'Unlearn what you have learned' (Yoda): the critical study of the myth of Star Wars

Title: 'Unlearn what you have learned' (Yoda): the critical study of the myth of Star Wars
Creator: McDowell, John C.
Relation: Understanding Religion and Popular Culture p. 104-117
Publisher: Routledge
Resource Type: book chapter
Date: 2012
Description: It is 25 May 1977, and little is known about the movie that opens this evening, Star Wars (hereafter this will be referred to by the abbreviation SW). In fact, the fear of the 20th Century Fox studio, and the movie’s creator and director George Lucas himself, is that it will be a financial disaster. Lucas himself has even forgotten it is the opening night, and he is spending the evening with his wife Marcia in a restaurant near the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (The limited fan base of science fiction movies in the mid-70s makes SW a risky project. Lucas feels it will at most appeal to the “$8 million worth of science fiction freaks in the U.S.A.,” and he braces himself for the fall-out. See Kaminski 2008: 140f.) Nevertheless, “gigantic lines [have] formed … in each town, city, or suburb” as a result of word of-mouth (Rinzler 2008: 326). Because of the lengths of the queue, only those who are near the front, and have accordingly queued longest, are lucky enough to be admitted.
Subject: Star Wars; popular entertainment; film studies; George Lucas
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1327837
Identifier: uon:25756
Identifier: ISBN:9780415781046
Language: eng

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