The Press Box - ‘Star Wars’: The Lean Years (Ep. 403)

Episode Date: December 21, 2017

With another new ‘Star Wars’ movie in theaters and the franchise once again dominating the cultural conversation, The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh revisits the franchise’s forgotten lean years, when ‘Star Wars’ nearly faded away in the long drought between the original and prequel trilogies. Through interviews with prominent figures from Lucasfilm and the fan community of the 1980s and 1990s, Ben retraces the decline and subsequent resurgence of ‘Star Wars’ as the series fulfilled its destiny as the powerful intellectual property and source of fan fixation that it is today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello there. Come here, my little friend. Don't be afraid. Oh, don't worry, he'll be all right. Ben Kenobi? Boy, am I glad to see you. I'm old Ben Lindberg, the writer for the ringer.com, and you are listening to a special Star Wars episode of Channel 33, part of the Ringer podcast network. For the third straight December, there's a new Star Wars movie in theaters. Another one will arrive in only five months, with several more scheduled or in development, all of them feeding an endlessly updating online rumor mail. Between movies, Star Wars is on TV, too, and in countless comics, books, and video games. In 2012, Disney bought the famous but floundering franchise from its creator George Lucas. Several years had passed since Lucas had completed his deeply disappointing

prequel trilogy, and Star Wars fans weren't sure which would be worse. No more movies, or more movies made by Lucas. But in the short time since, Disney has brought back to the balance to the force, restoring the series' reputation and producing new content at an unprecedented pace. I've been a fan of the franchise for 20 years, and even I've never known a time without a constant supply of Star Wars content. But Star Wars fans weren't always so spoiled. It's almost inconceivable now, but for large stretches of the 1980s and 1990s, Star Wars was a wasteland. With the original trilogy aging, and as far as anyone knew, no new movies ahead, the series was receding from view, like the movie's old Tatooine sets sinking into the

sand. In the franchise's forgotten era, it looked likelier that Star Wars would fade away entirely than that it would bounce back to become the all-encompassing cultural presence it is today. The story of how Star Wars was almost struck down, but became more powerful than a fan from 30 years ago could possibly have imagined, tells us a lot about how the ways we create and interact with fictional worlds have changed. So today, we're taking a tour of the Star Wars lean years, guided by some of the figures who helped keep the Star Wars flame flickering during the darkest days for the franchise. And in doing so, helped ensure that Luke and Leah would still be the world's biggest box office draws 40 years after their big screen debuts. The selling of Star Wars

started with Craig Miller, who was Lucasfilm's first director of fan relations, serving from 1977 the year Star Wars hit theaters to 1980 when its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, came out. Although part of his job involved marketing and publicizing Star Wars, he soon discovered that the series almost sold itself. Today, you know, it's become a thing where people will stand in line for three days for a movie that they're really anxious to see. Back then, completely different world. That didn't happen. The fact that people were standing in line for many, many hours to get tickets to see Star Wars, that they were going to see it over and over again in a short period of time, those were unprecedented. After those fans saw Star Wars, they had the same.

They emerged to discuss it that we do today. But without online message boards, blogs, and social media, they had to rely on lower tech outlets. One way they scratched their Star Wars itch was writing fiction for fanzines and magazines like Starlog. As long as fans weren't selling Star Wars stories and kept the content PG. George was not amused by Star Wars porn. Lucasfilm usually let it slide. We looked at it kind of with a wink.

We were required to send them a cease and desist letter, which 20th Century Fox would send out. We tried to not be aware of, in an official way, of what was being published, as long as it was being done by fans, for fans, and not as a commercial sort of thing. Miller also set up a Star Wars fan club and wrote and distributed Bantha tracks, its newsletter, handling everything in-house. I was basically looking at it as, what would I have wanted to know if I wasn't working at Lucasfilm.

Bantha Tracks started at just four pages long and got bigger from there. The first issue had a big piece on George Lucas. After that, Miller talked to cast and crew, did pieces on special effects and fandom in different countries, and included quizzes and trivia for fans. The newsletter was nice, but it was no substitute for new movies, and it never revealed any info that Lucasfilm didn't want to divulge. But Bantha tracks was all many fans had to keep them connected to Star Wars

in the years between sequels, before the big reveals about the Skywalker family tree. Its distant descendant Star Wars Insider, which I subscribe to as a not very cool kid, still has a fan-centric section that bears the Bantha Tracks name. The silver lining for Star Wars fans in those information-deprived days was the certainty that sequels were on the way. And in late 1979, with the May 1980 release of the Empire Strikes Back approaching, Miller hit on an innovative new way to get the audience's attention.

Answering machines were relatively new at the time, But it occurred to me that people could call in and get messages. And so I proposed that we do a series of messages from different characters about what was going to be in the movie. Miller wrote scripts for five characters and had the real actors record their lines while they were working on looping for the film. Then he set up a toll-free number. 800-521-1980, as in Empire's release date, May 21st. For the first five months of 1980, fans could call in and hear a new member. message each month from one of the characters containing tantalizing hints.

Until I ran into Ben Kenobi and Luke Skywalker, I had myself a pretty good little operation. They wanted a ride to Alderman, and they're willing to pay enough, so I didn't have to ask any questions. Now I'm in the middle of a rebellion. I'm spending half my time dodging imperial ships, and the other half avoiding her holiness. Not only that, but Jabba the Huts got a price on my head, and he's put Boba fat on my trail. Something tells me it's not going to get any better when the empire strikes back. Call next month for new message. Miller didn't advertise the messages.

The phone number traveled by word of mouth. Even so, the response was literally overwhelming. The mechanical switching equipment in the state of Illinois, where the 521 prefix was physically located, couldn't cope with the call volume, and the state's 800 system shut down for a day, which Miller turned into another PR opportunity. We were only too happy to send out a worldwide press release, apologizing that there were so many Star Wars fans who wanted information about Empire Strikes Back. We certainly never expected that kind of overwhelming response, but it got us far more publicity

than we could possibly have imagined we would have gotten. That was how hungry Star Wars fans were for more Star Wars. But after the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983, Lucasfilm put them on a starvation diet. Star Wars simply stopped. In the months after Jedi, a trilogy of Lando Calarizian books came out, they would be the last Star Wars books published for eight years. In 1984 or 1985, there were two TV movies about Ewox, which were followed by two ABC cartoons, Star Wars EWox and Star Wars droids, which ran for a combined three seasons. They would be the last Star Wars TV series until 2003.

And thanks in part to the video game crash of 1983, there was almost nothing Star Wars related to play throughout the latter half of the 80s either. Although 1987 did mark the opening of the Star Wars themed Star Tours ride at Disneyland, there was only so much mileage of fans suffering from Star Wars withdrawal could get from a ride that took four and a half minutes. Even Bantha tracks stopped publishing in 1987 with nothing new to say. The same year, Lucasfilm licensing Vice President Howard Rothman was ordered to talk to retailers and convinced them to restock Star Wars merch. He had very little luck.

In meeting after meeting, he heard Star Wars is dead. Author Steve Sansuite, the world's most prolific collector of Star Wars memorabilia, and later as successor to Miller as Lucasfilm's head of fan relations, came up with a word for that period. I call the period the interregnum harking back to British history, a time when there was no king or queen in power. It just seemed to be a good word for the pause in Star Wars collecting and Star Wars merchandise. Most demoralizing of all, Lucas seemed to have little interest in expanding his saga. As Chris Taylor, the author of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, explains,

Lucas was chafing under the creative demands and restrictions of making Star Wars and was eager to take a break, one that would lead to a 16-year Star Wars movie drought. George Lucas was kind of sick of Star Wars. He was going through a divorce. It was not a happy time for him. And he'd been occupied with this trilogy for 10 years. And it was obviously stoned a grade on him. You know, the Indiana Jones series was going a lot better.

It was much more enjoyable to make. He could be much nice of a perfectionist. about that because he didn't have to be involved in the direction. He wasn't entirely creating the universe himself. So, you know, for a variety of reasons, he's sick of it. He tells the merchandising people just wind that whole thing down. For most of Star Wars young fans, there was little to do, but accept that Star Wars was over and find something else to obsess about Ghostbusters, Alien, The Terminator, or Back to the Future.

I completely moved on to a degree that seems shocking to me now. It doesn't seem possible in this day and age to put Star Wars down. But that was very much my mood. And roughly, you know, 84, 85, the Star Wars figures were packed away. Maybe I'd watch it again if it came on television. That was the extent of my fandom. That was pretty much all you could do. With the Emperor and Darth Vader dead, Lucas hadn't left fans with a villain they could imagine

continuing to take on the good guys somewhere off screen. At the same time, though, he'd cut off the story just when the characters were coming into their own. Luke's new powers went unwielded. Han and Leah's love went unconsomated. And the rebellion that had fought so hard to topple the, Empire never got the chance to rule in its place. It was as if the entire cast had done what Grand Moftarkin had scoffed it doing in Star Wars,

evacuate at their moment of triumph. You know, the story just didn't seem done. You get to the point of James Bond trilogy, say, where Bond are suddenly trained and ready to go out into active service as a spy for the first time. And then the movie ends. I mean, it can't be any worse of a situation than that for a fan of a franchise. The unenviable job of making Star Wars. seem relevant at the Nadir for the franchise felt a Dan Madsen who'd been infatuated with Star Wars at

14 when he saw the film for the first time. I am a little person. I stand four foot two inches tall. And I had just had some surgery on both of my legs. And so I was in two long leg cast when my cousin came over the week after Star Wars opened. He said, oh my gosh, he says, you have got to see this movie. And so he picked me up and pulled him. put me in his car and took me down to our huge theater here in Denver, and he had made arrangements with the management to be able to carry me in because I couldn't walk the time. So he literally carried me up the stairs to the balcony, and I sat in the first row with my legs that were straight out for me, and I watched Star Wars for the very first time, and I was absolutely

blown away. Madsen's room soon looked like a Star Wars shrine, and his affection for the franchise only deepened when he heard Yoda ask an empire. Judge me by my size, do you? Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. Madsen was a Star Trek fan too, and the Star Trek fan club he'd started became the official fan club, which eventually brought him to the attention of Lucasfilm. In 1986, the company called Madsen and asked him to take over their fan club too. In a sign of the times for Star Wars, the club would be called the Lucasfilm fan club. No one would have wanted to join a Star Wars Club in 1987. Even as it was, people weren't clamoring for a club whose main attraction at the time

was the Warwick Davis movie Willow. Madden launched the Lucasfilm Fan Club magazine when the club had fewer than 5,000 members. And he remembers how hard to sell a subscription was when he would set up at conventions. I remember the skepticism. People would come by that table and go, there's not going to be any more Star Wars movies. So why should I join this? First, it was kind of a rough go, because people really were skeptical that there ever would be anything new from Star Wars. I'd always tell them. I'd taken over a gold mine that, you know, everybody thinks has no more veins of gold in them, and I'm in there picking them away at it. And I know that there's still gold somewhere in there.

Without Star Wars to serve as the main attraction, or any attraction, Madsen was forced to scrape the bottom of the Lucasfilm barrel. You know, we were relegated to doing pieces in the Lucasfilm Fan Code magazine on things like Maniac Mansion, a TV show that Lucasfilm was working on. And Tucker, you know, the movie about the car made. with Jeff Bridges. And I mean, it got really lean in the 80s there for a while. And I just kept hoping and praying that there would come a time when Star Wars would come back.

Unsurprisingly, Madsen says it took 10 or 11 years before the fan club saw substantial growth. When he did sneak in Star Wars coverage, it was mostly backward-looking interviews with the original trilogy's cast and crew. Every now and then, though, he'd get the chance to talk to Lucas. And whenever he did, he always asked the question. I couldn't resist asking him what's going on with Star Wars. Are we going to know? Oh, I plan on getting back to it eventually, you know.

But there was never anything definitive. Like, yeah, you know, probably next year. I'm going to start working on that or something. And it was just time after time. It was this kind of like, you know, hopeless kind of promise that, you know, eventually he'd get back to it, but not yet. Meanwhile, Star Wars seemed to be nearing its expiration date, as George's ex-wife Marcia said in an interview years later,

the Lucasfilm Empire was an inverted triangle sitting on a P, which was the Star Wars trilogy, but he wasn't going to make more Star Wars, and the P was going to dry up and crumble. Although it wasn't and isn't widely known, the Star Wars recovery started right around the same time that Lucasfilm was talking Dan Madsen into writing about Tucker and Maniac Mansion. That same year, 1986, West End Games acquired the license for a Star Wars role-playing game. The work West End did then had an unparallel. impact on what Star Wars would look like over the upcoming decades, up to and including today.

Bill Slavisak, who wrote, edited, or developed most of the Star Wars material West End worked on, describes a role-playing game as a grown-up version of make-belief. Think Dungeons and Dragons. Although the Star Wars RPG itself was well regarded, it was the world building that West End did that cemented its legacy, as Slaviske explains. When you make a movie, and at the time there'd only been the three movies made, you only have to build as much of the set as you're going to film. Unlike a computer game, you're not bound by what the programmers have put into the game. You can do anything you can imagine.

And for that to work, I have to tell you not only what's beyond the farm, but what's beyond the rest of the planet. And then for Star Wars, what's in the rest of the universe? And very little of that material existed. Slavisak created most of that material from scratch, which means that he's probably the person most responsible for shaping the Star Wars universe, aside from Lucas himself. When Finn says the word med pack in The Last Jedi, that's because Bill Slavisak invented it decades ago. Although the Lucasfilm licensing group had final approval over West End's ideas, the company granted them a lot of leeway. And when West End needed to know something, they could consult the creator himself, as long as their questions weren't too wordy.

We were allowed to ask George questions if we had any, but they had to be on an index card, and they had to be a yes or no question because he was very busy. Slafesk calculates that in the five years that West End was laying down lower, he wrote more than two and a half million words worth of Star Wars material. We basically laid the foundation for what the world felt like. Beyond just the names and the technology that we were naming, we were giving a structure to the place. We filled in the blanks in such a way that it made it all make sense. I think that's not easy to point to, but it was very important in the long run.

In retrospect, it's incredible and emblematic of how devalued Star Wars once was that Slaviszek had the power to make so much Star Wars almost single-handedly. Today, the Star Wars franchise, like so many other high-profile intellectual properties, is such a big business that equivalent creative control could never be concentrated in one person's hands. Under Disney, an 11-member story group composed of experts with encyclopedic Star Wars knowledge is responsible for coordinating the story of the series across multiple media. Even by 2000, when Slaviske worked on Star Wars again for another game maker, Lucasfilm had altered the deal. The things that I could create and do in 1987 were no longer possible. It was a different world. And that's even more true today. There are just bigger licenses involved.

We were the only fish in the water at the time. And I think Lucasfilm was using us to figure out what they wanted to do next. And I think our success led them to realize they had more that they could do even without a movie coming out. In 1988, the year after Slavisak's Star Wars RPG came out, a man named Lou Aronica met a friend for a fateful lunch. Ronica was the founder and publisher of Bantam Spectra, the science fiction division of Random House subsidiary Bantam books. When his friend mentioned that he'd read something about Lucas saying that he wasn't planning on making more Star Wars movies, Aronica, a lifelong fan, couldn't let the casual comment go. I thought, wow, that's crazy.

There's so desperately a need for more Star Wars, but I literally went right back to my office and wrote a long letter to the Lucasfilm people saying, I'm a gigantic fan. I think I have a vision for how to do Star Wars stories in book form that I would love to present to you. if you could give me any time at all, I would appreciate just having the conversation about it. And I, and, you know, I mean, we're talking, you know, the late 80s here. So I folded up the letter, stuck it in the, in the, in the, in the inter office outbox, and, you know, waited for the mail to be delivered. And waited for about a year, yeah.

That letter sat in Lucasfilm's offices unanswered until one day Rothman ran it by Lucas. Lucas said no one is going to buy this. But because the franchise was so stagnant, Lucasfilm had little to lose. Out of the blue, Aronica received an unexpected call telling him he'd gotten the go-ahead. Even after the deal was done and the first book was announced, Eronica says, booksellers were skeptical about the series financial prospects, telling him that it seemed like Star Wars was from a different generation. But Aronica, who belonged to that generation, searched his feelings and knew it to be true.

The audience was out there. My feeling was as much as I adored Star Wars, that there had to be. be an enormous group of people who were just like me and would pay for books since they couldn't get movies. But Aronica knew that to really break through, the books couldn't be hackwork with Star Wars slapped down the front. It was critical that a book program be a really ambitious, well-thought-out, serious piece of science fiction. So, you know, the idea of publishing two books a month or something like that was never what I had in mind. What I wanted was have the next movie be a book. Aronica wanted to publish only one hardcover title a year to make each arrival an event.

And to pen the big debut, Aronica recruited a writer named Timothy Zahn, who was well-versed in Star Wars and had recently signed with Bantam. Zon crafted a story set five years after Return of the Jedi, in which Han and Leah are married, Luke is a full-fledged Jedi, and the empire is running on fumes. But our heroes have their hands full with memorable new villains like former Imperial Agent Mara Jade and blueskin tactical genius Grand Admiral Thrawn. everything about the book, from its hard cover to its grand title to its movie poster-style cover, was intended to light up the pleasure centers of lapsed Star Wars fans. The strategy worked. The day the book went on sale, the salespeople just started calling saying, you know, we need more copies. We, you know, this place is sold out. You know, this, you know, Barnes & Noble is completely out of books, you know, that sort of thing. It was just instantaneous.

And from the initial orders, we just started reprinting like every day because there was so much more demand than was originally anticipated. Erder the Empire reached the number one spot on the 1991 New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction, spawning a trilogy and several other sequels and prequels of its own. The original has sold more than a million copies to date. Sansuite says the book sales spelled the beginning of the end for the Star Wars Interpreference. People were shocked, and it was a wake-up call that there was this strong desire for Star Wars that had been unmet. And the merchandising started the slow grind towards putting products in the stores. If anything, Erda the Empire was too successful. So strong was the subsequent demand for more Star Wars writing that Erronica was forced to relent

and allow a second sidebar hardcover release each year. After he left Bantam in 1993, his successors truly took the safety off. 22 Star Wars books were published in 1997 alone. That schedule, which Aronica had hoped to avoid, diluted the quality, the scale, and the sales of the books. This audience wants the galaxy spanning scope of Star Wars. When they think Star Wars, they're thinking enormous scale. They're not thinking little small. stories. According to Taylor, we wouldn't have more Star Wars movies without those Star Wars books.

That's why we still have Star Wars, because the publishing world was able to save it. So yeah, there's the argument that it was there waiting all along, but, you know, the wrong the wrong author and the wrong way of launching it, the wrong kind of resuming of the story could have easily doomed it to an ignoble failure. Even after Air to the Empire, Star Wars still wasn't all the way back, but the worst of the wait was over. In 1994, the Lucasfilm Fan Club magazine was rebranded as Star Wars Insider, reflecting the company's renewed commitment to its long-neglected flagship franchise. Lucas officially began writing the prequels in November of that year, confident that CGI technology

had advanced enough to bring his dubious vision to life, although filming didn't begin until June 1997. By that time, the lucrative special editions, which made me a fan, since at that age I wasn't aware that Han had ever shot first, had demonstrated that the sales of Air to the Empire weren't a flute people would still pay to see Star Wars, even if it was really the same Star Wars recycled with mostly not so special tweaks. And the special edition, I would say, is probably the biggest pivot, because that's when you finally have the proof that, you know, Star Wars could still resonate with a giant audience, could still pack people in to the synoblaxis, which was very surprising for a lot of people at the time. LucasArts also had gotten in on the Gold Rush. After outsourcing Star Wars to other developers during the 80s, Lucasfilm's game development wing reclaimed control. troll of the license and churned out a series of classic Star Wars games with their own original

stories throughout the early to mid-90s, including X-wing, Thai Fighter, and Dark Forces and Dark Forces too. The prequels ramped up interest in every aspect of Star Wars, and weeks before the Phantom Menace premiered, Madsen, who made a cameo in the movie, organized the first of many Star Wars celebrations, official fan gatherings launched by Lucasfilm. Suddenly there were cosplayers, card game players, and R2D2 builders. There were now more ways to experience Star Wars than ever before. No fan who lived through the lean years would want to go back. Compared to those dark days, the cornucopia of the current era gives every fan over 40 a kid in a Star Wars store feeling. Madsen, maybe most of all. I would never have dreamed that it would be a new movie every year

and that we'd be having movies set, you know, in different times and with different characters. And you know, we'd have animated shows on TV. I mean, that just, you know, I look back to those days when I was doing the fan club and I think, wow, if only they were doing that then, we would have had so much material. We wouldn't have known what to do with it all. And to be honest, too, you know, as a kid, I look at the amazing action figures and the merchandise and the toys they have today. And I'm thinking, man, where were these when I was a kid?

Star Wars fandom is different today, in mostly positive ways. But there are some aspects of those tough transitional years that the veterans miss. Staying true to Star Wars and the Lean Times brought a sense of shared membership in a subculture that had fallen out of favor. That kind of camaraderie may be more difficult to forge today when Star Wars fans are the in-crowd. Back in the day when I was doing the fan club during those lean years, it was a niche community. People, you know, you wouldn't run into people constantly that were diehard Star Wars fans. People still kind of thought of fans back in those days, whether you were a star star, Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, you know, it's kind of nerds, you know, and geeks and such.

But, you know, today Star Wars become so mainstream that everybody has a Star Wars fan. Now it's cool to be a Star Wars fan. In a fractured media landscape where companies place a premium on recognizable properties, fans of massively popular franchises like Star Wars no longer have to worry about long breaks between new releases. Unlike Lucas in the 80s, Wrightsholders operate on a reverse field of dreams model. If you'll come, they will build it. Yet as the supply of Star Wars has increased, it's also grown harder to maintain the same

excitement about upcoming editions. Each new movie increases the amount of Star Wars in the world by a smaller percentage than the film before. The magic of those lean years during the Star Wars time was that you had to use your imagination, you had to year, you yearn for new Star Wars. You appreciated whatever you got, you really did. And now today, I guess my feeling about that, I think there could. come a time when people will start to just kind of get used to having a new Star Wars movie every

year, and it won't quite seem as special as it does now. Although I still see each new Star Wars movie on opening night, I no longer host pre-movie marathons for my friends, as I did before the prequels and The Force Awakens. There are now too many movies to do that in the day, nor do I look for leaks, spoilers, and speculation in the months leading up to release, because I know the weight won't be that long, Like Luke, I've learned control. Control, control, you must learn control. Lucasfilm has learned control, too.

Today, the greatest danger facing Star Wars, in every massive multimedia franchise, isn't an absence of content, but in excess. The more success Disney experiences with its Star Wars products, the more tempting it becomes to flood the market with more. It's a trap, Cue Admiral Akbar. It's a trap! That the franchise fell into, both in the book boom of the 90s

and the video game boom of the early 2000s. When, as former LucasArts President Jack Sorensen explains, the desire to capitalize on the prequels led to compromised quality. One of the real problems that happened with Star Wars is that the new movies, it forced the company in so many ways to do really too much Star Wars product because of the overall global demand for kidding every kind of genre and every topic. And it definitely was a real, setback for what had been the tradition of LucasArts as a company.

Thus far, Disney has steered clear of the mistakes of Star Wars earlier eras. Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, who isn't afraid to fire famous directors to keep productions on track, despite the success of the Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, which had the biggest and second biggest box office opening weekends ever. And with the help of her story group, which has brought order to the galaxy and kept the local systems in line, she's still commissioning movies with enormous scales, instead of settling for what erronica called sidebar stories. Taylor, who understands the cyclical nature of Star Wars, as a scholar and a fan, thinks Disney is doing its best to make Star Wars slump-proof.

This once-a-year event seems to be a very good rhythm for Star Wars. I think Lucasfilm is loath to put that off and kind of come out with more movies every year. You know, they recognize that that sort of, that Marvel timeline would diminish the value of what they have. I think Kathy Kennedy is now on the Luronica timetable. So he can feel justified for that, I think. Although Lucas himself has long since relinquished control of his creation, everything is proceeding as he has foreseen. Whatever his shortcomings is a director and dialogue writer,

the bearded one recognized the power of the universe he'd spawned. When Rothman told him in 1987 that retailers had declared Star Wars dead, Lucas took the long view. It's not dead. It's just taking a rest, he said. A lot of kids really love those movies. Someday they're going to grow up and have kids of their own. We can bring it back then.

He was right. Star Wars looks a lot different today than it did when Lucas said that. But its appeal and its promise still haven't subsided. I think it will fade eventually, but I think if we know anything from the history of Star Wars, it's that it always comes back. You try to kill it and it comes back in the next generation. In other words, The Force will be with you.

Always. I'm Ben Lindberg, and you've been listening to Channel 33, part of the Ringer podcast network. Thank you.