George Lucas	...	(Director)
	...	(Writer)
Harrison Ford	...
Carrie Fisher	...
Mark Hamill	...

Summary: Writer/director George Lucas’s film was not expected to be a success. A “sci-fi western” with a virtually unknown principal cast (Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher), studio bosses were so convinced the movie would flop that they happily gave Lucas the merchandising rights to any Star Wars products for free. They obviously did not realize the film’s huge potential, and never expected that it would lead to two sequels, three prequels, an Ewok spin-off, cartoons, computer games, toys, soundtracks, books, huge video and DVD sales, sweets, clothes, bed linen, and even food.
On paper, the movie that cost $11 million, and went on to make over $460 million, probably didn’t sound like a potential blockbuster, let alone one of the most successful films ever made. After the death of the aunt and uncle who raised him, a headstrong young man, Luke Skywalker (Hamill), teams up with an old Jedi Knight, Ben “Obi-Wan” Kenobi (Alec Guinness), two creaky robots, a cocky spaceship pilot named Han Solo (a star-making performance from Ford), and Solo’s furry Wookie pal Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) to rescue a princess (Fisher) from an evil guy wearing robes and a big plastic helmet. Star Wars could have turned out a bit silly, especially considering that most people in the mid 1970s expected “sci-fi” to mean wobbly Star Trek sets or effects on a par with Ed Wood’s hubcap-on-a-string from Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959).
But Lucas had much bigger ideas. A couple of decades before computer-generated images could be used to create fantastical worlds and distant planets, Lucas, using incredibly detailed ntodels, clever photography, and well-chosen locations—scenes featuring Luke’s desertlike home planet of Tatooine, for example, were filmed on intricately built sets in Tunisia (reused in 1999 when lucas filmed Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace)—tells the story of another universe, one in which the evil Empire led by Darth Vader (David Prowse, with voice supplied by James Earl Jones) rules, but where rebel forces are gathering to bring down the bad guys.
Lucas also created a mythology that has been embraced by young and old alike. As well as creating various creatures from his galaxy far, far away, his good-versus-evil storyline introduces us to people and objects that have since become part of the English language: the Millennium Falcon (Solo’s spaceship, which lucas originally imagined would look like a flying hamburger), light sabers (the swordlike weapon with its own recognizable “swoosh” sound), Imperial Stormtroopers, and, of course, the Jedi Knights (so much a part of our collective consciousness now that an internet campaign suggesting that people enter “Jedi” under the religion question of a United Kingdom census form proved hugely successful).
In giving the world Star Wars, Lucas succeeded in making much more than just a movie (one that would eventually get its own exhibit at the Smithsonian, no less); he made a world, a new style of cinema, and an unforgettable outer space opera that has been many times imitated but never bettered. And you never can see the strings. —Joanna Berry (1001)