bishop888 asked:

i know star wars is a unique case and a one in a million property but after seeing the new trailer with the older han,solo and knowing that both leia and luke have aged signigficantly would it give any more credence to letting some of the marvel characters eventually age a little more,maybe not so in the comics but defintly in the movies, i know we already have a new younger thor and miles probably will eventally replace peter parker as a younger spidey but maybe this could pave the way fore ths

brevoortformspring answered:

I think the difference with STAR WARS is that it’s a film, and so there’s no way to avoid the fact that the actors in question age–in the same way there’s no way to avoid the fact that, sooner or later, Robert Downey Jr. isn’t going to play Iron Man any more, because he is either too old for the role or dead.

I would imagine that, given a choice, the STAR WARS people would rather have a young and fit and trim Luke and Leia and Han and so forth, but they have to work with what they’ve got. We are in a unique position, in that the Marvel characters do not age unless we want them to. So thirty years later, Spider-Man is essentially the same as he was when the original STAR WARS trilogy came out.

An even better example; Indiana Jones. We all want the guy from the first three films, rather than the one from the fourth, right?

[vexilloquitious]

Wrong, at least about Star Wars.

Given the choice, Lucasfilm allowed their characters to age, regardless of medium. There is a whole library’s worth of books and comics and games and other material not reliant on the use of the original actors in which Luke grows older, marries and has a child, Han and Leia marry and have children and grandchildren. Lucasfilm was in the exact same position as Marvel; they did not have to age the original trilogy characters. But they did.

At the time, film sequels to the original trilogy were far-off and highly improbable. The beginning of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, in the form of the Thrawn Trilogy novels and the comic book Dark Empire in the early 1990s, jumpstarted a whole new generation of Star Wars fans and helped prove to Lucas that an audience for the prequel films existed.

Fans were not put off by a married Han and Leia with three children; in fact, the Solo children became fan favorite characters in their own right as they grew up. And Han, Leia, Luke and other original trilogy characters were not confined to the senior citizen center; they continued to serve as heroes alongside the new generation. Nor did the aging of characters prevent Lucasfilm from telling stories set during the characters’ youth, or indeed thousands of years before the original trilogy took place - and hundreds of years into the future.

Analogy deeply flawed, try again.

(As for Indiana Jones, there was nothing wrong with the fourth movie and Harrison Ford’s portrayal that a different script wouldn’t have solved.  Storytellers need to learn that stuffing people in refrigerators - be they murdered women or archeologists - is a bad trope in need of eradication).