

It’s pretty obvious that George Lucas, for all his statements to the contrary, does not particularly enjoy watching from the sidelines while other film-makers lead Star Wars into a brave new era. In the wake of The Force Awakens taking the global box office by storm in December 2015, the saga’s creator unwisely quipped to US talk show host Charlie Rose that he had sold his “kids … to the white slavers that take these things” – referring to Disney’s October 2012 purchase of all rights to the long-running space opera – and criticised JJ Abrams’s film as a “retro” effort. It felt like a low blow from a film-maker whose own efforts to reinvent Star Wars, the execrable prequel trilogy, were received with derision by fans and critics alike.

What would Lucas make, one wonders, of the chapter in a new Star Wars novel, Aftermath, which reveals the fate of his most detested creation, bumbling Gungan loon Jar Jar Binks? The in-canon story details Jar Jar’s demotion to the status of a lowly Naboo street performer, destined to pratfall and gurn for a pittance in galactic credits for the rest of his days. The kids love him, reveals author Chuck Wendig, but the grown ups frown and do their best to ignore him, while his fellow Gungans shun their former representative.

At the centre … Daisy Ridley as Rey and John Boyega as Finn, with droid chum BB-8, in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Lucasfilm

The episode is symbolic of just how much Star Wars has changed in the mere five years since Lucas handed over the keys to the Millennium Falcon and a cupboard full of multi-coloured lightsabers to Disney for a mere $4.05bn, most of which, to the film-maker’s great credit, he has promised to donate to charitable endeavours. The long-running space saga has retained the use of non-human comic relief – droids such as BB-8 and K-2SO both slip comfortably into the role of Kurosawan sidekicks once filled by R2-D2 and C-3PO – but there is no longer a deliberate pandering to younger children. The current keepers of the Star Wars flame seem to know instinctively what Lucas forgot: six-year-olds do not buy the movie tickets. And so, much as superhero films have been doing over the past decade, the saga has been shifting towards a degree of sophistication that makes it increasingly unsuitable for younger kids. Don’t expect the Ewoks to show up in Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, or for that matter in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Han Solo spin-off, unless for an Easter egg-style cameo in line with the brief appearance of Ponda Baba, aka Walrus Man (and numerous others) in Rogue One.

Star Wars’ increasing maturity also manifests in the diversity of Disney-era cast lists. The space opera series was never an exclusively Anglo-Saxon vision of life among the stars, as illustrated by the casting of Samuel L Jackson, Jimmy Smits, James Earl Jones and Billy Dee Williams in the Lucas-era movies, but Rogue One and The Force Awakens have ushered in a more cosmopolitan view of the galaxy. As well as introducing John Boyega’s deserting stormtrooper Finn and the multi-ethnic crew of rebel grunts vying to get those Death Star plans into Princess Leia’s hopeful hands, we’ve witnessed debuts for Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso and Daisy Ridley’s Rey, two women placed right at the centre of their respective stories. Rey may even get to join the rarefied ranks of female Jedi in Episode VIII, if we are to believe new reports linked to the French rendering of the movie’s title. Even the cult figures are as likely to be female as male in the new Star Wars era, with Gwendoline Christie’s Captain Phasma surely in line to get her own spin-off if she ever manages to escape from that garbage chute.



Such has been Star Wars’ shift in dynamics that it is almost impossible to imagine anyone suffering the indignities faced so bravely, and with such fabulously earthy humour, by the late great Carrie Fisher in the 1970s and 80s. The actor and writer loved to tell the story of how Lucas once told her, as a 19-year-old ingenue, that she should not wear a bra on set as such garments did not exist in space. The film-maker later persuaded his star to wear the infamous “slave girl” gold bikini for 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

A report from website The Tracking Board suggesting Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge is to play Star Wars’ first ever female droid in Lord and Miller’s Han Solo movie. Well, almost the first: Lucas, lest we forget, introduced the servile TC-14 for an early scene in The Phantom Menace. A C-3PO lookalike, her job was, perhaps inevitably, to bring Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn their drinks.

In many ways, Lucas’s attitude towards women in space seems to have regressed during the prequels: Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala may not have suffered the discourtesies faced by Fisher as her daughter in the saga, but at least Leia got to fire a blaster or two (not to mention strangling Jabba) in the original trilogy. Despite their similarities in rank, Padmé rarely got involved in the action, but (as Fisher also observed) she did get to change her costume and hairstyle an awful lot.



Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, in 1999. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Stereotyping of characters may not have been all Lucas's fault –he drew ideas from pulp fantasy novels and 1930s comics

The stereotyping of female characters – at least in the original trilogy – may not have been entirely Lucas’s fault. The film-maker drew most of his ideas for the 1970s and 80s movies from pulp fantasy novels and comics of the 1930s, as well as the planetary romance genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, which were filled with beautiful princesses, dashing (male) heroes and exotic aliens. And Star Wars’ creator did occasionally place women and people of colour – Jackson’s Mace Windu in the prequels; Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi – in positions of power. Then again, there appear to be more bug-eyed lobster men than women among the highest ranks of the Rebel Alliance. And although Lucas has repeatedly denied racial stereotyping in depictions of new extraterrestrial creatures – see both Jar Jar and those evil Asian types in the Trade Federation – they appeared tricky to many viewers, so any praise on such grounds must be mooted.

What’s clear is that Star Wars was long overdue an update, one that Lucas appears to have been ill-prepared to carry out. The action may be taking place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Disney’s movies increasingly reflect the rich cultural diversity of 21st-century living on a planet much closer to home.

