Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars as Pulp Sci-Fi
mikelove writes "Salon has an article arguing that Star Wars owes its origins to pulp science fiction and not Joseph Campbell-esque mythology. Finally SOMEONE is realizing this... Also makes the suggestion that Lucas/Kasdan didn't really write The Empire Strikes Back, which makes a certain amount of sense when you compare it to Lucas' other screenplays."
But I've always felt that the whole nine movie plan was a bit of revisionist history after people didn't get the "Episode IV" joke-cum-homage to old time serials ("...our story so far:"). Maybe I'm just looking for evidence of my own crackpot theory, but the movie is full of stuff like that: irising in and out, deliberately clunky cross screen fades, villains in crazy costumes, hysterical cliffhangers (the compactor scene mentioned in the article for instance)...it's all from those fun old serials. Doesn't lessen the impact of the movies for me, but by the same token, the Campbell/Jung stuff doesn't increase it.
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
I read the original screenplay, long before Star Wars came out, edited the manuscript of the novelization of Star Wars. I know the novelizer personally, and knew the publisher, Judy-Lynn del Rey, very well (worked for her for 11 years then took over the Del Rey imprint when she had a stroke). In the period from 1976 (when the ghost-written first novel appeared) through 1980, no one ever mentioned a Campbell connection in the publisher's office nor did they mention any other element that might have contributed to Star Wars than pulp science fiction, Saturday morning movie serials (e.g., Wasn't it in Don Winslow of the Navy? where the evil Japanese were always trying to squash people in rooms with walls that moved?), and elements that had appeared earlier in less successful sf films (R2D2, for instance, was very like Huey, Dewey and Louie -- I think they were -- in Cool Running). And, for several reasons, the publisher was distraught when Leigh Brackett died: (1) Brackett was a personal friend, (2) "That's the end of Star Wars". What Judy-Lynn meant was: "there's no inspiration left to be found in the project other than Leigh's."
The Salon story seems to me, an old fan of science fiction, a founding editor of Del Rey Books, and its editor in chief for more than ten years, quite nicely done. There are many who could tell the story in more detail, I'm sure, but they didn't choose to write. And what was written has, to me, the ring of truth.