Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?

Living in a digital age provides the public – even us ordinary people – with tools and software to produce amazing creations. Gone are the days of relying on expensive cameras, heavy equipment and costly budgets in order to make a trendy, popular film. Today’s wide variety of gadgets and technologies (smart phones, computers, webcams, etc) can turn anyone into the next Spielberg, Scorsese or Tarantino, at just the touch of their fingertips! In Henry Jenkins’ essay, Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?, he discusses the movie Star Wars and how the popularity of the film acted as a catalyst for amateur filmmakers worldwide (which can be proven by the countless number of spoofs and remakes...come on, I know you've seen some). Jenkins states that the films are an outcome of a fan’s dream to live out or at least be the mastermind behind his/her own fantasy. Fans began making-up stories and re-enactments into short films and converging them with music, dialogue and costumes from the actual film.

For example, George Lucas in Love (a parody of not only Shakespeare in Love, but also Star Wars) was created by USC students about the famous Star Wars director suffering from writers block who eventually falls for a girl with buns on the side of her head (sound familiar?). The short film skyrocketed in popularity and even outsold the DVD Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999) in its opening week.

Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars is another parody created by Evan Mather, using Star Wars action figures to convey a “classic space opera, with the hip pop culture-speak and violence of Tarantino.”

But all of the publicity surrounding the Star Wars parodies serves as a reminder of the most distinctive quality of these amateur films—the fact that they are so public. These spoofs remain amateur, in the sense that they are made on low budgets, produced and distributed in non- commercial contexts, and generated by nonprofessional filmmakers who do not earn their revenue through their work, but in all actuality can be some pretty professional work.

However, due to different advances in technology and more accessibility to certain media, there seems to be uncertainty in terms of authorship, ownership and distribution, which creates problems between consumers and producers over intellectual property. The Internet allows us to take someone else’s work and make it our own. But people constantly take videos and change them up to create something new, we see it on Social Media all the time!

But is it fair to take the intellectual property of the original artist and remix it? Where do you really draw the line? 

Is it right for the Media Industries to try and stop people from doing this by imposing regulations and restrictions? Is it a lack of originality or an accepted appreciation in today's culture?

Personally, I think that it is a widely accepted appreciation and something that everyone loves to watch as much, if not more than the real thing. Parodies and spoofs of any kind are an outlet for fans to brainstorm, create, and live out their own ideas and fantasies, while simultaneously entertaining everyone else and promoting laughs. I think when someone takes material and remixes it, the remix becomes theirs because it was their idea to re-do it in some way, shape or form.

What do you think?