The Star Wars franchise could learn a major lesson from Mobile Suit Gundam

Star Wars is producing new and profitable material, yet it seems that the Star Wars franchise continues to struggle. Disney has consistently been able to provide a steady stream of new material and merchandising over the last five years. Announced plansPlease see the following: The latest moviesThen, These were abruptly canceledOr just keep them Still, silently backburnered. Disney Plus’ recent Star Wars TV shows keep New directions promiseIf you are interested in the franchise, Pulling backAnd Combining messages. Star Wars fans are still passionate about the series. Video games, Novels, ComicsAnd Animations, but the fandom is splintered, and there’s no clear vision or coherent narrative direction to the franchise as a whole. Everyone seems to desire something new from Star Wars.

So Polygon is gathering some thoughts about the franchise’s future under the loose banner of What We Want From Star Wars. These opinion essays lay out what we love about the Star Wars universe, and where we hope it’ll go in the future … or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

The current, odd, stagnant-yet-successful state of Star Wars seems like a needle that’s been threaded by another huge science-fiction franchise nearly as old. Not to imply that the neat solution to a thorny mega-franchise problem is simply “anime,” but Star Wars could learn from how Gundam has navigated the same growing pains. The giant-robot empire spawned by Yoshiyuki Tomino’s landmark 1979 anime Mobile Suit GundamThe culture has evolved to be a complicated, multifaceted cultural force that began in a small way, went through periods of dormancy and then grew. Star Wars could learn from Gundam. Here’s a hint: a lot more than just giant robots.

Image: Sunrise Inc.

One of the quirks of the Gundam franchise is that its “core” timeline, dubbed the Universal Century, is largely centered around a yearlong war. The One Year War is, as viewers repeatedly hear, the most terrible war mankind ever waged. It saw incalculable deaths just as an arms race reached its peak. Waged across Earth and various colonies in giant space stations, it’s a war so bad that war itself changes, as the mobile suit — massive humanoid machines operated by pilots, some of them shockingly young — becomes the signature weapon of the conflict. Mobile suits in this franchise are terrifying, but they’re also iconic, like X-Wings or TIE Fighters.

Gundam animation, manga, and movies are all based on this war. Mobile Suit GundamThe first series of television, “The Original Series”, is set in the last months of war. It chronicles how Amuro Ray (a boy) stumbles into a new mobile suit that allows him to pilot it. He helps Earth Federation turn the tide and defeat their aggressors, which are the fascist-leaning principality of Zeon. The series that followed were like Zeta GundamThese films, set after the conflict and portray its continuing fallout. Other examples include Mobile Suit Gundam – The 08th MS TeamYou can also call it: Mobile Suit Gundam: War in the Pocket, tell parallel stories set during this One Year War, taking advantage of the original series’ established sprawling scope and scale to tell all manner of stories. This is the closest Star Wars analog to it. The Clone WarsIt told many stories that spanned the title conflict while simultaneously rehabilitating Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Things could go wilder. A big chunk of Gundam stories don’t even bother with the Universal Century and its central war at all. Others create other universes that suit Gundam stories. There’s the soapier boy-band spin of Gundam WingThe grim tale of resistance Iron-Blooded OrphansOr the stupid robot fighting tournament in the middle of Mobile Fighter G Gundam. The unifying theme is nearly all iconography: the giant robots and young pilots who control them. And the thrill-seeking fans.

Image: Disney

Star Wars is unable to give a complete view of this galaxy, beyond its initial trilogy. Skywalkers Rise seemingly closed the book on the future of the Star Wars universe, and all current and upcoming stories take place before Tatooine’s twin suns set on that film one last time. Star Wars today is mostly driven by trepidation. Mandalorian, Boba Fett: The Book of Boba Fett, Bad BatchAnd Obi-Wan largely take place in the margins of stories we’ve seen before, never straying so far from the orbit of Luke Skywalker that he couldn’t appear in some form, whether as a child or as a Jedi Knight.

So if the stewards of Star Wars can’t find it within themselves to stretch further than what we’ve seen before, why not lean into the dedication to midquels and go deeper than they have before? The war in Star Wars’ original trilogy — what the current canon dubs “The Age of Rebellion” — could be Star Wars’ One Year War, a conflict that defines or lurks in the background of every story. Star Wars’ era that has been widely regarded as the greatest could allow creators to go bolder in the other parts of their story. This will give us the variety we need, if Disney decides to continue its current rate with Star Wars media.

Star Wars would be more open to telling micro stories and embracing variety, rather than its repetitive monotonous tone. Instead of yet another grim crime drama set on Tatooine, it’d be much more fun to look forward to, say, an original-trilogy-era sitcom about a shop This fixes defective droids, or a medical drama where a hospital staffed by Rebel sympathizers routinely has to perform first aid for Stormtroopers.

Image: Lucasfilm Ltd./Disney Plus

But future Star Wars doesn’t have to be that It is zealous about its commitment to the original trilogy or to the established canon. Star Wars is still able to play loose, just like Gundam. The short anime animations Star Wars: Visions are a good start — they aren’t canon, and fans have done a perfectly good job of parsing the difference between the new media canon and the “Legends” of the old Expanded Universe. Why not expand on the Legends?

The ultimate goal of Star Wars is to create new Star Wars flavors that are relevant to our times, not the nostalgic feelings of 1977 when a few people first saw it. That attempt to prioritize nostalgia, re-creating the past rather than telling a new story, is already a goal one degree removed from what all art — even art this openly commercial — strives to accomplish.

Gundam: Miniseries War in the PocketThis is an excellent illustration of the potential benefits Star Wars might gain from branching out. War in the PocketThis is the story of a young boy who sees footage from war and enjoys the images of huge robots fighting in the midst of skyscrapers. He even has toy mobile suits to play with, which feels strange until you remember that in America, we’ve made toy soldiers for boys almost as long as we’ve been fighting wars. The stunning weapons of mass destruction have dazzled him. War in the Pocket’s protagonist has grown up without any perspective on the war he thrills to — Gundam models are just cool toys to him. Even the toys that are made by the evil guys.

War in the Pocket accomplishes a lot of wrenching things across its brief run, but most memorably, it’s a story that re-asserts perspective, much like a popular Gundam meme. The power of the sword is both seductive and enticing to its users as well. When we say that someone who just tunes into these franchises to see cool robots or lightsabers “missed the point” of those iconic weapons, it’s because we fail — or refuse — to bring an empathetic, humane perspective to them, as War in the Pocket does. It’s impossible to create art that no one will take in bad faith or misinterpret, but the argument for telling stories in a long-running franchise is that it allows a conversation to take place across generations and audiences, for the fans to take ownership and for the art to push back, as different creators take the reins and yield them to others.

While there’s no compelling reason for Star Wars to survive any longer than it has — the Walt Disney Company has enough vectors for its fandom as it is — it remains a pop-cultural lingua franca, one of the few remaining touchstones that crosses generations and demographics. Because of this, it’s worth imagining the ways it could foster better, more well-rounded conversations, more ideas to discuss, ways to wrap the metaphor around our lives as they are lived. The lack of detail is overwhelming right now. It’s just a vector for getting us to pick up toys and stream shows. But there’s plenty of space for it to tell meaningful stories that don’t scratch the main narrative — and plenty of reasons to try.

Previously:

Star Wars has been better without any new films.
Star Wars needs more alien heroes
Star Wars! Please forget about tattooine