Lucasfilm Exec Makes Fun of YouTuber for Liking ‘Star Wars’
One of the things that fans hated about Star Wars: The Last Jedi was that it appeared to be filled with contempt for Star Wars fans. The underlying theme of the film was that everything you loved about those movies as a kid was bullshit and the lesson you should have learned is to always listen to old white ladies.
It’s becoming more and more obvious that some of the people responsible for making Star Wars do think you’re an idiot for liking Star Wars.
You see, Star Wars did something this year that I thought was impossible after a trilogy of movies whose best idea was “f**k it, a third Death Star, I guess,” and made people actually like Star Wars. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni took The Mandalorian and used it to redeem Star Wars, even filling Werner Herzog with childlike glee at the magic they had captured on film.
One of the most popular Star Wars YouTubers, Toos, put a video on his channel Star Wars Theory of his reaction to the second-season finale of The Mandalorian in which he was moved to tears by the appearance of Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker, who heard Grogu’s call through the force and came to train him in The Force. It was a big moment and I was amazed that the show had managed to take both Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker and make them even cooler than they were when I was eight and watching Star Wars on VHS for the first time. And it was actually pretty emotionally moving to see Grogu and Din Djarin part ways, even though I suspect that Grogu will be back and more active in assisting The Mandalorian in the future, much the same way Daigoro became a partner to his father in the later parts of Lone Wolf and Cub.
If you’re a LucasFilm executive and someone has a genuine emotional response to one of your films, probably for the first time since 1983, what would your reaction be? Would it be to get on Twitter and make fun of him? Because that was Pablo Hidalgo’s reaction, as reported by Variety.
That’s when he learned what Hidalgo tweeted: “emotions are not for sharing.” Toos was outraged, interpreting Hidalgo’s remarks as indeed piling on the mockery of his genuine emotions. By that point, Hidalgo had deleted the tweet, but, rather inexplicably, he also put a screenshot of it as the banner over his account; Toos took it as more trolling. “You’re telling people it’s not ok to have emotions about the work your company produces, and you make fun of them for crying?” he tweeted. “Not ok.”
Hidalgo apologized and claimed he was just poking fun at his own stoicism.
It’s not great, though, because it really doesn’t take much for Star Wars fans to get the impression the people in charge of Star Wars now really don’t like them, and some of them have basically come right out and said it. This isn’t really going to help things, regardless of what Hidalgo meant.
