May theForce be with you.Back in a 1973 note on “Star Wars,” Lucas made clear which side he was rooting for in theVietnam War: “A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.” ~ Kyle SmithPrincess Leia personally witnessed thedestruction of her entireplanet — something that could be consideredthe Holocaust, theMongol invasion, andStalin’s purges put together and multiplied by a thousand — yet is nonchalantly kissing her brother on Hoth a few weeks later. ~ Carl Forsling
Star Wars is an Americanepicspace opera media franchise created byGeorge Lucas owned by Lucasfilm. The franchise began with theeponymous 1977 film and quickly became a worldwide pop-culturephenomenon. The franchise has been expanded into various films and other media.
Star Wars leans more towardsfantasy thanscience fiction and I think that’s to its benefit. It hasgood vs. evil,monsters,princesses,knights,magic items, etc.All of these make it as easy fit for the RPG genre. Star Wars is also one of the most beloved IPs in the world. ~ James OhlenAnd there I am sitting in the theater at almost 11 years old and that was a powerful notion. And I think this is what your point was, we would like to believe that when s*** gets serious, that you could harness that Force I was told surrounds not just some of us but every living thing. And so, I really feel like the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline, it’s not that I don’t believe that as part of the canon, I’m just saying that at 11 years old, that wasn’t where my heart was. ~ J.J. AbramsStar Wars producer Gary Kurtz claimed that Star Wars made three times as much ontoys as it did onfilms, while creator George Lucas said: “All themoney is in the action figures.” Lucas famously retained licensing and merchandising rights to Star Wars in exchange for a $500,000 directorial fee. The result made him a billionaire. ~ Anna SmithGeorge made a fairy tale story, with a princess, the young prince, and the cynical Harrison Ford playing Han Solo. To me, it was an absolutely perfect rendition of a great comic serial. I learned to draw from comic strips, the better ones. I always remembered the earlySupermans were better drawn than the later one, and the earlyTarzans were spectacularly well drawn, the anatomy of the jungle was great. There’s artistry in comic strips and George was obviously a devotee of that and what he did was brilliant. ~ Ridley ScottOne of the more commonly described oddities of the Star Wars universe is the notion of entireplanets with oneclimate. We are introduced to desert planets and ice planets and swamp planets. Of course, any one planet could have a myriad of different climates and ecosystems in the real world. But this peculiar detail reveals the metaphor that Star Wars is working with: eachplanet in Star Wars is basically eachcountry in our world. Thismetaphor allows the Star Wars universe to essentially retell stories from the era ofBritish imperialism ~ J. Andrew Deman
Afriend of mine backhome justdied...I never got to say goodbye, you know? I keepwishing he'll come back as a blueghost, likeObi-Wan Kenobi. There's so much I want to say to him.[sigh] Why can'tlife be like Star Wars? ~Aaron McGruder
I will just say this: I would never presume to question anything George Lucas says is canon in Star Wars. And our job was not to negate or undo. A lot of people who are critics of ourStar Trek, and I respect all of them, said we destroyed what they loved and negated everything. And we worked hard to clarify that we are not saying that our Star Trek over-rides a thing of the original Star Trek — it was a parallel timeline. I never wanted to negate canon that fans held so dear. And because I love Star Wars and have for too many years... ... And having said all that and meaning it — I don't want to presume over-write or change what George says the rules are. I'm not someone who quite understands the science of the Force. To me Star Wars was never aboutscience fiction — it was aspiritualstory. And it was more of afairytale in that regard. For me when I heard Obi-Wan say that the Force surrounds us and binds us all together, there was no judgement about who you were. This was something that we could all access. Being strong with the force didn't mean somethingscientific, it meant something spiritual. It meant someone who could believe, someone who could reach down to the depths of your feelings and follow this primal energy that was flowing through all of us. I mean, that's what was said in that first film! And there I am sitting in the theater at almost 11 years old and that was a powerful notion. And I think this is what your point was, we would like to believe that when shit gets serious, that you could harness that Force I was told surrounds not just some of us but every living thing. And so, I really feel like the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline, it's not that I don't believe that as part of the canon, I'm just saying that at 11 years old, that wasn't where my heart was. And so I respect and adhere to the canon but I also say that the Force has always seemed to me to be more inclusive and stronger than that.
One of the more commonly described oddities of the Star Wars universe is the notion of entireplanets with oneclimate. We are introduced to desert planets and ice planets and swamp planets. Of course, any one planet could have a myriad of different climates and ecosystems in the real world. But this peculiar detail reveals the metaphor that Star Wars is working with: eachplanet in Star Wars is basically eachcountry in our world. This metaphor allows the Star Wars universe to essentially retell stories from the era ofBritish imperialism. Theempire then becomes quite familiar to us, especially on the surface. In Star Wars, though, the empire is theenemy and the undisciplined, free-spirited rebels become theheroes — thus aligning Star Wars with thematic elements from theAmericanWestern even amid the trappings of British imperialist narratives.
GeneralDavid Petraeus didn't personally killOsama bin Laden. Why does “General” Han Solo lead a squad to take out the shield generator? His friends Admiral Akbar and General Calrissian, along with the rest of the rebel command structure, are above, fighting in a short-range gun battle with Imperial Star Destroyers.
Princess Leia personally witnessed thedestruction of her entireplanet — something that could be consideredthe Holocaust, theMongol invasion, andStalin’spurges put together and multiplied by a thousand — yet is nonchalantly kissing her brother on Hoth a few weeks later. Luke single handedly took out a small planet's worth of Imperials on the Death Star. Sure, he probably feels justified in killing the Stormtroopers, but even he has to feel a twinge of guilt having wasted probably hundreds of innocent space janitors along with them. The day Luke Skywalker is shown talking in a veterans advocacy group about thetrauma of losing his arm fighting his ownfather inhand-to-handcombat, maybe that will be the day we know the public has finally abandoned theillusion thatwar is painless ... orglorious.
One workshop that was developed initially by one of our contributors, Morrigan Phillips, was “Science Fiction and Direct Action Organizing.” It takes existing science fiction worlds—like Hogwart's, like Oz, like Mordor —and has you pick the marginalized folks there and has you create an organizing goal, and has you develop direct action tactics to achieve that goal. It is the funnest workshop on the face of the planet or any other planet. You end up with flying monkeys in Oz demanding the right to return, because they've been taken from their homeland. And you end up with fighting Uruk-hai in Mordor rising up against their slave owners. You have the Elf Liberation Front, who starts creating political education courses magical creatures and squibs. What if storm troopers launched a work stoppage and shut down the Death Star?
So, I took the screenplay and divided it into three stories, and rewrote the first one. As I was writing, I came up with some ideas for a film about robots, with no humans in it. When I got to working on the Wookiee, I thought of a film just about Wookiees, nothing else. So, for a time, I had a couple of odd movies with just those characters. Then, I had the other two films, which were essentially split into three parts each, two trilogies. When the smoke cleared, I said, 'This is really great. I'll do another trilogy that takes place after this.' I had three trilogies of nine films, and then another couple of odd films. Essentially, there were twelve films. It's a nine-part saga that has a beginning, a middle and an end. It progresses over a period of about fifty or sixty years with about twenty years between trilogies, each trilogy taking about six or seven years
George Lucas in "George Lucas", by Steranko,Prevue #42, September–October 1980
The Star Wars series started out as amovie that ended up being so big that I took each act and cut it into its own movie...The original concept really related to afather and ason, and twins—a son and a daughter. It was that relationship that was the core of the story. And it went through a lot of machinations before I even got to the first draft screenplay. And various characters changed shapes and sizes. And it isn't really until it evolved into what is close to what Star Wars now is that I began to go back and deal with the stories that evolved to get us to that point...When I first did Star Wars I did it as a big piece. It was like a big script. It was way too big to make into a movie. So I took the first third of it, which is basically the first act, and I turned that into what was the original Star Wars...after Star Wars was successful and I said “Well gee, I can finish this entire script, and I can do the other two parts.
George Lucas,Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas by Dale 2 Pollock, 1983 p. 36
You have to remember that originally Star Wars was intended to be one movie, Episode IV of a Saturday matinee serial. You never saw what came before or what came after. It was designed to be the tragedy of Darth Vader. It starts with this monster coming through the door, throwing everybody around, then halfway through the movie you realise that the villain of the piece is actually a man and the hero is his son. And so the villain turns into the hero inspired by the son. It was meant to be one movie, but I broke it up because I didn’t have the money to do it like that—it would have been five hours long.
George Lucas,Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas by Dale 2 Pollock, 1983 p. 38
The first [version] talked about aprincess and an oldgeneral. The second version involved afather, hisson, and hisdaughter; the daughter was the heroine of the film. Now the daughter has become Luke, Mark Hamill's character. There was also the story of twobrothers where I transformed one of them into asister. The older brother was imprisoned, and the young sister had to rescue him and bring him back to their dad.
George Lucas, Claire Clouzot, "The Morning of the Magician: George Lucas and Star Wars," The George Lucas Interviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 57-58,ISBN 1-57806-125-3
The part that I never really developed is the death of Luke and Leia's mother. I had a backstory for her in earlier drafts, but it basically didn't survive. When I got to Jedi, I wanted one of the kids to have some kind of memory of her because she will be a key figure in the new episodes I'm writing. But I really debated whether or not Leia should remember her.
George Lucas, quoted in Bouzereau, The Annotated Screenplays, p. 291
WithoutRay Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.
George Lucas, "RIP Ray Harryhausen: 1920–2013",Comingsoon.net. Retrieved 2013-05-08
These are my kids. I loved them, I created them, I'm very intimately involved with them and I sold them to the white slavers that take these things...
Back in a 1973 note on “Star Wars,” Lucas made clear which side he was rooting for in the Vietnam War: “A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.”
Western societies have been fortunate in the last decades; since the end of theSecond World War they have not experiencedwar first-hand. True, Western countries have sent military to fight around the world, inAsia, in theKorean orVietnam Wars or inAfghanistan, in parts of theMiddle East or inAfrica, but only a very small minority of people living in the West have been touched directly by those conflicts. Millions in those regions of course have had very different experiences and there has been no yearsince 1945 when there has not been fighting in one part of the world or another. For those of us who have enjoyed what is often called the Long Peace it is all too easy to see war as something that others do, perhaps because they are at a different stage of development. We in the West, so we complacently assume, are more peaceable. Writers such as theevolutionary psychologistSteven Pinker have popularised the view that Western societies have become less violent over the past two centuries and that the world as a whole has seen a decline in deaths from war. So while we formally mourn the dead from our past wars once a year, we increasingly see war as something that happens when peace – the normal state of affairs – breaks down. At the same time we can indulge a fascination with great military heroes and their battles of the past; we admire stories of courage and daring exploits in war; the shelves of bookshops andlibraries are packed with military histories; andmovie andtelevision producers know that war is always a popular subject. The public never seems to tire ofNapoleon and his campaigns,Dunkirk,D-Day or the fantasies ofStar Wars orThe Lord of the Rings. We enjoy them in part because they are at a safe distance; we are confident that we ourselves will never have to take part in war.
[Irvin] Kershner was absolutely perfect for the middle film, which is a dark, troubled and anguished film. That's the kind of character Kershner is himself; he's very amusing socially, but his mind is full of dark torments and worries. George was the perfect man for Star Wars because he understands gags. He's got a great story sense. He's got tremendous appreciation of all the little gags and jokes. But I think I was probably the right guy for the third film, because I like the great virtues: I loveloyalty,friendship,love...
One, two and three are going to be very interesting − if George is ever able to start writing.Steven [Spielberg] and I would like to. It's a very interesting part of the saga, the early days. Theyouth of Ben Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker is really important. It's a very different world.Technology is different, means ofcommunication are different.Sentiments are different. But it will take a long time, I'm afraid so. It's just a fact we will have to face. Good things come in threes, and all good things come to an end. That's just one of the realities of life. Your kids may see it.
From the very beginning, toy executives saw more potential in Star Wars as atoy line than amovie. ("I expected the movie would come and go, but that it would be a great hook,"Bernie Loomis once said, explaining why hisKenner toy company acquired the worldwide rights to produce Star Warstoys before Star Wars even arrived in theaters.) The movie's unexpectedpopularity led to a desperate gambit to capitalize in time forChristmas. Their first big Star Wars toy, the "Early Bird Certificate Package," was basically just an empty box containing a few stickers and a mail-in certificate that could be redeemed for four Star Wars figures when they were actually ready. It was a hit.
Star Wars leans more towardsfantasy thanscience fiction and I think that's to its benefit. It hasgood vs.evil,monsters,princesses,knights,magic items, etc. All of these make it as easy fit for the RPG genre. Star Wars is also one of the most beloved IPs in the world. Since the first movie came out in 1977 fans have wanted to live in that universe and video games are the closest they'll ever get to that fantasy.
Before Star Wars, the films that were box-office hits wereThe Godfather,Taxi Driver,Bonnie and Clyde andThe French Connection - gritty, amoral art movies. Then suddenly the onus switched over to spectacle and everything changed... I don't know if that is a good thing.
Star Wars had come out around the time of Seagull, and everyone thought I was a horrible actress. I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me.
George made a fairy tale story, with a princess, the young prince, and the cynicalHarrison Ford playing Han Solo. To me, it was an absolutely perfect rendition of a great comic serial. I learned to draw from comic strips, the better ones. I always remembered the earlySupermans were better drawn than the later one, and the earlyTarzans were spectacularly well drawn, the anatomy of the jungle was great. There's artistry in comic strips and George was obviously a devotee of that and what he did was brilliant.
Star Wars is aboutgood versus evil. I don't know what the empire did wrong. I still have no idea. I still don't know, they got up and they dress the same and then they (the rebels) kill them because they dress the same, like, I don't understand it. Yeah they blew up a planet, but that's a cheap reason to want to hate someone. The point isPower Rangers is way doper than Star Wars.
Dude, I think Star Wars is f****** horrible. I think Star Wars is a terrible franchise. It has terrible values. What are you teaching people with Star Wars, right? 'Oh yeah, we're the rebels and we're just gonna blow up people who dress the same?' Like it's good versus evil? It's terrible because there's really very little evil out there. The evil is taught to us through a narrative, but the evil has a point of view, the evil has a perspective., and if you don't get to know the perspective of the evil then how do you know you're not evil?
Star Wars producerGary Kurtz claimed that Star Wars made three times as much ontoys as it did onfilms, while creator George Lucas said: “All themoney is in the action figures.” Lucas famously retainedlicensing andmerchandising rights to Star Wars in exchange for a $500,000 directorial fee. The result made him a billionaire.
A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped inSan Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected littlestar-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.
"I would love you to do something for me," I said.
"Anything! Anything!" the boy said rapturously.
"You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do," I said.
"Anything, sir, anything!"
"Well," I said, "do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?"
He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. "What a dreadful thing to say to a child!" she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.
Alec Guinness,A Positively Final Appearance: A Journal 1996-98 (1999), p. 11
Huey: Afriend of mine backhome justdied...I never got to say goodbye, you know? I keepwishing he'll come back as a blueghost, likeObi-Wan Kenobi. There's so much I want to say to him.[sigh] Why can'tlife be like Star Wars?
Caesar: Well, thenJar-Jar Binks would bereal, and there'd be a bunch ofEwoks running around everywhere - nobody wants that.
Huey: A smallprice to pay if the people youlove could come back as blue ghosts.
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