HOW IT STARTED:
Fast-forward to the 1970s. Kenner’s a division of General Mills. It makes Easy Bake Ovens, and tops wish lists with its Six Million Dollar Man merchandise based on the day’s hit cyborg-action series. (Television shows, not movies, was where it was at for the toy industry.) Then one day a filmmaker shows up with an oddball proposal. Corky Steiner paints the scene: “A number of toy companies passed on [this] unusual presentation with funny names… These names are ridiculous. [People thought,] ‘This guy must be nuts.’”
“No, he’s not nuts,” Kenner’s research-and-development team says of Lucas and the pitch for his unseen film, Star Wars, per Steiner. “Everything we think we see in this script is a toy. This is a bonanza.”
—“The First, Worst Star Wars Christmas: A Look Back at the ‘Brilliant,’ Toy-less 1977 Holiday Season,” Yahoo, December 14th, 2015.
How It’s Going:
What’s hilarious about this whole fiasco is that Disney specifically bought Star Wars because they lacked a brand that appealed to boys. They had tons of merch sales to girls but had almost nothing for boys.
So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it… https://t.co/nodAbbidl0— Bizlet (@bizlet7) May 5, 2026
Tweet continues, “So they bought it for billions and the creative dept feminized it defeating the entire purpose of buying it to begin with.”
As John Nolte wrote in 2023, “Disney went woke and killed what even the stillborn Lucas prequels couldn’t kill: the magic of Star Wars.”