My friend Cheno has relayed to me an interesting bit of gossip: it seems that employees of George Lucas’ special-effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, were recently asked to sign non-disclosure agreements that forbid them from speaking publicly about Star Wars episodes seven, eight and nine. What does that mean? Well, it could mean that The Great Flanneled One is planning to make more Star Wars movies following next spring’s Revenge of the Sith.

No doubt this possibility has a lot of Internet fanboy-types wetting their pants with glee, but I myself am having a far more subdued reaction. My first thought is that I’ll believe in the legendary “final trilogy” about the time I start seeing trailers for a fourth Indiana Jones film, another long-rumored fanboy wet dream. My second thought is that I hope these films never get made.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone whose nickname used to be “The Jedi Master,” but after everything that’s happened to the Star Wars franchise in the last few years, I just don’t have that much faith left in Uncle George.

The problem isn’t him necessarily, although I suppose he must take some blame for my disillusionment since, as he so proudly tells any reporter who crosses his path, all things Star Wars are under his direct control. My disillusionment isn’t limited to Star Wars, however, which leads me to think that the problem is more related to how movies and TV in general are made and sold these days. The truth is all of the media franchises that used to command so much of my attention and affection have lost their luster in recent years. In addition to George Lucas’ empire (forgive the pun), the Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Highlander franchises have all deteriorated to the point of me declaring my Official Indifference™, and all for similar reasons.

The first and most obvious issue is that these franchises have all become commodities. They’re brand names now, and they are sold to their fans like Nike sells shoes, shorts and t-shirts. Anything that can be marketed under the banner of Star Wars, Star Trek, et. al., will be, and it will be sold and sold some more for as long as the market will bear it. In my opinion, this process makes it harder to continue loving the original work without qualification. The marketing leaches away at the substance and the authenticity of the artwork, and soon it starts to seem as if there’s nothing to the artwork except a marketing opportunity.

Of course, there have always been merchandise tie-ins with popular films and television shows, and Lord knows I’ve bought plenty of “media-branded” items over the years. In the simpler age known as the 1970s, buying a tie-in product like a toy or a poster was the only way to make your favorite movie or series tangible. It wasn’t possible in that pre-home-video era to watch them whenever you wanted, so you found other means to hold on to the ephemeral viewing experience. But the souvenirs weren’t the point of the movie or show; they were simply a reminder of it.

Now it seems as if that equation has been inverted. Technology has given us the amazing ability to hold a movie (and, with DVD season box sets, an entire TV series) in our hands, to watch it whenever we want, as many times as we want. The downside is that the film itself has become — in the form of that tape or disc — just one more branded item that can be sold. Movie producers are far less interested in filling theater seats nowadays than they are in how many DVDs they’re going to sell after the film completes its theatrical run, and the theatrical experience — once the whole point of the enterprise — has mutated into little more than a marketing tool aimed at selling discs. And because of this technology, I’m not sure that films mean as much to people as they used to. We don’t treasure them as much because viewing any particular movie is no longer a limited-time offer.

In addition, there seems to be far more tie-in merchandise than anyone wants these days. Back in the ’70s, people bought and collected Star Wars action figures because we liked them, and most of the items were created long after the movie became a hit. The demand came first. Now it seems as if the moneymen try to create the demand whether it exists or not, and often it doesn’t. The toy stores were a pretty sad place in the months following The Phantom Menace, what with dozens of unsold action figures hanging forlornly on their pegs. I made the mistake of picking up some Phantom Menace items that I can’t part with now, not because I love them but because no one else wants them. The manufacturers vastly overestimated the demand the new movie was going to generate, and all the overstock made the whole damn thing — the movie and the marketing — seem very fake and lame. (The movie had its own flaws, of course, but I think a lot of the reaction against it was because of the out-of-control marketing that accompanied its release.)

It isn’t just the tangible merchandise that gets oversold, though. The artistic product is also run into the ground these days. How many TV shows have gone on for one season too many? How film series have had one or two too many sequels? Take Star Trek, for example: the original series was innovative, unique, eye-catching, and, in its way, profound. The first few Trek movies were something special, because they came after a long period of nothing but re-runs of the original episodes. Then came Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it was good but maybe not quite as good as the original, or at least not as groundbreaking. Then came the other three spin-offs on TV, more movies, more books than you can count, toys, and “collectibles” that really weren’t very collectible at all because they were consciously designed to be scarce due to artificially low or sporadic production runs. Each new iteration of Trek drained off some of the total creative energy granted to this one idea, and now Star Trek is, to all but the most die-hard fans, a pretty ho-hum affair. The thing that has been hardest for me to accept as I’ve witnessed this decline is that with each and every new iteration, I have seen potential. I’ve seen ways in which the Star Trek story could be continued successfully. In each case, though, whether through a lack of talent or economic pressures or a cynical lack of concern from the producers as long as the damn thing keeps selling, I’ve gotten nothing but ever-increasing mediocrity.

(When you think about it, this artistic strip-mining is as much a result of producers trying to wring every last dime out of an idea as a glut of crappy action figures, so you could blame this phenomenon on marketing as well.)

Which brings me back, albeit in a roundabout fashion, to Star Wars. There was a time when I would’ve welcomed any new SW product that Uncle George saw fit to give me. Like most people my age, I knew the legend that the movies were originally conceived as a nine-part saga composed of three trilogies, each set some 25 years apart. The original films — officially known as Episodes IV, V and VI — are the middle trilogy, and the prequel films of recent years are, of course, the first trilogy. So the rumored Episodes VII, VIII and IX would be the final, concluding trilogy and would (presumably) follow the exploits of an older Luke Skywalker as he attempts to reestablish the Jedi Knights in a New Republic (this is the premise of many of the tie-in novels published over the last ten years). It’s a great story and an inspiring image: a maverick genius working outside the Hollywood system to create a vast, elaborate tapestry that would eventually become the greatest film saga of all time.

There’s just one problem with that legend, however. It’s crap.

If you do some work on eBay and secure for yourself a stack of vintage magazines containing interviews with George Lucas, you’ll find little evidence to support the notion that he ever planned to do nine films, at least not at first. As best as I can tell, he didn’t conceive of this grand saga until sometime around the filming of Return of the Jedi.

You may be thinking to yourself, so what? So this: there was always a loose framework of backstory on which to base the prequels. George had to have at least a vague notion of the history of things in order to make the original films make sense. But I’ve never heard anything from a legitimate source to suggest that the Flanneled One has anything in mind for a sequel trilogy. And quite frankly, I don’t trust him to cook up anything that wouldn’t be a dismal disappointment. The story of the Skywalker family is over with Return of the Jedi — the Empire is defeated, the Emperor is dead, and, if you choose to incorporate the ideas of the prequels (I’m still not sure I do), balance has been restored to the Force. What is left to tell? There simply is no artistic reason to make any more Star Wars films. Really, there was no compelling artistic reason to make the prequels, either.

I’m not going to discuss the prequel films in depth right now (if I start down that path, forever will it dominate this post’s destiny). I will say that I don’t think they’re total garbage as so many others do, but nevertheless I was disappointed by them. The worst thing about them has been the effect they’ve had on our cultural memory of the original Star Wars films. I’ve heard a lot of people say while talking about the prequels that, in retrospect, the originals weren’t any good either. That simply isn’t true. No one believed that until 1999, when the hype machine tried to build The Phantom Menace into the greatest movie ever, only to have the movie fall flat on its face, artistically speaking. After that, a backlash began that ultimately swept up the original films as well. And that disaster grew from ideas that Lucas was known to have been mulling over for twenty years, not from something new he just pulled out of his butt to keep a franchise going.

My concern is this: given the way the prequels have diminished the original trilogy, I worry that an additional three movies of highly dubious quality will only cause that much more damage. Back in ’99, I was so excited for the prequels that I had a countdown timer running in a corner of my computer desktop. Now, five years out, I wish they’d never been made. I would rather have the original three films remain as isolated but pristine relics of a long-lost decade, still beloved and respected, then have one hundred hours of Star Wars that doesn’t quite live up to its potential. (I also wish that the Star Trek film series had stopped with number four, by the way.) If movies are products of their times, then maybe the time to do more Star Wars films was two decades ago. Maybe trying to do any kind of Star Wars now is doomed to fail. I wish we didn’t have the evidence to support that theory… and I hope we don’t get any further evidence after Revenge of the Sith.

One final thought to wrap up this too-long post: I spent a lot of my teen years daydreaming about what the complete nine-part Star Wars saga would be like, and I always hoped it would eventually materialize. I never believed it would, I just hoped, and that was actually more satisfying than seeing what did turn up. As Spock once said in a different franchise, “having is not always so pleasing as wanting. It is not logical… but it is often true.”