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Category:    Home > Essays > Science Fiction > Fantasy > It’s The 30th Anniversary of STAR WARS!!! - so where’s the big celebration?

It’s The 30th Anniversary of STAR WARS!!! -  so where’s the big celebration?

 

By Nicholas Sheffo

 

 

So many trilogies want to be Star Wars, even the prequels to Star Wars, but none since have quite worked out.  As a big licensing entity, pop culture celebre and as endlessly referenced and imitated in the mainstream, its like the films have always been with us, though they are only a recent entity.  When the original trilogy ended, there was even a period of burnout where many thought it was all the films could offer.  Then there are the memorabilia, especially the toys, which at their best are like investing in blue chip stocks in how their prices just keep climbing and climbing.

 

Of course, none of this was the case back in 1977, when the film came out of nowhere, became a huge box office champ when Fox thought it was gong to be a bomb to the point where they let George Lucas have all the “worthless” marketing rights and it took advantage of a groundswell of Science Fiction interest that went over the heads of many a Hollywood executive.

 

The “experts” always tell us about how much “better” The Empire Strikes Back actually is and sometimes go on to say they understand “art” and “deep meaning” in everything when they are just posers.  Yes, Empire is a great middle act, a fine film and with Lucas backing director Irvin Kershner, a fine sequel.  However, though few want to consider this or admit it, Star Wars as the single self-contained 1977 film does not need sequels, tie-ins, spin-offs or anything else.  It is the most fun a space opera ever was, could be or will be.  The effects were so ahead of their time (and none were digital at the time, which if you see an original print, still looks good) that they might as well have been magic.

 

Many try to explain the popularity as merely connected to the “mood of the country” or “Vietnam Syndrome” or the like, but that is not quite the whole story either and is just an excuse not to analyze the film.  It is also often what those who could care less say who think they know it all but know nothing.  It was not adults who created the repeat business.  It is more than that.

 

The immediate answer to the title of this essay is that Lucas has tampered with the films to death to the point where it is more like playing Clue than watching a film with all of its memorable parts left alone.  It was the film he got right to begin with and minus the “Chapter Four” opening added later is well-edited (including the scene where “Han Shoots First” and Han’s Millennium Falcon fights off a fighter attack) and has a smooth pace that is always clever, witty, inclusive, slowly builds on the story and its energy and has zero pretension about it.

 

While the politicians were fighting it out about where the country was going on their way to ripping it apart and The American Dream was not yet under unforgivable assault by opportunists and other “forces” the news is finally getting a backbone to report on just now, Star Wars proved that the right combination of heart, soul and technical innovation done in a original way (as the films would all be referentially derivative of cinema’s past, especially in Sci-Fi, Adventure and Fantasy genres) can win over anything.

 

At the heart and soul of the original film before it became cliché though the recyclings and almost countless digital upgrades of all the films and digifilms, the characters were developed just enough to know without overly fixing them in any situations or backgrounds.  That meant we would want to know more and even fill in their back stories with what most genre films of late lack: imagination.  It is ironic that all this digital has been the enemy of imagination despite its supposed freedoms and opportunities.

 

The first film was the counterculture space opera.  Chewbacca was essentially a hippie before being reduced to secondary status in future installments.  Han Solo was the tough guy with a potential heart of gold, but would not hesitate to kill to survive.  Luke was the good guy who lost everything but gains more by risking all in doing what is in his character grows and gains back so much.  Obi Wan is the mature figure of wisdom who intervenes when the system and expected/needed family support fails, but knows much more.  Evil was more definable between Darth Vader and the great Peter Cushing in what remains the most underrated performance in the whole series and the technology represented by R2D2 & C3PO showed we could co-exist with technology without it manipulating us, controlling us or allowing us to become mindlessly addicted (i.e., cell phones) to it.

 

With Lucas representing the legacy as a franchise that needs refreshened until he gets it right (which does not explain the tragic digital and editing changes to THX-1138) and with many features and related programs later, he is not going to honestly focus only on the 1977 film.  It “being his film” is the line we keep getting, but though the ownership part of that is true, it does not negate in any way how it or any other film is also a part of the lives of the fans in a way that is more important than ownership.  It is part of a collective experience and memory, especially when it is the original Star Wars.

 

After vowing the original versions would never hit DVD, Lucas recycled the old 12” LaserDisc copies and added them to reissued version of the digitized trilogy.  Seen as “double dipping” or more, they did not sell.  By only making them letterboxed and not anamorphically enhanced, the idea was to get new fans (and old ones by maybe tricking them?) to show their “inferiority” when these were not even HD transfers.  Many diehard fans are still holding on to those 12” box sets.

 

In real life, the original trilogy was issued in nice 35mm prints and even better 70mm blow-ups with big mag-stereo sound that always seemed richer than the Dolby Digital redos and even Lucas said one needed to see the films on the largest screens possible.  The digital versions could never handle the stretch out and were never in 70mm.  In England, the original 1977 35mm prints were even in three-strip dye-transfer Technicolor, making it even more impressive, color rich and grain free than most such prints!

 

Which gets us back to the point of this “are we having fun yet?” would-be celebration, now you can see why the excitement that should be there is not.  Sure, die hard fans will celebrate, old and new, but the regard will be no match for the initial film’s popularity.  Instead of the energy, optimism and idealism that accompanied the film now long gone, we get hardly any trace of it.  It has for too many now become the gimmickry-filled space franchise Star Trek was once accused of being, a franchise with its own current crisis.

 

For that brief golden moment, Star Wars was more than just a film, but a reaffirmation that anything was possible and in a way many still believed before the film arrived in the first place; a point remarkably impervious to ideological debate, balancing the traditional with the progressive in a still stunning way when you consider it in context.  The decline of the spirit of the original film is too ugly for most to deal with if they were even privy to it original success.  The stagnation seems to be multiplied by the endlessly schlocky and extremely embarrassing would-be franchises that have fallen on their face since, where sequels are mad even when the first film bombs!

 

But most important and beyond all this, for those lucky enough to have been there back in 1977, Star Wars was not the only game in town.  So much being made was still exciting.  It’s just that here was a film (even over Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, which is another story) that had its act together and went out of its way to connect with the audience in a way the audience knew a film could.  Then the film went beyond, delivering more than anyone expected and though it created a complex, palpable world with a familiarity that was so different and interesting, it also one with a sly sense of disarming humor that embraced the hardware by always making the healthy point that it was not as important as the people.  Digital effects have the opposite effect, no matter what anyone says.

 

So for this 30th anniversary, if the happiness, joy and desire the film spelled out was alive, the franchise found a way to keep it so no matter what its twists and turns and why it was the big hit it was was not forgotten (or even purposely mutilated by “certain interests”) in what is such a shockingly short time, would the country (and in effect the world) really be in the foreign and domestic mess it is in now?


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