A LONG TIME ago, in a small town far, far away, a young man named George Lucas had an idea for a story:
A simple young farmboy gets a magic sword from an old wizard so he can defeat an evil knight, rescue a princess, and save the world.
Actually, Lucas wasn’t the first person to have that idea. Everybody has that idea. Granted, they don’t always do it with knights. Sometimes it’s cowboys; sometimes it’s samurai. Sometimes the farmboy is a farmgirl. Sometimes the wizard is a scientist and sometimes the evil knight is a dragon or a cyborg. Sometimes it’s guns instead of swords.
But Lucas knew all that. He was a Northern California kid who grew up watching movies and racing cars, a tyro moviemaker at a moment when American film had become very serious. The 1970s had genre goofs like The Exorcist and Rocky, but the gold-standard movies were adult stories about violence, sexuality, and the treachery of dreams. Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather. Heroes in these movies lost — like, all the time. Sometimes the whole movie got you to like bad guys, and sometimes they died anyway!
Lucas rebelled against all that. He looked back to the Flash Gordon serials and war movies of his youth, and mixed in all his favorite irreducible elements from boy-hero-king chosen-one stories — a historian named Joseph Campbell had helpfully assembled a list. Lucas kept the swords, the magic, and the knights.
Then — and this was, perhaps, his greatest innovation — Lucas kept everything else, too. Wizards, dragons, princesses, horses, cars, motorcycles, airplanes, ships, ray guns, teddy bears, his family dog, pirates, car chases, Nazis, gangsters, samurai, dogfights, gunfights, swordfights, fist fights, gladiators, spies, castles, and robots. In space, traveling at hyperspeed.
Star Wars is, in short, a single, unified, vast, familiar, astonishingly well-executed story that emerged from the mind of one filmmaker. It is now worth billions of dollars, drives entire industries and subindustries, and has become a seemingly permanent facet of global culture. It’s profoundly silly, yet also strangely profound — a grand, nostalgic romance full of wisdom and love that three generations equate inextricably with childhood, adventure, and the definition of good and evil.
