I don’t get what the big deal is about the supposed Campbell influences. I mean, the whole point of Campbell’s work was that it applied to all adventure stories, right? So why is it surprising to find that when Lucas creates an adventure story, Campbell’s ideas apply to it? Even if Star Wars is a bit more archetypical than most stories, that just means that Lucas and Campbell were both drawing from the same archetypes.
Some stories follow the framework more closely than others. Obi-Wan, and Yoda are clearly mentors in the “Star Wars” films, but who fills that role in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”?
It became an issue in this thread because Lucas claimed explicitly to have modeled his scripts on Campbell’s theories, one reviewer cited above claimed that “Attack of the Clones” had no hero in the “Campbellian” sense, and another poster suggested that Campbell had less influence on Lucas than commonly believed.