Marketing Genius, Episode II: The Camblr Strikes Back
Alright, pile of people that came by during my 15 minutes of Daring FireFame. If you’re still swinging by, thanks! This is the inevitable separate followup to my original post (because the Default Tumblr Layout is too narrow and that post was getting far too tall.)
First things first
Let’s you and me get something straight, dear readers suggesting I missed second-tier characters like Salacious Crumb or Bossk. Hold up. Keep that train in the station, sirs. Literally everything in the Trilogy with a face or an engine has a name and home planet, but the primary intrigue of the list is not utter comprehensiveness — it’s just to illustrate how many “household” Star Wars terms were seeded not by the films themselves, but by the film’s marketing machine.
Anyway. Here are some things I learned due to this little project.
“Used” universe, “used” language
I don’t have to explain the “used” universe to you — it’s central to the feel of Star Wars. Doors in Mos Eisley have sophisticated touch-panels set into the dirt wall. Y-wings look like they’ve had their outer shell stripped off (and were purposely designed as such by Lucas’ team), revealing crazy circuits and wiring. The pilots’ chairs in the Millennium Falcon are scuffed and worn. The universe feels real — but more than that, it feels taken for granted by the characters. Han Solo slouches into his chair like he’s done the motion a thousand times. Luke’s landspeeder has a lousy paintjob and a dirty windshield.
Until this project, I had never extended that idea to also encompass the actual lines spoken by the film’s characters. However, it remains true: the characters take their entire universe in stride — technology, biology, and terminology.
To these characters, all of their dirty old world, while anachronistic to us, is old hat to them. They don’t blink at giant starships, garbled alien language, or even a 7-foot-tall walking carpet.
Star Wars: respecting the viewer
The leanness of the script leaves very little room for audience-directed expository dialogue. The word “X-Wing” is only spoken when an officer must notify Darth Vader what type of ship is landing in Cloud City. The word “lightsaber” is only used once in A New Hope, by Obi-Wan, to tell Luke what it is he’s holding. And heck, of course the word “Ewok” is never spoken — how would Leia know they were called Ewoks, when the Ewoks themselves could only talk in vowely gibberish?
I now consider this to be an underappreciated stroke of genius: the characters in Star Wars are written to be familiar with their environment, just as their environment is designed to be familiar with them. Neither the environment nor the dialogue is compromised to cater to the audience.
The English alphabet isn’t used anywhere, for heaven’s sake [well, almost: a reader contributed this notable exception]. A lesser movie would have written “X-Wing” on the side of Luke’s fighter’s fuselage.
Poor Lando
It’s worth noting that this leanness, like many other things, diffuses somewhat in Return of the Jedi. Other than the notable “Ewok” omission that started this whole mess, a few other terms are spoken for the first time in Jedi. By a slight but amusing margin, the worst offender is good old Lando Calrissian:
- “I wonder what those Star Destroyers are waiting for.”
- “That blast came from the Death Star! That thing’s operational!”
- “See if you can get a few of those TIE fighters to follow you!”
Even though the term “Star Destroyer” is used throughout Empire, all 3 of those lines are uttered by Lando in fairly quick succession. Contrast this to the more realistic “I’ve got him, Red Leader” comm chatter in A New Hope, and the difference really stands out. You can almost hear the ™s echoing in afterward … “That blast came from the Death Star™!”
And you never even noticed.
I’ve always unconsciously categorized Star Wars differently than any other film. Back in the day when I’d list my top movies on my MySpace profile, I’d always forget to put in Star Wars. Something about how the movie is put together is so non-standard, so nontraditional in such subtle ways — if you’ve read this far, you’re nodding.
So I’ll leave you with this: you do realize that Star Wars lists no actor’s names until after the movie is over, right?
If not, think about it. Just more quiet genius at work.
