Dec. 16--"Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose," Yoda advised Anakin Skywalker in "Revenge of the Sith," the third or sixth "Star Wars" film, depending on how you keep track.
It's an invaluable lesson creator George Lucas, the force behind the Force that permeates everything in the "Star Wars" universe, eventually seems to have embraced in turning over the franchise to Disney and J.J. Abrams, whose "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" opens as Episode VII this week.
Letting go is one of the toughest things for anyone deeply invested in what he or she leads and has built, even when there's a great sum of money involved, as in this $4 billion deal. Doing so also often is absolutely necessary.
If Lucas wanted his 38-year-old film series to be a living, breathing legacy that outlives him -- surviving not as an artifact or museum piece but a growing, expanding entity -- he was going to have to let loose the reins to which he had tightly clung for so long since its inception.
That also meant letting Disney discard his ideas for what should happen with the characters and story.
As they say at Disney (and sometimes sing): "Let it go."
"They're not going to do what I want them to do, and I don't have the control to do that anymore," Lucas told CBS earlier this year. "All I would do is muck everything up. So I said, 'OK, I will go my way, and I'll let them go their way.'"
Of course, stupid, let's not be.
There's no question the Disney money should have soothed much of the discomfort Lucas might have from handing over the keys to the galaxy. But it's not as though he needed the cash, and it would be a mistake to underestimate his attachment to the "Star Wars" franchise.
This is the man who kept going in and tweaking the films to make them, in his view, the best versions he could. Visual and audio effects were updated. Elements were inserted, removed and manipulated.
Lucas argued this was not unusual with films and, amid blowback from the most dedicated devotees, he felt compelled to remind everyone these were movies and not religious events.
Most notably, in Han Solo's exchange with a bounty hunter in 1977's "Star Wars" -- later renamed "Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope" -- it very much appeared he shot first (and last). A later version of the film showed Greedo clearly shot first. Later still, the amount of time between the two shots was tightened so it seemed they were nearly simultaneous.
"What I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people," Lucas explained in a 2012 Hollywood Reporter interview.
"It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom," he said. "I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down."
