A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… actually it wasn’t really a galaxy far, far away but the creative recesses of a scrawny film director’s mind. That brain does occasionally appear to be on some other planet though, but anyway, I digress. A long time ago in the headspace of a Hollywood wunderkind in the new generation of American indie filmmakers, the idea of Star Wars was born and eventually came to fruition as a fantastic movie that mixed sci-fi, folk mythology and pioneering filmmaking effects to create something extraordinary and extremely significant in pop culture.

Thirty-odd years later after numerous sequels, prequels, spin-offs and supplementary extratextual tie-ins, Star Wars is now much more than the single space-opera feature released back in 1977. George Lucas’s lovechild grew - for better and for worse - into a multi-dimensional, multi-platform, multimedia hydra of many heads that just keeps on sprouting more and more. The latest extra layer added to the official canon is Star Wars: The Clone Wars: a computer-animated feature film that explores events between Episodes II and III and gives us all a multi-coloured cartoonish blast of lightsabre waving, blaster shooting action.

Lucas has described the CGI-project as being a way of taking Star Wars to a new audience and giving a younger generation a cinema experience similar to that received by older fans of the late 70s and early 80s, just like the prequels did a decade ago. Always reasonably family-friendly, the latest extensions of the Star Wars brand - The Clone Wars and its 2-D precursor on the Cartoon Network - appear as efforts to really attract children and appeal to them directly. There’s a sense of spurning older fans here and it’s possible to postulate that perhaps Lucas is looking to ever-younger groups because firstly, they are the future investing consumers and secondly, because they are not yet jaded and cynical. They’re greener than Yoda and as-yet are unwary of any issues about Greedo shooting first, DVD airbrushing or midichlorians; plus they probably lack the literacy level to lambast Lucas and his cultural complex on the internet.

If Lucas is looking to bring his mega-brand to masses hitherto untouched and uninterested in Star Wars, it raises questions of how far he’s willing to go to get them. We’ve already seen how he and Steven Spielberg appropriated their adoration of pulpy sci-fi and 1950s pop culture into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and it’s not impossible that future Star Wars ventures would similarly reach out by taking elements out of other movie types in the vein of a Tarantino or Coen brothers film.

Just as the anime-esque computer-generated imagery of The Clone Wars is calculated to captivate a new generation of youngsters, I can see Lucas in a drastic off-the-wall outburst attempting to pull in the Sex and the City/Mamma Mia! crowd with an inter-galactic rom-com (Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala’s honeymoon in the rural retreats of Naboo perhaps, with a filial sub-plot to add a dash of Meet the Parents). To give geriatrics, unimpressed by big special-effects and grouchy that “the good old days” of drama have gone, a film-noir thriller or detective-style mystery that culminates in a courtroom showdown could do the trick and pull another demographic under the influence of the Lucas empire.

How do you attract that crucial 16 to 25 mainstream cinemagoing market segment? Set up either a crass gross-out spoof or infuse Return of the Jedi with the ‘torture-porn’ trend presented by the Saw and Hostel series to get the low-brow youth audience enthused about Star Wars. All you have to do is make up some deranged new Sith villains and subject some naïve fuzzy creatures to an array of vile acts of violent sadism with plenty of gratuitous gore. Hey presto: box-office profit and brand proliferation. If Lucas is intensively eager to beat the rebels at their own game, it can only be so long before he unveils an official explicitly erotic Star Wars commodity to counter the types of bold fan-fiction that have already been fantasised by the febrile minds of fanboys and fangirls.

Despite the odd mention of Indy and occasional references to other material (like the proposed Red Tails project), Lucas can’t let go of Star Wars; and why would he want to when it is so phenomenal? Whether you’re enthusiastically obsessed with it, antagonistic towards it or simply ambivalent, there’s no doubting that Star Wars is something a bit special and, love him or loathe him, it was George Lucas who conceived the original vision that has become such a significant cultural movement.

The Clone Wars and subsequent extensions to the original saga may not be worthwhile and may not even be very good, but it’s pointless to get too angsty and upset about them. Whilst it’s worth wondering if Lucas is a few Ewoks short of a forest moon colony as he continues to pump out more products, it’s ultimately true that Star Wars as an entity is so vast that fans can pick and choose. If Star Wars: The Clone Wars is targeted at a particular generation, others can bypass it and stick to the original trilogy, the prequels, the computer games, comics or whatever it was that first ensnared them in that galaxy far, far away. In the words of Ben Kenobi: “let go”. George Lucas can’t, but the audience can.