A fair chunk of that went into getting Industrial Light & Magic up and running, and Lucas still went considerably over budget (Fox had originally given him $8 million).
You should’ve paid more attention. He in fact sounded like Grover.
I was one when Star Wars was released, so I didn’t get the opportunity to see it until circa 1992 when a theater in Dallas showed the trilogy in a triple feature. That was a long, long time to sit in a movie theater. One thing I’ve heard mentioned is that a lot of science fiction movies from the 1970s were fairly bleak with the likes of Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, and Silent Running. But Star Wars was fun, it didn’t deal with a lot of complicated issues, good & evil were black & white, so it was a nice change for people.
For me, seeing it in a theater in 1977, what set Star Wars apart from other Sci Fi movies was that all the futuristic stuff looked used. The droids, the spacecraft, all had dents and collected dirt just like present day appliances and cars. That more than anything else is what made the story come alive for me.
Cinematic space opera kind of died with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in the 1930s. Star Wars was part nostalgia and it’s not surprising it was made by the same director who made American Graffiti.
It was a very marked contrast from the bright shiny style of Star Trek. Obi-Wan mentioning that the Jedi had protected the Republic for “a thousand generations” always stuck in my head as a kid - I remember doing the math in my head and realizing that the galactic civilization was ten times older than the Roman Empire.
You have to remember two things: It was supposed to be reminiscent of 1930s serials. Yes, the dialogues was hokey. It was supposed to be. The other thing is when it was released. It was groundbreaking at the time.
That was off-putting. But it was amusing when he was moving up and down on Lukes back going, ‘Hmmm… Hmmm…’ Still, there was Leia in the metal bikini…
I believe the person you were replying to was talking about The Rise of Skywalker - and it’s a fair comparison. If A New Hope is Flash Gordon, TRoS is Manos: The Hands of Fate.
IMO, TRoS has some good moments, but it’s an unsatisfying conclusion to the saga and a shining example of why Disney should have ignored the chuds complaining about The Last Jedi (which IMO is the best film out of the nine.)
If so, my mistake. After the first three, I’m not really sure which is which.
Yeah, Grover and a little Miss Piggy too.
I saw it as a kid when it first came out and enjoyed it tremendously.
What you need is some sensors that turn it off if it intersects your own body, which ought to be easily doable with their technology. It’s actually a really good weapon and tool otherwise. Oh, non-Jedi can’t use it to stop blasters and such, but a blade that cuts nearly anything and can fit up a sleeve or in a pocket would be very useful. The fact that turned off it’s just a hilt makes it more like a knife than a sword for many purposes; it’s small enough that you can carry it everywhere without it getting it the way as a big, clunky sword does. That’s a reason why people still use knives, even after swords have gone out of fashion; swords are just too big and awkward to carry around all the time for the rare occasions that they are the best tool for the job. Knives (and light sabers) lack that defect.
And we see it used as a tool all the time in the setting; a “cuts anything” blade is extremely useful even if you never use it as a weapon. Even better if you can make it variable-length and have a “knife mode” for finer work.
I’ve been playing various versions of the Star Wars tabletop roleplaying games with the same group of friends for about 25 years. Somewhere along the line, we nicknamed lightsabers as “UCTs”: Universal Cutting Tools. 
Hah, I like it. They really are.
Hey, he, she, droid? How would we know? That’s my personal amusement. I know Solo went there first, but it amuses me to think about all that time Luke thinking of R2 as a guy when she’s pinning away and can’t even say it out loud.
Fanfic: sometime after the events of Jedi, someone comes along and invents a vocal synthesizer that takes the existing AI identity and creates a voice that matches. Suddenly R2 speaks and Luke realizes she was a girl all along. “Wait, all those times I masturbated to that hologram of Leia, you were watching me?” “Yes, Luke dear.”
They are definitely what we would call “strong AI”, have unique personalities, and seem aware of their mortality. That they are somewhat more robust than organic beings does not mean they can’t be killed.
That’s the kind of thing my dad would complain about to us kids. “If it’s a robot, they can just rebuild it and it’s as good as new.”
I think they are intended as slave analogs to the Roman Empire. It certainly puts a different spin on it when Uncle Owen talks about having their memories wiped.
My observation is that the movies were written as adventure films for 10 year old boys. On that level, they play pretty well.
And yes, my sister loved them too, but she was a major tomboy and wanted to be Han Solo.
I personally think Empire is a better movie than SW, but that may just be my preference from seeing it first. I think most people agree the teddy bear planet was too cutesy. And the remasters had some improvements and numerous detriments. Crowding the streets of Mos Eisley was overdone. And the whole Greedo gun battle was ruinous.
Oh absolutely. It was space fantasy played out by the rule of cool.
Yes. It is well established that Lucas stole from was inspired by the best, from The Dam Busters for the climactic battle to Kurosawa to Dune. Being unaware of all this at the time, it seemed so original and fun, but now I know some of the lifts.
And kendo is drawn from katana.
How about a laser hilt of the same energy, like Kylo Ren’s cross hilt.
Probably something you could do to a novice, but I suspect fully trained force users are prepared for that kind of thing. Just like Vader starts throwing things at Luke during their first confrontation, but not the second.
In the original film, Threepio and Luke both refer to Artoo as “he/him.”
That’s not true. When he discovered the jawas all dead and realized the stormtroopers traced the droids to their farm, he raced off and left Obi-wan to go home. He was torn up and IIRC cried. That we never really hear about them again can be chalked up to their further unimportance to the story, whereas Ben has the force and can come back as an energy glow.
Again, it never really is important to the plot.
It’s stated that they are traveling sub-light and that they have a limited range. I don’t know the canon timeline, but it seems like at least a couple of months. It’s not like Leia had time to grab a wardrobe on her emergency evacuation, and they don’t have Star Trek style replicators. I’m sure they have a space washing machine on that bucket of bolts.
Whereas Luke clearly has spent time honing his abilities as his one change of clothes become sweat and mud encrusted.
Plotwise, those aren’t holes that need filling. Just like we don’t know how long they’ve been cruising between planets before getting to Hoth. It seems like there was plenty of time for Han to run off with his cash, pay off Jabba, and make a rendezvous.
What seems much more of a gap is Yoda’s insistence that Luke must complete his training, but when Luke finally makes it back, he blows it off with Luke just needs to confront Vader - which is what he did when he left Degobah. Presumably Luke has been practicing during the time prepping to rescue Han, but still, there wasn’t anything else Yoda needed to impart? Oh well, he can tell him later, after he dies.
I think this says a lot about why it works. The characters all act like it’s normal. And as somebody else said, or feels ancient and lived in - not spiffy clean.
I think some of it is that Lucas drew heavily on archetypes to create a feeling of similarity even while being strange and far away. Parallels to ancient Rome and a corrupt Empire. Imagery drawn from NAZI Germany with the “stormtroopers” and the Imperial jodphurs. Fantasy tropes of the pretty Princess, the rogue scoundrel, the young, naive hero-to-be, the ancient wizard. The huge monsters to slay or to escape.
Side note here - what the first three movies had that was taken away in the prequels was the feeling of the vastness of space, the immensity of the Empire. Although there is a tenuous track of contact to link Leia to Obi-wan to Luke, who is more significant than he could know, it still feels like this could be any random set of people thrown together.
Finding out that Luke and Leia are twins and their father is Darth Vader is the first tweak that shrinks the galaxy.
The prequels try too hard to make everything tie together. Anakin was a slave on tattooine who built C3PO and met R2, who was Luke and Leia’s mom’s droid before getting mindwiped and slanging spending two decades toodling around the galaxy only to be accidentally selected by Leia to send her message. The whole clones plotline with Jengo Fett. There’s a friggin’ young Greedo hanging out with Anakin for Pete’s sake.
But I digress.
Snerk.
Like I said, my own personal amusement not to be outweighed by canon. I mean, we never actually hear from R2, so it could all just be assumptions.
Other elements of the story we are not supposed to think too hard about.
The Empire apparently has no OSHA. Power doors that zoom open and closed and would crush you. I assume they have some sort of sensors. Long narrow bridges across deep chasms with no guardrails whatsoever, and the bridges retract. Hangar bays that separate deep space from habitable environment with energy fields that ships pass right through.
How about the penchant for ugly hats? Weird wide dome lids abound. Funky jutting chin pieces.
Okay, here’s one that recently came to my attention. Luke’s farm on Tattooine supposedly uses 'vaporators, to what, condense moisture from the air? But if Tattooine is a desert planet, where does the moisture come from?
Dune at least presents an ecological reason for the availability of moisture on the desert planet. But without the giant sandworms and thus the sandtrout, there shouldn’t be enough water there to sustain much ecology, nevermind human colonists.
At least I’ve now seen diagrams that show how the Millennium Falcon has room for three crew members. Though shouldn’t it really be four? Pilot, co-pilot, and two gun turrets. Right? At least they also show space for cargo storage inside.
I don’t guess I really picked up on the fact that all the exposed rough surfaces on the MF were in fact because of missing closeout panels. It was supposed to be sleek and solid, but all the missing panels were three source of all the “hunk of junk” comments.
Yes, e.g. midichlorians. WTF?
I agree explaining the Kessel run and parsecs was stupid, but I don’t know that was Lucas. Hadn’t he sold the franchise to Disney before Solo?
But the stupidest thing Lucas did was to remaster the Han/Greedo confrontation so that first Greedo shoots first, and then later Greedo and Han shot simultaneously while Han ducks - while sitting down.
I mean, considering the current state of political affairs in this country, I can absolutely believe that a fascist regime would be that incompetent at basic workplace safety.
The Solo movie had been in the works from before the sale to Disney, and though it was revived afterward and reworked, it was largely Lucas’s initial idea intact, with Lawrence Kasdan the screenwriter throughout (though he did bring his son on board to co-write).
Note that Ewoks do eat humans – they were about to cook and eat Luke and Han, and it is implied they have eaten Storm Troopers.
If you are willing to include stuff outside the movie, they definitely have eaten Storm Troopers.
Brian