Since Disney’s 2012 purchase of Lucasfilm, connected stories set in the Star Wars galaxy have exploded across media, including feature films, fiction, comic books, television, and games. This paper discusses the development of a college course taught in 2017 that leveraged existing student interest in the Star Wars franchise to teach a broad range of media literacies, including the critical analysis of films, TV, comics, print fiction, and games. The course focused on analyzing different aspects of transmedia storyworlds, or narratives that span multiple media and target different generations of audiences. The paper also discusses a second course to be taught in Spring 2018 that uses the Star Wars galaxy as the setting for role-playing and fiction writing. Far from pandering to students with pop culture, these courses position them to become critical consumers and active producers of media content in the 21st century.
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