It’s famous Hollywood lore that George Lucas had the foresight to keep merchandising rights for Star Wars. What I learned from the Netflix documentary “The Toys that Made Us” was that that deal was a really bad one for George.
Since several toy companies had said no, Kenner had all the leverage. GL only got 2.5% of the profit. Kenner got 95% (I think Fox got the rest but don’t remember now). Worst still, the contract lasted forever as long as there were $10,000 in toy sales. This was easy to do when the toys were hot. When sales cooled after Return of the Jedi, Kenner would just send a $10,000 check to keep the license as is.
Kenner was eventually bought by Hasbro and stupidly in 1995 someone at Hasbro forgot or refused to send the check and the Contract dissolved. GL renegotiated and the new contract was terrible for Hasbro and great for GL.
Then, suddenly George Lucas announced he was making more Star Wars movies. Was this a coincidence? It seems really hard to swallow that it was. I suppose being immersed in SW again in the contract negotiations could have inspired him but really? It was an interesting angle to all this I never knew before.
I don’t think the new Star Wars prequels were George Lucas wanting to keep the toy rights. It was clearly motivated by the advance in CGI effects, especially Jurassic Park.
However, the intermediate Star Wars project of Shadows of the Empire definitely was a toy money grab. I think that was in the doco too.
On a related note, part of Mark Hamill’s contract was that he got a copy of every Star Wars toy. While such a collection might have been worth a significant amount of money, Hamill gave the toys to his children to play with.
Not all of them. Hamill has whole storage parks full of unopened toys. He has said in interviews that while he gave a lot of them to his kids (and other peoples kids) to play with, it barely scratched the surface as far as sheer worldwide volume.
Lucas actually announced that he would be doing the Prequels in the early '90s, when the first Expanded Universe novels (like the Thrawn trilogy) proved that there was still interest in the franchise. Hasbro actually bought Kenner in '91, but it’s probably still just coincidence.
Also, I watched that entire documentary series (there were also episodes on Barbie, He-Man, and Hot Wheels). I found it to be fun, but they seemed to sometimes play fast and loose (or at least incomplete) with timelines and facts.
The Star Wars one was very cool, as they interviewed a lot of the key players at Kenner, but (not surprisingly) they didn’t manage to get Lucas to talk with them, so his side of the story was missing.