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CHAPTER 1

MATTHEW FREEMAN

Rebuilding Transmedia Star Wars

Strategies of Branding and Unbranding a Galaxy Far, Far Away

In reference to the Batman brand, William Uricchio (2010: 119) argues that its fictional world — the gothic streets of Gotham City, the dark neon-lit skylines, Wayne Manor, etc. — is as much a valued brand asset to the corporate entities of DC Comics and Warner Bros. as the character of Batman himself. Since Uricchio's remark, much has been written about the enduring appeal of fictional worlds (Saler 2012; Wolf 2012; Harvey 2015), with scholars theorizing worlds of science fiction and fantasy, in particular, as spaces of magic, joy, and escapist possibility that fans wish to get lost in. The Star Wars universe serves as one such example, a storyworld that has thrived across multiple decades, generations, and media. Even after the climactic events of Return of the Jedi (1983), Star Wars lived on, telling new adventures, continuing to make a brand asset by expanding the microelements of the Star Wars film series into a transmedia macrosystem.

Scholars such as Carlos A. Scolari (2009: 599) have explored conceptions of "transmedia narrative worlds as brands," but the Star Wars world paints a particularly complex picture. Since the dawn of George Lucas's original film trilogy in the 1970s, Star Wars has spawned countless stories, eventually forming an Expanded Universe (EU, in fan vernacular) across comics, video games, novels, and so on, each the product of licensing agreements under the stewardship of many different writers, artists, illustrators, and so on. And with Disney's takeover of the Star Wars brand in 2012 — purchasing Lucasfilm and in turn rebranding the EU as Star Wars Legends, expelling its stories from official narrative continuity (Proctor and Freeman 2016) — the transmedia branding of the continuing Star Wars universe has become a complex blend of branding, rebranding — and even unbranding — mechanisms and strategies, each fusing to form audiences' expectations.

This chapter will serve to outline and categorize those complex branding mechanisms and strategies, revealing the different modes and nuances of branding, rebranding, and unbranding employed in the rebuilding of Star Wars's transmedia product extensions pre– and post–Disney takeover. I will both build on and complicate Henry Jenkins's (2011) assertion that in Hollywood's contemporary fiction factory, transmedia branding models tend to follow one of two formulas — either forming a consistent continuity across multiple media (that is to say, the same world with the same incarnation of its various characters, etc.), or a multiplicity in each media iteration (that is, creating multiple, very different versions of a storyworld and its characters). Conversely, I consider in this chapter that transmedia branding models operate more of a dialectic relationship than as a binary logic. To do so, I explore how Disney has employed a unique brand strategy that makes strategic use of a "legends and myths" motif in order to cast out seemingly unwanted narrative components of the existing Star Wars universe while simultaneously repromoting them as narratively valuable additions to the brand. The chapter interrogates the discourses of inauthenticity that became associated with the Expanded Universe of old, and indeed how Disney's transmedia branding strategy has evolved in line with the corporation's larger brand identity. Finally, I go on to examine the function of "possible worlds" as a specific branding technique in the Disney era that works to complicate Jenkins's aforementioned continuity-multiplicity model, exploring links between the branding of Disney's transmedia Star Wars adventures, their chosen narrative trajectories, and the meanings of the larger Disney brand image. In doing so, the chapter shows how the Star Wars universe can serve as a useful lens through which to study multifaceted models of branding in the age of media convergence.

Branding in the Age of Media Convergence

Exploring the branding strategies that have come to characterize the transmedia Star Wars universe means first understanding the changing role of branding in the contemporary media industries. This means situating my argument inside the context of media convergence, itself "the coming together of things that were previously separate" (Meikle and Young 2012: 2). Convergence has now come to dominate contemporary understandings of the models through which culture is produced industrially. Entire media industries, along with their technologies and practices, have become increasingly aligned, branded, and networked. As Henry Jenkins (2003) writes, "media convergence makes the flow of content across multiple media inevitable." Convergence has accelerated the ways in which fictional creations are developed as media brands. Television, a medium founded upon the delivery of audiences to advertisers, is central to this acceleration. In turn, as Benjamin W. L. Derhy Kurtz (2014: 5–6) adds, "the rise of transmedia platforms — alternative reality games, websites, mobile games, e-books, e-comics, web-series, etc. provides a new range of possibilities to boost brand recognition."

Transmedia storytelling has been defined as "a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple [media] channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience" (Jenkins 2011). For Jenkins, this process of unfolding stories across multiple media platforms serves to make "distinctive contributions to our understanding of the storyworld," a fictional space that is constructed in and across these multiple media sources (2006a: 334). World-making, then, itself the art of transmedia storytelling, argues Jenkins, is "the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others" (2006b: 335). In other words, transmedia storytelling has become a means of understanding the flow of content and fictional storyworlds across media, with this flow initiating a slippage between practices of transmedia storytelling and media branding.

John Caldwell (2004: 305) argues that branding, much like transmedia, has emerged as "a central concern of the media industry in the age of digital convergence." And as Catherine Johnson (2012: 1) says, "programmes are now being constructed as brands designed to encourage audience loyalty and engagement with the text beyond the act of television viewing." Considerations of branding in this context work to evoke what Jenkins (2006a: 69) also calls brand extension, "the idea that successful brands are built by exploiting multiple contacts between the brand and the consumer." For Jenkins, this too "should not be contained within a single media platform, but should instead extend across as many media as possible. Brand extension builds on audience interest in particular content to bring them into contact again and again with an associated brand" (2006a: 69). Following this logic, it is important to emphasize the distinct slippage between concepts such as brand extension and transmedia storytelling.

In fact, the precise industrial means through which transmedia storytelling (or world-building) occurs has considerable overlap with the concept of branding; for to maintain brand recognition across a range of media texts itself requires a sense of textual or visual coherence and expansion across these texts so as to ensure that each "feels" like it fits with the others. In other words, both transmedia and world-building can be conceptualized in terms of extensions of branded content across multiple media, working together via textual and paratextual factors to "produce a discourse, give it meaning, and communicate it to audiences" (Scolari 2009: 599). And yet there are clearly different strategies of transmedia branding, especially as more digital marketing and storytelling tools become available.

As indicated in the introduction to this chapter, Jenkins (2011) identifies a binary approach to how fictional storyworlds tend to be extended across media in today's industrially and technologically converged media industries. The first approach places ample emphasis on continuity, where "all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative world"; the second model, meanwhile, "celebrates the multiplicity which emerges from seeing multiple versions of the same stories." Transmedia branding formations in Hollywood have often come to exemplify the binary continuity-multiplicity model. Whereas Marvel's highly coordinated Cinematic Universe (MCU) — more accurately a transmedia universe, as William Proctor emphasizes (Proctor 2014a) — demonstrates the former model, in which the stories and characters of cinema's Iron Man (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and Avengers Assemble (2012) and of television's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–) and Daredevil (2015–) all intertwine together within a single story-world; the comparatively inconsistent Batman storyworld typifies the latter model, in which multiple, often contradictory iterations of the character work to engage different audiences in new ways. So, what characterized the branding of the transmedia Star Wars universe pre–Disney takeover?

Branding a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Part of the job of the director is to keep everything in line, and I can do that in the movies — but I cannot do it on the whole Star Wars universe.

— George Lucas (quoted in "Canon" n.d.)

In 2008, Howard Roffman, Vice President of Licensing at Lucasfilm, said on the subject of Lucasfilm's marketing plan for the Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series: "We have stuck to a very clear branding strategy for the past decade. ... In the end it is one saga and that saga is called Star Wars. We have wanted to send a clear message to our fans that everything we do is part of that overall saga" (quoted in Parisien 2016). Hoffman's comments imply that understanding the branding of the Star Wars universe is straightforward, indicating that as a brand approach, Star Wars clearly exemplifies Jenkins's aforementioned continuity model.

And yet close examination of the long-standing transmedia Star Wars universe paints a far less simple picture. Since its cinematic genesis in 1977, Star Wars has grown into a vast licensing enterprise, spread out across multiple media platforms including novels, magazines, comic books, video games, radio plays, and so on. Luke Skywalker's heroic journey may have reached a natural conclusion upon defeating the Empire come the end of Return of the Jedi, but the world of Star Wars lived on for a new wave of future adventures — albeit following a fallow period between 1985 and 1991, a "dark age" when the brand retreated into the cultural wilderness after the climactic Return of the Jedi, primarily because "there was no new film to keep audiences excited and engaged" (Proctor and Freeman 2016: 223). Importantly, what characterized the adventures of what became known as the EU was their tendency to move the larger Star Wars story forward in time. Though there are examples of EU stories that went back in time — such as Brian Daley's The Han Solo Adventures trilogy from 1979, which were published between the release of A New Hope (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and told the stories of Solo's smuggling days prior to the events of A New Hope — for the most part, the EU was a place for the future of the Star Wars universe, telling new stories that took place after the events of Return of the Jedi.

This tendency to use the EU to depict the future adventures in the Star Wars world is perhaps best exemplified by Timothy Zahn's novels from the 1990s. When Lucasfilm granted Bantam Books the license to publish Star Wars novels, the publishing marathon that followed continued to weld additive scaffolding onto the Star Wars saga's narrative architecture. The first novel written and released for Bantam Books was Zahn's Heir to the Empire in 1991, which Zahn then followed up with Dark Force Rising (1992) and The Last Command (1993). The Thrawn Trilogy, as it became known, is set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, chronicling a future story canvas that had yet to be marked by the Star Wars film trilogy (Proctor and Freeman 2016; Guynes 2017).

Moving the storyworld into the future was as much a necessity of the EU's authorial circumstances as it was a creative strategy. Zahn's outline for Heir to the Empire had planned to include a history of the Clone Wars, which had been mentioned in the first film but never explored. Says Zahn: "I had a history of it all worked up, but Lucasfilm told me, 'You are not to reference this anywhere, except in the most vague of terms'" (Kelly 2015). In other words, Lucasfilm's authorial grip on the Star Wars universe imposed a number of firm restrictions, especially when it came to the story events already a part of the Star Wars saga. Moving the story forward in time provided Zahn — along with a large number of other licensed authors, creators, illustrators, designers, etc. — a more unmarked territory to explore. Incidentally, Disney has since reintroduced the character of Thrawn into its transmedia storyworld via appearances in Star Wars Rebels (2014–), thus further reinforcing the sense of brand slippage between Lucas's Star Wars world and Disney's (see also Hills in this volume). As William Proctor and I (2016) have discussed elsewhere, "the EU tells us what happened to principal characters, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca and so on. ... Han and Leia get married and have children, Luke begins rebuilding the Jedi Order as part of the New Republic ... and fan-favourite, Boba Fett, is resurrected following his unceremonious death in Return of the Jedi."

If I were to return, then, to Jenkins's binary conception — continuity versus multiplicity — of transmedia models, there is a clear sense that, at least on a textual level, the Star Wars EU of old demonstrates the continuity approach, where all of the narrative pieces cohere into a consistent storyworld. Promotional materials sought to accentuate this continuity approach to transmedia branding discursively. Consider, for example, a newspaper advertisement promoting Star Wars audio books, published in the Times UK) in 1999. The advert reads: "The Star Wars double cassettes are the only authorised continuations of the Star Wars saga and include Star Wars music and sound effects" ("Star Wars Audio Books" 1999: 36). Much effort is made here to convince readers of the close relationship between Lucas's Star Wars films and the adventures available in audio formats, promoting connective textuality via paratextual communication.

And yet on this same paratextual level, the Star Wars EU came to be associated with discourses of inauthenticity, market logics, and even brand formations more befitting of Jenkins's multiplicity model, where multiple versions of the storyworld emerge. For example, the Zahn novels outlined may be referred to as "franchise novels" (a piece in the Guardian newspaper, in fact, even feels the need to justify "the shameful pleasures" of reading such "spin-off books," implying a hierarchy of cultural capital between the works of film and those of literature [Walter 2014]). This cultural capital can manifest as a commercial stigma in fan circles. As Tech Times reporter Jason Serafino (2015) asserts, "Star Wars novels stir a range of emotions for fans: Some view them as natural extensions of the movies ... but others just view these novels as a way for Lucasfilm to make a quick buck." Daniel Worden (2016) agrees: "Licensed property comics, games, etc. ... are notoriously hit or miss for readers and gamers. Mostly they miss, plagued by lackluster writing and awkward art." Moreover, this stigma surrounding the licensed products of the Star Wars EU goes as far as academic circles. Jenkins (2006a: 105), for instance, argues that "the licensing system typically generates works that are 'redundant' ... watered down, or riddled with sloppy contradictions." For Jenkins, "franchise products are governed too much by economic logic and not enough by artistic vision" (2006a: 105). While it is problematic to privilege new transmedia versus old-style licensing in this way, as Matt Hills (2012c: 412) has argued, in some sense the very acknowledgment of a hierarchal tier system between one medium and another indicates a separation between Star Wars and the Star Wars Expanded Universe that problematizes any understanding of this era's transmedia Star Wars world as one of absolute brand continuity.

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Excerpted from "Disney's Star Wars"
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