Much as we have two billionaires - Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - funding space exploration, we have two cinematic franchises creating our outer space fantasies. The Star Wars franchise is now found on Disney+, and the new streaming shows - The Mandalorian, The Book of Bobba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi - can be found there providing origin stories and histories for the movies that are now also on this platform. The Star Trek franchise is now found on the CBS streaming platform ParamountPlus, where it also has three series, Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds, along with animated Star Trek spin offs and the other Star Trek series originally produced on broadcast television and the movies developed from them.
Fans are often partisan about whether Star Wars or Star Trek is superior. Together the two franchises represent half of the concentrated industry that is syfy, the more terrestrial-focused Marvel and DC Comics franchises being the other firms in this oligopolistic market. (Even the producers outside of these two behemoths can often be seen as more like one than the other, with Jos Whedon’s Firefly more like the long ago and far, far away galaxy of Star Wars, and Hulu’s The Orville more like the Star Trek world, which it spoofs.) It would be interesting if Musk or Bezos were partisans of either franchise, but neither is openly so. Musk has opined that he loved both as a child. Bezos actually had a cameo in the 2016 movie Star Trek Beyond, and famously had William Shatner as a passenger on a Blue Origin flight 5 years later, but hasn’t compared the two franchises. The Star Wars franchise, which began in 1977, has earned $70 billion in revenues from all sources, beating out, for now, the Star Trek franchise, at $11 billion, even though the latter began at Desilu Productions in 1965.
Another billionaire is a partisan: Peter Thiel favors Star Wars because Star Trek seems to have a non-capitalist economy. For this opinion - though no doubt more for his support of politically incorrect candidates and ideas - Thiel was criticized in a particularly unintelligent piece in the New Yorker, by a writer named Manu Saadia, who is the author of a book called Trekonomics.
Saadia’s article is loaded with howlers. My favorite is his denigration of Star Wars as just a Western: “Although the galaxy that George Lucas created exists long ago and far away, it is in fact much closer to home than ‘Star Trek.’ Forget the lightsabers and the Force: the essential story of the films is familiar, a techified version of a Wild West that existed only in Buffalo Bill’s traveling revue and its celluloid successors, the Westerns.” But creator Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to Desilu Productions as "a Wagon Train to the stars." So it’s not clear how being a “Western” - having frontiers, and villains, and guns - distinguishes Star Wars from Star Trek.
Saadia seems to believe that “the process of capitalist accumulation” really will, as Marx said, lead us to a magical post-capitalist future where Star Trek style replicators will mean humans no longer work and all our needs will be provided for. And he has great fun quoting the twitter intelligentsia, the primary research resource for today’s journalists, on how Jabba the Hut is the hero of the Star Wars universe for Mr. Thiel, since only by Jabba’s being a creditor enforcing his rights on the debtor Hans Solo is the Star Wars adventure set in motion. One wonders if Manu Saadia is experiencing any inflation or shortages today and if he even begins to fathom how his belief that production is magical might be related. One wonders if he thinks in the future anyone will need to mine or transport the rare earth minerals the replicators might use or that one might have to pay people to write the code that operates them in order to give them an incentive to not do something else with their time and imaginations.
It’s interesting that the partisans of Star Trek are the ones attracted to magical thinking, when of course Star Wars famously has a major element a form of magic called The Force, and a group of what are close to being witches and wizards, the Jedi. But on closer examination, it may be that the Star Trek universe is the one that is more magical and less realistic and less grounded in nature and human nature. There are a number of other differences between the two fantasies that go far beyond capitalist and non-capitalist economics, though they may reflect other contending moralities or ideologies, and in each of them I contend that the Star Trek franchise seems to be more fantasy and farther from human nature than is Star Wars. Perhaps this explains the bigger commercial success of Star Wars, even though Star Trek had a decade’s head start. Star Wars engages more widely real human passions about real human problems.
Saadia was perhaps accidentally onto something by focusing on replicators. In Star Trek technology is usually smooth and clean with the finish of next year’s Apple product. Even when crew members have to crawl into the “jefferies tubes” to do repairs, things are usually well lit and dust free. In contrast the androids and other gizmos of Star Wars, from C3PO up to the Millenium Falcon Hans Solo flies, are usually gritty, oil stained, and damaged. We frequently see people - human or alien - selling parts or doing repairs and reclamation. The only technology that is clean and shining in the Star Wars universe is the technology of the Empire, though unlike Apple products (or Federation technology) it tends to be a shiny black, not a shiny white. Which is the more magical universe - the one where the technology usually works perfectly and looks beautiful, or the universe where technology takes work and looks thrown together, and the magic is separate from the tech?
Star Trek technology has another magical element besides its Steve Jobs designer glamour. Star Trek has time travel. (And alternate universes.) So far no Star Wars plot line has had to use time travel (or the multiverse) to reset a story. But Star Trek has been having its heroes travel through time since April 6, 1967, when William Shatner went back in time to woo a young Joan Collins in “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The most recent seasons of two of the three current Star Trek shows occur entirely out of their timelines: Picard finds Jean Luc Picard and friends thrown back into contemporary San Franciso and Discovery finds its intersectional crew, complete with a finally elected Stacey Abrams (that’s real magical thinking) tossed forward from 2254 AD to 3188 AD. That’s a form of magic not available to real people trying to solve their problems.
Star Trek frequently very self-consciously argues with itself and its fans that it is NOT like Lord Vader’s Empire, despite their similar fondness for shiny technology and clean orderly ships. Or even more relevant, not like its dark reflection, The Borg. It does not force people to join the Federation. In fact you can’t join it and it will not reveal itself to you, unless you first achieve faster than light travel by building a warp engine. (Curiously for the socialist critics of Peter Thiel, this means the Federation is also not offering its life and labor saving technology to all the workers of the worlds that have not reached that technological pinnacle.) Once you do decide to join it though, as the Klingons point out, you will have to accept the jab. You can’t go to school or work in the Federation unless you play by its rules. If the Federation really is a state controlled and centrally planned economy is obedience to its rules required to get its benefits? And is outlawing any trade or intercourse with needy pre-Warp savages the only way its fiscal house can remain in order?
It probably helps then that almost all the aliens the Star Trek Federation meets are so much like people in the Federation, almost all species who stand upright, walk on land, have bilateral symmetry, can frequently interbreed with humans and other Federation members, and even often have a variety of races with the exact same shades of skin pigmentations found among humans. Star Wars is messier, less humanoid-normative, with creatures of a far greater variety of sizes and body types, as famously depicted in the Mos Eisley Cantina. Similarly Star Wars has sentient robots that seem to have been around for centuries and hold vital roles in the economy - and the resistance - and are friends with people (even if the robots don’t seem to be free yet). Just as Star Trek socialism seems to be demand a certain uniformity from alien members of the Federation, the Federation also has an uneasy time dealing with cyborgs and robots. It has a very few androids made to look like humans, but beginning with V’ger, the sentient reconstruction of Voyager by an alien robot civilization in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), the Federation is uneasy with robots, from the Borg to scary (man made and alien) AIs mankind (along with Vulcans and Romulans) has to battle or flee through time to escape. In general, Star Trek’s socialism seems to require a uniformity of its subjects.
The state (the Federation) seems to have partially supplanted the family in Star Trek. Children, and two parent families (part of the uniformity is that all the races the Federation meets seem to have two parent reproduction), are rare in Star Trek: one crew member was accidentally impregnated by an alien in Enterprise; no children were aboard the original 1966-1969 Star Trek; Next Generation had a single mom whose teen son was the now famous Wil Wheaton and another partly Klingon child of a crew member; Deep Space Nine had two crew members with a baby and a captain who was a single dad to a teenage boy; Discovery has an adult woman looking for her long lost mom.
By contrast Star Wars is loaded with family and is becoming more so. In the original movies we learn that Luke and Princess Leia are twins and their father is Darth Vader. In the later moves Leia and Hans Solo marry and have a child. In the new Disney+ series The Mandalorian is protecting a baby Yoda, and in Obi-Wan Kenobi a Jedi is protecting a pre-teen Luke and a pre-teen Leia, and their families, while the Empire is stealing “Force-sensitive” children from their families (and killing the families) to raise them as evil Jedi who will serve the Empire.
I actually expected to find survey data showing that a higher percentage of women respond to Star Wars than to Star Trek. But survey data in the past has shown that only around a fifth of women like either. At a recent book party for the libertarianish Star Wars fan book Can the Force Save the World? men and women were in equal attendance, and Minneapolis (Democratic) Mayor Betsy Hodges, who wrote one of the two introductions, spoke on how fleeing into the fantasy had helped her cope as a teen with sexual abuse. One imagines Star Trek could have as well provided an escape into fantasy if the franchise had been producing more stories at the time. But would it have been as soothing, given Star Wars focus on Jedis and Mandalorians and others protect children from attack by powerful evil authority figures? I will be curious to look again in another decade and see if Star Wars does not continue to earn more than Star Trek, if it continues to have less magical thinking and less dirigiste politics, and if it does not attract more female fans.
A shorter version of this article ran at SpliceToday last week.