It’s an interesting question. Cheesy lines, over-the-top acting, zippers up the back of the monster’s costume–how many films just like it have found their way into the Betamax bins of history? If we are to believe the writers of That ’70s Show, it is the keen action and the super duper special effects. But there is also something more. Watch the first 3 minutes of the famous ’70s Show episode, “A New Hope.”
The entire episode is filled with nostalgia, hilarious throwbacks to the original series. The nostalgia continues to this day, from reproductions of Star Wars lunch boxes to celebrated Goodwill discoveries. Though it was almost lost in the incredibly painful second film of the prequel series, Attack of the Clones, the third episode, Revenge of the Sith, begins to recover the things we loved most about the original three.
Now we can look forward to a new episode this Christmas. And, predictably, it is filled with nostalgia:
“Chewy, we’re home.” Classic.
But, nostalgia for what? There has to be something at the core of the series, beyond cheese and lights. Why has it stuck with us?
I think the answer is hidden in this long lost trailer from 1977.
In the days after Saturday Night Live and Spaceballs and The Simpsons, it’s hard not to imagine going into the theatre in 1977 and expecting a spoof. Perhaps we’ve lost our innocence as a culture.
And it is also easy to forget how far special effects has come. When you live in a generation where you can use shareware software to stage an at-home light saber battle, 20th century effects won’t impress us much.
But it isn’t just effects is it?.
The films that visually impressed me the most growing up–Toy Story, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix, Shrek, and Inception–had more to them than technology. 2012 is a good example of a film with no story and a pretty dumb premise but pretty good effects.
No, I think the reason we love Star Wars is that it goes deeper into our cultural consciousness than we can imagine. Look at the stunning statements made by the trailer:
“an adventure unlike anything on your planet”
“the story of a boy, a girl, and a universe”
“a big, sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance”
“it’s a spectacle light years ahead of its time”
“it’s an epic of heroes and villains and aliens from a thousand worlds”
“a billion years in the making: Star Wars”
Then the flash of light.
George Lucas is, I think, at the deepest level a mythmaker. He certainly is a genius SciFi world-builder. He takes the universe-changing work of Larry Niven and Frank Herbert to a new level with his own mythic Empire. But while Ringworld and Dune are set in the future, Star Wars is set in the deep past.
Star Wars isn’t just adventure. Star Wars is mythology.
In this sense, I think that as much as George Lucas relies on the SF masters, he is also a deep reader of the master myth-maker, J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien understood the project of mythopoiea at the most intimate level, shaping Middle Earth out of a worldview that is entirely consistent with itself. Moreover, Tolkien’s project does what myth always does: it tells us about the present world. Myths are never really buried in the past. True myths, the good ones, will resonate again and again through cultures that appear long after the myth-making culture has slipped into legend.
That’s why I think Star Wars has lasted. Beyond big names and big budgets and super duper effects, when you watch Star Wars you get the sense that it really is a film “a billion years in the making.” It is a story that tells all our stories, a myth speaks to us today.
Really, it’s a film that’s worth feeling nostalgic about. May the Fourth be With You!
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
Campbell was actually on set during the shooting of ‘StarWars’ (or so I was always told). ‘The Matrix’ sticks more closely to the basic template, though – I guess if something’s not broken, why try to fix it?
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It’s fun to take that “monomyth” idea and lay it next to Northrop Frye’s work.
I didn’t know Campbell was on set. Pretty cool. I bet there are interviews out there….
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Sorry Brenton – a quick google just revealed I was wrong. Lucas drew on Campbell’s work for inspiration and they did meet subsequently, but (alas) Campbell was never on set. He does provide a commentary on Lucas’s use of the monomyth however.
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Still, the rumour was cool!
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Yes, it was!
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Slightly off topic, I’d just like to say one of my favorite scifi writers wrote the screenplay to “Empire Strikes Back”: Leigh Brackett. She wrote fantastic stories. Sadly many are hard to come by anymore. Incidentally she also wrote the screenplay to “The Big Sleep”.
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That’s cool. I’ve never heard of her, but a great SF name, don’t you think? One of the things I love about SF/Fantasy is the great diversity of authors, and not all mainstream.
Fantasy have taken the indie world by storm. What about SciFi (other than paranormal)?
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Star Wars changed everything. I remember walking out of a Star Trek Convention in the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City in ’76 and being met at the sidewalk by a guy passing out leaflets – ads for Star Wars! We knew nothing about the film — I don’t remember seeing the trailer posted above, just a much shorter one that really said nothing about what the film was about. Movies in those days were, well, dull. Everything had to be “significant” and “relevant”. So when my friend and I walked into the theater on that afternoon, we had no idea what to expect. We didn’t have to wait in line – it seemed there was no interest in the movie at all. Then the theater went dark and we were hit with the John Williams fanfare. It was pure magic, and I had never seen anything like it before. Star Wars stayed in the theaters for like 2 years – I saw it 17 times in the theater myself.
It was kind of like when I discovered Lord of the Rings — when I first read it in 1970 there was nothing like it. You got to the end and said “WOW”, and then if you went to the bookstores, well, there was no “Heroic Fantasy” section, so all you could do was go home and start again at the beginning of “The Fellowship of the Ring.
Like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars grabbed me because it was a serious effort to tell a fantastic story with no condescension. Heroism was dead in 1976, and Star Wars brought it back.
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Very cool story, Marc. I felt like I was with you in ’77.
I was, though, a toddler in ’77! I missed it all–even missed ET, mostly because we were too poor to afford the ticket. The only film I saw as a kid was Phar Lap.
And all three films were out before VCRs were readily available, so you had to back to the theatre, right? At least until it hit TV.
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Seeing it in the cinema was a big deal, especially as most TVs in Ireland were black and white back then. Maybe my age was a factor, too (I was thirteen): Star Wars was very different from the Disney movies I was accustomed to.
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Star Wars in black and white… That would be gruesome!
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