Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Was The Prequel To Today’s Fan Culture

This was Phantom Menace mania, and not even Jack Dawson from Titanic was immune to Midnight Madness, when Toys R Us stores were allowed to start selling the new Star Wars action figures.

It had been 16 years since the previous Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi. Suddenly, fans were set to be treated to three new movies chronicling the rise and descent of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, and they were thirstier than the desert planet of Tatooine.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace would go on to become the highest-grossing movie of 1999. It was predicted that 2.2 million full-time employees would skip work on opening day, leading to a $293 million loss in productivity, according to The Wall Street Journal. At the time, the movie was the second highest-grossing film ever, after Titanic, reportedly earning $924 million that year and more than $1 billion after rereleases. 

After the first three films, franchise creator George Lucas had talked about doing other movies in the Star Wars universe, but unlike today, where the slightest hint of nostalgia is furiously mined in the search for box office gold, additional movies were never guaranteed. It’s telling that the working title for The Phantom Menace, the retroactive start of Lucas’ Star Wars saga, was The Beginning.

The movie was in many ways a harbinger of fan culture as we know it now: expanded worlds, Easter eggs, canon tie-ins, post-credit teases, reboots and, yes, even backlash. The Star Wars prequels may not have done it all first, but they made it a part of our everyday lives.

Just look at the recent response to the final season of Game Of Thrones. (Perhaps it was telling that Lucas visited the set.) Fans had speculated about the ending for years, hanging on every detail, only to be given a story they weren’t quite expecting. They didn’t think it matched the storytelling already laid out. All those passionate reactions mirrored what had happened two decades earlier with the Star Wars franchise, even down to the fan petition to change the writers. (Never mind the later fan petitions for Lucas to return). 

In 1999, it took a while for all the hype to reach Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California, the pastoral home of Lucasfilm. The Phantom Menace was financed by Lucas outside the Hollywood system, so there were no shareholders or studio heads to answer to. For supervising sound editor Matthew Wood, the experience was like making an independent film, albeit “perhaps the biggest and most expensive indie film ever made,” as CNN noted in 1999.

Wood got his first real taste of hype toward the end of production, and it tasted a lot like Pizza Hut.

“They came out [to Skywalker Ranch] with a big pizza truck,” Wood told HuffPost. “They were giving out free pizza to everybody and the big cups had all the Star Wars characters.”

The sound supervisor recalls that the crew members at Skywalker Ranch were treated to Star Wars cup toppers, including characters such as Mace Windu and Darth Maul. All the characters they had been working on were suddenly “plastered on everything,” according to Wood.