Now ThAt-At's What I Call Music

By Travis Johnson

Mashup culture is a weird thing. While Sturgeon’s Law certainly applies (the formula for the vast majority of these things seems to be Recent Nerd Property x Nintendo Character = TeeFury Profit, when they’re not just stapling NuWho onto things and calling it a day), some of them are clever and/or cute, and this batch of fake album covers incorporating elements from the Star Wars films falls into the latter category.

Superfi have form for this: their Apple/Beatles series was pretty cool, as was their Desperate Movie Sequels.

The key difference between this kind of thing and most pop culture mashup stuff is that the Superfi guys aren’t trying to make money off of it – they’re just throwing it up for fun (and traffic, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone on that one). By contrast, online tee-shirt companies generally take their IP from whatever’s popular, and the standard 24 hour sales window on those things means that by the time the Cease & Desist orders hit their inbox, the design has been retired and the Paypal transactions are cleared (this is why you’ll see the same design crop up on multiple sites – that’s the artist trying to maximise his profit across multiple platforms). Generally speaking, the original creator is not compensated and their material is not licensed, and they don’t have much recourse; even the notoriously litigious Disney seems to have decided not to bother wasting resources on chasing down every Marvel or Star Wars (or both!) knockoff that crops up.

While you might not have much pity for a massive business monolith like Disney or Warner, it’s worth remembering that not every pop culture icon is the fruit of some gargantuan corporate tree – consider Hellboy, whose creator, Mike Mignola, is not a fan of his work being milked for the profit of others: