If you want evidence of Star Wars' influence on contemporary culture, look at your computer screensaver. Many screensavers provide an illusion of lights streaking toward you from the deep recesses of the machine. It's as though you were looking out the portal of a spaceship, watching distant stars streak past as you raced toward a galaxy far, far away, faster than the speed of light.
You can probably credit the origins of this technological illusion to director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the time, the movie's depiction of a ship plunging through space was a thrilling novelty for the audience. Eight years later, with the release of George Lucas' first Star Wars movie, the illusion became, in the words of film critic Stuart Klawans "a visual cliche.
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Unless you're from another galaxy, it's almost impossible to have not heard of the Star Wars series, even if you've never seen any of the six movies.
Since the release of the first Star Wars on May 25, 1977, the films have become part our collective consciousness. As film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote, "George Lucas' space epic has colonized our imaginations, and it's hard to stand back and see it simply as a motion picture, because it has so completely become part of our memories.
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Indeed, anyone who saw the first trilogy -- Star Wars: A New Hope (as the first was retitled), The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, all of which came out between 1977 and 1983 -- in their youth has had their psyche stamped with the movies' imagery, language and ideas. Darth Vader, the Force, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Obi-wan, Jedi knights, lightsabres and Yoda occupy shelf space in the imaginations of, well, billions of people. The prequel trilogy -- The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, released between 1997 and 2005 -- has only reinforced this collective imprinting.
The 30th anniversary of the movie that began it all is being celebrated around the world with a variety of ceremonies and tributes.
Beginning yesterday, Star Wars fans were expected to fill the Los Angeles Convention Center for a five-day convention that will feature celebrities from all six movies, special film and video presentations and an exhibition of movie props and costumes.
Elsewhere, too, Star Wars is being remembered this weekend.
In Belgium, a 30-metre high balloon figure of Darth Vader has been launched to coincide with the movie's anniversary. The Biography Channel is airing tributes to Star Wars creator George Lucas and Harrison Ford, the actor who played Han Solo, while the History Channel is broadcasting Star Wars Tech and Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed.
Clearly, with fondness Star Wars remembered is, as Yoda might say.
Even though it was initially released in only 32 theatres in the United States, Star Wars grossed $3 million in ticket sales in the first week. It would go on to gross $798 million worldwide during its original theatrical release. That made it the highest-grossing film of all time until 1982, when E.
T. The Extra-Terrestrial set a new record.
Star Wars also spawned a massive merchandising empire that includes everything from books and comics to toys, models and several television series.
By 2005, according to Forbes magazine, the Star Wars franchise, including movies, television programs, toys, comics, books and other merchandise had earned nearly $20 billion.
No wonder the American Film Institute placed it 15th on its list of top 100 films in the 20th century. And then there's that ubiquitous line: "May the Force be with you.
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More immediate was the influence of Star Wars on the film industry itself, whether in terms of technology or economics. "Star Wars not only rejuvenated the moribund science-fiction genre; it also ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster movie -- which, for better or worse, transformed the way the movie industry does business," says film historian David Rapp.
On the technological side, the 1977 film changed special effects.
For example, Star Wars was the first to pan a camera across a star field, according to a review by Mark Leeper.
"Space scenes had always been done with a fixed camera, and for a very good reason," says Leeper. "It was more economical not to create a background of stars large enough to pan through.
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Lucas, however, introduced his now famous, and much copied, from-below pan of a spaceship.
It was this kind of innovation that garnered Star Wars several Academy Award nominations, and produced six Oscars for visual effects, score and sound, costume design, editing, art direction and set decoration. George Lucas' company, Industrial Light Magic, revolutionized movie visual effects such that today, as Rapp says, "spectacle is an integral part of American movies driving budget -- and box-offices grosses - ever higher.
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Not everybody likes this new world. Film critic Steven Greydanus points out that Star Wars has been blamed for wrecking the Hollywood movie industry by turning it from "relevant" and "gritty" films such as The Godfather, Taxi Driver and Annie Hall toward "juvenile fantasy, spectacle, and romanticism."
From the late 1960s through to the mid-1970s, Hollywood turned out some of the best movies ever made - from gangster films such as The Godfather and detective movies such as The Long Goodbye to westerns like McCabe Mrs.
Miller to hard-edged dramas such as Midnight Cowboy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Last Picture Show.
In the wake of Star Wars' success, film companies increasingly funneled money into big-budget escapist movies and ignored smaller, low-budget films. This turn in the business effectively put an end to what some regard as a golden era of movie making.
"With Star Wars, director George Lucas didn't completely kill off American movies, but he did manage to cripple them badly," says film critic Charles Taylor. "Since Star Wars, it's become infinitely harder for movies that aren't prepackaged, formulaic blockbusters to get made at all, let alone seen."
Taylor thinks the influence of Star Wars on the movie industry has been Vader-like: the movie moguls have gone over to the dark side.
They're obsessed with sequels, prequels, merchandising and high-concept marketing in which films are tailored to a particular audience and a film's post-release advertising determined by its opening-night box office success. Taylor sums up the intellectual legacy of Star Wars as "the infantilization of movies."
Lucas himself has defended the legacy of Star Wars.
In a 2005 interview with Wired magazine, he said he deliberately made his movies for adolescents because it is they who need stories to help make sense of their lives. "Societies have a whole series of stories to bring adolescents into adulthood. These lessons are continually handed down from generation to generation.
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"I love history so I created an environment - in the past, present, or future -- that allows me to tell the story, but in a way that's not incendiary."
The Star Wars series would not be so successful if it did not have an abiding cultural resonance. After the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Lucas told an interviewer that "this is the kind of movie we need.
There needs to be a kind of film that expresses the mythological realities of life - the deeper psychological movements of the way we conduct our lives.
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