May the Force be with you.

Back in a 1973 note on “Star Wars,” Lucas made clear which side he was rooting for in the Vietnam War: “A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.” ~ Kyle Smith

Princess Leia personally witnessed the destruction of her entire planet — something that could be considered the Holocaust, the Mongol invasion, and Stalin’s purges put together and multiplied by a thousand — yet is nonchalantly kissing her brother on Hoth a few weeks later. ~ Carl Forsling

Star Wars is an American epic space opera franchise centered on a film series created by George Lucas. The film series, consisting of three trilogies and a stand-alone anthology series, has spawned an extensive media franchise called the Expanded Universe including books, television series, computer and video games, and comic books. These supplements to the franchise resulted in significant development of the series' fictional universe, keeping the franchise active in the 16-year interim between the two film trilogies. The franchise depicts a galaxy described as far, far away in the distant past, and it commonly portrays Jedi as a representation of good, in conflict with the Sith, their evil counterpart. Their weapon of choice, the lightsaber, is commonly recognized in popular culture. The franchise's storylines contain many themes, with strong influences from philosophy and religion.

Feature films

Star Wars leans more towards fantasy than science fiction and I think that’s to its benefit. It has good vs. evil, magic items, etc. All of these make it as easy fit for the RPG genre. Star Wars is also one of the most beloved IPs in the world. ~ James Ohlen

And there I am sitting in the theater at almost 11 years old and that was a powerful notion. And I think this is what your point was, we would like to believe that when s*** gets serious, that you could harness that Force I was told surrounds not just some of us but every living thing. And so, I really feel like the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline, it’s not that I don’t believe that as part of the canon, I’m just saying that at 11 years old, that wasn’t where my heart was. ~ J.J. Abrams

Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz claimed that Star Wars made three times as much on toys as it did on films, while creator George Lucas said: “All the money is in the action figures.” Lucas famously retained licensing and merchandising rights to Star Wars in exchange for a $500,000 directorial fee. The result made him a billionaire. ~ Anna Smith

From the very beginning, toy executives saw more potential in Star Wars as a toy line than a movie. ("I expected the movie would come and go, but that it would be a great hook," Bernie Loomis once said, explaining why his Kenner toy company acquired the worldwide rights to produce Star Wars toys before Star Wars even arrived in theaters.) ~ Scott Meslow

George made a fairy tale story, with a princess, the young prince, and the cynical Harrison Ford playing Han Solo. To me, it was an absolutely perfect rendition of a great comic serial. I learned to draw from comic strips, the better ones. I always remembered the early Supermans were better drawn than the later one, and the early Tarzans were spectacularly well drawn, the anatomy of the jungle was great. There’s artistry in comic strips and George was obviously a devotee of that and what he did was brilliant. ~ Ridley Scott

One of the more commonly described oddities of the Star Wars universe is the notion of entire planets with one climate. We are introduced to desert planets and ice planets and swamp planets. Of course, any one planet could have a myriad of different climates and ecosystems in the real world. But this peculiar detail reveals the metaphor that Star Wars is working with: each planet in Star Wars is basically each country in our world.
This metaphor allows the Star Wars universe to essentially retell stories from the era of British imperialism ~ J. Andrew Deman

• Star Wars (1977)
• The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
• Return of the Jedi (1983)
• Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
• Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2000)

Television

About Star Wars

A friend of mine back home just died...I never got to say goodbye, you know? I keep wishing he'll come back as a blue ghost, like Obi-Wan Kenobi. There's so much I want to say to him. [sigh] Why can't life be like Star Wars? ~ Aaron McGruder

• I will just say this: I would never presume to question anything George Lucas says is canon in Star Wars. And our job was not to negate or undo. A lot of people who are critics of our Star Trek, and I respect all of them, said we destroyed what they loved and negated everything. And we worked hard to clarify that we are not saying that our Star Trek over-rides a thing of the original Star Trek — it was a parallel timeline. I never wanted to negate canon that fans held so dear. And because I love Star Wars and have for too many years… … And having said all that and meaning it — I don’t want to presume over-write or change what George says the rules are.
  I’m not someone who quite understands the science of the Force. To me Star Wars was never about science fiction — it was a spiritual story. And it was more of a fairytale in that regard. For me when I heard Obi-Wan say that the Force surrounds us and binds us all together, there was no judgement about who you were. This was something that we could all access. Being strong with the force didn’t mean something scientific, it meant something spiritual. It meant someone who could believe, someone who could reach down to the depths of your feelings and follow this primal energy that was flowing through all of us. I mean, that's what was said in that first film!
  And there I am sitting in the theater at almost 11 years old and that was a powerful notion. And I think this is what your point was, we would like to believe that when shit gets serious, that you could harness that Force I was told surrounds not just some of us but every living thing. And so, I really feel like the assumption that any character needs to have inherited a certain number of midi-chlorians or needs to be part of a bloodline, it’s not that I don’t believe that as part of the canon, I’m just saying that at 11 years old, that wasn’t where my heart was. And so I respect and adhere to the canon but I also say that the Force has always seemed to me to be more inclusive and stronger than that.
  • J.J. Abrams "Why J.J. Abrams Believes the Force Is More Inclusive Than Midi-Chlorians and Bloodlines", Peter Sciretta, Slash Film, (December 7th, 2015)

• One of the more commonly described oddities of the Star Wars universe is the notion of entire planets with one climate. We are introduced to desert planets and ice planets and swamp planets. Of course, any one planet could have a myriad of different climates and ecosystems in the real world. But this peculiar detail reveals the metaphor that Star Wars is working with: each planet in Star Wars is basically each country in our world.
  This metaphor allows the Star Wars universe to essentially retell stories from the era of British imperialism. The empire then becomes quite familiar to us, especially on the surface. In Star Wars, though, the empire is the enemy and the undisciplined, free-spirited rebels become the heroes — thus aligning Star Wars with thematic elements from the American Western even amid the trappings of British imperialist narratives.
  • J. Andrew Deman, “Star Wars is colonial fantasy: How our future imaginings are limited by our past”, The Conversation, (December 13, 2017)

• General David Petraeus didn’t personally kill Osama bin Laden. Why does “General” Han Solo lead a squad to take out the shield generator? His friends Admiral Akbar and General Calrissian, along with the rest of the rebel command structure, are above, fighting in a short-range gun battle with Imperial Star Destroyers.
  • Carl Forsling, *When It Comes To The Military, SciFi Movies Are Missing The Mark", Task and Purpose, (December 1, 2014)

• Princess Leia personally witnessed the destruction of her entire planet — something that could be considered the Holocaust, the Mongol invasion, and Stalin’s purges put together and multiplied by a thousand — yet is nonchalantly kissing her brother on Hoth a few weeks later. Luke single handedly took out a small planet’s worth of Imperials on the Death Star. Sure, he probably feels justified in killing the Stormtroopers, but even he has to feel a twinge of guilt having wasted probably hundreds of innocent space janitors along with them.
  The day Luke Skywalker is shown talking in a veterans advocacy group about the trauma of losing his arm fighting his own father in hand-to-hand combat, maybe that will be the day we know the public has finally abandoned the illusion that war is painless … or glorious.
  • Carl Forsling, *When It Comes To The Military, SciFi Movies Are Missing The Mark", Task and Purpose, (December 1, 2014)

• So, I took the screenplay and divided it into three stories, and rewrote the first one. As I was writing, I came up with some ideas for a film about robots, with no humans in it. When I got to working on the Wookiee, I thought of a film just about Wookiees, nothing else. So, for a time, I had a couple of odd movies with just those characters. Then, I had the other two films, which were essentially split into three parts each, two trilogies. When the smoke cleared, I said, 'This is really great. I'll do another trilogy that takes place after this.' I had three trilogies of nine films, and then another couple of odd films. Essentially, there were twelve films.
  It's a nine-part saga that has a beginning, a middle and an end. It progresses over a period of about fifty or sixty years with about twenty years between trilogies, each trilogy taking about six or seven years
  • George Lucas in "George Lucas", by Steranko, Prevue #42, September–October 1980

• The Star Wars series started out as a movie that ended up being so big that I took each act and cut it into its own movie…The original concept really related to a father and a son, and twins—a son and a daughter. It was that relationship that was the core of the story. And it went through a lot of machinations before I even got to the first draft screenplay. And various characters changed shapes and sizes. And it isn’t really until it evolved into what is close to what Star Wars now is that I began to go back and deal with the stories that evolved to get us to that point…When I first did Star Wars I did it as a big piece. It was like a big script. It was way too big to make into a movie. So I took the first third of it, which is basically the first act, and I turned that into what was the original Star Wars…after Star Wars was successful and I said “Well gee, I can finish this entire script, and I can do the other two parts.
  • George Lucas, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas by Dale 2 Pollock, 1983 p. 36

• You have to remember that originally Star Wars was intended to be one movie, Episode IV of a Saturday matinee serial. You never saw what came before or what came after. It was designed to be the tragedy of Darth Vader. It starts with this monster coming through the door, throwing everybody around, then halfway through the movie you realise that the villain of the piece is actually a man and the hero is his son. And so the villain turns into the hero inspired by the son. It was meant to be one movie, but I broke it up because I didn’t have the money to do it like that—it would have been five hours long.
  • George Lucas, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas by Dale 2 Pollock, 1983 p. 38

• The first [version] talked about a princess and an old general. The second version involved a father, his son, and his daughter; the daughter was the heroine of the film. Now the daughter has become Luke, Mark Hamill's character. There was also the story of two brothers where I transformed one of them into a sister. The older brother was imprisoned, and the young sister had to rescue him and bring him back to their dad.
  • George Lucas, Claire Clouzot, "The Morning of the Magician: George Lucas and Star Wars," The George Lucas Interviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 57-58, ISBN 1-57806-125-3

• The part that I never really developed is the death of Luke and Leia's mother. I had a backstory for her in earlier drafts, but it basically didn't survive. When I got to Jedi, I wanted one of the kids to have some kind of memory of her because she will be a key figure in the new episodes I'm writing. But I really debated whether or not Leia should remember her.
  • George Lucas, quoted in Bouzereau, The Annotated Screenplays, p. 291

• Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.
  • George Lucas, "RIP Ray Harryhausen: 1920–2013", Comingsoon.net. Retrieved 2013-05-08

• These are my kids. I loved them, I created them, I'm very intimately involved with them and I sold them to the white slavers that take these things...
  • George Lucas "George Lucas Apologizes For 'White Slavers' Remark., Sasha Erfanian, IGN, (2015/12/30)

• Back in a 1973 note on “Star Wars,” Lucas made clear which side he was rooting for in the Vietnam War: “A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.”
  • George Lucas as quoted in “How ‘Star Wars’ was secretly George Lucas’ Vietnam protest” by Kyle Smith, (September 21, 2014)

• [Irvin] Kershner was absolutely perfect for the middle film, which is a dark, troubled and anguished film. That’s the kind of character Kershner is himself; he’s very amusing socially, but his mind is full of dark torments and worries. George was the perfect man for Star Wars because he understands gags. He’s got a great story sense. He’s got tremendous appreciation of all the little gags and jokes. But I think I was probably the right guy for the third film, because I like the great virtues: I love loyalty, friendship, love...
  • Richard Marquand, Interviews:Return of The Jedi, Star Wars, Jules-Pierre Malartre, Den of Geek, (25 June 2013)

• One, two and three are going to be very interesting − if George is ever able to start writing. Steven [Spielberg] and I would like to. It’s a very interesting part of the saga, the early days. The youth of Ben Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker is really important. It’s a very different world. Technology is different, means of communication are different. Sentiments are different. But it will take a long time, I’m afraid so. It’s just a fact we will have to face. Good things come in threes, and all good things come to an end. That’s just one of the realities of life. Your kids may see it.
  • Richard Marquand, Interviews:Return of The Jedi, Star Wars, Jules-Pierre Malartre, Den of Geek, (25 June 2013)

• Huey Freeman: Given that the original story was written in the mid seventies, I think "Star Wars" was meant to be allegorical to the anti-colonial struggles that had only recently taken place on the continents of Africa and Asia - not to mention the struggle for black liberation here in the United States.
  • Aaron McGruder, The Boondocks, (5/18/1999)

• From the very beginning, toy executives saw more potential in Star Wars as a toy line than a movie. ("I expected the movie would come and go, but that it would be a great hook," Bernie Loomis once said, explaining why his Kenner toy company acquired the worldwide rights to produce Star Wars toys before Star Wars even arrived in theaters.) The movie's unexpected popularity led to a desperate gambit to capitalize in time for Christmas. Their first big Star Wars toy, the "Early Bird Certificate Package," was basically just an empty box containing a few stickers and a mail-in certificate that could be redeemed for four Star Wars figures when they were actually ready. It was a hit.
  • Scott Meslow, "Star Wars isn't a movie franchise. It's a toy franchise.", The Week, (September 4, 2014)

• Dazzled, jealous and angry ... I am convinced that (Lucas) has looked at my books!
  • Jean-Claude Mézières "Here's what Star Wars took from Valerian", John Wenz, Popular Mechanic, (May 13, 2015)

• Star Wars leans more towards fantasy than science fiction and I think that’s to its benefit. It has good vs. evil, monsters, princesses, knights, magic items, etc. All of these make it as easy fit for the RPG genre. Star Wars is also one of the most beloved IPs in the world. Since the first movie came out in 1977 fans have wanted to live in that universe and video games are the closest they’ll ever get to that fantasy.
  • James Ohlen, lead designer; "10 years of kotor lead designer James Ohlen interview", Game Agent, (July 11, 2013) ^{[citation needed]}

• Before Star Wars, the films that were box-office hits were The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Bonnie and Clyde and The French Connection - gritty, amoral art movies. Then suddenly the onus switched over to spectacle and everything changed... I don't know if that is a good thing.
  • Simon Pegg "Twitter unimpressed by Simon Pegg's criticism of geek culture", Kat Brown, The Telegraph (May 19, 2015)

• Star Wars had come out around the time of Seagull, and everyone thought I was a horrible actress. I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me.
  • Natalie Portman "Natalie Portman: Star Wars Made Everyone Think I Was a "Horrible" Actress", Madeline Boardman, USMagazine, (Dec 19, 2014)

• George made a fairy tale story, with a princess, the young prince, and the cynical Harrison Ford playing Han Solo. To me, it was an absolutely perfect rendition of a great comic serial. I learned to draw from comic strips, the better ones. I always remembered the early Supermans were better drawn than the later one, and the early Tarzans were spectacularly well drawn, the anatomy of the jungle was great. There’s artistry in comic strips and George was obviously a devotee of that and what he did was brilliant.
  • Ridley Scott "Ridley Scott On ‘The Martian’ And Why ‘Star Wars’ And ‘2001’ Sent Him To Space With ‘Alien:’ Toronto Q&A", Mike Fleming Jr., Deadline, (September 12, 2015)

• Star Wars is about good versus evil. I don't know what the empire did wrong. I still have no idea. I still don't know, they got up and they dress the same and then they (the rebels) kill them because they dress the same, like, I don't understand it. Yeah they blew up a planet, but that's a cheap reason to want to hate someone. The point is Power Rangers is way doper than Star Wars.
  • Adi Shankar in "Adi Shankar Says Power Rangers Is A Better Franchise Than Star Wars" by Matthew Mueller, ComicBook.com, (August 31, 2018)

• Dude, I think Star Wars is f****** horrible. I think Star Wars is a terrible franchise. It has terrible values. What are you teaching people with Star Wars, right? 'Oh yeah, we're the rebels and we're just gonna blow up people who dress the same?' Like it's good versus evil? It's terrible because there's really very little evil out there. The evil is taught to us through a narrative, but the evil has a point of view, the evil has a perspective., and if you don't get to know the perspective of the evil then how do you know you're not evil?
  • Adi Shankar in "Adi Shankar Says Power Rangers Is A Better Franchise Than Star Wars" by Matthew Mueller, ComicBook.com, (August 31, 2018)

• Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz claimed that Star Wars made three times as much on toys as it did on films, while creator George Lucas said: “All the money is in the action figures.” Lucas famously retained licensing and merchandising rights to Star Wars in exchange for a $500,000 directorial fee. The result made him a billionaire.
  • Anna Smith, "Lights, camera but no action figures: are movie toys going out of fashion?", The Guardian, (5 Apr 2018)

External links

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