Free from Fatigue: The Power of ‘Star Wars’ Night

Written by Joel T. Lewis

I have begun to take the natural pairing of baseball and Star Wars for granted recently. Not so long ago the juxtaposition of these two very different fan bases didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. But as this pairing becomes more matter-of-fact it opens us up to further analysis of both as time, baseball and Star Wars move on, grow, and change. “Franchise fatigue” has become the subject of some debate these days; whether it even exists, if it does what constitutes that fatigue, and whether certain fan bases are experiencing it. 
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At its core, franchise fatigue is about over-saturation and diminishing quality. In film the franchises that bear names like Alien, Predator, Terminator, and even the MCU come under fire as they continue to roll out film after film with a dizzying frequency that gives viewers pause. We’ve come to expect a certain level of quality and spectacle as these massive stories evolve from film to film and as fan service and tired tropes rear their ugly heads more and more frequently, we begin to resent our movie-going dollars, hungry for surprises, for ingenuity. Perhaps no franchise is more beset by a passionate or perhaps presumptuous fanbase desperate to avoid fatigue than the Star Wars Saga. 

The Star Wars fan is unique in their very specific ideas about how story ought to progress, how tone should shift, and perhaps most juvenilely, how characters ought to evolve or fail to do so. We hadn’t started to discuss the notion of fatigue with regard to the Star Wars saga until after the release of the divisive Last Jedi film, but I would say that film serves as an example of the inevitability of that conversation. For better or worse, that film was different from what we had come to expect from our Star Wars films, it zigged when it should have zagged and it zigged so dramatically that it split the earth between members of its fandom. But it got us thinking about what the franchise was, what it could be, and how different our opinions of those ideas were in the fandom.

Now I could get caught up in the factors that contributed to the tabling of the slated Anthology films after the lukewarm reception and box office performance of Solo, a film that might very well be the first greatest casualty of franchise fatigue, and the, in my opinion, small-minded outrage inspired by Episode VIII, but that would lead us a bit off track. This is about Star Wars, but it’s also about Baseball. 

It would be strange to talk about franchise fatigue in relation to baseball. Or would it? I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to talk about Baseball as a form of storytelling. In fact, Baseball is a decades long story with its ebbs and flows, its shifting cast of players, and directing managers just like a film franchise. Just like Star Wars. I mean it is called “the show.” So why don’t we discuss fatigue as fans of baseball, the way we have begun to as fans of Star Wars? It’s not as if baseball fans are immune to over saturation or diminishing quality. The life cycle of any team season to season can fluctuate from hopeful optimism all the way through the seven stages of grief as poor management, underperforming prospects, or just plain bad luck radically alter the narrative of that franchise. So what is it that keeps us coming back to baseball after a season of disappointment, of these fatiguing circumstances? It’s distance certainly; having time and space enough to miss baseball helps. The new release every six months’ time frame that Disney had set out for Star Wars certainly contributed to fans experiencing fatigue. But more than that, the thing that keeps us coming back to Baseball, and ultimately the thing that will continue to bring us back to Star Wars despite fatigue, is nostalgia. 

I’ve said it before, as long as Disney is going to churn out new Star Wars films, I will be in the theater to see them. Doesn’t matter the quality, how bad the last one is, how silly the premise. And you know why? Because of that body buzzing exhilaration I feel in that theater the second I hear the opening flourish of the Star Wars Theme. It’s there for me every time and it takes me right back to being a little kid, sat a little too close to the TV, listening to my Dad reading me the opening crawl because I was too young to read it myself. It’s the same walking out and seeing the crisp lawn of the baseball diamond, every time I get that rush, that excitement, that little kid feeling that, “this is where baseball happens!” I believe that the power and purity of that feeling is what keeps us coming back to baseball year after year and I believe that same feeling is the secret to overcoming our franchise fatigue with Star Wars. 

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