Ever since my Grade 4 teacher read The Hobbit to my class back in 1978, I have been a fan of Tolkien. I have lost track of the number of times I have read both The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, and I have read The Silmarillion three times (most recently after many years in preparation for the Amazon Prime series).
For the most part, I have not bothered with the published volumes of rough drafts, nor the more recent rehashing (eg Hurin’s Children) of stories from The Silmarillion, although I did read Unfinished Tales once about 25 years ago.
So I can confidently talk about what is ‘canon’ in the Tolkien universe and what is not, although I would say about those people online who spend a lot of their time explaining why something is or is not so in the various movies to go and get a life.
Obviously I did watch the Amazon Prime series, and was disappointed by the anaemic story line. True, it was hampered in that Amazon only holds the TV rights to The Lord Of The Rings, and that it has not yet been able to acquire the rights to The Silmarillion (and the included story Akalabeth), which actually covers The Fall of Numenor in great detail. Amazon has had to rely on what it does own, which includes the detailed information as backstory in the various appendices to The Lord Of The Rings, as a guide for its series.
All the same, I am quite dismissive of it, particularly in the depictions of Elendil, Isildur, Galadriel, and Elrond, and in the concocted origins of the metal Mithril, to consider The Rings Of Power as mere fan fiction, rather than as even a halfway accurate retelling of Tolkien’s story.
We do get to wonder as whether fan fiction has a valid place in interpreting the work of popular Sci Fi/Fantasy authors and filmmakers.
When it comes to Star Wars, things get a little more complicated, given that in the 48 years since the original movie and the follow up Star Wars Christmas Special came out, comic books and novelisations of related stories in that Galaxy Far Far Away have been ubiquitous since the very start, some of which have long been endorsed and accepted as ‘canon’ by the original creator, George Lucas.
With Disney now owning the intellectual property of Star Wars, the potential for fan fiction to run amok is much greater (an example which does make me grateful that the Tolkien Estate is grimly holding fast to the rights to The Silmarillion).
Star Wars and Disney are a great fit for two major reasons. One is that, like the classic Disney stories, Star Wars does not have any sex in it, and very little if any romance. The closest we get is Princess Leia in a metal bikini in what we now call Episode VI. The other is that, just like Disney, Star Wars makes for great toys and related merchandise. You can grow from wearing a Donald Duck t-shirt to a Darth Vader t-shirt (Donald and Darth do share many similarities when you think about it, which is why I like both characters so much).
So it is not surprising to find Star Wars on Disney+. [It is a better fit than the Kardashians or documentaries about the Jonestown massacre for example.]
The recent Disney driven sequel trilogy had very little of originality to it, and indeed they discarded any of George Lucas’s suggestions in favour of a totally derivative and somewhat woke storyline which focuses on more potent super weapons which need to be blown up in the first and third sequels, along with a desperate escape in the second. Sounds just like the first trilogy really, except for the wokeness and some very loose superfluous storylines.
Now we have various Star Wars series, of varying quality, on offer through streaming. Some, like The Mandalorian, are quite clever and adept at harnessing ‘canonical’ back stories to create the sort of space western which could have come from the fertile imagination of George Lucas. Others, like Ashoka, not so much (although I am as always a big fan of anything featuring Rosario Dawson).
Last night, aside from watching the latest episode of The Acolyte (a prequel stand alone series which does not impress me), I watched a few short cartoon episodes from the other new offering, Tales From The Empire. Very underwhelming.
There were no space witches in the original Star Wars, nor in any of the prequel or sequel movies. Nor was there this sinister blue faced Admiral Thrawn. Using fan fiction to create such new storylines with such supposedly important new villains risks not just confusing the fan base about the ‘canonical’ narrative, but also contaminating the potential for making a decent fourth trilogy in future – something that I strongly suspect Disney and its shareholders would dearly love to attempt.
Lost For Words! 