The original Star Wars films remain some
of the most popular movies ever made, having achieved a level of
recognition in American and worldwide culture rivaled only by such
classics as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone
With the Wind (1939). Indeed, the similarities between
these two particular films and the Star Wars trilogy
go beyond simple popularity. The Wizard of Oz was
the special-effects masterpiece of its era, showing new ways to
bring fantastic vistas to the screen. Gone With the Wind was
the original blockbuster production, famously over-the-top in its
design, scale, and sheer visual sweep. It was, in fact, the box
office record holder until the original Star Wars dethroned
it. In a way, the Star Wars films were throwbacks
to this earlier era of resplendent production values, epic scope,
and the pursuit of sheer entertainment.
After the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period during
which the studio system that had made Hollywood into the entertainment capital
of the world was in steep decline, George Lucas, along with his
friends Francis Ford Coppola and Stephen Spielberg, gave the old
studios a new reason for being. No independent production, no matter
how dedicated, could produce the kind of effects-laden, flashy,
bright, exciting, and simply spectacular creation that Lucas, and
Spielberg especially, wanted to create. After Star Wars came Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the Lucas-Spielberg
co-production Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), starring
Harrison Ford, both effects-heavy spectaculars that became international
megahits. The race was on: every summer brought the studios’ latest
attempts to manufacture some of the blockbuster magic—that quality
that makes people pay to see a movie again and again—conjured up
by Star Wars back in 1977.
Another remarkable aspect of the Star Wars phenomenon
that continues to influence the movie business today is the aggressiveness and
pervasiveness with which the films were marketed. Today it is commonplace
for every summer film to have its merchandising tie-ins, such as
cups emblazoned with a film’s characters, for sale in store and
fast-food chains. Such marketing schemes had been around before Star
Wars, such as with the Beatles craze and the 1960s Batman television
show, but Star Wars turned such tie-ins into a
major aspect of a blockbuster film’s profitability. The Star Wars line
of toys, especially, remained popular even in the three years that
separated each of the episodes of the trilogy, a highly unusual
circumstance. Even today, original Star Wars toys
sell at a premium among collectors. Anyone who was a child in America
in the years between 1977 and 1983 can tell you, for example, that
the snow monster that attacks Luke on Hoth is called a “wampa” and that
the giant lizards the Imperial troopers ride on Tatooine are “dewbacks,”
even though these terms are never used in the films and don’t even
appear in the credits—all thanks to the toys and the omnipresent
marketing of these films.
Many other examples of the penetration of the Star
Wars world into our culture spring to mind. When President
Ronald Reagan proposed a space-based missile defense program in
the 1980s, it was officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative,
or SDI—but the program was universally known, to friend and foe
alike, as the “Star Wars” program. Reagan also made a famous speech
at the height of the cold war in which he identified the Soviet
Union as “an Evil Empire,” and even if he wasn’t thinking of Darth
Vader and stormtroopers at the time, everybody else was. “Darth
Vader” became an instant synonym for an evil boss or high school
principal. Many of Yoda’s catchphrases (“Do or do not; there is
no try”) remain easy laugh-lines after all these years.
With cultural phenomena come cultural myths. The famous
line “Luke, I am your father” does not actually exist—the actual
line is “No, I am your father,” and is perhaps
the most misheard movie line since the nonexistent “Play it again,
Sam” from Casablanca (1942).
