Why is Star Wars so popular?

Cafe Society
21

“Star Wars” is the most important movie made in my lifetime, fundamentally altering the course of pop culture. “Empire Strikes Back” really pushed it to higher levels.

The made it a modern mythology. Every culture needs a mythology.

When I saw “Star Wars” I was six. I thought it was the greatest movie ever. My parents thought the same. It is impossible to overstate the impact it had on people. It’s a very good movie by any standard, but at the time it just blew people away.

You just cannot replicate that feeling, which is why the recent movies seem so empty.

22

I suspect the Hidden Fortress technique that Lucas stole from Kurosawa was a major part of why the first movie caught on so big. The central characters, who are in a large fraction of scenes, are minor players, mostly with only an indirect effect on the ultimate outcome. Note how, in the final exhaust port run, Luke essentially removes R2D2’s contribution.

Making minor characters with minimal influence the axis around which the story tracks put the audience right into the middle of things, generating a strong sense of empathy. From what I have seen of later efforts, this technique gradually fades out of the picture, rendering the material rote and remote.

23

Oh, yeah I got that. I was thinking of the Netflix series The Toys that Made Us. They did an episode on Stars Wars toys made by Kenner. The Kenner executives were treated to a special sneak preview of TPM when it came out in 1999. They jokingly talked about how, when the lights came up after the movie ended, all they could think of was how bad the movie was. One of the Kenner executives said in his interview “parliamtenary procedure: that’s what the kids are looking for in a Star Wars movie!” or something to that effect.

24

You are absolutely correct. I was allowed to go see Star Wars; my parents would never have let me see any of the films on that list, except maybe Annie Hall, which held no interest for a ten-year-old boy.

25

FWIW, my son is 9, and Star Wars is THE coolest thing in his mind. He doesn’t really dig Harry Potter or Ninjago, and while he likes playing with Beyblades, he LOVES Lego Star Wars and the other stuff.

He was just the right age to see the third trilogy from the beginning, along with Rogue One and Solo. First real movie franchise he was exposed to. I’ve tried to get him to watch Star Trek, Harry Potter, and all sorts of other stuff, but Star Wars will be his first love, I think.

I’m kind of the same way- Dad had taken off work in 1976 to take four-year old me to see Star Wars at the first showing at the Houston Galleria, and I’ve seen every one in the theater, most on opening day/weekend.

26

Why star wars was popular in 1977 and why it’s still popular more than forty years later are two different questions I think. After Return of the Jedi, by 1985 Star Wars was no longer a big presence in toy stores as kids moved on to other things. In fact, there wasn’t much of a Star Wars presence until the 1990s when the special edition was released. It’s hard to imagine going to a store these days and not seeing a Star Wars product but once upon a time…

So why’s Star Wars still so popular today?

27

I feel Star Wars did a super good job at making great video games in the 80s and 90s to keep it relevant for the youth. I’m fairly certain anyone who played video games in that time period has held at least one Star Wars game in high regard even if they never watched a movie beforehand.

28

Well, I’m 48 years old, and I was exactly the age to adore the original trilogy. Now I’m the demographic with spending money, and I am in the first generation to hit middle age for whom it’s considered socially acceptable to play video games and be a geek about stuff like “Star Wars.” I am, as a result, the first generation to have that desire catered to.

When my Dad became an adult, people would have thought he was an asshole if he’d walked around in Davy Crockett shit and talked to his friends all the time about Davy Crockett. No one thinks there’s anything odd about me talking a lot about Star Wars.

Back before my wife and I started living together she brought her daughter over to my palce for a family viewing of “The Empire Strikes Back.” After they left and were getting into the elevator, my future stepdaughter opined that she didn’t think it was all that great a movie. My future wife was aghast. “It was the best movie ever!” she said as they got on the elevator. Seeing another woman on the elevator who was about her age, maybe a little older, she said to my future stepdaughter “Watch this,” and then turned to the woman and said “The Empire Strikes Back. Right?”

The woman immedaitely replied, “Oh, so great! So great! I love it!”

My future wife said “Yoda, right?”

Said the stranger, “Love Yoda, I do!”

Us Gen X types can do that. Star Wars was our mythology, and for the first time ever, it was okay to not have to grow out of it.

29

It’s the story and the characters, done extremely well without overthinking it. All the actors were perfect for the characters they played. Had Tom Selleck been selected to play Han Solo or Orson Welles to voice Darth Vader, for example, I think the series would have ended right there. And it was just plain fun.

Even given all that, for me the high point was not watching the original trilogy as a kid. The high point that I remember was the months leading up to the release of the Phantom Menace. I was in college at the time, and it seems like the anticipation of the premiere was all anyone could talk about.

30

This. They are fun. Even the third trilogy (the prequels, much less so)

31

The original Star Wars was huge without extreme marketing. The original trailer was kind of blah, with ominous music (not John Williams’ later upbeat fanfare). There wasn’t a big buildup in advertising to the film’s release (although they did manage to get an impressive cover blurb in Time magazine – “The Year’s Best Film”. And the Boston Globe ran a bottom-of-the=page blurb on the front page on the day of its release). They didn’t even have all the usual toys ready months in advance (toy manufacturers were caught off-guard by the film’s immense popularity, and it was a couple of months before any sort of Star Wars toys showed up in stories). About the only thing they had out in advance were the novelization by “George Lucas” (actually Alan Dean Foster, as everyone quickly surmised) and the first issue of the Marvel comic book adaptation (which had Darth Vader’s mask and helmet as green with red eyes – https://comicbookrealm.com/series/2036/27448/marvel-comics-star-wars-vol-1-issue-1 )

Yet the premiere was packed, and tickets virtually impossible to get for the first show. And it was released May 25, 1977 – a Wednesday, not even a Friday. I went to an afternoon showing the next day and sat through it twice in an almost empty theater, but that changed rapidly. Star Wars continued to play, without any interruption, at the Charles Street Cinema in Boston for over a year.

So the first film succeeded pretty much on its own merits. Lucas was known for his somewhat obscure science fiction film THX-1138 and a little more for American Graffiti (although I think people remembered the film, not Lucas’ name). The big summer movies were supposed to be the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me and Disney’s The Rescuers and the WWII film A Bridge Too Far and Smokey and the Bandit. The other fantasy film (which was kinda big in London, where Star Wars opened late in the summer) was the penultimate Harryhausen film Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.. All of these films had been advertising heavily in advance of opening. Star Wars blew them all away. I know a guy who saw it 39 times that summer. I think I only saw it seven times, myself.

You can say that advertising was largely responsible for the later films, but i don’t think it’s entirely true – a lot of it was the memory of how good the first film had been. When they re-released Star Wars the next year (despite its still play in some places from the initial release), a lot of the interest was because they were showing the advance trailer for The Empire Strikes Back. I suspect more people went to see the film just to see the trailer than to re-watch the original.

As I’ve written before, I think that Star Wars’ popularity derives a lot from its dive-right-in no-holds-barred embracing of science fiction tropes. Although there had been a lot of science fiction movies and TV series (most notably Star Trek and 2001), moviemakers were wary of them and seemed to think that science fiction concepts were too “far out” and not likely to be embraced by general audiences. Although there was clear interest in a Star Trek movie, the concept had languished for years. Harlan Ellison even wrote an article predicting that such a movie would never be made. Without Star Wars, that might have been true – the closest to a Star Trek revival they had was a Saturday morning animated show and the start of development of a new TV series. When Star wars was a huge hit, the Star Trek movie got greenlit in a hurry, and they cannibalized the incipient TV show for parts. Star Wars showed that there was definitely a popular market for this kind of thing (rather than cheapo flicks like Moon Zero Two or Damnation Alley, or “prestige” stodgy films like Marooned.)

Star Wars gave us dogfight battles in space, the multi-aliened Spaceport Bar, planet-destroying weapons, and Evil Galactic Empires. This was old stuff to fans of science fiction literature, most of it dating back to the 1920s and 1930s work of Edmond Hamilton and E.E. Smith and Leigh Brackett (who Lucas got to write the first drafts of Empire Strikes Back), and kept up ever since. To most of the movie audience, though, all of this was fresh and brand new stuff, since they movies never showed it before.

32

He may put on a stoic front, but say the b’ar shot first to your dad sometime and watch the fireworks.

33

A bunch of kids liked it and got their kids to like it.

Also, I think one thing that helped Star Wars was that it was a precious commodity. You never knew if there was going to be any more. Not until Disney bought it and started blowing it up. That I think has caused it to lose some of it’s luster, and I think that’s why they decided to pull back a little. People will accept mediocrity sometimes, but not if it’s being shoveled down their throats endlessly.

We now know there’s going to be a Star Wars movie every other year or so for the rest of our lives. And TV shows filling up the rest. So it’s not at special as it once was. I certainly feel like I can pass on new entries now and catch up later.

34

IMO your whole post was great. But that bottom line knocks it out of the park. SW was bigger than a story; it was a mythology.

35

when the first one came out my friends father was around 50 and he walked out of it about 1/2 way through.

I think some people probably like it just because all their friends like it. I’m a rare person who does not hate 1-3 although I admit they have flaws. 7-9 were OK but also had flaws.

36

I have to admit, this kind of surprises me. I never heard of anyone walking out of the original Star Wars on its first run.

Heck, my advisor took a visiting Russian scientist to see it. They both loved it. So did my non-sf mother. Star Wars undoubtedly had a broad audience appeal.

I don’t doubt that there were people who didn’t like it, but this is the first first-hand report I’ve had of it.

(I suspect Harlan Ellison wasn’t a big fan, either. He wrote lots of lines condemning those whose main business was built on “homages” rather than coming up with new stuff.)

37

They are ALL very flawed movies, the prequel’s flaws are just a lot more in your face (terrible dialogue, terrible directing of the actors saying the terrible dialogue, overuse of CGI merely to show off your CGI instead of it serving the plot) but the plot and story are probably the most solid out of the trilogies.

38

The mythology responses I see here are accurate, but vague. The world-building quality of the franchise lent itself very well to all the subsequent non-film materials set in that universe. Comic books and novels I think are what really made SW such a phenomenon beyond the movies because they built up the mythos and setting. SW fans were fueled by written materials much more effectively than the movies themselves.

39

My memory may be faulty, but 1977-78 may have been the last era when movie theaters would allow you to buy a single matinee ticket and just sit through 3 or 4 showings of the same movie. I don’t think the enormous nostalgic excitement Star Wars stirs in me would exist if I hadn’t sat with my friends through dozens of screenings. When VHS became widely available a few years later, we were trained to obsessively watch films like ESB and ROtJ over and over again.

40

I’m the same age as you (48). The original Star Wars films came out at a time were very few film makers had the ability to create that level of a mythology and world-building with that degree of technical competency. Lucas basically basically borrowed heavily from Akira Kurosawa samurai films and class WWII war movies, transposed them in a space opera fantasy setting and created something no one had seen before.

The Star Wars franchise continues to be popular for several reasons. One is that, unlike a lot of sci fi films from the 70s and 80s, the effects and visual aesthetic continues to hold up 40+ years later. No one looks at an X-Wing or Tie Fighter and says “that looks like a dorky 1970s spaceship”

The other reason is that they continue to make just enough “good” Star Wars (and even some “great” Star Wars) to continue to generate interest. I would consider Rogue One “great” Star Wars, on par with ANH and ESB. The Mandalorian is also pretty good. Although derivative, The Force Awakens was probably on par with RotJ. It was good enough that people had hope that the following two films wouldn’t suck as bad as they did.