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?