I don't need to tell you what Star Wars is. You already know.
Consider this: Can you picture an Ewok? Sure you can; Ewoks are tiny and fuzzy and teddy bear-like. You might even be able to tell me they appear in Return of the Jedi and live on the moon Endor. This is despite the fact that the word "Ewok," fairly famously, doesn't appear once in the original Star Wars trilogy. The films — and their marketing — are so ubiquitous that you already know.
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And that's just how Star Wars has been for a long time. It's part of the cultural ether, a thing you breathe in as surely as Superman or movies where two people who hate each other are obviously meant to get married. You know the story of a farm boy from a desert planet who meets a pair of robots and gets sucked into a story that's one part interplanetary action adventure and one part family saga.
So I don't need to tell you what Star Wars is. The more pertinent question for those who've never seen the films — or who have but just can't connect with them — is why Star Wars? Why did this kinda weird, scrappy little sci-fi movie from 1977 go on to become a cultural behemoth?
There are many reasons, but everything starts with the miracle of timing
If Star Wars hadn't been released in 1977, I'd wager there would have been something to fill that space in the vacuum by at least 1985, if not 1980. Critics and film historians remember the American films of the 1970s as some of the best ever made — emotionally layered works that examined characters who operated in shades of gray. But audiences' interest in these films was, ultimately, only a minor flirtation.
To say that American film before the '70s had never existed in such morally complex milieus would be inaccurate. For one thing, the entire genre of film noir would beg to differ. But the '70s were different in that even morally complicated, dark and disturbing films could be huge commercial successes. The Godfather, for instance, is about the corrupting power of evil, wherein the protagonist is slowly sucked right back into his family's crime empire. And it became one of the biggest hits in film history for a brief time.
But if you kept your ear to the ground — or just looked at things from a slightly different angle — things weren't all that different from the more carefree blockbusters of just a few years prior. For most of the history of film, the biggest hits have been escapist in nature. The '70s just shifted that escapism into other genres.
The No. 1 film of 1973, for example, was The Exorcist — which, yes, went further than any horror film ever had before in depicting the horrors of demonic possession, but was still fundamentally about the ultimate battle between good and evil, with clear delineations between the two.
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The division between white hats and black hats found its fullest flowering in two films that actually preceded Star Wars: 1975's Jaws and 1976's Rocky. In both films, there's a good guy and a bad guy (or shark), and they have to face off. Though both movies feature more complicated and earthbound heroes than today's blockbusters, they're still stories where everything boils down to one final showdown between a mostly good guy and a mostly bad guy. (Apologies to Rocky's Apollo Creed, who enjoyed more nuance in the sequels.)
And it worked. Jaws made more money than anybody thought possible — and inadvertently invented the summer movie season — while Rocky made tons of money and won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Plus, there were plenty of science fiction and fantasy movies being made around the same time, spurred by the massive success of 1968's big hit 2001: A Space Odyssey, which proved that audiences would turn out for genre movies if they were thoughtful or at least well-produced. As Noel Murray underlines at the Kernel, the year before Star Wars came out was littered with dozens of sci-fi movies that didn't quite hit the zeitgeist as well.
Consider this: Can you picture an Ewok? Sure you can; Ewoks are tiny and fuzzy and teddy bear-like. You might even be able to tell me they appear in Return of the Jedi and live on the moon Endor. This is despite the fact that the word "Ewok," fairly famously, doesn't appear once in the original Star Wars trilogy. The films — and their marketing — are so ubiquitous that you already know.
https://bitbucket.org/backlinksor1/
And that's just how Star Wars has been for a long time. It's part of the cultural ether, a thing you breathe in as surely as Superman or movies where two people who hate each other are obviously meant to get married. You know the story of a farm boy from a desert planet who meets a pair of robots and gets sucked into a story that's one part interplanetary action adventure and one part family saga.
So I don't need to tell you what Star Wars is. The more pertinent question for those who've never seen the films — or who have but just can't connect with them — is why Star Wars? Why did this kinda weird, scrappy little sci-fi movie from 1977 go on to become a cultural behemoth?
There are many reasons, but everything starts with the miracle of timing
If Star Wars hadn't been released in 1977, I'd wager there would have been something to fill that space in the vacuum by at least 1985, if not 1980. Critics and film historians remember the American films of the 1970s as some of the best ever made — emotionally layered works that examined characters who operated in shades of gray. But audiences' interest in these films was, ultimately, only a minor flirtation.
To say that American film before the '70s had never existed in such morally complex milieus would be inaccurate. For one thing, the entire genre of film noir would beg to differ. But the '70s were different in that even morally complicated, dark and disturbing films could be huge commercial successes. The Godfather, for instance, is about the corrupting power of evil, wherein the protagonist is slowly sucked right back into his family's crime empire. And it became one of the biggest hits in film history for a brief time.
But if you kept your ear to the ground — or just looked at things from a slightly different angle — things weren't all that different from the more carefree blockbusters of just a few years prior. For most of the history of film, the biggest hits have been escapist in nature. The '70s just shifted that escapism into other genres.
The No. 1 film of 1973, for example, was The Exorcist — which, yes, went further than any horror film ever had before in depicting the horrors of demonic possession, but was still fundamentally about the ultimate battle between good and evil, with clear delineations between the two.
http://lhcathomeclassic.cern.ch/sixtrack/view_profile.php?userid=373576
The division between white hats and black hats found its fullest flowering in two films that actually preceded Star Wars: 1975's Jaws and 1976's Rocky. In both films, there's a good guy and a bad guy (or shark), and they have to face off. Though both movies feature more complicated and earthbound heroes than today's blockbusters, they're still stories where everything boils down to one final showdown between a mostly good guy and a mostly bad guy. (Apologies to Rocky's Apollo Creed, who enjoyed more nuance in the sequels.)
And it worked. Jaws made more money than anybody thought possible — and inadvertently invented the summer movie season — while Rocky made tons of money and won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Plus, there were plenty of science fiction and fantasy movies being made around the same time, spurred by the massive success of 1968's big hit 2001: A Space Odyssey, which proved that audiences would turn out for genre movies if they were thoughtful or at least well-produced. As Noel Murray underlines at the Kernel, the year before Star Wars came out was littered with dozens of sci-fi movies that didn't quite hit the zeitgeist as well.
