Star wars came out when I was four.
According to my parents it was the first movie I ever saw in the theater. I’ll let you figure out how old I am based on that information.
And when I say Star Wars, I mean the first one, A New Hope. When I first saw it wasn’t called A New Hope, it was just Star Wars.
Star Wars is a great movie.
Star Wars became my childhood.
Star Wars became my birthday and Christmas for years.
It became visits to my grandmother. She would regularly have a new action for me. It was always wrapped in a brown paper bag.
It became playground games—lightsabers verses lightsabers.
It became Halloween costumes.
The music made my four-year-old chest just stick out. I grew muscular and taller listening to opening music. Star Wars was the world I was in.
Yes.
We all know the cultural phenomenon that it has become. And the huge intellectual property that it has become to Disney.
5 Billion dollars to be exact.
But it wasn’t just me. An entire generation of boys and girls, who are now middle age with children of their own who are into Star Wars. We are passing down the world to another generation of movie lovers.
But there has to be reasons why it is so good...
Here are the ten reasons why Star Wars is the greatest movie ever made.
1. The opening. Beginning a movie with loud music and a title crawl was ripped directly from the Flash Gordon serials of decades previous. But they weren’t done nearly as well as this. Then flew in the ship in. But it flew in FROM OVER HEAD! And not just one ship but two!
2. Darth Vader. Five minutes in we are introduced the greatest villain we have ever seen. And here is the thing, he doesn’t say one word. But you know, you need to be scared of him.
3. The Music. Let’s face John Williams is the Master at cinematic music. There is John Williams, and then everyone else.
4. Lightsabers. They were described originally as laser swords and they’re such an obvious invention, but I know of no other place before where laser swords existed in a movie.
5. Ralph McQuarrie . The average movie watch does not know who Ralph is. The hard-core of us do. And we know that it was him who took George’s words and turned them into beautiful illustrations.
6. The Toys. Lucas made a seismic shift in how movies were promoted. The toys were just awesome. I got new toys every Christmas and birthday from 1977 to 1984. Have toys allowed children to replay the movie. (Remember kids, this was before DVDs.)
7. Sound Effects. Without Ben Burtt there is no laser blast, no lightsaber sound, no roar of a tie fighter, no growl of Chewbacca, no rumble of the trash compactor, no explosion of the Death Star. In other words, no Star Wars.
8. Industrial Light and Magic. Lucas needed special effects that had never been done before. In the process he created a company that is used by most of Hollywood.
9. The spaceships. The x-wing, tie-fighter, and of course the Milineum Falcon. The Falcon itself is a character in the movies. The Falcon is such a character than when I saw The Force Awakens the crowd cheered when the Falcon finally appeared on screen. Personally part of the reason that Return of the Jedi is not my favorite of the series partly because no scenes really occur in the Falcon.
10. The Force. Everyone wants to have the Force. The Force is the spirituality behind the story. It is with the Force that the movie goes to a different level. We all want the Force. We are all interested in that sort of power.
This was a love letter to a movie.
A remembrance to my childhood.
That is why it is the great movie ever made.