I love Star Wars, even the prequels. But the biggest result of Star Wars was the universe that it inspired. You have stories that go back to the beginning of the Old Republic, to the Yuzzhan Vong invasion. There is SO much in the Star Wars universe, I can't describe it. I picked up a new Star Wars book over the weekend. It's called Star Warsarth Bane-Path of Destruction. It takes place a thousand years before Episode 1. If you have ever wondered why there was only TWO Sith Lords at a time in the movies, Darth Bane is the reason. Also, if you remember from Episode 1 that one of the Jedi Masters said that the Sith had been extinct for a millenium, again, Darth Bane deserves credit for that. As a result of some teachings on Korriban, he determined that there should only be two Sith Lords. One to embody the power, the other to crave it. As a result of the massive change in the way Sith do things, you end up with a plan a thousand years in the making that would eventually destroy the Old Republic and the Jedi in Episode III. It is a hell of a book to read, and Darth Bane doesn't start out as a nice guy either. That's just ONE of hundreds of stories that populate the Star Wars universe. Not all of them are good, I'll admit, but the good stories outnumber the bad. Darth Bane actually has references to the first Knights of the Old Republic game, so just about everything is connected in some fashion. Say what you will about the prequel movies, I loved them, just not as much as the originals. I can understand why people didn't like them, but I'm a much more forgiving Star Wars fan than most.

in 1977 I won an art competition in our local rag and the prize was two tickets to see Star Wars at the premiere for the North-West in Manchester. I took me gran, she didn't get much in the way of days out. I quite enjoyed it at the time, but when I saw it again a few years later on the telly, I thought it was wubbish. And I still don't like it.

TESB and ROTJ are different matters though, I'll happily watch those anytime. None of those new ones though, they're dreadful.

Interesting though that "changed the world" comment. that's actually true in various ways. if we go back in time with Uncle Taw's Memory Machine, to the mid 1970's.....

"aw mum not flares again, they're kak!"
"shut up and don't be cheeky, now off you go to church"
"don't make me walk there the skinheads hang around the precinct"
"be quiet I'm missing Waggoner's Walk"

well maybe not THAT 1970s memory! Instead let's look at cinemas and "cinema culture" of the time; cinemas were grotty dingy dives, mostly aging leftovers from the golden age of the 1930s and 40s, now smoke-filled hovels inhabited by courting couples and dirty old perverts in raincoats. Film fare on offer was dominated by big-budget disaster, police/gangster, and war films, the occasional Disney offering which often wasn't good (eg Cat from Outer Space) Children's Film Foundation nonsense (anyone remember Billy's Time Bike?) and sub-porn rubbish from the likes of Russ Meyer. About the only spark of originality at the time were the police and detective dramas, such as The French Connection, The Godfather, Serpico, and Taxi Driver. Being kids we could only really get into the Disneys and our Saturday morning matinee which was mostly cartoons, an educational film about pottery in the Cotswolds, and episode 23 of some foreign series about Achmed and the 37 Thieves of Marrakech (or pirates, or smugglers - the plots were largely interchangeable.)

Into this dearth of dullness and the strict limitations upon what we could watch - bear in mind that there was none of the choice of today, it was a strict kids v adults split, and kids films really lacked any production effort in the main, moronic plots, bad acting, just time-fillers really, and with only 3 channels on telly (BBC1, BBC2, and ITV, and lots of families like ours still had black and white sets!) there wasn't much in the way of entertainment - along came these tales of this fillum taking America and the rest of the world by storm. Spaceships, lasers, adventure? we got some few minutes of trailers and it was like nothing we'd seen before, huge spaceships, exotic costumes, believable special effects that didn't look like extras in badly-fitted suits or cheap fireworks or bits of Airfix kit on wires. So in that sense, Star Wars was ground-breaking at the time (although as I was later to discover, it actually wasn't ground-breaking at all, everything in Star Wars had been done before right down to the plot.)**

(** I know the SW fanboys will take exception to that but I'm happy to prove my point!)

However, it certainly changed the world of film and television in a major way. Lucas had hawked his draft of the script round every producer and picture company in Hollywood and been rejected until Fox gave him a second chance. No-one, including Fox, expected Star Wars to become the multi-billion phenomenon that it rapidly turned into, and all those producers who turned it down must have been hammering their heads against the wall in frustration! In response there was a rash of more-or-less quickly knocked off copies, sci-fi adventures of varying quality, most of which you'll never see again, but some did do well and gave rise to others in their turn. Paramount rejected Star Wars, but once it had become big, they decided to brush off their old Star Trek scripts from the 60's and see if they couldn't cobble a film together. Having the sense to get a decent novellist to write the screenplay, and a director who went for 2001-style grandeur rather Star Wars space opera, Star Trek: the Motion Picture wasn't arf bad, and then gave rise to it's own sequels and then the various series. So it would be true to say that without Star Wars, or rather the commercial success of Star Wars, Star Trek would have remained as just some old episodes from the 1960s being constantly repeated, no films, no TNG, no DS9, no Voyager, no games, no ST:Enterprise (that wouldn't have been a bad thing though!)

Columbia offered up Battlestar Galactica which got heavily panned as a Star Wars carbon-copy, but even at the time I felt it was more than that - I'd seen Star Wars carbon copies and BSG had an epic scale and potential for depth that was far more than a mere copy should have. Clearly I wasn't the only one who thought so, hence why it's been so brilliantly "re-imagined" in recent years.

I think that I may have said this before but original BSG was something of a proving ground for several people who were later to go on and become key players in sf productions through the 80s and 90s. I think it would be fair to say that if there had been no Star Wars, then there'd have been no BSG, and no BSG means that there'd have been no Babylon 5 or DS9 (in all probability) Being a sad kind of Mullah who reads credits, I notice these things.

So yes, Star Wars "changed the world", and it also introduced the concept of mass-merchandised action figures (ok there were others but this was the first time anyone really noticed)

Incidentally, if anyone has ever seen or gets the chance to see the 1976 film "Battle of Midway" then pay attention to the score - John Williams wrote it and it's almost identical to his score for Star Wars a year later! I remember buying the double album LP soundtrack and reading the included brochure in which Williams discussed his creative process for composing the soundtrack, not once mentioning that he'd mostly just rehashed his "Midway" score. No wonder he and Lucas worked so well together!




Edited by - Tawakalna on 7/28/2007 7:35:27 AM

Fact is, if there was no Star Wars, I would have never been interested in sci-fi and would have never got into games.
In fact there might not even be a Freelancer, or some of our other sci-fi games. Now that would be interesting to go back and pervent star wars from coming out and seeing what would happen.
Who knows, the world might have ended......

Ahh, for all Taw's bluster, he will never let it be known he is a closet Jar Jar Binks fan, and has a stuffed life size one in his home.

They were all good, in their own way.

meesa tink you bin smokin too much dat big tree in yo garden Meesta Final!

you know full well I'm for the Imperials and always have been - jive-talking semi-aquatic idiots and cuddly teddy bears aren't exactly my thing.

well, in what if? mode, who'd have played Christopher Blair in Wing Commander if Hamill hadn't made his "mark" in Star Wars?

and still in what if? mode, Star Wars might well never have happened if Akira Kurosawa had been killed in WW2, or if he had never been able to make Seven Samurai; why? because Kurosawa's samurai films were the genesis for concept of the Jedi Knights, as Lucas himself once admitted before he changed history to "I made it all up myself, honest!" and one specific film, The Hidden Fortress, is essentially the plot of Star Wars - two sparring heroes rescue a rebel princess who knows the location of the secret base (and treasure) and off they go on an adventure to get her there past the evil baddies, with a couple of comic buffoons (one tall, one short) in tow. Sounds a bit familiar that plot.

Lucas used to be very honest once about his influences and homages, and for many years he made no secret of his admiration for Kurosawa's work - in fact, Lucas helped to revive the great man's career by financing Kagemusha - Shadow Warrior; and in many other respects Lucas was in the past happy to explain why he did things the way he did, 30s adventure movies, 50s sci-fi flicks, tales of derring-do etc. Then for "some reason" in the late 80s and 90s, there was this sea-change and the story began to be put around that he thought the whole lot up years in advance and it was all completely original and worked out in every detail - utter claptrap of course, when he touted his original script around in the 70s he had material for one film only with some vague ideas for sequels only coming about once he had a commercial success on his hands.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 7/27/2007 6:28:54 AM

I'm a big SW fan...became a even bigger fan when i picked up KOTOR I and II...i usually hate RPG games but these i just love,i still play them reguarly..there's so many ways to do finish it that u'll never get bored!

Have to say SW:G was terrible,but u can forgive em for that.

Another Star Wars fan here just love the good vs. evil in these films. I must say I was shocked when I seen III and how twisted a young man looking for power can get plus the big lie he believed.

I would like to see some about what happened between three and four would like to see some about what went on after six.

“SISU”
(Pronounced: siss-sue)
(Meaning)
Guts, Tenacity, Steadfastness, Courage, and an Indomitable will to Succeed, and Survive.

That's where the books and games come in. Mostly books, though.

i liked all the movies but i felt the biggest problem with the prequels outside of casting which was horrible, even compared to LOTR, was the psychological development of anakin that makes him a total tool - it was really non-present. ya ya, the sketchy outlines were there but lucas's neglect towards internal dialogue made anakins character more opaque and hard to read. really i couldn't see why he was such an obnoxious prat, when he was brilliant enough to craft c3po and work on pod racers at the age of 8 or so.

revenge of the sith almost made up for the two movies before it and without-any-doubt it saved the franchise.

It wasn't so much that Anakin was mis-cast as the way the character was written. Anakin was supposed to become a bad-ass Jedi, but he was a whiny little turd. Ewan McGregor was awesome as Obi-Wan, though.