Forceis stillstrong
open to the public. But lakhs of fans make pilgrimages, trying to get as close as they can.
Millennium Falcon is delicious.
The space craft can travel at 25,000 light years per day. The design is often referred to as the “pork burger” because it was inspired by a burger that Lucas bit into and placed next to an olive on a toothpick.
sources run deep.
A huge influence on the Star Wars story has been Joseph Campbell’s 1949 work on comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It outlines “a hero’s journey” as a tenet shared by myths around the world.
wasn’t supposed to end well.
The original idea for the ending of Return of the Jedi was for Luke to turn evil. Supposedly, the final scenes were to feature him putting on Darth Vader’s mask and saying “Now, I am Vader”. Lucas eventually abandoned the idea to stick to the child-friendly tone. But a dark Luke appears in the 1991 comic Dark Empire. In it, Luke briefly apprentices under a resurrected Emperor Palpatine.
Prior to 1977, audiences in the US could stay in the theatre all day for the price of a single ticket. Star Wars audiences often hung back for a free re-watch, prompting theatre owners to set a limit of one viewing per ticket.
For the original film, he settled for a lower writer-and-director fee in exchange for 40% of the merchandising revenues. Movie merchandise was not a big market at the time, but the film’s popularity and Lucas’s business savvy changed that. Today, you can buy toasters that scorch a silhouette of Vader on to your bread. A Star Wars-themed cosmetics collection is out this month. Mattel’s Baby Yoda soft toy was Amazon’s best-seller in 2019, just after The Mandalorian’s release. The Star Wars 75192 Millennium Falcon holds the record for the largest Lego set (it has 7,541 pieces).
have set records.
R2-D2 model from the 1977 film sold for $2.76 million at auction in 2017, setting a new benchmark for Star Wars memorabilia.
tend to go overboard.
Steve Sansweet owns the largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia, with an audited collection of 93,260 items. He started collecting in 1996, as director of specialty marketing at Lucasfilm. By the time he retired in 2021, he’d served as director of content management and head of fan relations. He’s written 18 books, 16 of them on Star Wars.
Wars has been to space.
In October 2007, a shuttle launched by the US’S National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) took the lightsaber used by Mark Hamill (as Luke Skywalker) in Return of the Jedi, into orbit for two weeks.