The saga began with the film Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), which was released on May 25, 1977, by 20th Century Fox. The film became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon - spawning five more feature films, three spin-off films, five television series and an extensive collection of licensed books, comics, video games, action figures, trading cards, card games, and other products - all of which are set within a fictional "galaxy far, far away."

An example of the space opera genre, the Star Wars story employs archetypal motifs common to both science fiction and mythology, as well as the romantic music motifs now often associated with those genres.

Feature films

Although The Ewok Adventure, later renamed Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, played in theaters in Europe and Australia and is technically a Star Wars feature film, it is generally associated with television, therefore it is covered in the television section below.

Setting

See also: Star Wars opening crawl

Unlike the traditional science fiction films preceding it, the Star Wars world was initially portrayed as dirty and grimy, rather than sleek and futuristic. In interviews, Lucas tells of rubbing the new props with dirt to make them look weather-worn, a concept he has referred to as "a used or ancient future", a concept further popularized in the film Alien of the same era. He may have been inspired by Sergio Leone, whose 1960s films performed a similar function for the Western genre. It is also possible that he may have received the idea from Akira Kurosawa, who believed that it gave his actors a more authentic look.

Each Star Wars film opens with the text, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." Lucas intended this as an allusion to the classic fairy tale opening of, "Once upon a time, in a faraway land..." This is the only way the Star Wars Galaxy has been defined in relation to the real world. To some, Lucas's allusion suggests that the films are to be interpreted as allegorical and metaphorical narratives of the future, rather than literal events of the past. Lucas intentionally left the details open to interpretation. Events occur in the Star Wars galaxy; although the film series itself spans the events of only two generations, other stories set in the Star Wars universe (those from the so-called "Expanded Universe") cover events that span millennia.

The Star Wars films use an opening text to provide the audience with the background to the story. Lucas emulated the Flash Gordon serials by having his opening text "crawl" up the screen from bottom to top at a high pitched angle, as if the text were disappearing into the distant starscape. Also in all Star Wars films, a starship of some kind whooshes by after the crawl disappears completely. In a May 15, 2005, interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Lucas described the creation of the distinctive crawl: "The crawl is such a hard thing because you have to be careful that you're not using too many words that people don't understand. It's like a poem. I showed the very first crawl to a bunch of friends of mine in the '70s. It went on for six paragraphs with four sentences each. Brian De Palma was there, and he threw his hands up in the air and said, 'George, you're out of your mind! Let me sit down and write this for you.' He helped me chop it down into the form that exists today."

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