On Thursday night’s Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt played a Star Wars-loving Pawneean who mounted an epic filibuster under a little-known provision of the rules governing the City Council. It’s a great meta cameo for a guy who’s a nerd icon. But watching the whole thing, which Parks and Rec wisely released online several days in advance of the episode’s air date, I got to thinking that Oswalt’s pitch for a new Star Wars movie, which would mash up Thanos, and Tony Stark, and the X-Men, not to mention Robot Chewbacca actually says a lot about the state of nerd franchises as geek culture has taken over the world and become big business:

Oswalt’s grand mashup speaks to the mass enthusiasm that has made comic book movies and science fiction franchises such generally dependable moneymakers for studios despite the significant upfront costs required to make and to market them. But it’s also a reminder that there is enormous corporate consolidation of geek properties, particularly in Disney, which owns Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and in the form of J.J. Abrams, who now controls both the Star Trek franchise and the core narrative of the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. These companies—and Abrams and Joss Whedon, is acting as an overall creative consultant of the Marvel movie universe—are absolutely capable. But this consolidation does represent a narrowing of perspectives.

And in Oswalt’s monologue, the things that fit together about all of these universes is their gee-whiz elements, their Infinity Gauntlets and jets and X-Wings and Iron Man suits. They’re all worlds in which amazing things can occur, of course. But this kind of enthusiasm strikes me as besides the point, and makes me a little sad. X-Men is an engine for exploring ideas about collective identity, about genetics as a source of identity, about the Holocaust, about the regulation of extraordinary abilities. The toys are extras, not the point. Ditto for Star Trek, where things like warp drives and beaming are a way of getting the characters rapidly into a lot of different situations that are about opening up everything from interracial relationships to the question of whether artificial intelligences have rights. If those ideas get lost in the rise of geek culture as a massively consumed corporate product, we’re losing a lot of what made those franchises so deeply engaging, and objects of such deep identification and debate in the first place.

Corporate consolidation, in other words, is the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s granted beloved geek figures like Abrams and Whedon enormous amounts of control over Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, and Power. But we’re at a critical point where we’ll see if the concentration of all of that creative and financial power actually lets science fiction and fantasy conquer pop culture in all of its multifarious inventiveness, or if it just means that a narrow, relatively homogenized set of stories and set of characters takes over the world, bringing a narrow set of ideas with it.

Per Kotaku:

At CinemaCon today, Disney revealed plans to release new Star Wars films each summer beginning in 2015. The plan isn’t to go Episode VII, VIII, IX in three years but, rather, to run spinoff films in-between the major “episode releases” every two or three years. This is consistent with earlier reports of plans for spinoff movies, plus reports that the next trilogy will pick up after 1983′s Return of the Jedi. Disney’s announcement meshes the two together rather definitively.

In a way, I’m even more interested in what the spinoffs might look like than about the new trilogy. It’s a setup that creates more space for creative storytelling within the Star Wars universe, while still keeping the core space opera going under the—if nothing else—predictable leadership of J.J. Abrams. I don’t know that Disney will ever be comfortable getting this experimental, but there’s so much room for playing with visual styles, kinds of stories, and pairings of directors and subject material. Why tie Ben Affleck, for example, to the core trilogy movies when he could take his experience with Boston cop movies and apply it to a movie about the Corellian Security Force? Why not reunite Jessica Chastain and Kathryn Bigelow for an austere lady-Jedi movie—or even cast Chastain as Mara Jade? How about hiring Guillermo del Toro to do all of the monster design for the franchise going forward and letting him play with some stories about non-human main characters? Disney’s going to make an absolute fortune out of these movies. I’d like to see fans communicate to them as clearly and as loudly as possible, and as early in the process as we can, that we’d be excited to see the Star Wars franchise innovate if it’s going to flood the zone, rather than stay stagnant.

Ever since Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed that the company would be making not just a subsequent Star Wars trilogy of movies, but stand-alone films based on individual characters, speculation’s run rampant about which projects are under development. There was word of a Yoda picture, then rumors of Young Han Solo and Boba Fett projects. We’re a long way from knowing what the plot and main characters of that trilogy will be, or who the stand-alone movies will definitely focus on. But because pointless speculation is awfully fun, and because I’m increasingly convinced that the best way to make the most of the Star Wars universe would be television, rather than movies. And just as Disney’s developing a S.H.I.E.L.D. spinoff from The Avengers, I suspect we’ll get a live-action Star Wars show at some point as the company tries to make the most of its $4 billion in intellectual property. So if we’re making wish lists, here are six terrific settings for Star Wars television shows:

1. The Correllian Security Force: Cop shows have become a cliche, but one way to revitalize the genre would be to move it to another planet, add alien investigators rather than NCIS-style Mossad liaisons, and have the crimes involve smuggling, code-cracking, the Antilles family fueling station, and a class between a Vichy France-style dictatorial government and a spunky rebellion. Plus, if Disney is going to go the Muppet Babies route and tell lots of origin stories for Star Wars universe characters, at least a CorSec show would give us a young Corran Horn dating aliens, going after Booster Terrick, and wandering around unaware of his Jedi origins.

2. Rogue Squadron: It’s been a while since we had a broadcast network show about the military, and a story about a spunky gang of ace pilots/Marine-style commandos dogfighting with Imperial troops, liberating capitol planets, and teaming up with aliens to fight plagues—not to mention having spicy romances with each other—could be a lot of fun. The challenge for science fiction on television is always the expense of its special effects, but focusing on Rogue Squadron’s commando missions rather than dogfights could keep costs down, and let ABC compete with, and hopefully do better than, Revolution.

3. The Errant Venture: When we meet Han Solo in A New Hope, we only get a few minutes of him in smuggler mode before he’s coopted into the Rebellion’s cause. But the Star Wars universe smugglers are awesome! Setting a show on the Errant Venture, a Star Destroyer (for the non-huge-nerds among you, those big triangular ships from the movies) commandeered by Booster Terrick, a Corellian smuggler par excellence, that becomes part spaceport, part military vessel, and for a while, the site of the Jedi Academy. Think Cheers, just writ giant, criminal, and more magical than Bostonian.

4. Tales Of The Bounty Hunters: I’m meh on a Boba Fett movie. But you want an anti-hero show set in the Star Wars universe? Take a look at some of the other badass bounty hunters hired by Darth Vader to hunt down Han Solo. That, or hire Timothy Olyphant after he’s done playing Raylan Givens for FX. Either way, hunting down different characters would be a terrific way to tour around the Star Wars universe, and to spend time with some characters who aren’t simply on opposite sites of the Rebellion-Imperial divide.

5. Mos Eisley Cantina, or backstage at a Coruscant restaurant: Much of the time we spend in the Star Wars universe is with people who play pivotal roles in its political future. But what about folks for whom the Galactic Civil War is largely passing them by? What’s it like to live in a universe populated by a bunch of different species, with huge class divides, where some people happen to have quasi-magical powers. Give us the folks who are witnesses to Star Wars history. Oh, and make it a sitcom.

6. Kessel: Obi-Wan was wrong: there is a more wretched hive of scum and villainy—and also a lot of political prisoners—in the galaxy than the aforementioned cantina. Kessel, the Imperial prison planet, is full of hardened smugglers, Imperial resisters, and Black Sun gang members. An Oz-like show about how they build an alternative society together could be a little bit more hardcore and a lot more revealing than another hero’s journey movie.

The news that J.J. Abrams will be directing Star Wars Episode VII may have me down at the mouth for what it says about the larger, risk-averse state of franchise science fiction and fantasy. But when it comes to Star Wars, because I am an irrepressible optimist, there’s always a new hope. And this time, it’s in the form of rumors that Disney may be considering a female lead for the project, though some of that sourcing includes the speculation that Matthew Vaughn pitched Chloe Grace Moretz as a lead, a prospect that would have killed me and sent me to feminist nerd heaven.

Because I’d love to see this come to pass; because I still think it would be smart for Disney to not entirely blow up the Expanded Universe continuity so it can juice the value of a ton of extant intellectual property; and because early rumors are that Michael Arndt, who is writing the script, is setting the movie in the Jedi Praxaeum, the school established on Yavin 4 after the end of the Galactic Civil War, it’s worth a reminder of how many fascinating female characters pass through that setting in the Expanded Universe. Any of these women would make for terrific subject material for Episode VII, and pay us back for the deeply terrible writing for Padmé Amidala in the prequels.

1. Jaina Solo: The most obvious way, and one of the coolest, to pass the torch from the generation of actors who defined Star Wars to their characters’ children. Jaina Solo is Han Solo and Leia Organa’s daughter, and in the Expanded Universe, she grows up to be an incredibly talented fighter pilot, Jedi Knight, and half of a hot will-they-or-won’t-they romance with the descendant of an Imperial officer. There’s a ton to be done there, and a natural bridge for small roles for Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, as well as Mark Hamill as Jaina’s famous uncle.

2. Tenel Ka Djo: Princess Leia is one of the most badass subversions of the princess genre of all time, from her toughness under torture, her prickly romance with Han Solo, and her role as a stateswoman in her own right. But she’s hardly the only descendant of a royal family to find a larger purpose in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Tenel Ka Djo is the heir to a hugely powerful matrilineal kingdom, Hapes, who walks away from her destiny to train as a Jedi Knight. Disney’s made some steps in the right direction with Brave, but this would be downright revolutionary.

3. Mara Jade: Maybe the contender with the strongest fanboy constituency, there are challenges with making Mara the main character of a new trilogy, namely that she ends up as Luke Skywalker’s wife, and telling her origin story now would require finding a way to substantially age down Mark Hamill if they’re going to have a canonical epic romance. But Star Wars is, to a certain extent, really the story of Darth Vader. With him out of the picture, Mara’s trajectory from the Dark Side—she worked for the Emperor, before Luke found her and turned her to the light—would provide a complementary journey that would hit familiar emotional beats and make similar use of the Force.

4. Daeshara’cor: In the original Star Wars trilogy, members of the alien species Twi’lek mostly got to be sexy—and sacrificed—dancing girls or villainous advisers. Daeshara’cor is a former slave who hooks up with the Republic and with Luke Skywalker out of her hatred of the institution. She could be an interesting way to tease out the impact of the Empire and the stakes of the Rebellion that doesn’t involve goofy trade federations or adorable podracing moppets.

5. Tionne Solusar: Need to give a new generation of Star Wars fans a thorough grounding in the mythology of the Force and Jedi history? Who better to feature than the Jedi historian. Send Tionne around the galaxy on a testing and recruiting mission, and you could recreate some of the getting-the-band-together magic of X-Men: First Class.

Because we really need our pop culture franchise to be dominated by an increasingly limited number of visions, Deadline and other outlets are reporting that J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars Episode VII:

Star Trek director J.J. Abrams will be helming the next Star Wars movie. “It’s done deal with J.J.,” a source with knowledge of the situation told Deadline today. Argo director Ben Affleck was also up for the gig, the source says. Michael Arndt is writing the script for the first installment of the relaunch of George Lucas’ franchise by Disney.

There are two issues here: how well-suited Abrams is for Star Wars in particular, and the consolidation of big franchises under a very limited number of perspectives (especially since the perspectives are those of white dudes).

On the question of Abrams as a fit for Star Wars, I’m deeply ambivalent. I think the franchise has been at its weakest when it’s delving too deeply into the details of its mythology. In the initial trilogy George Lucas and his collaborators had the wisdom to retain the emotional power of the Force as a cinematic device by leaving it relatively mysterious. Once the movies started delving into midichlorians and the manifestations thereof, the Force started to seem clunky and silly, no longer something those of us at home could dream of accessing. Abrams and his collaborators have a weakness for focusing on mysteries and exploring them to death, be they Smoke Monsters, strings of numbers, or aliens rampaging around New York City. I do think there’s an extent to which Abrams will be protected from this tendency by Arndt’s script, and the larger plans of Disney, which will presumably will be thinking about projects like television shows and Zack Snyder’s rumored stand-alone Star Wars movie. But I do think that Abrams’ interests in mysteries are actually a relatively a poor match for the greatest strength of the Star Wars movies: using a mysterious concept to open up a larger world, rather than focusing obsessively on the mystery itself.

But really, the profound disappointment I felt on hearing this news is less about my specific feelings about Abrams as a director. It’s more that franchises like The Avengers, Star Trek, Justice League, and Star Wars are opportunities for writers and directors to exert enormous cultural influence, and to accrue the kind of capital and credibility that can become enormous springboards for their more personal projects. The Avengers, for example, gave Joss Whedon an opportunity to bring his unique spin on female characters to Black Widow, who’d been poorly served in Iron Man 2. And its success won him a long-running and one assumes extraordinarily lucrative position overseeing the franchise: his ideas about superheroism will play a major role in American moviegoing for as much as a decade to come, and the money he makes from it gives him the opportunity to pursue more passion projects like his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. That is an extraordinarily precious thing, and it makes me terribly sad to see that power concentrated in one person, rather than spread out to a number of people with different interests and perspectives on the kinds of questions raised by our biggest franchises.
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In a bit of news it reports with an appropriately ginormous block of Salt, I Watch Stuff passes along a rumor that Star Wars Episode VII could be set at the Jedi Academy at on Yavin 4:

In an article about both the Mayan apocalypse and how George Lucas used Guatemalan temples and forests as a backdrop for the moon base Yavin 4, it’s casually claimed that Disney’s recently-announced new Star War will be one “in which Skywalker comes back to [Yavin 4] to build a Jedi Knight academy.”

It makes sense as an idea, and seems to match up with what the Wookieepedia claims is Star Wars canon for Yavin’s future, but before we start dreaming of the many hilarious pranks to be played on mean ol’ Dean Skywalker, it’s probably worth noting that the article gives no source for their information, and it seems pretty likely this is not official, as Disney is not the type to reveal their top secret projects to guys writing about a loose connection between Star Wars and the Mayan apocalypse. Still, something to think about. At least for the brief time we have left before the Mayan calendar and Star Wars claims us all.

I may have more ambitious wishes than this scenario for this attempt to move the Star Wars franchise forward. But rumor though it may be, this actually strikes me as a reasonably smart way to bridge the old franchise and the possibility of new stories. A Jedi Academy setup would let Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford play reduced roles or make cameos, and let the movies continue or sum up their stories, while not tethering the films to their original lineup too securely. A number of the major characters in the Expanded Universe pass through there, including Corran Horn, the Correllian cop-turned-fighter-jock-turned Jedi, who trained there under an assumed name, Mara Jade, the Imperial agent who becomes a Jedi and Luke Skywalker’s wife, Han and Leia’s children, and people who eventually play key roles in their lives. The setting could be a jumping-off point to treat Corran as a new main character, or to chronicle the rise of Jacen and Jaina Solo, and to tell the story of their adventures in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, a pain-worshipping alien species that invades the galaxy, or in the years after, as they become preeminent in the Jedi order. Whatever Disney ultimately chooses to do, providing a dignified bridge between the iconic cast and a new generation of stars, without getting too caught up in cutesy—or racist—alien races at the margins, needs to be the priority here. A Jedi Academy story seems like a promising way to achieve that goal which is modest, but that’s been awfully hard to achieve in the past.

As someone who’s been shouting from the rooftop about all of the amazing female characters who already exist in the Star Wars Expanded Universe and really should be featured in the upcoming sequels to the films, I was excited to see Luke Plunkett report this bit of Star Wars trivia at Kotaku:

Turns out that there were four female pilots cast and filmed for Return of the Jedi‘s climatic Battle of Endor. Two of them were A-Wing pilots, the other two piloting an X-Wing, with one, played by Vivienne Chandler, having an entire page of dialogue.

Sadly, according to Star Wars Aficionado, they’ve remained mostly unknown and unseen until now. The two A-Wing pilots, one elderly, can at least be seen buried in the extras on the Star Wars blu-rays (I’ve never seen them), but the two X-Wing pilots went straight to the editing room floor. Bizarrely, one of the A-Wing pilots, pictured up top, had her lines dubbed over by a male voice actor in post-production (though people are telling me she’s still visible in the film).

Things like this really make me increasingly convinced that it would not just be nice, but important to see a Star Wars movie that’s centered around a woman who is on the same kind of hero’s journey Luke Skywalker took all those years ago. This is a moment when we have a generation of young actresses who are credentialing themselves primarily as action stars, from Jennifer Lawrence, to Chloe Grace Moretz, to Hailee Steinfeld, and to a lesser extent, Saorsie Ronan and Abigail Breslin. We have proof that female-centered action franchises, like The Hunger Games, can be global smash hits. But what we don’t have is women worked into major franchises like The Avengers as equals. Having the next trilogy of Star Wars films focus on a woman like Jaina Solo, Han and Leia’s daughter, would be a real passing of the torch, and passing it in a way that’s fully integrated into the franchise already.

Sometimes, it can seem like pop culture is converging on real life: romantic comedies highlight a vein of unproductive thinking, a movie about an aging parent highlights the path forward through a dilemma, an origin story makes certain bits of psychology make sense, even if they lead a character to different and more dramatic ends than our own. So it was with me and high school reunion movies this year. In addition to shooting guns and kissing girls, Channing Tatum starred with his wife, Jenna Dewan-Tatum in the reunion drama Ten Years. The folks behind the American Pie franchise decided that Jim, Michelle, and company had let their reunion slide a couple of years, and held their ten-year reunion thirteen years after Paul was ushered into manhood by Stifler’s mom. Ben and Kate broke with Thanksgiving’s traditional dominance of sitcoms—though there was a turkey-stealing cold open—and sent its characters back to their high school days. Even when I was in high school, I suppose I was looking forward to who I’d be a decade or more after graduation—after we got back from senior prom, my friends and I somehow ended up watching Grosse Pointe Blank*. But even for someone who was born looking forward to adulthood, being reminded that I actually was going to go back to be a grown-up with people who knew me when I was 17, and seeing how awkwardly it all played out on screen proved to be a little much as the actual day approached.

But I survived! And as someone who is in recovery from the social deficiency elements of my geekiness, if not my affection for cultural ephemera that, when I was in high school, carried less social capital than Dawson’s Creek, the experience left me with some insights. Because so many of you were so helpful in preparing me to go to a suburban hotel and drink not very good bourbon with people I haven’t talked to in ten years, I thought I’d pay them forward for those of you in the audience who are contemplating returning to your hometowns in the year to come, but are as nervous about it as I was**.

1. You Weren’t As Bad As You Thought You Were: Most of my memories of high school are of it as a place I was eager to get out of, mostly so I could start over in place where (almost) nobody knew how awkward I was. It turns out, though, that I’m a pretty unreliable narrator of my own life, as I suspect many of us are as well. And it turns out we’re more generous in our memories of each other than we are in our memories of ourselves. Walking through the door of that hotel, I remembered things I hadn’t thought of in years: marathoning Wild Things and the Usual Suspects on weekend afternoons with a friend I’d lost touch with while we were in college, dancing at prom with another, passing notes—these things we Olds had before cell phones—so thick it was hard to fold them up small enough to palm or slip through locker slots. Going to my reunion let me have back good things that I’d forgotten, including my sense of who I was in high school.

2. No Power In The ‘Verse Can Make You 17 Again: As the evening wore on, one of the guys in my class and I confided to each other that there was something supremely strange about revisiting a part of our lives that none of the people we’re close to now know much about. But the thing about going back is that it didn’t transform us: he didn’t get his long-surrendered hair back or lose his awesome wife, and I didn’t suddenly revert to my high school pixie cut and standard wardrobe of a short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt. Our high school selves aren’t people who are lurking in the shadows, waiting to take over our bodies with all the force of demonic possession. The past, in this case, is pretty much past. And we can revisit it in safety.

3. The Things That Made You Geeky Then Are Your Superpowers Now: Okay, this may be more literally true for me than most people. But while not everyone is going to turn their high school obsession with the Star Wars Expanded Universe into a paying job, the number of former geeks in my graduating class elevated by their passions, and the number of formerly popular people who ended up pursuing geeky professions is impressive. They’re working as camera techs on great television shows, actually making music full-time, doing amazing biology research, even working as literal rocket scientists. This isn’t really a Revenge of the Nerds scenario: it’s that after graduation, no matter where we were in high school, we came to a common consensus that sincere enthusiasm is an asset. It’s not about who’s cool and who’s not anymore: it’s about who’s interesting.

Now, none of this will help you confront your high school mean girl or bully, or consummate some unfinished business with a high school crush, or kill it on the dance floor, because I didn’t do any of those things, and I don’t really think they’re essential checkmarks on the reunion list. But the easiest way to trip yourself up in anticipating your reunion—and I certainly did this to myself—is to think that it’s some sort of climactic rebellion, an emotional Battle of the Trident. But the truth is the war is history, and reunion’s just a tournament: done right, everyone survives to go home.

*We also may have gone to IHOP for late-night pancakes. My sense of adventure in high school was calibrated to the same frequency as Liz Lemon’s.

**Which is to say really, embarrassingly terrified, given there was no chance that, unlike in American Reunion there was no chance I’d end up in front of my high school friends in fetishwear a la Michelle and Jim.

This actually really sets my mind at ease about the process behind and prospects for Star Wars Episode VII:

Months before Lucasfilm was sold to Disney and plans for new Star Wars movies were announced, Toy Story 3 writer Michael Arndt was hired to write a 40-50 page treatment for Episode VII, sources confirm to The Hollywood Reporter. Arndt, the Oscar-winning scribe behind Little Miss Sunshine, has completed a treatment for the new movie and is likely to pen a draft of screenplay.

The Toy Story franchise is, to a certain extent, an obvious — but until this point, overlooked — analogue for the Star Wars universe. That was a story about toys brought meaningfully to life, and the ways in which their personalities were limned by their corporate programming, but also about the fact that they were able to transcend them in the name of larger goals like friendship, safety, and deep and abiding love. The Star Wars characters and movies went through a rather different trajectory: they started out as deeply human, were entombed in plastic both literally in the proliferation of toys that extended the franchise, and figuratively given the woodenness and pandering of the prequels. Arndt’s found deep humanity in actual plastic before. He could do it again.

More broadly, Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine are among the most genuinely sincere cultural artifacts to take hold in a big way in recent memory, and movies that respect children’s ability to absorb a lot of difficult stuff. Lots of folks remember how weird the family in Little Miss Sunshine was, but it’s fundamentally a movie about pain and utter commitment. Paul Dano’s agonized silence in that movie is as dark as any of Hayden Christensen’s pouting in Episodes I-III. The movie itself isn’t really for children, but it’s a movie that respects Abigail Breslin’s character’s ability to reckon with death, depression, even the prospect of her own humiliation. And it’s a film about resisting enthusiasm and finally giving into it. Toy Story 3, by contrast, lives in that space of utter commitment to its emotions, trusting children to reckon with the prospect of abandonment, betrayal, death, and moving on, and grown-ups to be emotionally open to a story about those ideas without needing to be heightened by any of the folderols that are supposed to make a story “adult.”

That is where Star Wars‘ sweet spot is: big, sophisticated, difficult-to-confront emotions that challenge kids just enough and make adults remember what it was like to be awed by the world. If Disney’s looking at Arndt, or folks like him, it seems more likely that they recognize that.

I promise this will be the last exercise in Star Wars nerdery for…a little bit, at least. But Jamelle Bouie, who is one of my favorite people to geek out with, and I sat down yesterday to record a Bloggingheads episode about our hopes and fears for the new movie coming down the pike. In it, Jamelle makes what I think is a good point: that Disney’s profit incentives could actually be good for fans if they did things like release remastered box sets of the original cuts of the movies.

Another part of the conversation we had was how to design villains for the new movie better. In the absence of Vader , as a Big Bad for most of the prequels, the villain design was either haphazard or racist. One thing Jamelle and I discussed was whether the new movies could introduce the shape of familiar conflicts but with different participants. The remnants of the Empire could function like an insurgency, but one run by white, British-coded members of the Imperial Navy. If you want to do a trade wars story, bring in Thyferra, the planet that produces Bacta, and where a white minority forces labor out of an alien majority, a la South Africa. If you want to force an existential crisis with the Jedi, bring in the Yuuzhan Vong, who have an apocalyptic worldview, and are very effective at implementing it, to be al Qaeda. In a way, I’m excited to see how this goes less for Episode VII itself and more for a chance to think about what our action movies should be.