Star Wars Celebration on YouTube: Where’d You Go? Chicago

It’s Good Friday, and I’m having browser issues. Microsoft put up an alpha version of its Edge browser, and I tried, like a web developer, to surf it before it was finished, and it lasted maybe three days.

Star Wars Celebration went on from April 11 to April 15 in Chicago. The celebration is an army of devotees sharing a love of Star Wars.  This year Star Wars Celebration premiered a teaser for Episode IX, a preview of the Star Wars series The Mandalorian, the cinema for Jedi: Fallen Order, and a trailer for S7 of The Clone Wars. It is all interesting.

Being that this year is 2019 and Lucasfilm put The Phantom Menace, a prequel film to Star Wars, in the cinema in 1999, the twenty-year anniversary of Phantom Menace was observed.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace score

Five days is a long time to spend with Star Wars, but between Thursday and Monday, a viewer watching the events on the Star Wars YouTube channel got to see the panel discussions each day at 12:00 and 4:00 Chicago time. Celebration, which I think is nine years running, moves around the US, but this year they put it on in Chicago. Given the audience’s enthusiasm, it seems like that worked well for them.

Photographer:
donterase

Jedi: Fallen Order is the name of the EA game that is the first new Star Wars game since Battlefront II. EA is a notoriously difficult game company. The decisions EA makes are known to send gamers away.

I suspect Disney needs Episode IX in December to be a sensation if they want their investment in Disney+ to succeed. Disney+ is the streaming service available this fall, in November, when Disney is making available their animated Star Wars features, along with the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, the Star Wars live-action films, and The Mandalorian. Disney+ could rival Netflix, and it is expensive for Disney in the short term, so it is reasonable to think that if Episode IX is a major success, it is an indication Disney+ will also do well.

It is hard to anticipate what Netflix is planning in response to its rival. If there is already talk about what Netflix is going to do, I haven’t caught it.

I believe that Lucasfilm CEO Kathleen Kennedy is leading Lucasfilm for the next ten years, and her decisions to put a lot of roles that are empowering for girls affect her hold on the Star Wars fanbase because a large number of fans have made a backlash owing to the perception that they are “toxic.” The space opera Star Wars has a lot of fans, so the response has been loud about how Star Wars has met its “demise” in the sense that there will never again be a great trilogy. The next trilogy of Star Wars films is going to be directed by Last Jedi director Rian Johnson.

The Last Jedi was the film that divided the fanbase, perhaps deliberately. That said, there was a backlash to the Star Wars Prequels, which subsided, so the same may be true of the problems facing the Star Wars Sequels, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and now Episode IX, concluding the Skywalker Saga. Be that as it may, The Mandalorian, continuing Return of the Jedi, from 1983, looks fantastic. Some of the success of Disney+ is probably going to be affected by whether Episode IX proves to be a record-breaker.

Good luck to Lucasfilm.

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