The Sherlock Holmes example is interesting because it is a cultural phenomenon that has survived through being repeatedly reinterpreted. Not many people read the Conan Doyle originals - but we all know Sherlock Holmes from the later film and TV versions and the countless references in other works. So I would agree that for Star Wars to survive 100 years it will need to be successfully remade several times.
Tarzan is a similar example.
Or…Frankenstein?
Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong, Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, however, are iconic characters more than they are stories. Dracula is well known, but largely as the character of the gentleman monster and all the things that come along with vampires. Tarzan is the ape man. Sherlock Holmes is the acerbic genius, who’s spawned any number of copies - “House M.D.” is a deliberate copy of Sherlock Holmes, for instance. In every case it’s largely the character that’s remembered, an iconic symbol of something; Dracula is man’s darkest desires in the flesh, Frankenstein’s monster is really the first science-gone-wrong story, so on and so forth. I’d bet that a lot of people, maybe most people, could not give you even a vague plot outline of “Dracula,” “Tarzan,” “Frankenstein” or “King Kong” unless they’d seen one of the more faithful movie adaptations. (In the case of King Kong, either of the good movies.) And I bet 80% of people who know who Sherlock Holmes is can’t name three Sherlock Holmes books or stories.
Star Wars doesn’t have one central, iconic character that you cvan make a whole wack of movies about. There’s no one name you associate with it that they’ll be pumping out movies both good and bad in 20, 40, 60 and 80 years’ time. The central character of the first three movies is mostly Luke, but Han Solo is right up there. Then in the second trilogy it’s mostly Anakin/Darth Vader, but there’s lots of Obi-Wan. Who’s the iconic character that people will remember 100 years from now?
Will resource depletion, a growing trend towards anti-scientific thinking, environmental damage, & a burgeoning global population allow for the possibility of people watching films, 100 years from now?
Will government tolerate the message in Star Wars, 100 years from now?
Guesswork…
The difference between Sherlock Holmes and Star Wars is that Doyle never had a multi-million dollar corporation constantly inventing new Sherlock Holmes products. Hundreds of new Star Wars products are being made every year, three decades after the first film was released. There’s a constant stream of Star Wars video games, novels, comic books, and TV shows feeding into the popular culture. And, of course, the prequel trilogy was enormously successful, even if it was total crap, so there’s a whole bunch of new fans invested in the franchise, who are thirty years younger than the original crop. Star Wars is going to be around for a long, long time. The original movies might fade a bit from popular memory, just as the original Holmes novels aren’t widely read any more, but the franchise will stay alive, and that will invest enough relevance in the original films that they’ll continue to be studied and talked about well past 2107.
Jar Jar?
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You look more & more like a Sandperson all the time, Laughing Lagomorph! :mad:
Hell that other Giant Nerd outlet, Star Trek, is showing a bit of a popularity drop. Will that franchise last into the next century? I’m doubting it.
We want to think the things we like are the most important things and that our era produced things that will endure.
Sadly that ain’t the truth. Have Kids then see how quickly that little illusion fades (Unless you really really force them by constant exposure).
It’s one of those sad milestones we reach in life.
The Day Daddy ain’t cool no more.
I think Star Wars will be remembered more for a) the contemporary devotion it inspired and b) its technical advances than for its mythic resonances. Truth is, the whole series is too muddled and poorly thought out to stand up to generations of changing tastes. Star Wars was one of those freak cultural events that have to be seen in the context of their time; people were ready for that kind of thrilling yet corny spectacle, and the technology had finally matured to the point that Lucas was able to give it to them.
I think we need to establish what the word “they” in “will they be talking about it 100 years from now” represents.
I have absolutely no idea whether Star Wars will be recognizable pop culture for the majority of Americans in 100 years.
But I do know that “the day Daddy ain’t cool no more” means different things for different people. I still listen to the same music my dad listened to when he was 21 - the Beatles, the Stones, Yes, the Allman Brothers, you name it. If you want to go back even further than that - I work with a guy who, whenever he brings CDs to work, they’re always CDs of 30s-era scratchy blues music that sounds like it was recorded on a fucking wax cylinder. And that’s this guy’s regular listening music, and he’s in his early 20s. My point here is that there’s always going to be a subset of people who prefer vintage things and who are always going to appreciate the culture of the past. I don’t know if everyone is going to be talking about Star Wars, but these people certainly will.
You think not? The books have never gone out of print, and they recently (well, three years ago) issued The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Both it and cheap editions are in all book stores. There are plenty of books I look for in bookstores to see who’s in and out of print, and who’s being stocked and not. Sherlock Holmes is always there – the original Doyle Sherlock Holmes. (This isn’t true of Dotle’s other works. Try finding a copy of The White Company, or Tales round the Red Lamp, or even The Lost World.)
The same goes for Dracula. Despite the many re-uses and sequels and the like, Drac stays in print. Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, he’s pretty readable. Frankenstein, I think, doesn’t get read as much because, despite the subject matter, it’s frequently a ponderous philosophical tract and the prose is more 18th century than 19th. Tarzan’s still in print, but I think he’s become a victim of publishing economics – he did pretty well in hardcover surprisingly late, then hit paperback in the early 1960s when most paperbacks were books about his size, and got reprinted into the 1970s and a little beyond. But nowadays most books are little paper bricks of several hundred pages, and they’ve had to bundle together more than one book.
It certainly helps to have re-interpretations that help keep these characters alive, but the don’t need them. Try finding copies of older pastiches of Holmes – Boyer’s “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” (by many accounts, one of the better ones) or even Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickinson Carr’s “The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes” (My choice for the best, and co-wriutten by Doyle’s son) – and you’ll probably come up empty. If it were just the character, you’d be able to find these other works. But it’s only the Doyle originals that live on.
Yeah, but not that many people read, period 
. I do have a Conan Doyle collection, and when I read the stories I picture Holmes as Jeremy Brett from the TV version. (OK, I lie, I picture him as Basil Rathbone.)