Okay, I realize it’s dumb to get annoyed by articles in entertainment magazines, but I do write for The Screengrab...and isn’t public venting what the InterTubes are all about? So allow me to respond to Jeff Jensen’s defense of George Lucas and The Clone Wars in the current issue of the usually somewhat less annoying Entertainment Weekly (which at least had the good sense to give the feature-length animated infomercial in question an F). Bemoaning the aforementioned F, the poor box office showing of The Clone Wars and general fanboy discontent with Lucas, columnist Jensen writes, “Missing from the overheated bashing of The Clone Wars was the crucial point that it was made for kids, not the grown-ups for whom the original trilogy remains (ridiculously) sacred.”
Um...okay. Because Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were edgy Scandinavian Dogme 95 films made for grad students and aging Cannes jurists, right? That same "for kids!" argument has been used to defend The Phantom Menace, the Elmo-fication of Sesame Street and the general dumbing down of family entertainment from the time I actually was a kid ‘til now: hey, chill out, Grandpa...it’s okay if insert TV show or movie here is shallow, poorly written and generally dimwitted. It’s for kids!
Now, it’s not that everything I watched as a child of the ‘70s was primo high quality Art. I though Welcome Back Kotter was the height of urbane, sophisticated wit in my formative years, and was shocked to discover how incredibly crappy the program seemed when I caught a stray episode a few years back.
But Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back hold up (and, okay, we can argue later about Return of the Jedi). I may not be as goofy-nerdy-crazy about them now as I was in my pre-pubescent geekery, but I can still appreciate the craftsmanship that hooked me as a child. Yet more important than sheer craftsmanship is the lack of condescension in those earlier films. Lucas took his storytelling seriously then: much of his audience may have been youthful, but he didn’t treat us like kids. He took his goofy, made-up characters and the goofy, made-up world they lived in as seriously as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling all took theirs, without mugging for his young audience like a birthday party clown.
In The Clone Wars, a character refers to Jabba the Hutt’s son as “Stinky.” That’s not dumb because I’m an adult. It’s just dumb. It breaks the fourth wall. It breaks the reality of the storytelling universe, because it’s a cheap, easy, “hip” reference from our world, not the fictional world of the story. And even kids who may like that schtick today (a small number, judging by the film’s box office results) will realize it’s dumb when they get a little older. Nobody has to defend the Harry Potter-verse by reminding adults that, hey, it’s for kids! Adults like Harry Potter DESPITE the fact it’s made for kids...they like it because it’s good.
Later in his article, Jensen informs us that, in addition to thinking aging hipsters (and, I guess, kids) shouldn’t expect quality from kid stuff, we should also realize “Star Wars is a stream of content – books, comic books, toys, micro-cartoons, videogames, DVDs, and, soon, a TV series. This new generation sees no distinction between movies and their merchandise, and that’s just fine with them.”
Which means today’s kids must be dumb as a sack of hammers, except Jensen then goes on to elucidate that today’s biggest movie franchise (Harry Potter) is a “literary franchise [accessory].” Which, as far as I can tell, has no meaning whatsoever nor relation to all the kids out there who actually CAN tell the difference between a certain work of art that moved their souls and, say, a Harry Potter toothbrush from Wal-Mart. “The Clone Wars will not be remembered as a great animated movie,” Jensen concludes, “or an awful one, for that matter. But it might be remembered as part of a larger pop moment that is wiring the future of entertainment.”
On behalf of all the old fogies AND the youngsters of America, I hope to God he’s wrong.
Related Stories: Star Bores: Five Reasons to Skip The Clone Wars, George Lucas and the License to Print Money
