Also, it looks — approachable? lived-in? — weirdly authentic, or something. Like, this is the story of some hick farm kid who rides around in a beat-up flying car: he watches his uncle haggle with the used-robot salesman, because this isn’t about gleaming futuristic androids but about dented secondhand goods that are a commonplace instead of a novelty; and that guy who owes someone some money? Oh, yeah, he’s got a faster-than-light starship, I guess; but it of course gets denigrated as a piece of junk, it’s maybe not as elegant as the old-timey weapon from a more civilized age that, y’know, a desert hermit might have tucked away.
Put together, the whole effect helps to drop you into the story; they’re all taking this stuff pretty casually, and, well, you can too…
On top of that, I think video games sustained the excitement for the Star Wars universe through the 90’s and beyond in the gaps between the trilogies. There were quite a few great video game series that were built around Star Wars, from X-Wing, Jedi Knight, Knights of the Old Republic, Battlefront, to dozens of smaller games.
I think lack of overexposure helped a lot. They had the 3 original movies and, boom, that was it for decades. That made them unique and legendary. Now that they’ve had so many more, it just isn’t that special and unrecoverable anymore.
One old timer told me a story about Coors Beer. There was a time when you couldn’t get it east of the Mississippi River. When he was in college in Chicago, guys were always asking the California guys to bring back Coors Beer. It was very special because it was unattainable. Well, several years after that, they were shipping it all over the United States. It then became like many other beers, not special.
I was watching a show on Disney + yesterday called “Earth to Ned” (a new Henson project where an alien has a talk show to learn about Earth. Yes, it’s funny!) and one episode featured Reggie Watts and Billy Dee Williams as guests, so it was the Star Wars episode. They asked Watts what he liked about Star Wars as a kid and he brought this up. He said he noticed right away how everything was dirty and grungy which was way different than science fiction up to that point (notably Star Trek and 2001, I presume).
So, you’re not the only one to have noticed and appreciated that aspect of the films! Actually I suspect this may have been something that detracted from Episodes I-III. Those were too shiny. Episodes IV-VI took place in the desert, the bar, the swamp and the forest. The sequels were pretty grungy too. “The Mandalorian” is grungy as well.
Yes, the aged look – Luke’s speeder has clearly seen better days. The Jawas’ hold is filled with all kinds of robotic trash, as is the Garbage Compacter in the Death Star.
Prior to Star Wars, the only movie I know of that showed a grungy spaceship was the cult film Dark Star. (which Alan Dean Foster also wrote the novelization of, like Star Wars)
I’ve read that the lived-in look in the original movies was an intentional choice by Lucas, to depict both the general decline of the galaxy in the decades after the death of the old Republic (noting that Imperial ships and facilities were, of course, clean and shiny), and the fact that the Rebellion was operating in the shadows.
And, conversely, the “shiny” look of the Prequels was also a deliberate choice, to depict the Republic before it fell (even though it was rotting at its core at the time).
I never thought of this whole grunge aesthetic before yesterday so what you say makes sense, and I wonder if the shinyness of the prequels was yet another reason they didn’t appeal to people as much as the originals.
The plots of Episodes 1 and 2 don’t make any sense. There are so many plot holes, it’d take me an hour of typing to explain them all. Phantom Menace is especially horrific.
The original trilogy has SIMPLE plots, but they’re solid. Well, Return of the Jedi has a few question marks.
I’d say the first two movies were very good. The third movie was good. The others - less so. Their popularity is mainly nostalgia for mythology. As I said, it’s amazing what they did with 70s technology and aesthetic and later movies did not improve on this nor the story. But lots of maudlin sentimental moments. There was a time I could have told you any bit of useless trivia about the first two films.
That may have been the motive for the choice, but I think it (possibly unintentionally) gave the movies a big hook by making the world seem real and lived in. If you watch SF that has a lot of white corridors and pefectly polished metal with people wearing (usually pocketless) jumpsuits all in a single style, it doesn’t seem like something real. Actual people have different clothing and decoration styles, and places that people have been in for long get dirty and scratched up. The fact that original Star Wars had a feeling like it was an actual place where people lived instead of some weird ivory-tower fictional locale helped a lot with making it popular.
And it really doesn’t help that, in addition to the ‘everything is shiny’ aesthetic, the prequels use a ton of green screen with CGI. CGI tends to look less ‘real’ (especially 90s CGI) to people, and using CGI against a green screen runs into the problem that actors and extras can’t react to little environmental cues because they’re only added in post production. The actor’s eye never darts to the guy running from door to door across the street, the victim may pull away from the danger but not any specific part of it, and (if the crowd is CGI) there’s a distinct uniformity to them that you don’t get with live actors.
I think most people would be okay with clean sci-fi if it looked real. Star Trek when done right looks cool, even though the Enterprise is clean, because it looks like people work and live there.
The human eye and brain are REALLY good at detecting fake stuff, just incredibly quick at it, often to the point that your brainb reports “that’s bullshit” to your conscious mind even if you cannot actually think of what, specifically, triggered that feeling. Much of the SW prequels just don’t look real. It’s often strikingly obvious. The originals didn’t have the option of CGI, so they had to work hard to make the sets and costumes look good.
I don’t agree with that depending on exactly how you define ‘most’ and ‘okay’ - there are plenty of ‘clean’ SF shows that had or have decent numbers of viewers, but there are clearly a significant number of people put off by the obviously unreal environments in those shows. The thing is, you didn’t have real-looking spaceships and bases and dwellings in most pre-ANH SF, at least when they had budget and were trying to do space opera. Before ANH you generally got super-shiny and pure white spaceship and ‘modern housing’ interiors, plus often some kind of wasteland where everything was crap and wilderness areas that are wilderness, or you had things like TOS where the interiors were low-budget and obviously props. Look at things like THX-1138, 2001, Logan’s Run, Space:1999, and other movies and shows that came out before 1977. Then compare what came after - things like Alien and The Black Hole have much more lived-in sets, and ST: The Motion Picture has a clean set but not something either stark white or extremely ‘prop’ looking.
So while I agree later ST does the ‘clean but real’ look well, and there are certainly other SF properties with that look that are successful, I think it’s far from universally preferred. And I think the fact that the ‘lived in’ look wasn’t used in SF before Star Wars, then Star Wars was a huge hit, and then it became reasonably common (though not universal) is a good indication that there is a large chunk of people who prefer that style over the cleaner style, and especially who prefer it over the older ‘clean and unreal’ style that dominated pre-1977.
I saw ANH when I was 25, and loved it. I agree with CalMeacham that the SF tropes did it for me. There was all that cool Planet Stories stuff I’d never seen in movies before, certainly not done well. I wasn’t the only one. Baird Searles in his F&SF review said that after the cantina scene he just burbled, since that was a scene he had waited a long time for.
I even like RotJ pretty much, since I can forgive the Ewoks given a good resolution of the Luke/Anakin story.
I knew a bunch of people who saw a preview at an SF con in Chicago - probably just an extended trailer and maybe scenes, not the whole thing, and they loved it also. Fox was sure it was going to bomb though.
My wife got us tickets for episode 1 for our anniversary and we were sure disappointed. And the first sequel was so damn derivative I’ve never gotten around to watching episodes 8 and 9.
The big problem with this stuff today (and Star Trek has this problem also) is that most story lines have natural arcs and endings, but that doesn’t drive extended ticket and merchandising sales, so the suits keep putting out product that gets worse and worse, except for a few miracle successes.
Because Harrison Ford is the fucking man. The charisma of Han Solo goes a LONG way in making the movies bearable. If the story had just centered on Luke Skywalker, they would have sucked. George Lucas and the other people involved in creating the movies basically struck gold with Harrison Ford. Everything else that other posters have said about the sets, the aesthetics, the story etc, is true, but I just cannot imagine it would have all come together and coalesced without Ford.
Space, flashy red and green lasers, a fictional world in another galaxy, robots, stormtroopers, big fiery explosions, big menacing AT-AT walkers stomping about in a snowy landscape…that easily appeals to all sorts of people.
In 1984 - 1985 I worked in a department store in Scotland, in the home computer department. The toy department was adjacent. By 1985 you practically couldn’t give away the Star Wars stuff. Figures dumped in bargain bins at 10p each, that kind of thing.
