The Timeless Appeal of Star Wars
Summer of 1977 was my first as a teenager. It was also the last time I saw my grandfather. It was the year after America’s bicentennial, in which my younger brothers put on a family Fourth of July pageant called “201!” And it was the summer of Star Wars, which my favorite uncle, a sci-fi buff, took me to see a few weeks after its debut in late May.
To a boy raised without a television in the house, and whose cinematic experience up to that point consisted of the likes of The Wizard of Oz, Bambi, and Pinocchio (the latter two in a drive-in that has long since been torn down), George Lucas’ inaugural space opera was practically a religious experience, as it was for hundreds of millions of other theatergoers the world over. From the dramatic opening space battle high above the desert sands of Tatooine, with its iconic double sun, to the climactic confrontation between good and evil in the strangely sonorous space above the Death Star, the grand tableaux of the galaxy far, far away were unlike anything ever seen before on the silver screen.
For one thing, the original Star Wars is generally considered to have been the first movie ever to use what is now called CGI — in the rendering of lightsaber blades and bursts from blasters. That film, and its two successors, which gave English a new onomatopoeic word (the “Pew! Pew!” of blasters and similar space weapons), also enriched the American vernacular to a greater degree than any film (including The Wizard of Oz and The Princess Bride) before or since. The 1980s were dominated by the politics of the Soviet Union’s “Evil Empire” and President Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposed anti-missile weapon system. Mos Eisley’s “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” Yoda’s peculiar cadences and syntax, and the franchise’s signature phrase, “May the Force be with you,” have all entered the American folk lexicon, apparently for good. A dizzying array of charismatic alien races and characters, from the villainous Jabba the Hut to the valiant Chewbacca and the cuddly Ewoks, have become permanent fixtures on the cultural scene. To be unaware of who Luke Skywalker or his father are, or how the Death Star was destroyed, or what carbonite and Han Solo have to do with one another, is to be a modern pop-culture ignoramus.
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