Recently, director Matthew Vaughn provided Star Wars fandom with a provocative notion: rebooting Star Wars.
“For me, doing a Star Wars movie is to play with the characters that I loved,” said Vaughn on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast, “If they said to me, do you want to reboot Star Wars and actually have Luke Skywalker, Solo and Vader and do your version of it… That would excite me. Why are the characters so hallowed that from 1977 that you can’t re-do it for a new audience?” In subsequent interviews he asked why one can have many James Bonds and multiple Spider Mans and not a new Luke Skywalker.
It may hearten Vaughn to know that while Luke, Han and Leia themselves haven’t been restarted, their spirits have been many times. Star Wars is in a perpetual state of being ‘redone’ for a new audience. Even though Star Wars is effectively a story that exists on one timeline, it’s been released and re-released over the years with an eye on a new generation of moviegoers, viewers, and readers.
The prequel trilogy, while not a reboot, was made as a new starting point for younger audiences, which is why Anakin Skywalker is found as a child and not a daring pilot in his mid-thirties. It’s meant to be relatable to the youngest possible person whose parents brought them to see the movie and give them, effectively, their own Star Wars.
The introduction of Ahsoka Tano in The Clone Wars was another attempt to create a character through which the uninitiated could experience the Saga through fresh eyes. Ahsoka is someone to grow up with if you were born in the 2000s instead of the late 1970s. I feel recognition and poignancy as Luke Skywalker aged into a begrudging mentor; I imagine the kids who grew up with Ashoka felt similarly watching Ahsoka the series.
Ezra Bridger of Rebels is very much designed as a new Luke. He’s a street kid, not a farm boy, but he’s lonely, Force-sensitive, and looking to the horizon. He finds a Jedi Master, a new family, and goes off to learn the truth of his past and emerge into adulthood. If you’d never heard of Luke Skywalker, but just watched Rebels, you’d get a similar journey of found family and heroism through Ezra.
But the clearest example of a ‘soft reboot’ is the sequel trilogy.