{"id":457,"date":"2010-07-07T14:18:08","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T12:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=457"},"modified":"2015-04-28T00:30:28","modified_gmt":"2015-04-27T22:30:28","slug":"star-wars-the-never-ending-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/star-wars-the-never-ending-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Wars: the never-ending story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The film took three and a half years to make. It involved <span id=\"tooltip551e8410d7936\">dozens<\/span> of interviews, <span id=\"tooltip551e8410d7ce7\">contributions<\/span> from thousands of individuals, 44 terabytes&#8217; worth of digital <span id=\"tooltip551e8410d80ca\">footage<\/span> and filming on at least three continents. And it asked the question that has <span id=\"tooltip551e8410d852f\">haunted<\/span> a generation: Who owns <b><i>Star Wars<\/i><\/b>?<\/p>\n<p>For those who haven&#8217;t seen them \u2014 and, strangely, I keep meeting people who haven&#8217;t seen them \u2014 the <i>Star Wars<\/i> movies are a <span id=\"tooltip551e8410d88b0\">Greek-style tragedy<\/span> in six parts. They&#8217;re about a man with a serious anger-management problem who climbs the career ladder and travels a lot. His kids follow him around and want to kill him. A couple of <span id=\"tooltip551e8410d8c86\">effeminate<\/span> robots offer comments from time to time, and the whole thing takes place in <span id=\"tooltip551e8410d9458\">outer space<\/span>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"simplePullQuote right\"><p><i>Star Wars<\/i> draws upon every imaginable universal theme<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t sound like much, but the story draws upon every imaginable universal theme, including those of <b><i>Faust<\/i><\/b>, <b><i>The Seven Samurai<\/i><\/b> and various <span id=\"tooltip551e8410da3fd\">myths<\/span> and <b>Bible<\/b> stories. It&#8217;s the <span id=\"tooltip551e8410da7db\">summation<\/span> of every story that&#8217;s ever been told. It&#8217;s about <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dabc5\">coming of age<\/span> and coming of middle age. <i>Star Wars<\/i> <b>spoke to a generation<\/b> of teenagers (mainly boys) in the late 1970s \u2014 so much so that they&#8217;re still obsessed with it now, in their 40s.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"tooltip551e8410db042\">Director<\/span> George Lucas shares their obsession. He wasn&#8217;t able to create all the special effects he wanted in the first three films, so he remade them \u2014 several times. Then he created the three &#8220;prequels&#8221;, which relied almost entirely on special effects. But why not? <b>They&#8217;re his films<\/b>, right?<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/s8LZgH5-x_U?rel=0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the question asked in <i><b>The People vs. George Lucas<\/b><\/i>, a <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dbb61\">documentary<\/span> I saw at the Munich Film Festival last week. The fans interviewed in the documentary argue that <i>Star Wars<\/i> is so much a part of our common culture that <b>all of us own it<\/b> in some way \u2014 especially after having given Lucas <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dbf52\">billions<\/span> of dollars for movie tickets and <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dc334\">merchandise<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>Some of them believe this so strongly that they&#8217;ve <a title=\"Fanedit.org\" href=\"http:\/\/fanedit.org\/all-star-wars-fanedits\/\" target=\"_blank\">created their own<\/a> <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dc71d\">edited<\/span> versions of <i>Star Wars<\/i> \u2014 restoring some of the original scenes, removing characters they don&#8217;t like, and <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dcb05\">excising<\/span> some of the poorly edited dialogue of the later films. In some ways, they&#8217;re as bad as Lucas. No one wants to stop <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dd14d\">tinkering<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/beNH2bzJA2M\" width=\"420\" height=\"236\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When the Blu-ray edition finally comes out, will we face another round of changes? I&#8217;m afraid to ask.<\/p>\n<p>Two days after seeing <i>People vs. George<\/i>, I was <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dd54a\">flipping channels<\/span> on TV and <span id=\"tooltip551e8410ddc41\">came across<\/span> one of Lucas&#8217;s earlier films, <a title=\"American Graffiti (Wikipedia)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/American_Graffiti\" target=\"_blank\"><i>American Graffiti<\/i><\/a>, from 1973. I <span id=\"tooltip551e8410de29f\">couldn&#8217;t help but<\/span> admire how perfect that film is: the well-developed characters, the believable situations and dialogue, and the ability to <span id=\"tooltip551e8410de65d\">freeze<\/span> a moment in time as perfectly as a Polaroid picture. Lucas never needed to go back and <span id=\"tooltip551e8410dea46\">redo<\/span> it. He got it right the first time. And that way, it belongs both to him <i>and<\/i> to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The film took three and a half years to make. It involved dozens of interviews, contributions from thousands of individuals, 44 terabytes&#8217; worth of digital footage and filming on at least three continents. And it asked the question that has haunted a generation: Who owns Star Wars? For those who haven&#8217;t seen them \u2014 and, strangely, I keep meeting people <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/star-wars-the-never-ending-story\/\">&#8230; >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[10,14,181,26,180],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1781,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions\/1781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}