The examples Bmax and Pochacco make don’t impress me much – I’ve heard of both, despite not being at all interested in The Sorrows of Young Werther. I know quite a bit about Der Ring.
as i say above, there are plenty of incredibly popular works that are utterly forgotten later. I’ve come across several examples. I’d cite them, but I’ve forgotten the names (Easy joke, but true). There was some utopian novel that racked up all sorts of praise from people like George Bernard Shaw (And it’s not Bellamy’s Looking Backward – that’s been reprinted in paperback, and I’ve read it), but is almost utterly forgotten today. Get the book The Experts Speak, and you’ll find sections devoted to “works that will last forever” that didn’t.
But some of them do, nevertheless, and not necessarily the best. Charles Dickens’ works are still popular, even though you could make a case that much of his stuff is hopelessly sentimental and panders to pop culture levels. The outmoded science fiction of Verne and wells is still read. Heck, even penny dreadfuls like “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and "Varney the Vampyre’ refuse to die.
The Wizard of Oz has never been out of print, but others of Baum’s, like the Magical Monarch of Mo are curiousities. I suspect the 1939 movie version of Oz will continue to live even when we have those 3-D Feelies mentioned above. So, I think, will 2001, horribly outdated as it will seem then. So maybe Star Wars will continue to be popular, perhaps it won’t. The very first movie gas a visceral rush and a simple plot that makes it instantly accessible, even more so than its next two sequels, and light years ahead of “episodes I-III”.
I don’t think Star Wars will be completely forgotten, if nothing else they will have a place in the history of the moving picture business, like “Birth of a Nation”, “The Jazz Singer”, “Citizen Kane”, “King Kong” and so forth. People might not WATCH the Star Wars movies very often, but people will have heard of them. But the movies won’t be cherished as spectacles anymore, becuase they’ll be outdated as spectacles. But moving-picture buffs will watch them, marvelling that living actors were still used in action movies, the odd haircuts, the weird political/social ideologies, the unashamed portrayal of TABOO X, and so forth.
We don’t watch many movies from the silent era, but 1957 was 50 years ago and we can still appreciate them although tastes have changed. We don’t have many movies from 100 years ago, but that’s because there were no movies then. But 50 years from now people will still be able to appreciate movies made before 1957, so why shouldn’t audiences be able to appreciate movies made in 1977 in 2077?
I’m currently watching the special the OP is talking about, and it isn’t really telling me anything new. I took a class specifically on Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces combined with scriptwriting, stroyboarding, cinema, etc. it was drilled in how Star Wars is our generation’s defining hero’s journey story.
Don’t try and give me some other movie that came before Star Wars, 'cause I can pull out something else that’s earlier. That’s kinda the point: same hero different face.
We all still know heroes from antiquity like Hurcules, Jason, and Odysseus. Then add medieval ones like Beowolf, King Arthur, and Robin Hood. Modern ones include Superman and Frodo Baggins. Luke Skywalker will be added to the list and will never be forgotten.
The OP’s question is connected to how movies in general will be viewed in the fututre when so many people think the art form is dying. Greek plays are outdated, but the stories live on. In this case I think Star Wars transcends its medium.
New mediums will make old ones obsolete and forgotten? C’mon you’ve never read a book?
Oh, yes, I did. I had to study it in high school, and not because of some teacher’s eccentric choice; it was in the national official program at the time in Italy. This book of Goethe is supposed to have been very influential on the Romantic movement in Italy, France and Germany, and quite a few locally influential authors starting their careers with pastiches of Young Werther, like Ugo Foscolo did.
So, you see, there is something out of popular culture from 1907 which is still around! And it won’t die!
Sherlock Holmes is a good example of something that was very popular about 100 years ago that is still around today. The Holmes stories were read by and hugely popular with regular people. There is a whole Holmes industry like there is a Star Wars industry.
1907? How much time did your teacher spend on Werther? :dubious:
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers is a good example, though, for showing what will likely remain of Star Wars a century hence. The only really enduring part was the candy merchandising tie-in (though they did finally stop making the limited-edition cyanide-coated ones), from which Goethe of course made all his money. George Lucas did the same with Star Wars, so 100 years from now it will be the action figures that will be familiar to everyone.
Why? Enduring Fame is unptredictable. Why should Young Werther be a better model than gazpacho’s excellent example of Sherlock Holmes? Or Dracula, or Frankenstein?
Sorry. I got confused with the publication date of the Italian pastiche. The actual publishing date of Young Werther was of course 1774. As for your question, she spent about two lessons on that, but it came up really often when studying the Romantics.
My kids and their friends have never seen Star Wars or any of the sequels, and wouldn’t watch them if they were on. Harry Potter is their cultural icon.
While Star Wars was the first blockbuster to incorporate digital special effects, the technology was rapidly and massively out of date in no time. Compare this to another blockbuster, The Wizard of Oz, which incorporated color photography - that was an innovation that really hasn’t changed much to this day.
Star Wars will be of interest to film historians, and no one else.
??
The original Star Wars didn’t use digital special effects - it was model work, blue-screen work, and hand-animated mattes. There was some graphics work (the displays and such), but that wasn’t much different from what was in many films from the same time.
Star Wars wasn’t important for its effects. Certainly not in the way King Kong or 2001 were truly innovative in their effects. It’s interest lay in the way the story was told and in the commitment to creating a complete world. A lot of SF ideas and conventions that had been commonplace in literature showed up for the first time en masse in Star Wars – I get the impression that before that filmmakers were afraid of getting too far out, lest they alienate their audiences, and the counterexamples were few and far between and usually pretty badly done. Lucas combined all that with the sweep and storytelling style of a Flash Gordon Saturday matinee serial (only without the weekly cliffhangers, all co,mpressed into one piece). So he had a space movie with the effects of a 2001 but the excitement of a shoot-em-up. It’s instantly accessible, and that’s why I think it’ll probably be around for a while.
I think you’re getting a little carried awawy - it was a John Ford western set in space. The themes were nothing new. Kids today look at it like we look at Godzilla movies - cheesy and dated.
I think all of the people who are saying “kids today don’t like Star Wars” don’t know very many kids today.
At the library I work at, no movies are requested by litte kids more than BOTH Star Wars trilogies. They’ll be passed down from generation to generation much like The Wizard of Oz (the book and the movie) and Little Women (the book).
The puppets in the original trilogy look far more fake than the CGI aliens. I just caught a bit of ROTJ recently and it really struck me how totally fucking fake they look now. I think you’re seeing the OT through rose-colored glasses.
I’d have to agree. Yoda is pretty obviously a Muppet. Of course we all know he’s a Muppet, but it’s not just that you know there’s no such creature and so your disbelief is hard to suspend; he’s a Muppet all the way. He looks like a Muppet. He’s made to “walk” by kind of hopping up and down, just like Elmo, Kermit and Grover. It’s impossible to look at him and not think “Hey, Jim Henson.”
Some of the alien effects are successful - the aliens in the cantina sometimes look pretty good, in part because they’re just in the background. But a lot don’t, and “Return of the Jedi” is a festival of Muppets and midgets in Ewok suits.
The first two movies were definitely better than the subsequent four, but ascribing that to the type of special effects they used is quite a bit like saying that “The Godfather” is a better movie than “Battlefield Earth” because it didn’t use digital effects. “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back” are good movies because they’re well paced, exciting, and fresh. Every movie after that was simply an attempt to do the same shit.
However, I teach 7th Grade and most kids aren’t that familiar with the original Star Wars movies. They know they exist, but most consider them movies for their parents.
There are a few kids that are into because their parents got them into it, but most(even the nerds) aren’t into it. Lord of the Rings, which has nearly always had a movie version for them, has replaced it.
Speaking as a teenager at the moment, there is a nearly universal agreement among my peers that the original trilogy are vastly better than the most recent three. We can see and acknowledge that the effects are laughable, but the new movies are too plainly pandering to what Hollywood expects nowadays (Jar Jar Binks is reviled). Besides, while the dialogue in the original three is mediocre, the dialogue in the most recent three is downright bad.
However, most of my friends do not know that Han Solo shot first. If you say “Mark Hamill”, you get a blank look. It’s a very mixed phenomenon; it’s agreed that the originals are better, but I wouldn’t swear that they’re actually more watched.
I’d like to see the currrent pie chart of kids who borrow films from the library compared to the superset of all kids. Not to be toooooo snarky, but I’m guessing your sample isn’t representative of the general population.
What makes your sample any more accurate than Justin’s? I’m more inclined to trust his “wide range of kids deliberately seeking the movies out in his library” sampling than the “nephew and his mates, though I haven’t actually asked them or anything” sampling.