Kirk and Scotty in Star Trek: The Motion Picture

         The first instance of the kind of elegiac sequel storytelling that happens within the Hollywood blockbuster franchise that primarily comprises this canon of films came in the form of one of the longest running science fiction franchises, Star Trek. Almost a decade after the cancellation of the original series in 1969, Paramount Pictures and creator Gene Roddenberry began talks about returning to the Enterprise, a return that was first conceived of as a movie with the original cast returning, then as a show with most of the original cast on board, then, following the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a promising pilot script was expanded upon for a film starring every member of the original cast including prior hold-out Leonard Nimoy. With stalwart director Robert Wise at the helm, the Enterprise and her crew launched a mission to boldly go from television to film. The transition brought with it opportunities to expand upon the storytelling and aesthetics of the original tv series as well as the cast and crew of the Enterprise. With Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Wise dedicated a lengthy sequence to revealing the newly updated Enterprise design in loving detail as the expanded orchestral score signaled the triumphant return of the iconic ship and its crew. Indeed, audiences are placed in the crew’s position as they too marvel at the increased detail afforded by the 8-foot long model and higher fidelity film capture and projection. Such a sequence would feel overdone in a tv show, a medium that requires to-the-point storytelling and resists such fanfare as a matter of course. But on the big screen and after a decade lacking new filmed Star Trek stories, such a scene cements the story being told as feeling appropriate to its medium, larger than life and able to indulge in spectacle for spectacle’s sake.

         Not only was there a new version of the Enterprise in The Motion Picture, but there were also a few new cast members. Persis Khambatta played Ilia and Stephen Collins played Decker, two new crew members of the Enterprise around whom some of the story’s important machinations happen. Ilia, in particular, becomes a central character when she becomes somewhat possessed by the entity V’Ger (later revealed to be the Voyager space probe that had developed delusions of godhood after hundreds of years of neglect in the emptiness of space). In this way, she and Decker, who share a romantic interest unlike any of the returning crew, become entrypoints for audience members not familiar with the original series and its cast. Both younger than the original crew (each of whom was closer to 50 than 40 and not particularly in line with the younger casts of movies like Star Wars, Alien, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Ilia and Decker were crafted to appeal to wider audiences and provide some sexual chemistry. However, neither of them make it beyond the events of this film and the next film, Wrath of Khan, brought in Kirstie Alley as Saavik, a Vulcan protégé to Nimoy’s Spock, and Merritt Butrick as David Marcus, Kirk’s son. Again, these two new cast members act as entry points for new audience members but neither threatens to take over for the character for which they are echoes. Indeed, David Marcus dies in the next film and Saavik eventually disappears unceremoniously from the later films after being recast in the next film.

Kirk and Spock in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan

However, Wrath of Khan, like The Motion Picture, is again thematically concerned with the past returning to wreak havoc in the present. This time it’s Ricardo Montalban’s titular Khan who returns from his first appearance in 1967’s “Space Seed” episode of The Original Series. In that episode he was revealed to be a genetically modified warlord from the late twentieth century and was eventually exiled to a remote, deserted planet with his followers. In Wrath of Khan, he finds out about the Genesis technology Starfleet is developing to terraform planets and wants to use it to wipe out Earth as vengeance for his treatment. Montalban’s performance as a man over 200 years old yet genetically modified to remain in the prime of his life enables him to play both the wizened old man and the vivacious action villain at once. The character’s presence at three periods of Star Trek’s history, including its pre-history involving Eugenics Wars, also imparts onto him the quality of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’s Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) who similarly sees three different wartimes in the three acts of that film. What Colonel Blimp achieves with makeup to age Candy Star Trekachieves first with drawings that captured the youthfulness of the Khan character in the late twentieth century, then with Montalban’s two performances separated by 15 years in both real time and story time. Like Colonel Blimp, Khan’s presence here enables the film’s writers (Nicholas Meyer, Harve Bennett, and Jack B. Sowards), director (Meyer), and actors to craft a story about past injustices coming back to haunt people who were trying to do the right thing in a tough situation and to reflect on the changing nature of war. Though Star Trek has always had a semi-utopian impulse, its stories still need conflict and drama and its universe can plausibly contain a villain like Khan, particularly when it casts that villain as a remnant of an earlier, more violent time. By bringing Khan back again and giving him a mission to exact revenge on Kirk and Star Fleet, the Star Trek franchise asserts that the stories contained in the Original Series’ episodes were not as self-contained as they seemed, that what happened in the past has consequences for the present and that the end of an episode isn’t the end of a story.

As the film series continued, the actors from the original crew continued to stick around and age along with their characters. The last film to feature all of the crew was 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a Cold War allegory about what might happen when the Berlin Wall fell and the people living on either side were unwilling to give up their long-simmering resentment of each other and a movie about whether the old crew of the Enterprise is outmoded in this new galactic configuration. By the time the film came out much of the cast was nearing or over 60 years old and feeling distinctly out of place in a film landscape dominated by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise. In this way, the franchise’s continued repetition and replication across media enabled something somewhat unique as it gave a cast full of near-geriatrics a long lasting and successful action sci-fi career. Children who were enamored of Kirk and Spock on TV in the late 60s could bring their kids to see the final adventures of the crew nearly three decades later. Of course, this wasn’t the end of Star Trek, as three of this crew returned in the next movie to hand-off the franchise officially to the crew of The Next Generation in Star Trek Generations, a film that featured Kirk’s onscreen death. And Nimoy eventually reprised the role of Spock in the 2009 reboot/elegiac sequel thanks to some tricky plot maneuvering involving alternate dimensions allowing the original Spock to meet and mentor Zachary Quinto’s rebooted, much younger version of the character. Star Trek predates the franchise model that came to account for a large number of Hollywood productions and its initial steps outside the original series were proto-elegiac sequel films that paved the path for older stars to return to famous characters and filmmakers to revive (semi)dormant intellectual properties in an attempt to retain original fans and make new ones.

Heather Langenkamp plays herself in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

As the Star Trek movies continued throughout the 80s, another pair of franchises were started and rapidly expanded within a decade to have half a dozen entries each: Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street. These two supernatural slasher franchises fed on a similar formula of introducing a new crop of teenaged victims in each film to be soon chopped up, impaled, and otherwise dispatched by Michael Myers (various actors) or Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). While the Nightmare films were able to keep things relatively fresh given Krueger’s dream powers granting filmmakers involved in the franchise opportunities to change things up with some regularity, the Halloween films soon had to take absurd narrative turns involving druids and cults to keep that franchise running. Eventually, however, both franchises ran out of steam and by the middle of the 1990s the two franchises were looking for another shot of reinvigorating creativity. 1994 saw the release of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, a movie that brings back writer/director Wes Craven and actor Heather Langenkamp to play themselves in a meta-story about Freddy haunting the cast of the original film into making a new film where he’d be scary again instead of silly. Similarly, in 1998 Jamie Lee Curtis returned to the Halloween franchise for the first time since Halloween II in a film that ignored all of the films that she wasn’t in, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later.

Image from Halloween (2018)

With film franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Rocky, Blade Runner, Top Gun, Halloween, and many others employing the storytelling strategy of a long-deferred sequel in the past 15 years, it is an appropriate time to start asking questions about how such deferrals change the nature of the much-studied concept of the film sequel: what ties these films together across multiple generations of filmgoers? What industrial and cultural conditions influence their production and call them into existence? Given the changes in film production and exhibition that separates the early films from their deferred sequels, how might we theorize reception for these serial texts? Film writer Matt Singer coined the term “legacyquels” for these films, based on their reliance upon the popularity and continued cultural relevance of the original films. However, that name does not capture the full range of effects of these films.

Laura Mulvey wrote of film’s malleability on video as creating “a dialectical relation between the old and the new, breaking down the separation from the past from which nostalgia is derived. But at the same time, it is elegiac: there is no escape from passing time and death itself.”[i] Mulvey’s astute observations about the way viewers who can pause, rewind, and fast-forward through a film when watching it at home provides insight into the ways that these delayed sequels operate in new mediums and new generations. Borrowing from Mulvey, I call these films elegiac sequels, given their existence as reminders that there is “no escape from passing time and death itself” as evidenced in their main features: (1) a delayed appearance of at least 10 years, and (2) the return of at least one actor from the original film(s). These features combine to put evidence of the passage of time on screen in the older bodies and often in-film deaths of the original actors/characters. As franchise-building exercises, elegiac sequels fare better than reboots and remakes because they affirm the importance, canonicity, and emotions that have been accreted around the original films as time has passed. Additionally, the elegiac sequel provides the occasion for the reevaluation of the cultural impact of the original film, opening up new conversations about cultural impact, casting, and celebrity.

Lucy and Andy and their son Marlon in Twin Peaks: The Return

         I see the elegiac sequel as a storytelling strategy that allows for a wide variety of film and television discourses to be brought together in novel and valuable combinations because of its unique construction, outcomes, and effects. Though I primarily think of the elegiac sequel as a function of blockbuster filmmaking given the prominence of those kinds of films in the flashpoint year of 2008 and their prominence in many large franchises, the elegiac sequel is a mobile phenomenon that can appear within indie filmmaking (the Before trilogy) and television from prestige examples like Twin Peaks: The Return to commercial streaming content like Fuller House as easily as it does within the Star Wars franchise. As such, they allow for a study of what remains consistent between these varied filmed media including the general format of elegiac sequel stories and the importance of actors/characters in the digital age, as well as what changes between them including various expressions of seriality, aesthetic differences, and paradigms of audience/fan response. My primary lens used throughout this text will be a rhetorical one, informed by the work of James Phelan and Gilberto Perez, the latter of whom suggests that “whereas poetics looks at the work and its construction, and the study of reception looks at the audience and its response, rhetoric looks at the way construction elicits response and the way the work works on the audience.”[ii] This rhetorical lens allows, as Perez states, for an investigation of the elegiac sequel not only from the angle of construction, which for me will encompass industrial and artistic influences and outcomes, but also reception, which, given the elegiac sequel’s revivification of (varyingly) dormant franchises with prior and lasting fan attachments, will lend itself to a study of the various audiences the elegiac sequel addresses on different levels of discourse and with occasionally disparate results. The rhetorical lens will also enable a broader umbrella under which I will pull together the various disciplines from which I will borrow, including star studies, genre studies, new media theories, and fan studies. Finally, the rhetorical lens will aid in my political motives for investigating the elegiac sequel, as I put to the test Mulvey’s theory that the juxtaposition between the old and new breaks down nostalgia rather than reifies it. Does the elegiac sequel’s ability to revisit and revise ideas, themes, and representations contained within the original text while crafting new stories give it political relevance or are the studios and filmmakers behind elegiac sequels hesitant to go beyond aesthetic changes in representation? Are they making nostalgia’s inherent conservatism available for revision and reimagination by new generations of audiences, or are they reinscribing it and making its grasp more difficult to escape?

The elegiac sequel is one in a long line of what Frank Kelleter and Kathleen Loock call an “auto-adaptive, evolutionary structure” within the “evolving cinematic formatting process” of cinematic remaking, one which they see as “a practice that generates media-specific modes of variation and organizes them into historically variable categories such as, currently, the ‘remake’, the ‘sequel’, the ‘spin-off’, the ‘revision’, the ‘spoof’, the ‘re-imagining’, the ‘prequel’, the ‘franchise’, and – most recently – the ‘reboot’.”[iii] As a narrative structure, the elegiac sequel combines tendencies of the remake, the sequel, the revision, the franchise, and the reboot as it adapts and evolves within the modern media environment. This is all part of the process of near-constant creative and industrial churn produced within Hollywood. Barry Langford suggests that, “Above and beyond any defined or definable set of stylistic parameters or industrial practices, this ongoing reinvention may be the most classical of all Hollywood’s enduring traditions.”[iv] And, as David Bordwell writes, “Crucial practices of storytelling persisted, despite the demise of the studio system, the emergence of conglomerate control, and new methods of marketing and distribution.”[v] As such, the elegiac sequel tends to follow a certain formula after meeting the criteria that enable its existence, similar to any other blockbuster film which must first fulfill some criteria of marketability and adaptability to other revenue streams. The most important criteria for the elegiac sequel is that there must be some lasting cultural impact that the original film or films had and upon which the new elegiac sequel can capitalize. In order to ensure that the franchise does meet this condition, the elegiac sequel must come at least 10 years after the original film franchise’s latest entry to ensure that enough time has passed and the original’s popularity has maintained a certain level. Finally, in order to ensure that there is a sense of continuity between the original and elegiac sequel, there must be at least one returning actor whose aged visage will do the bulk of the affective labor in portraying the loss of time and, potentially, inspire grief at the ultimate fate of the beloved character they play. Once these conditions are met, the formula can play out with various results.

Celine almost touches Jesse in Before Sunset

         The formula for an elegiac sequel sees audiences introduced to the new cast of characters and, frequently, an action scene or opening kill (in a horror film) before they are reintroduced to the returning character(s). The way that the plot plays out is highly dependent upon the genre in which the elegiac sequel and its antecedents appear. The neo-noir detective story of Blade Runner is repeated with a difference in its elegiac sequel, Blade Runner 2049, just as the wandering through a city on a first date indie movie “plot” of Before Sunrise is repeated nearly a decade later in Before Sunset for a second date. As the genre plot is set into motion, one of the new characters is usually revealed to be a child or grandchild of the returning character. Not only does this familial connection make the relationship between the new and returning characters easy to understand as they slot into traditional familial roles, but it also allows for the very reflections on the passage of time and eventual death, real or metaphorical, of the returning character that enables the new characters to take over both in the franchise in and the hearts of the new fans attracted by their presence. This emphasis on the bloodline also opens an opportunity for the filmmakers to either embrace or critique the inherent conservatism of following genealogies of celebrity and power. The middle of the film is then filled with exploits both exciting and poignant as the returning character, like Stallone’s Rocky or Ford’s Han Solo slowly comes to recognize some of themselves in the new characters (Jordan’s Creed or Ridley’s Rey) while reminding them that they are still the ones with all the knowledge and the charisma that once made them a star in the same kind of situation. These middle scenes, when executed well, are the engines that drive the elegiac sequel as a vehicle for both aging and newly arrived stars. If the newbies can match the old star’s ability to charm an audience and carry a film, there’s a great chance that it will launch their career into greater renown. If the aging star can remind us that behind the wrinkles and grey hair remains the same incandescent core that made them into indelible characters and movie stars in the first place, they can make the audience think about the value of the movie star as an aspirational figure, as an enduring and still entertaining performer who carries with them the weight of all of their previous performances but can still delight and surprise just as they did at the start of their careers. Time may pass, these scenes suggest, but it doesn’t entirely destroy, it only changes and provides opportunities for new experiences. As the Log Lady from Twin Peaks: The Return says towards the end of her final scene (filmed days before the actor, Catherine E. Coulson died in real life from cancer and two years before it aired within the show), “You know about death; that it’s just a change, not an end.” Unfortunately, one of those changes is indeed death, and so whether it is a metaphorical death, a health scare, or the real death of the character (and sometimes, tragically, the actor), the climax of the film often ends with the death of a returning character or characters in order to give audiences closure on that character before the new characters fully take over. In Hollywood, death is the only way out of the franchise.

         The formula for elegiac sequels is open enough to allow for a wide variation in tone and effect. They can be triumphant, as in the dual victories of Adonis Creed and Rocky over their boxing opponent and cancer, respectively. They can be foreboding, as in the Halloween elegiac sequel confusingly just named Halloween in which Michael Myers seems to be defeated by the trio of Strode women who survived the events of the film but whose signature heavy breathing over the end credits signals his undying return. They can even be upsetting, as in the case of Blade Runner 2049 which sees its hero discover after 2.5 hours of mystery that he is not special or even the center of his own story but rather a side character whose investigation ends in the reunion Deckard and his special daughter. Or they can be mixed, as the Star Wars sequel trilogy attempted with the deaths of the three signature returning characters (in order: Han, Luke, and Leia) across the three planned films that are mixed in with narrow victories over the ultimate evil (also a returning character in the form of Emperor Palpatine).

K walks through an irradiated Las Vegas in Blade Runner 2049

Elegiac sequels can also have varied effects within the culture they come from. It is not a mistake that the elegiac sequel tends not to have white male characters as the primary new character, as studios respond (ever so slowly) to criticisms that their blockbusters were too focused on white male leads. With the metaphorical or actual death of the original characters and the prominence of the new, more diverse cast of characters introduced to replace them, Hollywood studios and creatives can point at their representational politics and say that they’ve fixed past mistakes. Whether those new representations are actually beneficial of course varies from example to example, though the tendency is towards surface-level representation without much appreciation for how the new characters’ non-white-male-ness might influence the story being told (the terrible fumbling of Finn’s arc in the Star Wars sequels are perhaps the best example of this kind of failure). Though the surface level representational politics might have been brought up to the standards of modern culture in these elegiac sequels, there is still a question of whether or not that representation is meaningful without a deeper revision of the themes and politics of the franchise.

[i] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006, 194.

[ii] Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, IXX.

[iii] Kelleter, Frank and Kathleen Loock, “Hollywood Remaking as Second-Order Serialization.” Remake/Remodel: Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions, Kathleen Loock, and Constantine Verevis, eds.. E-Book. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 130.

[iv] Langford, Barry. Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style, and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 282-3.

[v] Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. E-Book. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006, 17.

Image from Avengers: Endgame (2019)

In 2021, at the writing of this chapter, the world of visual media is in a state of flux more tumultuous than it has been in decades. The introduction of streaming services has upended several industries, the coronavirus pandemic has brought the lurking danger of the end of cinemagoing as we know it to a head, and media critics everywhere are casting about for people and phenomena to blame for the massive changes that the filmmaking industry is undergoing. Among the chief causes to blame for the downfall of one of the few remaining mass culture enterprises, Hollywood filmmaking, is the sequel. In a piece for The Guardian in 2019, seemingly prompted by the popularity of Marvel’s capstone for the previous decade’s worth of films, Avengers: Endgame, David Cox writes that when films get a sequel and that sequel gets a sequel, “Creative exhaustion inevitably threatens.”[i] Cox’s article is indicative of a larger sentiment among moviegoers and media critics alike, specifically that sequels stand as the nadir of Hollywood’s drive towards making money above creative output. “Inevitably,” Cox writes, “the sequels juggernaut is throttling fresh ideas, the lifeblood of any creative activity. It may be offering the movies a short-term fix by imperiling their long-term health.”[ii] It is a foregone conclusion, in Cox’s formulation, that sequels absolutely will lead to the self-inflicted and intimate death of Hollywood as an industry, a kind of autoerotic asphyxiation accident writ large. Cox imagines a mythical “past” when “each excursion to the cinema unveiled a new world of characters, situations, stories, sets, locations, and ways of seeing.”[iii] This past doesn’t and never did exist, as sequels and serials were integral to the growth of Hollywood as an industry. Whether it was the weekly entries in long running series like The Perils of Pauline or Flash Gordon, or the later heavily sequelized franchises like The Thin Man or Universal monster movies or, as Kristin Thompson notes, the Danish crime drama sequel Dr. Gar el Hama flugt from 1912[iv], the serial has existed throughout film history. And yet, Cox can’t help but pathologize the drive towards sequels as a “chance to retreat into thought bunkers with those of like mind, and cut ourselves off from unsettling ideas.”[v] The sequel, in his conception, is a wholly safe and unchallenging place in which the “comfort[s] of repetition” recall the “consoling” nature of children being told “the same bedtime story every night.”[vi] Not content with the self-harm metaphor for Hollywood, now it becomes the infantilizing force in popular culture, ensuring that audiences remain emotionally and mentally stunted as they delight in the same pleasures over and over again. Cox ends his article by suggesting that “Maybe … it is time for filmgoers to grow up,” but it is Cox’s easy ideas about the nature of film and sequels, audiences and the industry, that need to be interrogated more thoroughly. Cox isn’t alone in his dismissal of the sequel as toxic and damaging to the industry from which they come, cries of “franchise fatigue”[vii] damaging box office numbers and audience enjoyment have been commonplace for years.

Posters for the three original Star Wars films

         If the discourse around sequels as an instance of franchised production is largely of fatigue, why and how do they continue to be successful in terms of box office performance and audience approval? The sequel, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century Hollywood context that this study is primarily interested in, comes most often from a desire to create or expand upon a franchised intellectual property. However, franchised production, like Hollywood production in the post-classical era according to Barry Langford[viii], is not as stable as it seems. To explain how franchises come into existence Derek Johnson points toward “the shared exchange of content resources across multiple industrial sites and contexts of production operating in collaborative but contested ways through networked relation to one another (frequently across boundaries of media platform, production community, and geography).”[ix] This is perhaps most easily seen in the attempts to cohere the Star Wars franchise through careful management by Lucasfilm (under Disney) which still produces conflicting levels of canonicity[x] and artistic creation[xi], not to mention the destruction of the previous Extended Universe canon novels, games, and other media. Johnson goes on to suggest that “The products and content offered by media franchising, therefore, might be considered less in terms of unified brands and singular corporate interests, but instead as contested grounds of collaborative creativity where networked stakeholders have negotiated the ongoing generation, exchange, and use of shared cultural resources.”[xii] Johnson is quick to point out that this notion of “collaborative creativity” that franchises sprout from is not intended to celebrate the franchise as a site for unbounded creativity and invention, “but instead as a site where the autonomy and freedom of individuals laboring within media institutions might be imagined, organized, and contested.”[xiii] If the franchise is, as part of Hollywood’s overall production strategy, constantly being reinvented as different media laborers bring their ideas for how their piece of the franchise can best work within the structures of the economic deals and boundaries they are operating under, the permutations that result from successful and repeated franchise formulae tell important stories about the historical and industrial situations in which they appear.

         Much has been made of the way movie studios becoming small parts of larger conglomerates lead to the development of the franchising strategies of the 1980s and beyond[xiv], but there has been decidedly less theorizing exactly how that happened. In this chapter, I bring together theories of serialized storytelling and industrial theories of shifting production and exhibition processes in response to changing consumption trends within Hollywood film and television production to explain how one particular version of serialized franchise production became popular across visual media starting in 2008. The elegiac sequel, as I call them, is not a new phenomenon but has newly become one of two (along with the cinematic universe as seen in the Marvel and Conjuring franchises) dominant modes of franchised production in the past two decades. Here I will first explain what an elegiac sequel is before looking at examples of the elegiac sequel that were made throughout film history but which did not lead to such an explosion of them as we can see starting in 2008. Following that brief history, I will look at the industrial pressures that explain why the elegiac sequel became such a popular format for reviving and continuing franchises in the early twenty-first century.

[i] Cox, David. “Nearing the Endgame: Is Hollywood’s Lust for Sequels Destroying Cinema?” The Guardian, May 16, 2019. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/16/hollywood-sequels-cinema-avengers-endgame.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Thompson, Kristin. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. E-Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. https;//hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.08180.

[v] Cox, David.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Brew, Simon. “Franchise Fatigue: Why Big Movie Sequels Are Underperforming at the Box Office (Even the Good Ones).” The Independent, July 7, 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/franchise-fatigue-blockbuster-sequels-hollywood-obsession-marvel-universal-warner-bros-despicable-me-3-mummy-a7829546.html.

[viii] “Above and beyond any defined or definable set of stylistic parameters or industrial practices, this ongoing reinvention may be the most classical of all Hollywood’s enduring traditions.” Langford, Barry. Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style, and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 283.

[ix] Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. E-Book. Postmillennial Pop. New York City: New York University Press, 2013, 7.

[x] See the Lego Star Wars games and holiday specials that bend if not break canonicity

[xi] See the storytelling struggle between the two directors of the Sequel Trilogy films as they went back and forth over what to do with plot elements such as Rey’s parentage

[xii] Ibid., 7

[xiii] Ibid., 14

[xiv] See Langford, Johnson, Thompson, Hall and Neale,