2008, 9:55 pm - Indexed: August 24, 2008, 10:10 am - Page Size: 53KB |