One moment Lucas in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth and the next moment he's providing color-commentary to a stupid mockumentary. And Lucas still wants to disown the Holiday special? You've got to decide how you want to treat your creation, seriously or as a punch-line. JRR Tolkien never indulged in self-mockery, for instance. I don't think JK Rowling did either.
All this Joseph Campbell stuff is embellishment after the fact.
Star Wars was a popcorn movie. It had no aspirations of being anything more. As a member of the original movie's intended target audience (i.e. someone who was going on 9 when it came out), I think it's ridiculous how self-important, pretentious, and humorless many modern SW fans have gotten. These movies were meant to be
fun. Having a sense of humor about yourself is not degrading.
All you have to do is read some of the scathing reviews of Star Wars in 1977 to understand what kind of uphill battle Lucas had to give what he did some sort of critical respect. You flush that down the toilet by indulging in this sort of thing, IMHO.
Yes, obviously, but as I said, you can't let that matter, and you can't let defensiveness about how you're perceived by others dictate what creative choices you make.
Star Wars wouldn't have been any better if it had been shaped solely by some calculated desire to please the critics. Successful works are successful because they're true to themselves, regardless of what the critics say. If they're worthwhile, they'll stand the test of time and the critics will eventually come around.
Remember this is the guy who brought us Jar Jar Binks and Ewoks. He could never completely walk the straight line with his own material even though his fans were trying to treat it as a "serious" modern myth rather than just a popcorn trifle.
And those fans are being ludicrously pretentious, as I said.
Star Wars is something George Lucas made because he couldn't get the movie rights to
Flash Gordon. That's all. It's not some sophisticated, intellectual science-fictional allegory that challenges our perceptions about the nature of humanity or the meaning of existence. It's a well-made adventure-serial pastiche. It's an exercise in nostalgia for an earlier era of filmmaking. It works because it gets back to basics. It came along at a time when most cinematic science fiction was somber and intellectual and cold and cynical, and it reminded audiences what it felt like to be a little kid going to the matinee and gaping in awe at the pew-pew spaceships and weird monsters and stalwart heroes rescuing beautiful damsels. Its success was a result of its simplicity and lightness -- and largely a result of its spectacle, since
Star Wars revolutionized movie visual effects to a degree that we wouldn't see the like of again until
Jurassic Park. It worked because it was fun and lowbrow and uncomplicated and action-driven and everything that the critics derided.
