The Park Wars are a good example of the creativity of fan fiction and Lucasfilm should give fans more freedom to use their intellectual property for creativity.
If you like South Park and Star wars, you are going to love Park Wars. It’s a parody on Star Wars created by Ayaz Asif (Jenkins, n.d.). He downloaded the trailer of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and was inspired by a wallpaper made by Ted Bracewell. It depicted the South Park characters in the Star Wars universe. Then Ayaz Asif created the trailer for Park Wars: The Little Menace. Ted Bracewell was so enthusiastic about it that they collaborated on making an episode, which you can view below.
This short film can be considered as a tribute to South Park and Star Wars, so it isn’t surprising that according to the South Park Timeline the creators of South Park loved Park Wars. They even lend the voices of the South Park characters to the episode. However, George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, did nothing to support this creative initiative.
Lucasfilm has a history of not making up its mind about its policy towards fan fiction: “Within the Star Wars franchise, Hollywood has sought to shut down fan fiction, later, to assert ownership over it and finally to ignore its existence” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 134). As Jenkins (2006) describes it Lucasfilm was almost a collaborationist in the 1970’s, meaning that they viewed fans “as important collaborators in the production of content and as grassroots intermediaries helping to promote the franchise” (p. 134). Lucasfilm actively encouraged fan fiction, but that changed over the years and in 2000 “Lucasfilm offered Star Wars fans free Web space […] and unique content for their sites, but only under the condition that whatever they created would become the studio’s intellectual property” (p. 152). Lucasfilm became a prohibitionists, it regulated and criminalized fan participation.
Lucasfilm is not dominating the fan fiction in the sense that it is prohibiting any creativity from taking place. Yet the company does limit the creativity of fans and young filmmakers, because they have to work within the borders Lucasfilm gives them. This is a conservative approach to intellectual property and it’s not working. Lucasfilm tried to prohibit any erotic fan fiction, but the erotica got pushed underground and can still be found on the web today (Jenkins, 2006). Fans and young filmmakers will do what they want with the intellectual property of Lucasfilm, because they can. The internet is not something that can be controlled or dominated by companies, it is a public space where a single individual can post what they want. Although it can have consequences for the fan, as I've shown in my article on cybersquatting.
However, the worst thing that can happen to a fan who posts erotic fiction of Star Wars online is that he has to take it offline. He can still create new fiction and put it online again. When they shut down Napster (wiki), my personal favourite illegal downloading programme, twenty new Napster popped up. And today people are still illegally downloading music from these programs. However Apple has found a legal way of downloading music and make a profit out of it, e.g. the successful iTunes (wiki).
There are many advantages for companies like Lucasfilm to become collaborationists. The Park Wars got a lot of free publicity (Jenkins, 2006). Asif was interviewed on the Sci-Fi Channel and the episode got aired on Comedy Central, the channel that produces South Park. Fan fiction or tributes made by young filmmakers generate a lot of free publicity this way, on top of this fan fiction helps to discover new talents for the industry. Like Jenkins (2006) describes, there are many young moviemakers that get discovered this way.
Prohibitionists are a thing of the past. Companies like Lucasfilm have to let go of their prohibitionistic nature and become collaborationists. These companies need an active and supportive fan community to become successful and get publicity for their product (Jenkins, 2006). Fans get inspired by popular culture, create fan fiction and with this produce their own subculture. The importance of these subculture and creativity to our culture is enormous, without it we would be missing out. My next article will explain more about this.
Literature
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture. Where old and new media collide. New York: University Press.
Jenkins, H. (n.d.). Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture. Retrieved May 20, 2007.