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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Star Wars was never good.

Okay: The Disneyfied Latter Days Crap is a given in a world where Marvel exists as it does now, and I'm not even mad at that. People drink two liters of Coca Cola a day. Whatever, their choice. Jar Jar Binks is so far down the shit-gradient it's not even cynical, ironic or campy, that shit is just plain bad.

No, my beef is with the status the original trilogy has. Archetypal, shallow characters and tropes going beyond the banal. The narratives are too middle of the road: not naturalistic enough for full immersion, not stylized enough to be authentic space opera. The doritos of sci-fi.

Three movies were made, somehow, on the aesthetic of the light saber. That's all it has going for it, that the light sabers look cool.

Rant over.

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When you describe something as archetypal, you basically admit it had very large impact. Similar to Tolkien being archetypal fantasy. Does not help your argument, really.

Your argument is baseless. I'm not saying your argument has no merit, I'm saying that your interpretation only makes sense in light of the media that came after the original trilogy. In a lot of cases, the tropes didn't become tropes until other people tried to ape them. I can think of plenty of movies that did not age well because they inspired so much of what came later. Arguably, the original Star Wars movies are amongst them. But its ridiculous to deride Star Wars as derivative of the films it inspired.

Arguably, the original trilogy was simply dungeons and dragons in space. Wizards, rogues, and knights in space.

But, it you look at the sci-fi/fantasy at the time, nothing really compares to what Star wars did. There's a reason it's pretty much the only widely known sci-fi films from the last 70s early 80s.

At least, not in film.

>Arguably, the original trilogy was simply dungeons and dragons in space. Wizards, rogues, and knights in space.

It was basically Flash Gordon plus WW2 movies plus samurai movies plus fairy tales and Arthurian fantasy in space.

I think one of the reasons why The Force Awakens is not good is that it tries to copy previous Star Wars movies, but Star Wars has always been best when it copies stuff from other genres and mixes them together into a new thing, not when it tries to copy from its own previous films.

>it's pretty much the only widely known sci-fi films from the last 70s early 80s

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Blade Runner, and The Terminator are all widely known late 70s / early 80s sci-fi films.

Probably not as well known but still pretty widely known are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Thing, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

Every single film you mentioned came out after Star Wars. The closest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, came out only 6 months later, so hard to argue that its derivative. Even so, its inarguable that Star Wars was the first of its kind to reach the kind of mass appeal that it did.

Likewise (to the parent), references to D&D or Kurosawa are red herrings, because those were sort of niche at that point. Flash Gordon is/was debatably niche, but even then, Flash Gordon wasn't made into a movie until 1980 (after Lucas gave up on pursuing the rights, and instead made Star Wars).

I'm not here to defend Star Wars as great art, but I am here to say that its place in the cultural canon is 100% earned, and trying to dismiss it as cliche, formulaic, or derivative is to wildly misunderstand the cultural impact of its forebears, and anachronistically criticize it for its similarities to the things it inspired.

Interesting take on a ~50 year cultural phenomenon with millions of fans. Maybe next time you could write "I don't like Star Wars" instead "Star Wars never good." That would be more accurate.

Number of fans does not imply quality. Case in point; see any "so bad it's good" fandom. Nothing wrong with that. GP's opinion is valid.

There must be dozens of you. Dozens!

> That's all it has going for it, that the light sabers look cool.

Hey, that's not fair at all. The lightsabers also sound cool.

(And all due credit to Ben Burtt for that.)

I mean I think they were ground breaking at the time for costuming and special effects. Many genre defining works look bad in retrospect because the genre has grown up since they came out.

You're not wrong, but come on. Exactly my point. It looked nice once, but that stuff is ephemeral.

There was never any substance to begin with, but still it's getting milked like there's no tomorrow.

This is just the worst type of internet content.

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