What did you like the most about Star Wars?
First, I grew up with it, the original Trilogy, watching them over and over on VHS. They were formative for me, they’re part of who I am. Watching Star Wars, reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, that kind of thing, repeatedly before I was ten years old, I would be a different human being without them. Return of the Jedi is the first movie I remember going to the movie theater and watching it all the way through.
But, as I grew up, I started appreciating them in other ways. Actually analyzing the way LucasFilm managed to take archetypical story-telling practices and flipping them just enough so that Star Wars feels familiar and unusual enough. There’s the technical side, too: they made the original Trilogy by pioneering a number of special effects and filming techniques, inventing a bunch of stuff that had never been done, or refining what had been done so well that many of the special effects from the original Trilogy still hold up, 30, 40-ish years on.
There’s the universe, the “Galaxy Far, Far Away” setting, a fairy-tale in space idea that’s been imitated many times but not quite fully replicated. There’s the journey Luke goes through, of wild-eyed farm-boy desperate for something interesting to happen in his life to mature magical knight who’s gone through some terrible things and had the core assumptions of his reality challenged and come out the other side. There’s the brilliant twist of the damsel in distress that is Princess Leia, who never had a moment of distress in her life, and five seconds into her own first rescue, commandeers it leads her rescuers out of the trouble they’ve found themselves. There’s Han Solo, who was my definition of what is “cool” and mature and grown up all of my life, but who’s also in over his head most of the time, and making things up as he goes (a type of role Harrison Ford was born to play, the heroic everyman who never has a long-term plan to save himself but through grit, luck, and stubbornness, still makes it through).
There’s the visual language of Star Wars. The forbidding image of Darth Vader, whether he’s boarding the rebel ship in A New Hope, or standing in the shadows in Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, is such a primal display of overbearing evil. The action. The landscapes. The wonder. By my teens, I’d even fallen into the now-completely-out-of-cannon EU, with West End Games’s d6 RPG and the revival of novels starting with Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy, and reveled in how many incredibly talented people were inspired by the ideas of the series. Of course, the EU eventually descended into a sludge of grimdarkness, but for nearly 20 years, it informed by appreciation of science fiction.
And that’s just the original trilogy, episodes IV, V, and VI. I love the prequels, too, although I do recognize them as flawed attempts at telling the story they’re trying to tell. I still respond to the tale of the rise and fall of Anakin in the prequels, and the appearance of the stagnating and decadent old Republic’s decline toward totalitarian empire. I still marvel at the complexity and completeness of the emperor’s plan at galactic domination. And again, that sense of adventure and wonder that the original trilogy gave me, I still feel when watching the prequels. I understand why many people have a hard time with them, but it’s still Star Wars, to me. And I’ve gone through probably 80% of the EU, and even bad Star Wars is still pretty fun Space Opera.
Thanks for the question, I hope I even began to answer.
