Those who’ve watched the latest season of The Mandalorian will have heard Bo-Katan Kryze pitch to the warring Mandalorian factions that they are stronger together. Spoiler alert; it turns out they are. Bo sold the idea of community over division. Her people bought in and they all shared in the collective victories.
In marketing, there’s a school of thought that a ‘community’ based marketing approach is more effective than traditional advertising.
My take on the reason behind this is that community has a pretty significant track record. This isn’t an emerging technology we’re being encouraged to adopt, or another case of the Emperor’s new clothes. This is something fundamental to the human experience. Community isn’t the latest greatest marketing strategy, it’s what we find in the remains after every fad has burnt out.
It was great to spend time with the You Are The Media community this month for Creator Day (which has evolved into Creator Week as far as I’m concerned) and congrats to Mark Masters and Matthew Denyer on two brilliant events.
In contrast to this tight knit group of likeminded folk, I began the month among a much broader community of 65,000 people with a shared interest, Star Wars!
It’s a Celebration
Star Wars Celebration is the official Star Wars fan convention. It returned to London’s Excel centre this year for the first time since 2016. The event circles around the world, with previous events in the US and Germany. The next is set for 2025 in Japan.
It first took place in Spring 1999 ahead of Star Wars’ return to cinema after 16 years with The Phantom Menace. It was described as being “for the fans, by the fans” and was hosted in Denver, Colorado, the base location of the official Star Wars fan club. Lucasfilm tasked fan club president Dan Madsen with creating the event.
Tragedy struck two weeks prior to the event with the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. Lucasfilm understandably looked to cancel Celebration. In an article for starwars.com, Dan recalled the difficult decision they made and the reasons why he fought for it to continue to go ahead.
“They felt that the city of Denver and Star Wars fans would not feel like celebrating after such a horrible, tragic event. And they had every reason to feel that way.
However, as a lifelong resident of Denver and a Star Wars fan I was adamant that what the city of Denver needed more than anything, two weeks later, was a bit of a reprieve from all the grieving and that Denver needed the Star Wars Celebration to happen.
By cancelling the event, we were allowing the two killers to continue their evil intent and horrendous damage by denying the thousands of fans who had already made their plans to be in Denver for Celebration. And the city needed this shot in the arm, this bright spot to help pull it out of the darkness it had been facing.
Even the mayor of Denver got onboard and wrote a letter to Lucasfilm asking them not to cancel the event and how positive and healing it would be for the city’s spirit.”
The eventual reversal was approved by George Lucas himself and it was decided the event would proceed and pay tribute to the children who lost their lives, including 14 year old Steven Curnow who was a Star Wars fan and looking forward to attending Celebration.
Tens of thousands of dollars were raised for the families of the victims via fan donations across the three days and the total was matched by Lucasfilm and Hasbro.
Party like it’s 1999
24 years later my partner and I arrived at a London train station at 8am on a sunny Good Friday morning. A few minutes in, two chaps in full Jedi robes joined us in our wait for the DLR train to the Excel for day one of Star Wars Celebration 2023. I’m not an especially chatty person first thing in the morning, nor the type to strike up a conversation with people minding their own business. None of that applied in these circumstances and I managed a hearty “morning lads” in their direction. I got a polite smile and nod in return. To be fair to us both, it was mega early.
As the train travelled up the line we gathered more and more fans, some like myself were head to toe in Star Wars branded clothing, others, like our two Jedi friends (I accept that friends might be a stretch) were in varying degrees of equally impressive cosplay.
Pressed against the doors as we closed in our final stop, the train guard opened a panel next to us to make her announcement that we were arriving at the Excel. I told her she’d missed a trick by not saying a certain classic Star Wars line. “Shall I?” she said with a grin. After a bit of light encouragement she was back on the mic to say “..and may the force be with you”. The whole train erupted with a cheer and we were officially home. What a beautiful moment.
I was choked as we left the station and began the long walk around and into the venue alongside countless other fans. It was a good job I was wearing sunglasses, I’ll tell you that much.
We need this
Unlike Denver at the time of the first Celebration, London didn’t have a painful connection to a recent tragedy, however school shootings in the US have sadly continued to happen since Columbine, with one in Nashville less than two weeks before US fans left to join us here for this year’s event.
It is of course, worth noting that we are still emerging from the pandemic, regardless of how relatively ‘back to normal’ life might feel. This was my first fan convention since 2019 and this will likely have been the case for thousands of others. everyone in attendance was effected by the pandemic, a tragedy on scale that is still difficult to fully comprehend.
Coupled with the pressures of the cost of living crisis and what felt like an enormously harsh winter, we all needed to experience a sense of joy. Most importantly, we needed to feel a certain powerful emotion that’s both key to Star Wars and potentially the secret ingredient that we take from community: hope
Comfort in Sound
When you observe the popularity and widespread success of podcasts, you have to wonder whether they’re a product of our era of community, or whether they shone the light that revealed the power of community to us as marketers. When I first started a podcast in 2006 it was made possible using the cheapest microphone I could buy/afford at Maplin, recorded with a friend in my parent’s dining room, edited on their Windows 98 PC (which was hobbling along by this point to say the least) and distributed, with some difficulty, via some free web hosting and MySpace.
That half hour podcast promoted a gig we were putting on at our local community hall in Upton, with a headline band that had never played in Dorset, nor had many people actually heard of them. We sold the building out with 300+ people our age attending and takings of over £1,000 on the door.
I should’ve known there was something to the whole podcast thing, but after 5 episodes my attention drifted elsewhere.
This year, Chris and Rosey Ramsay will be bringing the world tour of their podcast Sh**ged. Married. Annoyed.to The O2. – THE O2!! Where rockstars play. The greatest artists of our time. And now, podcasters! People talking? What has happened here?! Their podcast is bringing a phenomenal amount of people together.
CommunityCenter
An unexpected bonus of Star Wars Celebration was a fringe event organised by the hosts of my favourite podcast about the galaxy far, far, away, ForceCenter. I love their intelligent analysis and deep dives into Star Wars, so much so I’ve been supporting them as a paid monthly subscriber via Patreon for almost 5 years.
As well as being great broadcasters, ForceCenter hosts Ken Napzok and Joseph Scrimshaw from Los Angeles, California are also professional comedians. They hosted a stand up show, complete with Star Wars figures and references, in the basement of a Kings Cross pub (they’ll book The O2 next time). It served as an opportunity for fans of the podcast to come together while they, and we, were all in London.
Now I appreciate there is a fine line between fandom and community, and complex thoughts as to what qualities determine a group as being a community. As a ForceCenter subscriber I have access to a members’ Discord server, which was invaluable in helping me plan for Star Wars Celebration as we all leaned on each other for tips and advice to get the best out of the four day epic.
After the comedy show we hung around in the bar upstairs. Ken and Joseph joined us for drinks and were very humble in approaching and thanking each person rather than expecting anyone to flock to them. I’ve had their words in my ears for hours upon hours of podcast content, I feel I know them as well as my favourite bands I’ve been listening to for decades. They qualify as ‘famous’ and celebrities in my brain and yet speaking to them was as natural as old friends.
Once again, there’s something going on with this podcast business. It’s powerful. Is it hand in hand with community? I think so.
I found Ken’s Instagram post before the show to be very powerful. Take a read:
We all need this. Community facilitates a shift in relationship between creator and audience where both sides benefit from the exchange on a level that goes far beyond money changing hands. Just like the word blazoned across the t-shirt Ken wore on stage, it’s hope.
Stand with the Chand
This article was meant to be an excuse to bang on about Star Wars. It’s becoming a record of times I cried this month.
Chandos Green a.k.a Chandy’s talk at YATM Creator Day was a stand out moment for the event. Coincidentally his topic was about making a stand and how he has had to do so in his life in spite of serious health issues he’s faced since he was a young boy. On top of this he was subject to verbal abuse last year that left his confidence knocked.
Local hero Gordon Fong stepped up and organised a walk along the Bournemouth seafront with Chandy, known as ‘Stand with the Chand’ which I was proud to take part in last June. The walk attracted a bunch of media coverage that raised Chandy’s profile as an advocate and speaker for disability awareness. He’s now working for an event called Disability Expo taking place later this year at, guess where, the Excel.
What caught me off guard was Chandy talking about how much this gesture from Gordon meant to him then and still does 10 months later. Chandy chose to pay this forward by printing up a bunch of these postcards for all attendees to take and send to people in their lives. I’m going to say it again folks, it’s hope.
Thank you for all you do Chandy. I really appreciate the internet funnies you send me out of the blue and I’m still so grateful for when you sat with me at that formal lunch event because I was too hungover to stand! (‘Sit with the Toms’ doesn’t have the nearly the same ring to it).
Tom Rocks
Ten years ago this Spring I played an event called Teddy Rocks in Blandford with the lairy punk rock band I was in at the time. The festival had been started a couple of years earlier at the Greyhound pub in the town centre by Tom Newton, who we knew from playing gigs together with our previous bands. It was set up in memory of Tom’s younger brother Ted, who he lost in 2010 to a rare bone cancer.
The year we played was the first time they’d expanded to the beer garden and erected a proper festival stage. In the greatest ‘how it started / how it’s going’ ever. Check out where they’re at a decade later.
I went over to the festival site, now at Charisworth Farm and was in total awe of what Tom and his team have achieved. It’s an absolutely astounding example of someone taking their unimaginable grief and creating something that has positivity pouring out of it at every turn. Seeing Tom’s message of thanks to the crowd and Ted’s photo on screen just before Feeder took to the stage totally broke me.
I was a fly on the wall for the few hours I was there, but everywhere I looked I saw the hard earned results of a community coming together and the reward of an even stronger community to be a part of in return.
I’m so proud of Tom and incredibly grateful for the time he gave me on a project recently at the height of organisation for the festival and just days before the birth of his son! Congrats mate, you’re a hero and an inspiration (..and a firefighter! How do you do it?)
April showers
Other than the very obvious reasons detailed in this sprawling article, why is it that this April has been so overwhelming? Why have I been unable to hold back the tears on so many occasions? It’s not just me either, I’ve seen others suddenly overcome with emotion throughout the month.
I wrote about the wooden animals of Poole Dolphin Centre that have been brought out of storage and likened them to my life here in Poole, concluding with the following line:
A part of this town, sometimes hidden away, sometimes standing proud, hopefully remembered by someone.
In winter we hide away, in Spring we begin again. To quote David Tennant’s character Professor Huyang, the Jedi droid, in the trailer for the next Star Wars live action show Ahoksa, which debuted at Star Wars Celebration..
“Perhaps it is time to begin again?”
Alternatively, to repurpose a line of my own that I yelled across Blandford from the makeshift Teddy Rocks stage in 2013, inspired by battling depression:
“Because starting over is waging a war against giving up”
And that, is hope my friends!
Liam Toms 