# The ongoing hype about Star Wars is about getting back a thrill that can be no more. **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 14, 2017, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-hype-about-star-wars-is-about-getting-back-a-thrill-that-can-be-no-more/796339 "2017-09-14T20:03:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2017, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-hype-about-star-wars-is-about-getting-back-a-thrill-that-can-be-no-more/796339/41 "2017-09-22T12:42:56Z")
> [@](#): > > When Star Wars came out, you could count the total number of big budget space movies on a couple fingers. Forbidden Planet (1956) and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Um, that’s it. We can debate whether things like Barbarella (1968), Silent Running (1972), and Dark Star (1974) should count, and maybe I forgot something, but the number wasn’t big, right? Oh, dear, you aren’t that familiar with the field, are you? You’d have to properly define “Big Budget” – Dark Star was a _student_ film, and doesn’t by any metric qualify as “Big Budgwet”, but it _was_ a “space movie”. I’d include _Silent Running_ as a “Big Budget” Space movie. the 1950s were filled with space movies. _This Island Earth_ was definitely “Big Budget” – they bragged about it on the posters. And there was _Destination Moon_ (and _Rocketship X-M_, which rushed production to get there first, along with its follow-up _Conquest of Space_. Then there was the cataclysmic _When Worlds Collide_, which featured nothing less than the destruction of the Earth by a collision with a rogue planet, along with people escaping in a hastily-assembled rocket. Lots of other fifties films, some big budget, some not., Some very good, others awful: **It! The Terror from Beyond Space** (from which _Alien_ stole its plot) \*\*War of the Worlds The Lost Missile Operation Moonbase Worls Without End Catwomen of the Moon Queen of Outer Space Abbott and Costello go to Mars From the Earth to the Moon Twenty Million Miles to Earth War of the Satellites Battle in Outer Space \*\* et cetera et cetera. Space movies continued into the 1960s and 1970s, with **Robinson Crusoe on mars** (pretty good flick, in spite of the title) \*\*First Spaceship on Venus Ikarie XB-1/Voyage to the End of the Universe Countdown Moon Zero-Two Journey to the Far Side of the Sun Marooned The Green Slime \*\* I’m barely scratching the surface here – these are all off the top of my head. Note that there were a great deal more science fiction films, and ones with aliens visiting earth (_The Thing_, _The Day the Earth Stood Still_, _The Man from Planet X_ etc.), but I’m trying to limit this to “space movies”, where we see people going up and travelling through space. It was an established genre in the 1970s. What made **star Wars** unique was that it took the namby-pamby pussy-footing aroiund of trying to do a space movie without alienating the rubes and threw it out the window. Despite the example of TV’s _Star Trek_, moviemakers are a conservative lot, and they were convinced that Middle America would be freaked out by things if they got too weird, so they didn’t want to embrace full-out science fiction, lest they offend somebody or freak them out (recall the entire brouhaha over Mr. Spock’s pointed ears in TV’s Star Trek). So they’d timidly give you some little bit of science fictional stuff, but surround it with a movie of otherwise normal goodness. **Star Wars** threw all that out the window. It deluged you with a tidal wave of science fiction tropes – faster-than-light starships plying space between different suns, aliens of all different kinds, the Cantina scene, alien music, alien cultures, robots, blasters, planet-destroying weapons. And it made it seem familiar and comfortable (The Cantina bar music sounds more 20th century American than the Krel music in Forbidden Planet did 20 years earlier). This was stuiff that science fiction and comic book fans knew and had been comfortable with for years, but hadn’t been put up on the Big Screen before. They loved it. To the surprise of the rest of Hollywood, so did a LOT of other people. After that, they decided that Weird Space Mpvies were OK. But this – the first real wholesale indulgence in unmitigated, nerdy, SF, was the stuff of yourv early thrills. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2017, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-hype-about-star-wars-is-about-getting-back-a-thrill-that-can-be-no-more/796339/42 "2017-09-22T13:59:10Z")
> [@Quimby](#): > > I don’t think the gravy train will last forever. A few clunkers or just delivering the same over and over will start to create diminishing returns. It feels like it’s starting to happen with Marvel (although the next Avengers will probably bounce everything back). Preach it! I’m lookin’ at _you_, Transformers franchise. ---
**Author:** ![Clawdio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d07c76/32.png) [@Clawdio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clawdio)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2017, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-hype-about-star-wars-is-about-getting-back-a-thrill-that-can-be-no-more/796339/43 "2017-09-22T14:02:11Z")
> [@Aeschines](#): > > 1. I was six years old. I heard about _Star Wars_ from a boy in my small neighborhood. My dad took me. It was thrilling. It was a big deal. I was also the perfect age to enjoy all the toys to the fullest. Yeah, a lot of things were big and epic and thrilling at six. At that age we still think the world is full of magic. Look, I love going to the movies. I go a few times a month. But _ **thrilling** _? That is never a word I use to describe watching a movie, even at six years old (though I did think the bicycle riding through the construction site in E.T. was the coolest). I was born in 1980, so I missed Star Wars the first time around when it was kind of groundbreaking, so while I recognize their place in history, to me personally they are just enjoyable movies, not paragons of cinematic achievement that can never be matched. I liked the TFA (even if the plot seemed like a rehash of ANH) and I thought Rogue one was cool too. I think the closest I ever felt to thrilled in a movie was when I saw the documentary “Bully”. I say that because I remember feeling emotionally exhausted when I walked out of the theater. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2017, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-hype-about-star-wars-is-about-getting-back-a-thrill-that-can-be-no-more/796339/44 "2017-09-22T23:34:29Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > This was stuiff that science fiction and comic book fans knew and had been comfortable with for years, but hadn’t been put up on the Big Screen before. They loved it. To the surprise of the rest of Hollywood, so did a LOT of other people. After that, they decided that Weird Space Mpvies were OK. But this – the first real wholesale indulgence in unmitigated, nerdy, SF, was the stuff of yourv early thrills. One other thing was that there was a new generation of movie reviewers in 1977. The reviews of 2001 9 years earlier showed that the reviewers then had no idea of how to watch and understand high quality science fiction. By 1977 lots did - for instance Ebert - though Star Wars threw you into the film in true sf style far more than 2001 did (up to the end, that is.) And I’d add “First Men in the Moon” to your excellent list. Maybe one of the most true to the book Wells adaptations out there. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2017, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-hype-about-star-wars-is-about-getting-back-a-thrill-that-can-be-no-more/796339/45 "2017-09-23T02:29:46Z")
I’ll be 63 in January, and I still get goose bumps when I think of the scene with the twin sun setting and the London Symphony Orchestra playing in the background. Nothing in the other three SW movies I’ve seen can even come close. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-ongoing-hype-about-star-wars-is-about-getting-back-a-thrill-that-can-be-no-more/796339.md?page=2)