How Star Wars’ fan community was born 🌌 Dan Madsen of the Star Wars Fan Club

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TRANSCRIPT

Bailey Richardson: When did you first fall in love with Star Wars?

Dan Madsen: I was a 14 year old kid. I’d come home from school every day and reruns of Star Trek.

Just so everyone knows I’m a little person. I’m four foot two inches tall. When I was growing up, people would make fun of me and bully me.

Dan onstage at Celebration I

But the very first Star Trek episode I ever sat down and watched was an episode called “Plato’s Stepchildren,” which had Kirk, Spock, and McCoy traveling to a planet where they met a group of people and there was a little person who looked very much like me in this episode. For the first time I saw somebody on that looked like me

The little person asks Captain Kirk, “What’s it like where you come from?” And Captain Kirk looks at him and said, “Where I come from, size, shape, or color makes no difference.” I remember thinking, wow, what an amazing world that must be where I wouldn’t be judged by what’s on the outside, but what’s on the inside.

About a year later, I heard a Star Trek convention was coming to Denver, Colorado, which is where I’m based. I went to this convention and got the program book. On the back of this program book was an ad for a new movie I’d never heard before called Star Wars.

I made my plans to go see this new movie. Just like any other 14 year old kid, my jaw dropped at that opening scene with the star destroyer. I was just enamored, I couldn’t believe it. It was such an amazing moment in my life. I decided I had to become a Star Wars fan. I went and I bought all kinds of Star Wars memorabilia. I bought the model kits and hung them from my ceiling in my bedroom. And , I joined the very first official Star Wars Fan Club. I was one of the very first people to ever join.

BR: How did you sign up for the Star Wars Fan Club at the time? What was the process like?

DM: I saw an ad for the official Star Wars Fan Club in one of the Sci-Fi magazines called Starlog, so I joined it. I got this really cool membership kit, and then I’d get a newsletter.

BR: At some point when you were still quite young. you started your first fan zine. Can you tell me about the idea to start that zine?

DM: In 1979, a new Star Trek movie had opened—Star Trek the Motion Picture—and I decided to start a fan club for Star Trek. I sat down in front of a typewriter and typed out my newsletter. I advertised it in Starlog magazine. I got a job in a print shop and started making that newsletter look better and more professional.

After several years, that Star Trek newsletter got in the hands of somebody at Paramount Pictures licensing. They called me up and they said, “Are you aware you don’t have a license to do this?” And I said, “Well man, I’m just doing this because I love it.” And they said let’s get you out here and have a talk with you about maybe starting the first official Star Trek Fan club. So they literally flew me out to the studio. I got to visit the Star Trek sets.

They looked at me and said, you have the right amount of professionalism mixed with the right amount of fanaticism. You should be the one to do the fan club.

Three months later I got a giant contract in the mail and I signed it. I went on to run the official Star Trek Fan Club for years, doing my own thing but getting to know all of the cast and crew of the Star Trek films and TV series.

It was in about 1986 that I get a call out of the blue from the head of licensing at Lucasfilm, Howard Roffman. I’d been doing Star Trek official fan club for some time and had put out the Star Trek Communicator magazine. It was quite a slick color professional magazine. Howard Roffman said, “We’ve decided to close down the fan club internally here, but George Lucas has seen what you’ve been doing with Star Trek and we wondered if you might be interested in taking over running the Star Wars Fan Club.

“You have the right amount of professionalism mixed with the right amount of fanaticism. You should be the one to start the fan club.”

BR: Wow. I just would have been going absolutely nuts if I knew George Lucas had seen my work. Were you pinching yourself or was that not a big surprise?

DM: I was pinching myself. Star Wars was still this magical thing from my youth that I never imagined I would ever become involved with. To get the opportunity to fly to Skywalker ranch and meet George Lucas and sit down with Howard Roffman and talk about taking over the Star Wars Fan Club was mind boggling to me.

This was way before the first prequel. No one knew when or if George would ever get back to making Star Wars movies. So when I went out to talk with them, they still had a mailing list of all the people who were in the Star Wars Fan Club. They told me they’d let me make out a mailer and send it to all of them.

Then I made some very slick ads that went on the back cover of the Starlog magazine that said the fan club had returned, but we decided to call it the Lucasfilm fan club because we didn’t know when Star Wars would return. So we could cover everything that Lucasfilm was doing.

BR: What was it that made Howard and George and Lucasfilm excited about having a fan club?

Fans at Celebration I

DM: No question it was building a community of passionate fans so that they could market to those people. They could supply them with information, help them build their love of Star Wars, keep them in communication with one another, allow them to purchase things that would encourage their love of franchise—the collectibles and all that. That became a big part of my business that wasn’t really a big part of the fan club initially, but as I built it in my own way, that became a big part of it.

BR: Ok, back to the re-launch of the fan club. Tell me about how it started?

DM: I was able to get ahold of Anthony Daniels, who played C-3PO in all the films. He was my very first interview. We had a very long conversation over the phone. (He was in England.)

We re-launched the fan club at what was the very first official Star Wars convention ever. It was the Tenth Anniversary Star Wars Convention and was held in Los Angeles. We had a big long table right in the lobby where we could sign people up.

BR: So what was that convention like compared to your Celebrations later?

DM: It was much , much smaller scale. It was the early beginnings of what the Celebration might be, but that was the 1987. Lucasfilm wasn’t convinced they wanted to do conventions, but since it was the 10th anniversary of Star Wars, they decided to go ahead. And it was also the opportunity to launch this new fan club that they wanted to do as well.

BR: So it is 1987 and you’re at a convention. You have started this fan club. You’re probably growing and growing members reasonably consistently, but something special was coming in 1999.

When did you start hearing that a new film is going to come out and new Star Wars film is to come out?

DM: Every few issues, I tried to do an interview with George Lucas. I’d ask him every time: When are you going to get back to Star Wars? He’d say he planned on it some day, but didn’t know when.It was about ’97 when I first started hearing the rumblings that there was possibly Star Wars movies going to be made.

So I flew up to Skywalker ranch and we had a big meeting about restructuring the fan club. Star Wars was now the big thing on the plate for Lucasfilm and so we decided to rename it the official Star Wars Fan Club. We started designing logos and I came up with the name for the magazine—Star Wars Insider. An inside look at everything Star Wars.

At that point I was introduced to the producer Rick Mccallum who was working as George Lucas’s right hand man on the films. He would do updates with me every issue.

Prior to that I had already been putting in the middle of each fan club magazine a catalog called The jaw. What trader It had every piece of licensed merchandise that Lucasfilm had for Star Wars and beyond. That would go out to all of our subscribers so they would have the opportunity to purchase them. Towards the end of my time running all this, I had a 4,000 square foot warehouse with just aisle upon aisle upon aisle of massive Star Wars action figures and masks and toys and blankets.

Dan and his team preparing for Celebration I.

BR: So you not only had subscribers and fan club members, but you were able to generate revenue through sales of collectibles?

DM: Absolutely, yeah. We managed just about all of these major arms of the Star Wars world at one point in time. We were really Star Wars central.

At the peak of my business running the Star Wars Official Fan Club, I had three huge warehouses. I had a little over a hundred employees and we were doing about $20 million a year. We had also done the very first official Star Wars merchandise website. We developed starwarsshop.com that was connected to starwars.com in the very beginning.

We had the catalog in the magazine, too. When the magazine started going into standard distribution—to grocery stores and Barnes and Nobles—I think we’re doing about a half million magazines at its peak. And we had the largest membership numbers ever in the Star Wars Fan Club’s existence. At our peak we had 180,000 members in 1998/99.

Kevin Huynh: What was the relationship between Lucasfilm and your business like? How independent did you feel?

DM: Because we were officially licensed by Lucasfilm, we had a contract that we signed. They would run about five years at a time. We paid a royalty to them on everything we did and in return for that, they would advertise us on all of their Star Wars products.

If you look back at at one of Hasbro’s action figures from that time period, you’d see on the very back at the bottom “Join the official Star Wars Fan Club. Call 1-800 TRUE FAN.” When you call that number, it would come to our call center here in Denver where I had probably 25 phone operators that were sitting there all day taking orders for collectibles.

BR: When we started this interview, you said you were 14 or 15 when you’re first kind of wading into the waters of fan clubs. And then you’re at this point where you have three warehouses, you have 25 people just answering the phone, hundreds of employees.

You stepped into really big deals and big business as something that you just started when you were very young. How did you teach yourself to become so professional?

DM: I hired qualified people that could help me. People who could tell me here’s what we need to do in negotiations with Lucasfilm and Paramount to get the best royalty payments. Somebody to handle finance and accounting. A warehouse director. A lot of freelance writers to do writing for the magazine that I did in the beginning. Originally, I did almost all the writing interviews, layout for the fan called magazines.

It was all almost exclusively me, and then I just got to be too much work to handle the running the business.

Photo opps abounded at Celebration I.

When you’re doing something you love, every day at work was like go to Disneyland for me. I mean, did I have struggles? Absolutely. Some months we didn’t have as good as sales and you still had bills to pay. Other months things went crazy.

But as we moved up towards that first prequel, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, the excitement and enthusiasm for Star Wars was so you incredible you felt it everywhere. Everybody had been waiting for George to get back to making new Star Wars movies and many of us thought he’d never do it.

BR: At the time I was young, but I’m sure the whole country, the whole world was ready for this film and you are at the center of its fan club.

Will you tell us how the idea for you to host what became the first Celebration presented itself?

DM: I didn’t have a lot of time to put it together. And just as a note, I’d never done an event before in my life. I had done the business operations sides of things and writing and editing, but I’d never run an event. At any rate,

BR: Why did Lucasfilm ask you to host the event, do you think?

DM: I got a call from them a little less than a year and a half before the date of the actual event.

They said they wanted to do a big Star Wars event to kind of kick off these new prequels—to give the fans the opportunity to celebrate Star Wars. We really want the fan club to be the ones that do it. We think that it would be better if it came from the fan club then from us. It would have more heart if it looked like the fans were leading it. I agreed.

So I flew out to Skywalker Ranch and we had two days of meetings and what they wanted to do, how they wanted to do it. I had my three or four key people in my company came out with me and we all expressed our desires, what we wanted to do, too.

Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) emceed Star Wars Celebration I

BR: How did you approach planning with Lucasfilm?

DM: We had to talk about where it was going to be held. We looked at Orlando, we looked at Los Angeles, we looked at Chicago.

Then the “whos” and “whats.” Who would be the guests that would come? What kind of events would we have?

It really came down to my company and the people within my company developing and designing that whole first celebration. We’d go to Lucasfilm and say, “here’s what we want to do.” Then they’d add their two cents. It was months and months and months of meeting after meeting after meeting.

BR: Why did you decide to have the event in Denver?

DM: It’s the center of the country, and most importantly, it’s the headquarters of the official Star Wars Fan Club. My whole company was there—100 employees who could help work on putting this event together.

Then we had the problem of trying to find a space. We didn’t have several years to try to coordinate this thing. The convention center unfortunately had been booked. So we had to find a location that was still open.

We went with a place called the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. It had a giant hanger with aircraft from all different centuries. They were starting to open it up to hold big events. Lucasfilm’s head of marketing flew out and really liked the idea of mirroring Star Wars, the feature, fantastical with real life spaceflight and planes and things. So I got them to sign off on the location.

I still don’t know how I did it because while we were putting on this massive event that was being marketed to people all over the world through amazing different venues, we still had to put the magazine out. We still had to run the fan club. We still had to process all the merchandise run the website store.

And it was an enormous task to put this event on. I hired a local company who puts on major events here in Denver because they had an amazing base of volunteers.

BR: How did you approach the little design decisions—what to include and what not to cut?

DM: This event was focused on Episode I. We didn’t go back in to all of the history and past of Star Wars. Everything from a marketing perspective was pointing right straight towards Episode I. All of the big banners we produced had the characters and such from Episode I. All of the special guests at the convention were actors and producers from Episode I. Anthony Daniels, who was the master of ceremonies, he’s C-3PO and was in Episode I. He came out two weeks prior to the event to help design the entire stage show

Surprises for fans abounded at Star Wars Celebration.

Including exclusive props like a full sized X-Wing!

BR: What else did you do to surprise fans?

DM: The life size X-Wing was without question the most exciting thing. It was trucked out in pieces from Lucasfilm on a giant semi truck. One of our warehouses housed it for about a month prior to the event. Our employees got a big kick out of going into the warehouse and standing around the X-Wing fighter.

When it was time for us to take it to the venue, we shipped it fully assembled and open air on a big giant flat bed truck. You should have seen the people pointing as we’d drive down the street

That was a huge surprise because people got to stand next to it and have their pictures taken with it.

After I coordinated with Lucas film to let the museum keep it permanently on display. They don’t own it. Lucasfilm owns it, but Lucasfilm let them keep it and it’s still there to this day. So when you walk in, you see a B-52 and you see the NASA section and you see all these vintage planes. But walk to the back there and there’s a life size X-Wing fighter.

The other thing I will mention is the props and costumes display. Fans could see some of the costumes and props or original lightsabers that no one had ever had the opportunity to see before .We had the original Darth Vader costume. We had some of the original miniatures, like the original miniature Millennium Falcon. We had some of the original props that were used in Episode I that people hadn’t even seen yet.

So we had an entire museum there with display cases. These things were worth millions of dollars. We had to have it all insured and have 24 hour security. Lucasfilm had it shipped out in an armored truck.

“People came from around the world. We had people come from the Soviet Union. We had some that had come from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Australia. Some of those fans I met and have remained dear friends to me.”

Inside the tent at Celebration I.

BR: 20,000 people came to the first Star Wars Celebration. How did you get the word out to all those people?

DM: Number one was word of mouth from fans. You could feel the buzz of the excitement around the fact that Star Wars was coming back.

We began to advertise it about six months in advance. We put out the Star Wars Insider and in every issue we did two huge full-page ads talking about the celebration—who was coming, articles in the magazine about what was going to be seen there. We sent out a mailer to everybody on the mailing list. We did some news stories with some of the national media and local media. We had Lucasfilm’s PR director to handle a lot of the international press.

When the event actually happened, we had media from all over the world to cover it — from Japan and Australia and England and Germany.

BR: Where did attendees come from?

DM: Literally all over the world. It was truly amazing to me how many people came from around the world. We had people come from the Soviet Union. We had some that had come from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Australia. Some of those fans I met and have remained dear friends to me to this very day.

You have to remember Star Wars hadn’t had an official convention since 1987. There was this kind of dead time or downtime I should say, when there wasn’t anything new for Star Wars. That was my time period. I had to keep Star Wars in front of people. I had to keep it alive and vibrant, keep their excitement up.

So the idea that not only are they going to get to watch another Star Wars movie on the big screen, but they can go to an official Star Wars convention with all the trappings that you could possibly want from an event like that—meeting the new cast members, seeing some of the very first footage from the new movie, getting autographs, buying collectibles. It was huge.

We had an entire store set up. The line went all the way out the building. People could buy the very first action figures from Episode I at the Celebration, and that was a huge draw because this was the very first place to get these collectibles. We did exclusives that you couldn’t find anywhere else, so you had to come to the convention to buy that stuff.

BR: This was 1999, almost 20 years ago now. What has happened to the fan club since and the Celebration since then?

DM: The fan club is no longer . I sold the fan club in about 2001 toa company up in Seattle, Washington who did Pokemon trading card game and such. They ran it for a couple of years, didn’t have great success with it. Eventually I think Lucasfilm hired somebody else to do it and decided it was time to close it down again.

BR: Why did they decide to shut the Star Wars Fan Club down?

DM: They just didn’t see interest from people wanting to join a fan club anymore. The fan club became kind of a dinosaur with the internet because now you don’t really need the fan club to keep people abreast of what’s happening in the news. Fans go online and find stuff out within minutes of any news getting out. The club became not as important as it was in my day when the Internet was just starting.

But they did keep alive was the Star Wars Insider magazine. The Star Wars Insider has continued to this very day through a publisher based out of England. It’s still found in grocery stores and Barnes & Nobles and everywhere else, so the magazine is still the lifeline. It’s the thing that goes out to the fans.

BR: Do you think anything was lost with the fan club going away and the Internet replacing it as the information source for fans?

DM: Yeah, I some of the specialness was lost. I hear it all the time from people who say, “Oh, I miss the fan club because it was so cool getting stuff in the mail, looking forward to the packages.” And now there’s exclusive Star Wars collectibles for every store. Walmart has exclusives and Hot Topic has exclusives, so it’s just not as homegrown as it was back in the day when we were doing it. It’s lost a bit of that special touch. It doesn’t feel as personal as it used to.

BR: What about the celebration? What is your relationship to that now?

DM: It’s grown to the point where it’s now a massive convention company called ReedPOP who handles conventions at a whole different scale. We were doing it by the seat of our pants. These guys are set up. They do massive conventions all over the world.

I still talk with them and I’ve been to almost almost all of them other than maybe two. Next year’s is being held in Chicago and is going to be a very special one because they’re celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first celebration. So I’ll be there with a lot of kinds of interesting fun things to talk about.

BR: What was the biggest challenge you faced in producing the event?

DM: Two weeks before the event happened, we had the tragedy here in Denver of the Columbine High School shootings.

I remember I had gone to the hotel to pick up Anthony Daniels. He and I were sitting in the restaurant, and we looked up at the TV and there was a news story of the SWAT teams and police at the school, what was happening, and the horror of what was going on.

That swept the world. The whole country was just in shock. And it happened literally 20 minutes from where the celebration was going to be held.

The next day after this had all happened, I get a call from the head of Lucasfilm licensing and he says, “We talked with George and we think we should cancel the event. This is not a time of celebration.”

We had already sold something like $12,000 worth of advance tickets. People had already made their plans from all over the world. We had people sending us notes and letters saying they’re coming from Germany. They’d made their vacation plans around this.

So Anthony and I sat in my office and got on speakerphone with Lucasfilm for an hour and a half. I told them I think they had made the wrong choice. And I said, let me tell you why. If there was ever a time when this city needs to have something, happy—to have something to celebrate, to take us out of this dark mood that we’re in at this point from all of this horrible mess. It would be this. We’d be allowing these to mad men also affect the lives of all of these other people. They said let us talk a little bit with George we’ll call you back tomorrow.

In the meantime, I immediately got on the phone with the mayor of Denver, his office, and I said, here’s what’s happening. We need you to write a letter to Lucasfilm and fax it over there immediately that says you don’t want this event to be canceled. So the mayor of Denver sent a letter to Lucasfilm, and the next day we got on the phone. We talked and talked and talked and at the end of the conversation I could hear a pause as if they were looking over at somebody—we think it was George—to see a nod and we had convinced them to keep the event on.

We had special ribbons in the Columbine High Schools made up that everybody who attended the event could have. We raised money for the victims of the shooting. It was somewhere in the amount of $35,000. Then hen the event started, I came out on stage and asked for the whole audience to give them a moment of silence for what had happened.

BR: If I asked you to do the celebration all over again or maybe all of this work done. The magazine, the Fan Club, the celebration. What’s the one thing you would do differently? Is there anything?

DM: To be honest, the path I took to do all of these things has led me to where I am today. One experience led to another. I don’t regret them. Some of the things that didn’t work perfectly were learning experiences.

I made friends and had experiences throughout running the fan clubs, publishing the magazines and doing the first Celebration event have lasted a lifetime for me. I still get people to this day on facebook, on twitter, on emails, through the mail saying how much fun they had at the Celebration and how they loved the Star Wars Insider magazine. You walk around Star Wars celebration and people still recognize me and know who I am and know that what I had done in the past.

It’s just fun to see Star Wars continuing on and growing and to know that we played a part in all of that. We had just a little footnote in the history of Star Wars, but nevertheless, we’re still there. As a footnote,

BR: If you could go back in time, what would you whisper to your 15 year-old self?

DM: I would say never let anybody tell you you can’t do it. I had this kind of youthful innocence and naivety. I thought, well, sure, I can do that. Can you put on this event? Sure I can do that. We want you to publish a magazine that is going to be sold across the world. Can you? Sure I can do that. You know. As a mature adult today, I know I’d think, how am I going to do that? But at that time I just threw myself into it. I figured out a way to do it and asked for help and advice from others.

And — one person can’t do everything. The key was really choosing wisely to put good people around me that had experience in things that I didn’t.

BR: That’s what I love about communities. They built from an intentional effort to create joy and share a positive energy with other people.

DM: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It comes down to is creating the joy that these things bring to people and sharing it with others. These Celebrations are so important to this community. When they get together every two years they can just forget about everything that’s going on in the world and just celebrate this thing that they absolutely love as much as anything. They get together and get dressed in their costumes, buy their collectibles, go to their panels and watch the actors and get the autographs and see the new clips of what’s coming down the line. And you know, there’s more Star Wars being made today than ever before. So it’s a good time to be a Star Wars fan.

BR: Dan, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. What an amazing life you’ve lived. I’m jealous. It seems so fun.

DM: Oh, well thank you. It’s been fun and I have a lot of great memories that I’ll remember it until the day I die. It’s been a fun experience being involved in all the things that I grew up being passionate about.

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