Should we have more children-centric Star Wars live action films?

I think after the treatment of Jake Lloyd, you'd get investigated if you let your kid lead a Star Wars.
And while I'm being snarky about the unfair treatment of Lloyd, it's foolish to think it doesn't weigh in the minds of execs when they plot this stuff out.

Even the little girl who played Morgan Stark in Endgame was on the end of some targeted hate.

It's ridiculous this has to be part of the thought process with large franchises with dedicated fanbases but it is what it is.

I would love a classic 80s style Spielbergian Star Wars. The Star Wars equivalent of ET or Goonies. And I know some people want that harder stuff and something even closer to Gremlins or Poltergeist

 

They kinda did with Ahsoka. We're basically only missing her childhood before the Jedi Order. There's a risk with having a child as your main character. They can only do so much action to make it work for a child. To what is ultimately an action movie first and foremost. So, they would have to take a backseat. So to speak anyway to an older actor/actrees to handle to the action scenes; to at least make it believable.

 

I honestly never thought of it. But after thinking about it for roughly a minute, I don't think a film is a good idea. I think maybe a low-stakes D+ show set in the High Republic or a few generations pre-PT would be fine though. Make it an adventure show about pre-Jedi Padawans and some of the hijinks they get up to as they grow up.

The danger of this format is that it may dumb down the show and make it a kid's show instead of a show for all ages. Star Wars should always aim for the latter, because those types of shows - the ones that treat the audience fairly when talking about issues and not patronizing them - are the ones children remember. Avatar: The Last Airbender is the crowned king of this, but there are other examples too: Static Shock, Rugrats (on occasions), Filmore!, etc. Any show where tough topics can be addressed, they should be. And I can't think of a better franchise to tackle those issues than Star Wars. But they've shown a reticence to do that in their Post-Disney era, frankly. Rebels was decent at this, but Resistance, as much as I like the art-style and location and characters, was far from good. Things are treated like games, and most of it (or in Resistance, all of it) feels so inconsequential.

That leads into my second idea - pull an Avatar: The Last Airbender and put the kids in the middle of a war and have them make their way through that. Instead of time-skip after Order 66, show the journey of a Padawan or Youngling who escaped and is now making it off-world with a few companions around his or her age. Remember the Younglings from The Gathering episodes in TCW? Maybe let them live, and the point of the show is to see their journey to reunite. Or maybe one of them. Or maybe a different Youngling altogether.

 

I think it depends on what your definition of "kid" is. The Lost Stars novel does start out with two characters at maybe 8-10 years old, later focusing on them in their teen years and eventually adult, and it wasn't bad. If it's a youngling movie, however, I would definitely say no. I didn't particularly enjoy the youngling episodes of TCW, though the episodes hit on some pretty cool things. Ahsoka, however, is (correct me if I'm wrong) 17 years at the end of TCW. She's not really a kid anymore, though she's definitely not an adult yet. I do enjoy her character development and arc, and she's older, so there's room for that.
My main problem with a movie set on younglings is the character development. They're really young, so you can't just plop them down in the middle of trauma and battlefields and deep lessons and reaching inside their emotions and such, because that's not something that (most) kids can do. All character development that Ahsoka goes through is pretty deep, especially in season 7 of TCW.

I guess as long as the youngling/kids aren't so young that there's not a lot of room for character development, I think there's potential in the concept

 

Thought I would break this out into another thread. I have seen quite a bit of discussion recently about Lucas and children and Star Wars. Some of the most recent discussion here related to our SW Movie Building game, but other discussions as well.

I think some people are misunderstanding the topic of children and SW related to Lucas.

Lucas wanted to make movies "for children"....NOT "with children in them".

Some of his quotes:

"I wanted to make a kids' film that would strengthen contemporary mythology."

"It’s a film for 12-year-olds. This is what we stand for. You’re about to enter the real world. You’re moving away from your parents. You’re probably scared, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Here’s what you should pay attention to: Friendships, honesty, trust, doing the right thing. Living on the light side, avoiding the dark side."

So anyway....what are everyone's thoughts on this as related to the future of SW? Should future SW always stick to the core Lucas desire to make "films for 12-year-olds", or should future SW be more mature and be targeted to an older audience?

 

I'll repeat what I felt was the main point on the other thread - the goal should be to make material for all ages IMO, not just children, and not just adults. Make something that children can laugh and be delighted by, but doesn't speak down to them. Make something that doesn't make the parents who may be subject to watching these shows want to pull their eyes out. Or better yet, make a show that, when the children grow up to be adults they can go back and say "this may have aged, but it's still good." It's those types of shows that I recommend to my friends who have kids now, and it's those types of shows that people remember fondly. And Sponge-Bob.

Does this mean that these shows need to have children in them? That depends on the show and the creators. Avatar: The Last Airbender had children and teenagers as the main characters (Aang and Toph were 12, Katara & Azula were 14, I think Ty Lee was about 15 or 16, Sokka and Suki were roughly 15, and Zuko was 17), but most superhero shows starred adults with Spider-Man, X-Men: Evolution, Static Shock, and Batman: Beyond as the main exceptions. The age range is true for anime as well, ranging on the younger end of things like in Pokemon or Beyblade (or even Naruto) to older and usually teenage protagonists in Zoids, One Piece, and other shows.* Naruto actually ran the gambit, with the titular character and his friends starting out as twelve year olds and ending the series as nineteen and twenty year olds, with the final episode/chapter being a time-skip to them as parents themselves.**

But I feel like I'm getting distracted. The point is, my answer is "yes." If children are in the material, great. If not, that's fine too.


*Rurouni Kenshin is one of the largest exceptions, as he was 28 years old in a manga targeted for boys, making him older than the usual demographic. But then again, his show aired on Toonami and/or Adult Swim, so it wasn't really marketed for children in the West.
**This isn't entirely accurate. The final episode of Naruto is a wedding, and the sequel series covers what the final chapter of the manga did. But the point is the time-skip and aging with the audience.

 

"BRING ME, ALL YOUR ELDERLY!"
-Zuko, Avatar movie

 

Um, I don't think people are misinterpreting it.

 

I think this is the reason why Star Wars resonates with people of any age. The intent may be to teach young people the values that adults should already know, but for adults it reminds them of the values that we wish we could see more of in the real world.

I'm only 24 so it's entirely possible I'm talking out of turn here, my time and experience in the real world pales in comparison to many here but I think anyone really over the age of 15-16 far too often has to deal with things like dishonesty and distrust, people not doing the right thing, etc. It's a very complicated and complex world that we live in but Star Wars makes it all so simple. It's a momentary escape.

 

If this is, in part, responding to my statement which read:

Then let me explain what may be a misunderstanding of what I'm stating here.

I am not asserting that Lucas wanted, nor designed, Star Wars to have child actors in it so that the show could be for kids.

That's absolutely opposite of how Lucas thinks.
Lucas is more of the mindset of not talking down to children, but instead plopping them right into the mix of things and letting them look up to heroes who are going through situations that every kid will go through as they age - coming of age topics such as going out from home, interacting with scary new places and people, taking chances on ideas and people, making your own grown up family, et. al.

It wouldn't do very well to throw kids in there and tell them something they already feel, already experience, and already actuate in their daily life.
That's simply placating cinema - which a ton of children's film is.

However, that doesn't mean that he absented someone for the children to directly relate with.
There's a very large difference in the two concepts.

R2, for example, often takes up a position of a child in the OT - especially in the A New Hope and is easily relatable in his experiences to those of children.
He's typically found to be answering questions, following commands, towing along with the grown ups having wonderful adventures, and staying put when told...except for the naughty bits where he doesn't because he has independent thought that works out in everyone's favor in the end even though the first pass read of his actions by everyone else in the film tends to be frustration with his rogue behavior.

And that's how Lucas worked quite a lot with the angle - the children relationship characters would typically be obfuscated through science dress up and fantasy such that it wasn't a case of "Flight of the Navigator", which is itself quite a fine film, but quite counter to Lucas' typical approaches. A more similar approach would be The Last Starfighter whereby a child would look up to the main character and relate to his young brother who's more of a vicarious interactor.

The ST kind of missed this a bit. Such concepts were watered down to "cute" and "funny", rather than relatable experiences that kids go through (for their time - R2's experiences aren't as relevant to children now as they were originally).
That doesn't mean it's bad.
It's different.

BB-8 is wonderfully cute, but he's hardly relatable to a child as having experiences with people as a child experiences.
He's more like a really smart and loyal dog than a child.

So what am I going on about with what I wrote if I hold this position?

Well, Lucas did end up adventuring into exploring the child aspect of Star Wars directly on the nose with Anakin. He didn't need to do that.
He could have picked up with Anakin much older if he wanted to. He didn't.

In fact, he did it in spite of being told that it would absolutely ruin the film.

I'm not going to read the tea-leaves of Anakin as a young child here, but one of the net results of doing that was that a child at that point could relate to Anakin in some way (not all, but a lot) and then see him grown up in the next film to an age they would become, but weren't just yet.

Here you are today. Here you are tomorrow.
It works for the cautionary tale that it is - a story of a good child who grows up and becomes a bad man. Here's how that happens to someone like you.

That's much more direct than the original trilogy.

If you only look at the original trilogy, then you have a lens that sees that you should never ever put child actors into the leading roles in Star Wars, but instead have young adults for children to look up to.

As Lucas has repeatedly said, he doesn't do the same thing twice.
He already did that in the original trilogy, so starting with a really young hero and moving on from there is much more interesting since that wasn't done before.
And, as we know now, his ST idea was to kick off with a teenager and move onward from that.

Young adult hero, child hero, teenager hero.
One starting point for each trilogy.

So, again, what am I going off about in my statement?
I'm going off about doing something different but the same - like Lucas repeatedly did.

We always had some character somewhere that children could relate to the experiences of as child experiences in Star Wars.
That kind of died out in the ST. They didn't do that.

Rope it around for what I'm doing, that's pulling a sort of Flight of the Navigator position inside of a Star Wars film that's relevant topically to things we see around us right now and metaphorically representing those experiences through the vicarious avatar of the child hero.

Why? Didn't I just say this isn't what Lucas would typically do?
Yes, it is.
And yet, no - it isn't.

Lucas wasn't above doing that, otherwise he would never have written the story for Ewok Adventures.
And you can't say that doesn't count because that is very much Lucas being serious. He's not simply phoning it in. Lucas doesn't know how to do that, and we all know that. He has many faults, but being overly false with his work is not one of them.

He just never did it in the original trilogy, but he did do it in subsequent films.

The thing is, you can't water it down to a level that doesn't push the children's vicarious avatar somewhere in growth.

Every Lucas Star Wars story tells children two things:
1) How to understand the relationships between experiences in life.
2) How to go about going through those experiences.

If all you do is show a kid having a blast in a science fantasy escape, then you haven't shown anything in the same kind of ilk that Lucas would ever bother putting to film personally.

So my comment is about two things:
1) Getting ANY relationship built back into the cast that allows children to have a vicarious avatar in any form.
2) Using that position to link the children into an understanding of current experiences they may be facing and how to go through them.

That does not mean that Star Wars isn't Star Wars if it doesn't have a child actor in it.
Not at all!

It's more about following the design template Lucas laid out about trying different things and going somewhere different, while also relating that "somewhere different" back to an approach that he did use and anchoring it to that.

Lucas never took Star Wars squarely into a "Harry Potter" situation - ever.
Even the PT was still very much like having R2 take center stage as Anakin - by that meaning, essentially he's a tag-along good kid pushed and pulled around by adults going through an adventure and who also tends to go rogue now and then with good ideas folks generally think are bad ideas on the onset.

That is, even though Anakin was the lead character of the PT, in TPM he's moved about more as a supporting role.

What Lucas never really did in the epic format (given that Ewoks was in a fairy tale format and not so much an epic - the two overlap frequently in Star Wars but are not synonymous) was center the story on a child and explore Star Wars from that perspective and through that lens.

What an adventure in story that could be.
It takes caution to avoid mistakes and trope falls that destroy the integrity of the format, but it's an interesting approach to take what Star Wars typically has and swing it around to the center of attention instead of the edges of its attention, but to do so in attendance of all other aspects and approaches of storytelling that Lucas employed in Star Wars without overly glorifying the child position and maintaining the glorification of the adult position.

THAT is an interesting challenge and, in my opinion, rightfully experimental well enough for Star Wars to take on.

It has nothing to do with there needing "children in them".

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Star Wars is for the young and the young-at-heart. The further you move away from that, the further you move away from the spirit of the thing and start to make it into something else. I'd prefer not, but the market will decide that I suppose.

 

As the saying goes, "The penny is in the air..."
I'm currently waiting for it to drop, but I fully expect it to because the current zeitgeist of visual entertainment is hellbent on interpersonal melodrama and tension - essentially nouveau soap opera. That is, single camera soap operas. Keep them engaged by emotional tension.

When you look around at the landscape, there's no Knight Rider, Air Wolf, A-Team, Charlies Angles, Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote, Star Trek Next Generations equivalents right now. There's no real thrust for Indiana Jones (other than continued sequels), Flight of the Navigator, The Last Starfighter, Back to the Future, Gremlins, E.T., Goonies, Big Trouble in Little China, Splash, and certainly no Star Wars (as it was for its day) going on.

A few pop on now and then. You have things come out like The Librarian and its associated TV show that pop up, or Psych, but if you want entertainment that's on the lighter side at all right now you're almost exclusively relegated to the da*n Hallmark channel's cheese ball fest of perfect teeth and plastic surgery magazine fare (which, don't get me wrong - I am absolutely not above a Hallmark binge).

Adventure is all but dead right now.

You can see that plain as day in every system you stream on, or any film/show lister that has a genre picker in it.
Adventure is always lumped as "Action/Adventure".

So...Jon Wick is lumped with Tomorrowland.

Just look at one of the oldest bastions of American camp and adventure: Star Trek.
Now it's essentially U.S.S INTERPERSONAL DRAMA where characters are pitted against deep emotional dilemmas instead of external obstacles they have to face, and there's nothing wrong with deep emotional dilemmas. Star Wars has them in spades, but it couples that with a magnificent emersion in escapism, wonder, and adventure which permeate every pore of it except for that one aspect of emotional dilemma.

Where the ST strongly departs is in that note. TFA pulled it off well. Though it didn't really do much for wonder, it did well accomplish capturing the sense of escapism and adventure.
But as the ST moved along, it dropped that more and more until it was heavily bent towards emotional dilemma in such heavy saturation that it grossly outweighed other theatrical elements sharply.

My kids still ask to watch TPM. They're both teenagers now. And they do because they have a fun time laughing and romping around.
It's the same reason they love ANH. The same reason they like National Treasure (all be it, with less enthusiasm because it's not that great), hell - it's why Jumanji was a sleeper hit!

The market is WIDE open right now for optimistic fun adventures.
It's like we've gone full circle back to the 70's, except that Star Wars isn't leading the way on brassy romp.

So there's this giant hole just begging to be filled.

Hell, I was just in a conversation with a screenwriter a few weeks back and one of the talking points in that meeting was what had grabbed attention towards their work in the first place - it was this.
It was fresh. They had a pilot and set up for a series which had all of these wonderful little elements of Stargate, The Mummy, Back to the Future, and Real Genius wrapped up in a language of now. It was incredibly light on melodrama - while still having meaningful weight for the protagonist emotionally, and heavy on the escapade in such a way that it just kept the ball rolling.

It was a wonderful read and I wish it the best of luck, but the market is so off right now in weird ways that it may never see the light of day no matter how good it reads.

The only hope here is that this whole Covid situation has at least a bit pushed productions into an interest towards lighter fare, but they still haven't remembered or gotten their hands on, an adventure romp that really does justice to the genre and ignites everyone's interest in the genre exclusively in the marketplace.

We have definitely gotten into the habit, in the marketplace, of confusing nostalgia with adventure and that's a big mistake (looking right at you Wonder Woman 1984).
The reason folks love reprisals of these older modalities isn't because it's a reprisal of an old concept or flare - it's because the 80's were in love with adventure romps. They were everywhere.

And that was largely because Star Wars kicked the door down and forced it right down the industry's throat.

The 90's largely killed it because the early 90's was really hell bent on dark realism - something we're still recovering from even today!

It's hard to get the light into the world, but easy to take it away and forget what light looked like.

Light doesn't look like the Sequel Trilogy.
Light looks like Tomorrowland, and it takes not caring that you might lose in bringing it around.

One thing that's only starting to become a thing now is that studios, for the longest time, have judged a film isolated from everything else. The film's worth was how well it did in making sales of itself unto itself.
Its value to a larger catalog has never been of interest to anyone...ever.

Other than a catalog of big hits, perhaps, but that's not what I mean.

Now that the streaming wars are starting, now providers are starting to sell their catalog - not just their individual film.
Netflix isn't just banking on their latest production in isolation and looking at how well it sales itself.

They're looking at a section of their catalog and looking for content that fills a gap that they see in their content which they want to pad up so that viewers are hit with more content of that certain ilk.

And it is here that "light" has emerged again - there's new space for it to exist.
It is starting to slowly, but it's not all the way there yet. You see it sometimes even openly advertised now after the past year, in fact.

So the adventure romp is wide open to getting going in full proper form again, and to do that you have to attend to the proverbial child.
If you don't, then you just don't have the right air, because what young children have that adventure romps give a taste back to us jaded adults is a sense of wonder and enthusiasm in everything around them.

Even when they're scared and terrified, there's an edge of discovery and wonder - an adventure to overcome.

Lucas worked hard to fight against dangling character deaths at every turn, against having characters tear each other apart and drag each other through the dirt, against tearing into their internal psyche in such ways as to fill the screen with subtext at every turn.
And he did that because, as he said, "That's easy". And it's also not to form (however much Kasdan may hate that - and Kasdan is a genius writer - Grand Canyon is amazing).

Who the hell sticks an upbeat award ceremony for the characters succeeding in the story into the film...and gets away with it?!
...WITHOUT DIALOGUE!

The only way you pull that off is by pumping our amygdala so full of adventurous zest and excitement that we're not seeing a film by that moment - we're sitting in attendance to the ceremony.

Making CELEBRATION a tactile cinematic experience is probably one of the hardest things to do in film.
It's easy to make people feel sad, scared, or shocked.
It's harder to make them laugh, and thrill, and the utmost of challenges is to make them feel celebration.

That was the genius Lucas accomplished in the Original Trilogy.
The main reason the Prequel Trilogy didn't just blow the lid off like the original was just that. Lucas wasn't going to do that twice. He doesn't do things like that twice. He changes his angle of exploration and tries to do something else. He wanted to make something dark - he wanted to walk from celebration into madness.
Which is...absolutely nuts to attempt by the way. I don't know that he fully succeeded, but I also don't know that anyone could. That's so intangible and abstract of an experience to evoke that I don't know how to rightly judge that.
All I can do is take my hat off to the man for even having the balls and skill to attempt such an endeavor.

But to wrap my long rambling up...yeah, I anticipate Star Wars will go darker and less adventure romp as time moves on unless the light and the adventure romp become popular trends.
Hopefully I'm wrong and Star Wars leads the way in this, but I think they'll make the mistake of getting overly dramatic right on the coattails of the trend and try to spin on their heels to play catch up after something like the antithesis of Game of Thrones takes off.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

.. maybe this is one of the reasons why my son was never that much interested in TV or Streaming at all.
He did not like all that "heavy" stuff.
Talking about fun I have an actual example in mind.
We are not so much engaged with the whole MCU stuff, but we had a blast with "Antman and the Waspe" (except the scenes with Michael Douglas) . It was a funny and with that amount of ironic self awareness that shows you, that it doesn't take itself THAT SERIOUS.
It's not always a great film automatically, only because every scene seems to be constructed to send you trough an emotional "hell-heaven" trial.

@Topic.. it's all about how it's realized.

Maybe I'm kind of a naive "old child" myself while watching a film, but I really hate scenes like the one in at the end of the first season of GOT, where the daughter has to witness the execution of Stark. I saw it coming, I pressed the Off-Button and didn't watch the Rest of the Saga.
Therefore I would be the first "child" to watch the adventures you are talking about @Jayson, if kids are treated with respect and are taken serious by te rest of the cast and crew AND as long as they have fun while doing it

 

No.

And only because this perspective is wrong.
It's not about having kids in the film or not.

It's about having characters that a child can relate to the experiences of in the mix of adults they can look up to and adults who are scary.

As I mentioned in the other thread, R2 is akin to a child in the OT. He's who kids (of that time) can be familiar with in experience.
Drug and ordered around by the adults running around, doing tasks as asked or told, and doing a lot of sitting and waiting - being told to just sit there...and being naughty and going rogue with creative ideas that everyone things are bad ideas at first but turn out to be great with everything up front having only been a misunderstanding by everyone else of what was meant and why it was being done.

There's no child in the OT. There didn't need to be one.
There were child characters shoved into the obfuscated clothing of scifi fantasy - the kids could see themselves in robots and wild creatures as they looked up to adventurous adults fighting for good in amazing perilous stunts.

Anakin takes up much the same role in TPM as R2 in the OT - told what to do, where to go, a lot of being told to sit somewhere and stay out of trouble...and then not doing that because he has ideas that seem bad at first but end up being great ...etc...

The point here isn't that having kids in Star Wars suddenly brings back its adventurous wonder.

That won't happen. Lots of films have kids in them. They don't all hit the mark on adventurous wonder.

What makes it work is centering the story around the eyeballs of a child and making it be a buddy WITH a child.
The camera should be like their eyes - move like their eyes. Scooping the landscape in the way a child does - one step removed from everything.
There should always be characters, whether they are kids or not, who are going through experiences that kids experience.

So bring on kids into the films, but don't make it about bringing kids into the film.
The only reason you should bring a kid into a Star Wars film is because you need a kid for the story's approach to the story to work.

If you bring kids in because you want "optimistic child-like" air, then you'll blow the whole thing.
Star Wars never placates to children.
It shows them characters in a way they can relate to, and then shows them characters to look up to.
It's the same thing that Harry Potter did well in the first few films.

Harry Potter basically makes R2 the main character and then leads you around with R2 on the screen as the focal point as you are shown different kinds of adults who can be scary and admirable in muddy mixes interacting with R2 to specifically help or hinder R2 on his adventure.

In both Star Wars trilogies by Lucas the adults are the main characters who lead you around obscure complex socio-political situations which the child characters are side-car tag-alongs to and help the looked-up-to main characters in their adventures against the bad adults who want to stop the good adult's adventures.

Both are perfectly fine ways to go about it.
Neither work simply because "they have kids in them".

It's about how you approach the lens of the narrative and how you make it from the eye of a child.
THAT is what makes it wonderful and adventurous.

If you're making for the eye of a child, you've gone off mark. Adults can't make things for children. When you do that you get Public Announcement Rap Songs.
What adults can, and should do, is make things from the eye of a child.

If you do that, then it doesn't matter if you have kids or don't have kids. You'll inherently see where the child-like characters go if you're seeing things from the eye of a child and you'll just inherently make those characters - children or otherwise - because you're playing pretend like a child would.

Watch any BTS material on PIXAR making any of their movies and you'll see this in spades.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The idea of an animated ‘young Leia’ show my daughter (and girls her age) could watch, is attractive sounding to me. I know Disney has the desire to crosspollinate that demographic. From a brand diversification angle, that seems like a solid product.

There was a short-run ‘Kanan’ comic that touched on that idea. They could certainly develop that premise out more and trade on a proven commodity.

 

No. Lucas did not mean “kids in movies” he meant “movies for kids”

 

I totally forgot about that! Kanan was a solid comic, and great by New Star Wars canon standards...fun times...