Taken as individual parts, when you get right down to it, the entire premise for Star Wars seems rather silly. A western set in space. The good guys wear white, the bad guys in their black hats, a motley collection of guys in rubber masks and fur suits pretending to be aliens from other worlds. The lone bandit with a heart of gold with his trusty sidekick, the young, naïve farmboy who goes off on a quest with a wise old gunslinger who was an outcast himself.
It's all been done before, countless times. In fact, George Lucas has unabashedly taken cues directly from the Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that goes into great detail about how often these stories get repackaged and retold countless times throughout the history of man. After all, how different is the relationship between Luke and Obi-Wan from say, King Arthur and Merlin?
And yet, for all its similarities, or perhaps BECAUSE of it, the story of a Boy, a Girl and a Universe has become a cultural touchstone for 45 years. There was something different this time around. Whether America, and the world at the time, needed something like what Star Wars was offering. After all, we were still in the middle of a cold war, tensions rising in the middle east while gas prices soared, America was losing its place as a global leader. Star Wars seemed to become the escapist fantasy we could all rally behind.
Even though science fiction had been done, and done often, it was almost always done poorly. Cheesy special effects, flimsy costumes, boring battles between the sides of good and evil. Even spaceship battles tended to be static, uninspired. Then along comes this plucky kid out of USC Film School named George Lucas. His senior thesis was a project called: THX 1138. A dystopian science fiction film that was out of the ordinary for its time. He followed that up with a tribute to the California car culture and his love of the early 1960s with American Graffiti. He took the clout he built off of the success of that film to push ahead with his space opera, Star Wars. It was a gamble as, I mentioned previously, science fiction had been done often and not very well. But he went above and beyond, assembling a rag-tag team of artists who were willing to challenge the norms, take the next steps and effectively, re-write how things were done in Hollywood.
He backed virtual unknown commodities and talented artists to found Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) who practically reinvented special effects for film. In fact, ILM's team of artists would later go on to become innovators in 3D imaging and effects and Pixar was later born out of that. And the magic that these artists created, taking simple greenscreen imagery and adding motion tracking shots to make these simple plastic models appear as though they were truly flying through space was revolutionary.
On the advice of his good friend, Stephen Spielberg, Lucas would hire composer John Williams to score his little space opera. And John Williams did what John Williams does, bringing emotional gravitas to the film. Like the classical composers of the Renaissance Era, Williams could embody a depth to his music that they can easily stand alone without the visual cues from the film. I defy anybody to listen to Binary Sunset and not FEEL the loneliness of a boy in the middle of nowhere who aspires to become something.
His sound engineering teams going out and finding JUST the right sounds to add to his visuals to bring them to life. Imagine how boring a lightsaber alone would be if it wasn't accompanied by that audible hum or the buzzing sound as it whooshes through the air. All that from just waving a microphone in front of a speaker and picking up the feedback loop. The distinctive sounds as their blasters shoot at one another is just a simple small metal hammer tapping a guy-wire on an electrical pole.
Even more subtle than all that was making his vision of space look LIVED in. Prior to Star Wars, most science fiction sets, whether they're spaceships, space ports or some random planet homes, the world of Star Wars looks as though people have actually lived there. They don't look like someone just finished building it and people moved in before filming. When you visit the Lars homestead in the sands of Tatooine, you feel as though the Lars family has lived in this hole in the ground for generations. The Mos Eisley Cantina looks like it's somewhere you don't want to accidently walk into while you're looking for a drink. The first time you set your eyes on the Millennium Falcon, you think exactly what Luke said, 'What a piece of junk!'
Despite claims to the otherwise, I'm certain Lucas never, in his wildest imagination, would he ever have thought his little sci-fi film would become the multi-billion dollar corporation that it is today, with fans stretching across the world, legions of role players and fan clubs, generations of families growing up and enjoying watching the adventures of this plucky band of rebels defeat an evil empire.
May the Fourth Be With You.
