- Title
- Finding balance: Nostalgia in Star Wars transmedia
- Creator
- Kinder, Elizabeth
- Relation
- Australasian Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 9, Issue 2, p. 195-213
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00027_1
- Publisher
- Intellect
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Nostalgia is a necessary element of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008–20) and the ‘new’ Star Wars comics (Marvel, 2015–19), recent serial narratives in the ever-expanding transmedia Star Wars universe. The anticipation (and consequential reception) of these works is, in part, driven by nostalgia: the original Star Wars film, A New Hope, was released in 1977 and as the series has expanded in the decades since, in film and other media, nostalgia has become ingrained within the fandom as audiences are invited to repeatedly return to ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away’. As a result of decades of content, there is a sense of ‘owner-ship’ amongst the fandom and, at times, a resistance to new content that attempts to ‘weaponize’ nostalgia as a marketing tool, such as in the ‘Sequel Trilogy’ (2015, 2017, 2019). The Clone Wars, first mentioned in A New Hope, is set between two Star Wars (Prequel) films that feature key events in the overall saga, while the Star Wars comics take place between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The Clone Wars and the Star Wars comics succeed where the sequels (and prequels) arguably do not because they use nostalgia to serialize and capitalize on transmedia, allowing the audience to revisit characters and narrative events that have already been established for decades. Both works allow for character and narrative development between two fixed (cinematic) points in the story canon, with the spaces in between and around those points that frame their place in the Star Wars universe allowing for rich exploration.
- Subject
- Star Wars; comics; narrative; nostalgia; serialization; transmedia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1454391
- Identifier
- uon:44924
- Identifier
- ISSN:2045-5852
- Language
- eng
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