2005-04-24

Now, now, don't get haughty

"Star Wars is something to enjoy and take away what you can from it that maybe helps you in your lives. Don't let it take over your lives. That's what they all say about Trekkies, and I know Star Wars fans don't do that. The point of the movies is to get on with your lives, to take that challenge, to leave your uncle's moisture farm, to go out in the world and change it to save the universe." - The Flannelled One, April 2005


"Star Wars fans don't do that"? Maybe he missed the X-Wing Car, or hasn't seen photos of conventions, weddings, and so on, just like there are people with shuttlecraft mini-vans, bad costumes at conventions, and of course Trek weddings.

I mean, sure, the Star Wars movies are considered more "mainstream" than Trek these days, but even if it were Berman saying Trek fans aren't weird compared to what people say about SW fans I'd be scoffing at the notion. It's inherently questionable to claim that the fanboys of one saga are somehow better than the fanboys of another. After all, in the end they're all fanboys.

(Then again, it does occur to me that Lucas seems to be talking about the movies, whereas most of the weird SW fanboys are probably EU-philes. After all, one of the "bestseller" books of the recent EU series "New Jedi Order" was the first book, Vector Prime. Only
200,000 of them were sold in hardcover, and this fell to about 110,000 sales for final NJO book The Unifying Force. Paperback sales averaged just 300,000 for the first dozen books of that series, according to Publisher's Weekly. While this was more than enough to make these bestselling books, compare this to the 1.4 million hardcover sales for the novelization of The Phantom Menace or the millions and millions who have seen Star Wars.

In other words, EU-philes are a minority.)