My unpopular Star Wars opinion is that it’s fun to think Lucas was doing a based Vietnam analogy but he’s pretty clearly lying about intending the Ewoks to be the VC like he lies about having a plan all the time
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
They totally were, but they were also originally supposed to be full sized, and a lack of available fake fur meant they had to be shrunk down, thus sorta making them a joke. Oh well.
I think George combines real world analogues with pulpy adventure story tropes in a way that probably doesn't mix well on deeper inspection, but still produces a fun movie.
Is an analogy only something that works in a single way? The Empire is very obviously based on Nazis, but almost no chance an American making a movie portraying guerilla warfare in the 1980s wouldn’t have been thinking about the war in Vietnam.
As someone said above, he was also heavily influenced by the movies of his own youth and they’re pretty clear analogs to racist depictions of natives in stuff like King Kong
It's not so different from Spielberg's homages to the same kinda media in the Indiana Jones movies. They always were birds of a feather when it came to their inspirations.
Nothing beats the day I learned that the Jawas were speaking Xhosa (I had heard, but not confirmed, that the Jawas were recordings of people speaking Xhosa and saying nonsense and jokes and so when Star Wars played to Xhosa speaking audiences, it was comedic)
A million years ago I heard it told that, originally, the inhabitants of the Forest Moon were to be Wookiees. Big, angry, screaming Wookiees descending from the trees, ripping limbs off of storm troopers, and generally demonstrating why you don’t make a Wookie angry. Too scary for kids though.
I think it's a good lie, and close enough to be defensible. Obviously it was "just" a silly little WW2 retread. The storm troopers use MG42s after all, and are named storm troopers, and the borrowing from things like the Dam Busters is blatant.
I don’t believe he set out to make a movie where the VC are the heroes but the analogy is so obvious I’m sure it occurred to him well before they started shooting
Also, I think too many people think that the Rebels were the VC from the beginning, and not, you know, the Allies against the Nazi "Stormtroopers". The trench run is The Dam Busters from the perspective of the RAF. It wasn't until that scene in RotJ that they were also a VC analogue.
I don't think anyone's saying it's a perfecty, or evel well, though out and executed analogy. But I think it's pretty clear throughout the movies, not just in episode six, that he was thinking about the Vietnam War and American Imperialism. Especially given the political context when he wrote them.
Tbh, I'm with you. People weirdly think he needs to have SW again like they forgot the mess of the prequels. The better films he did were because of other people contributing, like the editing done by his then wife.
He's not some secret genius guy who has like multidimensional plans that got robbed
Mine is that the Shadow Council+ Kylo's turn were very clearly always intended to be what leads to the rise of the First Order, but then Episode 9 happened and now everyone's gotta pretend it's because of the Sith Eternal and the Acolytes of the Beyond when it isn't.
I'm old enough to have had a Star Wars art and photo book, where the writer's explicitly laid out all the serial move and 30s-40s-50s- sci-fi and fantasy that Lucas borrowed from, before Joseph Campbell lampreyed himself onto the whole endeavor
I think with SW it's the universe it's set in, rather than the stories, that turn my crank. Space wizards wielding laser swords, bounty hunters, smugglers, WW2 style dog fights in among the stars with big "aircraft carrier" style vessels, distinct aliens/worlds. The story potential is mindboggling.
While I can’t specifically disagree with most of this thread, this is the comment that hits closest to home for me. Mountains of potential in this ‘universe.’ Decades upon decades of sagas. It’s like he’s created a new, fun version of the Mahabharata.
Fair but by ROTS the prequels have pretty clearly become about the Bush administration. It was so much a part of the text I remember it making my Republican ex-Uncle mad
Comments
Then why aren't the ewoks and rebels partisan French and Jewish rebels george?
He had Luke and Leia kiss for Pete’s sake.
He's not some secret genius guy who has like multidimensional plans that got robbed