What backstory did Lucas have for Star Wars?

[Voyager]

@CalMeacham

What Lucas did was to boldly go out and create a visual science fiction universe (although he populated it with a science fantasy story), paying attention to detail, showing things that we’d wanted to see, but nobody ever did before. What blew SF fans away was the number and variety of science fiction scenes and tropes we’d READ about, and sometimes saw in graphic novels and illustrations, but which hadn’t appeared on screen before. The cantina scene? It’s in Babel-17 and in scores of other books, but you never saw a concatenation of different alien races in a bar in a movie before (Star Trek gave you something like it on TV, but that’s not the same thing).

40s space opera was full of things like this. I remember Baird Searles review of Star Wars in F&SF, where he said that he totally lost critical judgment after this scene and just burbled.

Before Star Wars, moviemakers would grudgingly give you some science fiction, but they’re a conservative bunch, and they didn’t want to freak out the Muggles, so it couldn’t be TOO weird. You can show some weird stuff, but not too much. Everything had a reluctant, restrained, unconvincing air about it. So you got Damnation Alley and Moon Zero Two and Zardoz and the like. But Lucas just plowed in and gave you full-bore science fiction wonderfulness, and it wasn;t scary like The Andromeda Strain or The Terminal Man or Westworld – it had swingin’ music and robots you could program and nifty zer-grav cars and things you wanted to play with. There were tough guys in the bars and an evil government, but you had that outside of science fiction, too. It was an unusual but interesting universe, and Lucas proved the suits wrong, Then everyone wanted to jump on the nahdwagon, and that long-delayed Star Trek movie could finally be made. And Cose Encounters, and plenty of other science fictiony stuff.

Except maybe for Forbidden Planet, just about any sf movie before Star Wars was anchored to Earth. They were going to have a talking head introduction to 2001 before Kubrick wisely decided otherwise, and you might remember how confused the critics were. Star Wars benefited from the fact that the prime movie going age then grew up in the space age, surrounded by sf stuff (even if not readers) and so got it.

Star Trek was the first media sf thing with a fully populated universe, which allowed for fan fiction. Star Wars was I think the second.

[kidchameleon]

@Little Nemo

That’s easy - Spielberg. He’s made a career out of the same type of audience pleasing blockbusters as Star Wars. And he did it before Lucas did and he’s been able to repeat his success several times which Lucas has not.

Yeah, Spielberg had Indian Jones. You think Lucas could come up with that in a million years? Or AI, like Kubrick could get past his 2001 to make something like that. Or how Spielberg pioneered revising movies like the tremendous success that ET was. Could George pull that feat off with Star Wars? I think not.

[OneCentStamp]

@kidchameleon

Yeah, Spielberg had Indian Jones. You think Lucas could come up with that in a million years?

Yeah, but if anything, the Indiana Jones franchise is less original and more derivative than Star Wars.

[H3Knuckles]

@OneCentStamp

Yeah, but if anything, the Indiana Jones franchise is less original and more derivative than Star Wars.

Is this a woosh? I thought it was pretty clear kidchameleon was making a point of the fact that IJ was written & co-produced by Lucas, and AI started life as Kubrick’s project. He’s making the point that Spielberg isn’t exactly the go-to guy if you want to show someone who can do the mega-blockbuster better (or more creatively) than Lucas can.

[OneCentStamp]

@H3Knuckles

Is this a woosh? I thought it was pretty clear kidchameleon was making a point of the fact that IJ was written & co-produced by Lucas, and AI started life as Kubrick’s project. He’s making the point that Spielberg isn’t exactly the go-to guy if you want to show someone who can do the mega-blockbuster better (or more creatively) than Lucas can.

Nope, I was the one whooshed. :smack:

[Nonsuch]

@Unintentionally Blank

It was also the first Sci-fi movie where the universe looked used. Everything before that was white and chrome and polyester jumpsuits.

That’s one quality of the original movies that I think still holds up. Sadly, Lucas completely junked it for the prequels: everything in them looks like it just came out of the plastic.

[silenus]

Of course. If there is one thing you count on from Lucas, it’s that if given the chance, he’ll fuck up what he once did perfectly. He really needs to be kneecapped if he ever thinks of doing anything other than producing or running LucasArts.

[MaxTheVool]

@Nonsuch

That’s one quality of the original movies that I think still holds up. Sadly, Lucas completely junked it for the prequels: everything in them looks like it just came out of the plastic.

Eh… I have three responses to that:
(1) it’s kind of the point. In Ep 4, our heroes are scrappy rebels making do with a smuggling vessel, escaping from a garbage chute, going to a dive bar in a port town, etc. In the prequels, our heroes are honored and wealthy (or the equivalent of wealthy) leading inhabitants of a peaceful and happy galactic society. It makes perfect sense that Amidala’s ship is kept pristine and mirror-polished… she’s the QUEEN OF A PLANET.

(2) Plenty of the stuff in the prequels did, in fact, look old and beat up and thrown together/lived in. Annakin’s pod-racer, for instance, or the lava mining installation.

(3) That said, there’s definitely still some truth to your criticism, particularly when it comes to huge-crowd scenes. The gungan army at the end of ep.1, for instance, has remarkably uniform equipment and uniforms. With CGI (which is hilariously over-maligned in general on the SDMB), you can put a lot of effort into making a single model look as lifelike as you want, along with scratches and bruises and chips and whatever (see Golem), or you can have phenomenally enormous crowd scenes that look pretty damn good, but it’s hard to have both at once.