Introduction: Adaptation, Transmedia Storytelling and Participatory Culture

Abstract

Since August 2010, Star Wars Uncut has been available online, a montage of 473 fifteen-second clips that reenact the movie Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope . ‘Curated’ by Web designer Casey Pugh, the website invited fans to upload collectively an ‘amateur’ collage of the Lucasfilm franchise. ‘Democratically’, the clips that garnered most votes were accepted into the finished movie, generating an enjoyable vernacular or grassroots version of the Hollywood franchise. Star Wars Uncut won the Creative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media in 2010, which makes clear that the low-threshold participation of fans and audiences has by now enormous impact beyond the marketing and public relations offices. Is this ‘crowdsourced’ movie an adaptation, an appropriation, or a remake? How does it use the changing modes of distribution and dissemination of cultural products? How does it relate to its foundational source text, the media franchise? What does it tell us about its Web-based generators, the ‘prosumers’ (Alvin Toffler) that turn cultural reception into cultural performance? What has the user-generated intertextuality of ‘vidding’, ‘mashups’, and ‘Internet memes’ on transient video/text platforms and archives—narratives that have been disregarded by Adaptation Studies until recently—to contribute as new textual modes, cultural phenomena, and social practices to our field of inquiry? How transgressive is mashup culture? And how politically, aesthetically, and culturally valid is the transgression of these fractured works, available in fluid versions within the distributive networks of ‘digital prosumption’? Are these the free and creative variations of ‘cultural jazz’ or merely a playground fostered by Big Bad Media to better situate and flog the products of corporate intertextuality? In what way does the anarchic carnival of Web-based participation create a new dialogic and heteroglossic media aesthetics requiring a different set of research tools?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.