Star Wars was created by George Lucas, the first film with the original title Star Wars hit cinema`s on the 25 May 1977 in the United States and a legend was born. The film became a phenomenon of today's pop culture. From the success of the film sprang among other feature films an extensive collection of books, comic books, video games, TV shows and much more.
Here at Space Fantasy we embrace all things star wars and comment on the latest news from the new upcoming movies to the masses of fan fiction that has been produced.
The term Star Wars refers on the one hand on the original film title published for the first Star Wars film in 1977 and the other hand on all licensed products from merchandising, of Lucas film issued and its partners over the thirty-year success story of Star Wars. According to a report by Forbes Magazine of 30 September 2010, 24.5 billion dollars has been made from star wars merchandising. Thus, Star Wars is a financial and commercial terms, the most successful film project of all time.
Essentially Star Wars is the story of the constantly ongoing struggle between good and evil, against the backdrop of a distant galaxy in a time long past history. Even Star Wars is understood as a mixture of several film genres with archetypal and mythological subjects, displayed as a modern vision of a fairy tale or space opera.
Since then, Star Wars has been very frequently parodied and used in sitcoms, series, etc.. Family Guy parodied the entire Original Trilogy and converted it into a cartoon. The cartoon series The Simpsons also used excerpts from the cult movie. Sitcoms like How I Meet Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory often helped themselves to any phrases and quotations, or even film clips.
The making of the film A New Hope, which premiered in America initially simply titled Star Wars dates back to the early 1970s. But George Lucas' inspiration for the creation of the Star Wars –Universe goes back much further back. During his anthropology studies at the University of Southern California Lucas was particularly involved the validity of a documentary film. In several short films from his student days Lucas has been particularly careful to maintain a visual and acoustic proximity to life and communicate. Inspired by a quote from the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa Lucas should this kind of filmmaking called later as "flawless reality". During his student days in 1969, Lucas employed with the writings of educators Joseph Campbell, whose book The Hero with a Thousand figures sufficiently influenced him in regard to religions and myths described therein and categorized.
Star Wars should combine both religious, fantastic and mystical elements in a simple and easily accessible plot. Basically, Lucas was drawing inspiration from Saturday morning shows like Flash Gordon and Captain Blood. [ On this basis, the story should provide a plausible background without much explanation needed, play in the characters, the main role, which is also the audience could identify. So Lucas created mythical archetypes from the film 2001 - A Space Odyssey (1968) and well-known epics like Beowulf and the Arthurian legend. Parts of the story - but especially the positioning of the narrator in the "lower" droid - he led from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. In addition, a good-looking young maiden, an adventurous young man and a bold guy who should embody the idealistic hero in Star Wars were present in the main characters of Princess Leia, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
The success of the first movie was followed by two further additions the empire strikes back and the return of the jedi which details the rebellion against the empire to their eventual victory in the battle of endor. It was another 16 years before George Lucas would revisit the Star Wars universe with the release of the Phantom Menace a prequel taking part in the old republic with Obi Wan Kenobi as a young man, these was followed by Attack of the Clones and the revenge of the sith, which showed how the emperor rose to power and exterminated the Jedi. Since the release of Star wars the universe has expanded with computer games, novels and comics adding to the story, With the purchase of the rights for star wars by Disney we can look forward to more stories from the exciting universe.
