Gone to the dark side

Some of the hottest toys in America for kids ages 4 and up are $20 “Star Wars” light sabers that have been upgraded to change colors or vibrate with “feel the Force” combat action. The plastic swords do more than make cash registers ring; each one is a reminder to youngsters that a brand-new “Star Wars” film hits theaters May 19.

But there is a dark side to the retail force. Despite the flood of playthings that have clogged toy aisles for the last month, “Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith” is not a film for the youngest fans.

The last film in the storied franchise but the first to receive a PG-13 rating, “Sith” is too grim and too intense for 5- and 6-year-olds, according to the filmmaker himself. George Lucas said he is already taking heat from parents who are bracing for trauma or tantrums -- the former if they take their young children to “Sith,” the latter if they don’t.

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Lucas said last week at his Marin County headquarters, Skywalker Ranch. “That’s the story.”

To Lucas, the story is the dark, final chapter to an opus he began writing in 1971 -- but to many parents, it is the latest popcorn movie of the summer to tell its youngest fans that they should stay home with the baby-sitter on opening night. The gap between the toy aisles and the box-office window has been growing in recent years -- it was never more evident than with the dark and disturbing 2003 “Hulk” movie -- but this time around, the movie in question is a pop-culture happening of the first order.

The plot of “Sith” is the transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. One sequence of his descent into evil is especially bracing: It’s when a group of “younglings,” the 7- to 10-year-old proteges of the Jedi, are slaughtered by the villain in his quest to snuff out the knighthood. The light-saber massacre occurs off-screen, but the framing scene and the glimpse of corpses afterward make his deed clear.

“You don’t ever see it,” Lucas said. “It’s implied. But it’s very important that he turn very bad.”

Far more explicit is pain that Skywalker suffers later in the film; after a climactic light-saber battle on a lava planet, the villain howls from the loss of limbs and the graphic charring of his flesh.

The intensity of those sequences makes for some incongruous tie-ins this time around for the franchise that practically invented Hollywood toy and product synergy. That gruesome scene on the lava planet? That’s the inspiration behind Darth Vader’s face on new boxes of “lava berry explosion” Pop-Tarts and Keebler’s “Lava Stripes” fudge cookies.

Nowhere is “Sith” more visible than in toy aisles, thanks to an array of new playthings and games from the Rhode Island-based Hasbro Inc. toys. Brian Goldner, who oversees the company’s U.S. line of toys, said the sale of “Sith” toys to very young children does not send the message that “Sith” is a movie for them to see.

“We sell a tremendous variety of toys for ‘Star Wars,’ and we sell different toys for different ages as well as for collectors,” Goldner said. “I don’t think anyone expects those children to be at the movie on opening day. The toys are a way to participate too, for the kids that won’t be at the theater.”

But Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College in New York and author of “Savage Pastimes” and other writings on pop culture violence, said the sale of toys to the very youngest of consumers is an instance of “Lucas wanting his cake and eating it too. He wants a movie that will appeal to the older teens, but he still wants this movie to be all things to all people with the retail presence.” For many parents, news that “Sith” will be PG-13 -- meaning parental guidance is suggested and that material could be inappropriate for those younger than 13 -- means that they will have to scout the film first.

“What I will do is before taking my 6-year-old son, I will go and watch the movie and try to predict how he would take it,” said Bruce Stein, who has already ruled out taking his 3-year-old daughter. Stein has more insight into the “Sith” issue than most parents. A former president of both Mattel Toys Worldwide and Kenner Toys, Stein had firsthand experience with films-as-toys, including some “Star Wars” projects. He now is a partner in the Hatchery, a company with varied entertainment projects in the realm of family fare, among them a “Benji” movie. “I don’t think the mistake here is putting the movie out with a PG-13 rating, I think the mistake if any is in putting out a preschool line of toys,” Stein said. What is undeniable is the humongous success of “Star Wars” as a toy entity. The “Star Wars” films have made $9 billion in merchandise sales with products as varied as a $340 metallic replica of Yoda’s light saber to an $8 Darth Vader edition of Mr. Potato Head. That staggering retail total is triple the franchise’s box office sales.

Nothing is hotter than the plastic “Sith” light sabers that are all the rage with 5-year-old boys.

Wal-Mart, a powerhouse in U.S. toy sales, had overnight hours early last month to give collectors first shot at the debut of the “Sith” toys, and now sandlots everywhere are packed with youngsters mimicking Anakin Skywalker and his more heroic offspring, Luke. (Hasbro declines to discuss sales to date, but in toy industry trade publications the item is hailed as the season’s brisk seller.)

“With that and our new talking Darth Vader mask, it gives the kids a chance to take it to a whole new level, with the sound of his breathing and everything,” said Hasbro’s Goldner. “Even if they can’t go to the movie, they can be part of it.”

More often, youngsters find that the toys, comic books and cartoons that are geared toward them are tied into movies that they cannot be part of at the Cineplex.

After years of comic books heroes reaching the screen as uninspired juvenilia, movies such as “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” scored big money and acclaim with PG-13 efforts that were fun romps but also kept the attention of older teens by including brutal fistfights and an impaling here and there. Fantasy films, too, have taken a turn toward the more mature scripts and harrowing images, as evidenced by the “Lord of the Rings” series and the most recent “Harry Potter” installment. The “Rings” movies were rated PG-13, while the “Potter” films were able to keep the action in the PG territory.

This summer, “Sith” is joined by “Batman Begins,” another PG-13 film, as the latest entry in the category of children’s heroic fare forced to grow up and grow dark for its 21st century revival. Any traces of camp that may have lingered from the “Batman” television series of the 1960s are wiped away in this go-round by director Christopher Nolan, who is best known for the complicated crime thriller “Memento.” His take on the caped crusader is being described as a psychologically gripping one geared to adults.

“Batman Begins” arrives June 15 with some parallels to “Hulk.” That summer 2003 film was clearly not geared toward children -- director Ang Lee turned the tale into a horror story laced with Freudian ruminations -- but still had toy tie-ins such as the “Hulk hands,” noise-making plastic gloves that were aimed at preschoolers and elementary school kids.

Does this all create an unspoken contract that the movie will be an all-ages affair?

Yes and no, said Diane Nelson, executive vice president of Global Brand Management, the company working with Warner Bros. on the retail life of Batman in connection with the film.

“You could say the toys are part of all the different cues that help define these event [movies], that the toy is sending a message that the film is coming and it may be for the kids,” Nelson said. “But you can also say that the array of products gives different consumers of different ages a way to participate in the Batman [experience] and that whether the parent decided to let the child go to the movie or not, this gives the child a way to experience part of the event.”

Nelson has a 5-year-old son who, as might be expected, already has a Batmobile and a growing collection of “Batman Begins” toys. “He won’t be seeing the movie, but the toys give him a way to have fun with this movie he would be aware of no matter what.”

As for the darkness of “Sith,” it follows two “Star Wars” installments that were unkindly reviewed in some quarters for having a lightweight screen presence. Lucas said the previous film, “Attack of the Clones,” would have been PG-13 had he not excised certain scenes. He knew this film would draw the stronger rating because “we cut off a few more arms, a few more legs.”

Twenty-eight summers have passed since Lucas gave the world a family classic, “Star Wars.” “Sith” is not that movie. Worse than gore, Lucas said, may be watching a father turn evil and a family splinter in “Sith.”

“For little kids,” Lucas said, “that’s pretty hard to take.... I’m not making these, oddly enough, to be giant, successful blockbusters. I’m making them because I’m telling a story, and I have to tell the story I intended.”

Times staff writer Eric Bailey contributed to this report.