Star Wars has gone far beyond just some movies. It has become a merchandising juggernaut. It has even become such a pop culture staple that people use it as a sort of tribe to find an identity and sense of belonging.
From popular online quizzes to determine which Star wars character you are, to popular video games, it seems like people just can’t get enough.
How did this happen? What is it that makes these movies such a part of who we are as people and not just a couple of hours of lighthearted entertainment?
A movie series doesn’t get this popular by accident. It has to have a number of things going for it to catch fire the way that it has. What are these things?
Let’s take a look at how Star Wars has captured the world’s imagination.
It’s essentially a soap opera
The original series of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were a three movie series that basically, for all intents and purposes, was a soap opera set in space.
This isn’t an unjust comparison as George Lucas called it that back in the 1970’s. It has a simple story that is easy to follow with enough drama to keep it interesting. There is a clear villain and clear heroes that follow a predictable trajectory.
Like a soap opera there are unexpected betrayals and of course a love story woven in, although a very unconventional one.
In essence, it has something for everybody. There’s plenty of action, lots of drama and even a few laughs.
The characters are iconic
In the first trilogy, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Han Solo and of course Luke Skywalker propped up a cast that was extremely memorable. Then add in other characters that had brief, but memorable roles such as Yoda and Lando Calarisian and you have a recipe for success.
Where the films were made as a series that needed to be watched in the entirety, the characters had to be such that people had to see the rest of the series to find out what happens to them.
It was a work of genius to make these characters what they were and the casting could not have been better.
The effects were state of the art
At the time the original movies were made, they won awards for the effects. They look far more real than you would ever expect for the time they were made.
This created a legacy of having the best animators and effects professionals working on the newest films that also are incredibly rich with effects. This draws the viewer into the action by creating a realistic world.
If the effects were not great, it would be looked back on as campy and goofy instead of the masterpieces that they turned out to be. The new films would likely not even have been made if the effects in the originals weren’t good.
