Over the last week, Ken and I watched the original trilogy again for the first time in at least 10 years. It’s amazing how well those first three movies still hold up compared to something like say, the Matrix series, which is already becoming an unintentionally funny camp classic – or Battlestar Galactica, which has finally given up even trying to be anything more than an emo soap opera. The original original Star Wars is still a masterpiece of powerful, iconic design and the raw enthusiasm with which it was made still comes through in every scene. You see so many scifi tv shows and movies today that are OK, but the last thing you think is “Wow, people really loved making this.”
For a long time though, I couldn’t stand the thought of Star Wars. The whole franchise suffered from a horrible case of overexposure. But I spent hundreds of hours of my adolescence poring over every piece of Star Wars preproduction artwork I could get my hands on and I probably wouldn’t have achieved my dream of being an independent illustrator without that well-spring of inspiration. One of my most vivid and wonderful teenage memories is of the day I saved up enough money to buy the Ralph McQuarrie Star Wars Portfolio print set. And the truth is, those “Art of Star Wars” books still get hauled out in film and TV art department meetings to this day, whether anyone wants to admit it or not.
I’ve never seen any reason to over-intellectualize the Star Wars films, or to defend them against people who think that we should only be allowed to read Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegan’s Wake. It’s as though some people think that the world isn’t big enough for Star Wars and Gravity’s Rainbow – as if for every comic book or rousing adventure movie ever produced, a piece of SERIOUS LITERATURE gets displaced out of existence.
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