Mind Meld Make-Up With Keith R.A. DeCandido

With this week’s Mind Meld, Keith R.A. DeCandido was unable to write us a response in time for the main post. However, he still wanted to write about our question and he sent his response in late in the week. His response follows:

The thing about rebooting Star Wars is that the market forces that dictated the Star Trek and Battlestar Galacitca reboots don’t exist for Star Wars. BSG was a somewhat obscure 1970s show remembered by all but a very small following at the turn of the 21st-century as a short-lived attempt to cash in on the original Star Wars. As for Trek, the most recent screen iterations of the franchise — Voyager, Enterprise, Insurrection, Nemesis– were all commercial disappointments.

For all that people piss and moan about the quality of recent Star Wars products, they remain immensely popular. As agonizing as it was to hear James Earl Jones’s voice uttering Hayden Christiansen’s whiny dialogue at the end of Revenge of the Sith, the movie grossed almost $850 million worldwide. By comparison, Star Trek Nemesis couldn’t even clear $70 million worldwide. SW comic books still crack the top 100 in sales, something that can’t be said for any Trek or BSG comics (of either the original flavor or the reboot), and SW novels still generally outsell Trek novels (and both outsell the short-lived BSG novel series).

Filed under: Mind Meld

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