General Introduction
– Missing our cues
– Listener feedback
Our Histories with Star Wars
– The anthropic principle
– The mythology of childhood
– The importance of the action figures
– Video games and trading cards
The Conception of the Film
– Lucas’s scant filmography
– THX-1138 and American Graffiti
– Throwbacks and moral complexity
– The studio system
– In which George Lucas destroys himself
– Is Lucas an auteur?
– Relationship to the two trilogies
– The benefits of constraints
The Summer Blockbuster
– Moving away from gritty urban realism
– Endless replication
– Merchandizing and other markets
Star Wars and the Monomyth
– Lucas as non-student student of Joseph Campbell
– Mythology and the human life cycle
– The end of one life and the beginning of another
– The wizard figure
– Lucas’s Freudian replacement
The Performances
– Michial and Victoria complain
– Lucas as inept director
– The youth of the actors
– Defending Mark Hamill
– Stylized classic Hollywood
– Is Alec Guinness over it?
– Movies as magic
– Kurosawa’s influence
Technology and the Force
– A matrix with good guys and bad guys
– The meeting at the end
– Darth Vader’s mechanical body
– Lucas goes wrong again
– Jedi mind tricks
– Who shot first?
Other Stuff
– The natural and the mechanical
– The score
– Michial fears for Yoda