Q & As About 'Star Wars': As an original fan has the mainstreaming of 'Star Wars' caused you to lose any passion for it?

Publicity photo (a rare space battle one, at that) from 1977. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

As an original fan has the mainstreaming of Star Wars caused you to lose any passion for it?

Star Wars has always been a mainstream franchise. Always. From the day it was conceived as a fun, exciting, fit-for-the-whole-family space-fantasy by a 29-year-old filmmaker just off his first hit film, American Graffiti, to this very moment, Star Wars was never a small niche film meant to be seen as a “cult” hit aimed at a tiny percentage of the moviegoing audience in 1977.

While it is true that George Lucas never imagined that his space-fantasy set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” would be a huge blockbuster, he and his creative team set out to make a film that, in Lucas’ own words, would have the broadest, i.e. “mainstream,” audience appeal.

I think that anyone who goes to the movies loves to have an emotional experience. It’s basic — whether you’re seven, seventeen, or seventy. The more intense the experience, the more successful the film.

I’ve always loved adventure films. After I finished American Graffiti, I came to realize that since the demise of the western, there hasn’t been much in the mythological fantasy genre available to the film audience. So instead of making “isn’t-it-terrible-what’s-happening to mankind” movies, which is how I began, I decided to fill that gap. I’d make a film so rooted in the imagination that the grimness of everyday life would not follow the audience into the theater. In other words, for two hours, they could forget.

I’m trying to reconstruct a genre that’s been lost and bring it to a new dimension so that the elements of space, fantasy, adventure, suspense, and fun all work and feed off each other. So, in a way, Star Wars is a movie for the kid in all of us. - George Lucas, 1976.

As you can see, Lucas never intended Star Wars to be one of those films which would appeal to a core group of devotees who were the only ones who “got it.” On the contrary, he went out of his way to make sure it would appeal to the average moviegoer. That’s why Lucas

• Relied on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces and its principal thesis that most cultures have mythologies with common archetypes while writing the screenplay
• Hired John Williams to compose a score that was original yet was based on 19th Century Romantic-era classical music to ground the film with a sense of familiarity
• Borrowed elements of other popular genres (war, Westerns, gangster crime dramas, and 1930s-1940s action adventures) and married them to the Saturday matinee serial format of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers

No, no, dear child. As a Star Wars fan of the 1977 Generation, I can safely tell you that the premise of your question (As an original fan has the mainstreaming of Star Wars caused you to lose any passion for it?) is false. Present-day Star Wars is not a mainstreamed version of a small, obscure 1977 film that was aimed at a small audience. It’s a franchise that spun-off from one of the most mainstream films of its era. And I, for one, I’m still passionate about it.