 I want to talk a little bit tonight about why Star Wars is the success that it is and why it reaches and communicates to so many people. I really don't have answers as to why, actually. All I can do is try to describe the phenomenon that I witnessed along with everyone else in my generation in 1977 when this happened. There was something I said, I don't remember what, in my first video, one of my viewers was asking me to expand on what the phenomenon was like and it was like nothing else I've ever seen and I don't think anyone had ever seen anything like it before. We're not talking about a movie or a movie series that was simply wildly successful and profitable like the Harry Potter movies were or how the new Marvel movies have been. They were nothing like the success of Star Wars. With Harry Potter and with Marvel Comics, actually, they had a history before the movies. There was a book series or there were comic books or whatever that people grew up reading and were already familiar with and were ready for the movies. With Star Wars, there was nothing. Star Wars was created from whole cloth, from scratch. There were no books, there were no comics. The first movie was the first Star Wars. 20th Century Fox didn't understand it when George Lucas was putting it together. I did mention that the success of Star Wars was overnight, that the fandom appeared the next day when the movie came out in theaters. It came out early in the year. I remember seeing it in the summer of 77 and it had already been in theaters for a couple of months. I think what Wikipedia says is that it was in May of 77 and I saw it in the summer a couple of months later. I had been seeing commercials for it. The television commercials were not impressive. I thought it was going to be some bad Swedish film. I really didn't know what I was going to see at all. I saw it with a family friend. In summer of 77, I was 11 and he was either in college or a little bit older, late 20s maybe. I grew up in a tiny town of only 2,000 people. We didn't even live in the town. We grew up deep in the woods. The nearest post office was 10 miles away, the nearest grocery store 10 miles away. The nearest thing that you could call a city was Beaumont in southeast Texas, which was an hour away. That's where the mall was. That's where the cinema was. My mother and my sisters wanted to go shopping. I and this friend of ours went with them. We went to Parkdale Mall. They went into the mall and shopped. He and I went into the cinema and saw Star Wars. Both of us, even near the beginning of the film, were sitting on the edge of our seats and bouncing up and down. When we came out of the theater, he was acting just like I was, like an 11-year-old who had just seen the greatest thing he'd ever seen in his life. We were like, oh my God. I think I saw the film at least five more times in the theater after that. By the time I saw it and it being Beaumont, Texas, there were no lines around the block. This was at the mall. We had a VW van, a big rectangular VW van. My dad drove a group of my friends one Saturday. We all piled in the van and drove to Beaumont again to see Star Wars. They wouldn't have gotten to see it otherwise. Those people in our little town didn't get to see movies. On the drive back, the sun was still out. The sky was still blue. We could see the moon. It was one of those days where you could see the moon in the blue sky. Of course, that was perfect. I was sitting in the passenger seat. My dad was driving. My friends were in the back of the van pointing their fingers out the windows at the moon going, one of my friends leaned in and said, I thought you said this thing was fast. They watch your mouth, kid, or you find yourself floating home. Then he said, what's that flashing? I slapped his hand. It was immediate. For everyone who saw this film, immersion in the world of Star Wars was immediate. Everyone understood it as soon as they saw it, even though everything in the film was completely alien. I think that's the key to why even people who weren't interested in science fiction or even people who weren't children could immerse themselves in Star Wars is because everything in the film was built from scratch. There were no scenes where you could see a highway in the background with cars driving by. There were no buildings that were obviously in Los Angeles or whatever. There was a show on TV called Fantastic Journey. It was a failed science fiction show. One of the things in one episode that I've never forgotten, there was this futuristic building that was supposed to be the alien dictator's headquarters on some other planet or in some other universe even, but it was obviously the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. There's nothing like that in Star Wars. The immersion is complete. You don't see dogs and cats. You don't see animals. You don't see birds. Every creature is built from scratch, except for humans of course, but come on. There's nothing that's familiar and recognizable. The aliens are speaking alien languages that you don't understand. Even Chewbacca doesn't speak English. R2-D2 doesn't speak English. Everyone in the movie understands him and because they understand him, the rest of us understand him, the immersion is complete and the film was made so well that everyone could just sit back and absorb it and even though there are so many bloopers, so many mistakes in the film that took years, even decades, for those of us who grew up with it to even notice like the stormtrooper hitting his head on the door, I first noticed that in the late 90s and someone had to show it to me. Twenty years it took. Gail Simone a year ago, October of 2014, on Twitter wrote a whole series of tweets about this very subject about why Star Wars, I have to read them in backwards chronological order. She says, after all the cultural impact it has had, it is hard to think of Star Wars as underrated, but there is something very impressive about the cohesive sense of commitment in the original films. Language, setting, and character are all almost immediately accepted by the audience without question. We don't need a tauntaun explained to us. Each film throws hundreds of concepts, sometimes completely ridiculous, and we still accept them and move on. Hundreds of better made films never accomplished this feat. We never crossed the bridge of unilateral acceptance of their reality, which shows how egregious the Ewoks had to be to break that bond. And she continues, we see something that is clearly a muppet with Fawzi the bear's voice and we accept it as a Jedi master and move on. How many films attempt this with bigger budgets and unlimited CGI and fail? Did you for a moment accept Avatar in that way? I wonder what Star Wars did that made that look so easy. Suspension of disbelief guys, I'm here to tell you it's a motherfucker. Easy to talk about, hard to achieve, even with an audience that wants to believe. Some films we watch, some we experience, Star Wars is experienced. Remember she's talking about the original film. She goes on to say, there's a difference between thinking that's cool and accepting someone's fantasy whole as it were. It's a remarkable, hard to define achievement, it doesn't fit in any Oscar. I would say fantasy writers can still learn a lesson from Star Wars. Compliance is fine, immersion is unforgettable. The first Star Wars film was the first time that you saw people standing in lines around a block to get into a film and the lines never quit. People and we're not talking about kids here, we're talking about grown adults would see the film, they would exit the cinema and then get right back at the end of the line again and they would see the film over and over and over again. It was such a surprise, of course all the kids wanted Star Wars toys for Christmas that year but there were no Star Wars toys. George Lucas hadn't arranged for toys yet so all the ads in all the comic books look like this. They were advertising the toys but they were just sketches that were saying the toys are coming, the toys are coming. I may do a video just about the toys because they were shit. The first toys were bad. As Gail Simone was asking how did he do it, how did George Lucas do this? Well it's hard to admit it in retrospect with the prequels but he actually planned it that way. He planned it to be that kind of immersive fantasy that everyone could identify with. He designed it to fit Joseph Campbell's hero's journey narrative. If you're not familiar with Joseph Campbell, he was a philosopher and educator who had this notion that all of human mythology was basically just one story, retold many times and in a variation of ways. George Lucas actually worked with Joseph Campbell. He was very deliberate about making the original Star Wars film follow that hero's journey narrative. It's a very simple story and it's a very simple movie. Whatever it was he had for that first film and for the second film, Empire Strikes Back, I believe the success of Empire Strikes Back was because George Lucas surrounded himself with people who could make that film great which was smart but even for Jedi he lost that touch and then every film he made after that, Howard the Duck, the prequels, whatever he had for those first two films he lost it. Chris Lackey who's one of the hosts of hppodcraft.com, the HP Lovecraft literary podcast. He has a young boy, a small child who a couple of years ago was three years old and he told a story about how he wanted to introduce his son to Star Wars and he had to think long and hard about do I want to show him the prequels. He eventually chose to and the result was his house is now completely covered in Jar Jar Binks. So the one thing that George Lucas retained was the mind of a three year old but getting back to the subject matter it really was such an unprecedented phenomenon and event. Every newspaper, every magazine had Star Wars on the cover for weeks on end, days, months, weeks on end. Every news outlet was clamoring for stories about Star Wars to show because everybody was interested in Star Wars, didn't matter how old they were, we were always seeing stories about 80 year old grandmothers who had seen the movie 20 times. Everybody had a character in that film that they could identify with, a character that they wanted to be. It wasn't so much that people had crushes on characters or wanted to have a romance with Han Solo or Princess Leia or whatever, they wanted to be one of those characters. You didn't see boys mooning over Princess Leia. You saw them pretending to be Han Solo or Darth Vader. For me, I identified with Luke. There's a trend on the internet today of people saying that it was impossible for people to identify with Luke especially with him standing next to Han Solo. I certainly did. I was never interested in Han Solo. The Star Wars holiday special that everyone ridicules so much, it was an inevitability, it was unavoidable. The television networks were desperate for Star Wars material and with just the one movie having just come out, there was no other Star Wars material. I don't remember which network aired the holiday special, but the three networks must have fought with each other over negotiating with George Lucas over who was going to get that holiday special. I can't tell that particular story or even talk about the newspapers and the magazines without explaining to younger people how different television and newspapers and media in general was. Of course, there was no internet. There wasn't even cable TV, okay. There was just the three broadcast networks that you had to watch over your antenna over the airwaves. And if you were lucky enough to have a PBS station in your area, you could say there were four networks. There were no VCRs. You couldn't record and rewatch what you saw on television. So there was a real desperation. I have read a number of times that the Star Wars comic book by itself saved Marvel comics from bankruptcy. I've read that the first batch of Star Wars toys by Kenner saved the Kenner Company. It's gone now. It wasn't just the movies that were the top selling movies. The comic books were the top selling comics. The toys were the top selling toys. The music, I haven't even talked about the music. People who've never seen the movies and aren't interested in the movies, even they recognize the Star Wars music. Just the soundtrack is a household thing. The soundtrack album was a top selling album. When Miko the next year recorded his disco version of the Star Wars theme, it was number one. It was the number one single when it came out. Star Wars was absolutely everywhere. There's nothing that I can compare it to today. Coming back full circle again, the fandom for Star Wars happened overnight. Star Wars came out and the next day, cosplay was a thing. You didn't see people dressing up like movie characters until Star Wars, and people were doing it immediately. The first comic book convention I attended was a year later, 1978, in Houston, the Houston con. It was all Star Wars. Everyone walking up and down these crowded aisles dressed up like Star Wars characters. That didn't exist before. There were big conventions. There were big comic book and science fiction conventions, mostly because of Star Trek. But not like this. And at that very first convention I attended, which again was only a year later, the biggest hit at that convention was Hardware Wars, a Star Wars parody. Do you know how we watch movies at the comic conventions back then? Again, this is before VCR. Do you know how we watch them? On film. There were film rooms with gigantic film projectors and the films were projected on the wall and everyone would crowd into these dark rooms and sit on the floor and watch movies on a giant screen from a film projector. My father at that first convention got to see Citizen Kane all the way through for the first time. He had never seen it all the way through. Citizen Kane. I saw Bambi, the Disney animated film, on film projected onto a wall. The little town that I grew up in, it had a theater, a tiny little movie theater, a little one screen movie theater that looked like it had probably been built in the 1930s. It would show films that it could get. It showed Star Wars a year after the film had been out, I think at least a full year. It took a full year for the canisters of film to circulate until they finally filtered their way down to the last dregs of the movie theaters. This little theater showed Star Wars one weekend and then closed down for good. Only all the kids in town had seen Star Wars. I remember later that week one of the teachers in English class, she was making a point about stories being set in certain time periods and the things that go with those time periods and she said, for example, when do you think Star Wars would be set? And all the kids said, in the future, in the future. And me and my friend Joey, we both raised our hands and stood up and said, no, no, no. Star Wars was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Everybody else in the class started saying, no, no it wasn't, uh-uh. Joey and I figured that people who had seen it in the local theater probably just weren't paying attention or that maybe the leading edge of the film had been damaged or something like that. I read recently that even at the very beginning, when the first film was starting to be distributed, George Lucas was already messing with it. He was already making alternate cuts to the film. And one of the changes he made was to add a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away before the 20th Century Fox logo, which we all saw and were all used to seeing. So it's possible that the cut of a film that made it to our tiny little town theater was one of the earliest ones that didn't have that. This story never ends. There's always a new wrinkle. When I wore my shut up about Star Wars t-shirt to Megacon in Orlando earlier this year, some people would nod and smile and laugh. Other people would say, what, what, what? This one young girl, she was a teenager, she said to me, but Star Wars is life. I don't understand how young people are connecting to Star Wars as much as they are. And I don't understand how they're seeing in it things that I and my generation didn't see even though we were very much jazzed by the film. There's something that the Star Wars universe is still doing to people. And I don't know what it is. And it's not going to go away. One of my viewers commented about the thing I made yesterday saying that it'll reach a crescendo and it'll pass. But it won't pass. That's the thing about Star Wars. It won't go away. So let's see what happens. You can support 30 Seconds Sci-Fi and my other projects by becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below. And visit the 30 Seconds Sci-Fi Tumblr, that's my headquarters. In addition to my videos, I publish links and updates there every day.