Chat corner 133: A New Hope

[annathecrow]

Welcome to the Monday chat corner!

This week, the topic is the movie Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, aka The First One. Is there something you’d like to chat about? New idea, old idea, interesting tidbit or piece of gossip…?

 

Comments

[annathecrow]

I'm sort of collecting recs for air combat movies that inspired ANH. So far I've got Dambusters, 633 Squadron and Bridges at Toko-Ri. Does anyone know any others?

(I mean, I know that if I googled I'd find someone's full list, but then there's nothing to chat about...)

For an interesting tidbit, I submit: Lars farm patio plants! I feel like every successive story (the movies included) made Tatooine into more of a death world, so it's funny to see that in the first movie, it looks more like... idk, a Space Arizona.

[yourlibrarian]

Heh, space Arizona! One of the things I always find curious is that it's supposed to be the hind end of nowhere but everything seems to happen on Tattooine. Even regular transports!

[atamascolily]

IIRC, Tora! Tora! Tora! was also an influence, although I haven't seen it myself.

I love the Lars patio plants so much! It's so strange to me that the shots of the courtyard and the house are an entirely different location from the rest of the property IRL, but that's the magic of cinema for you.

[havendale]

I did research for this week! My impression is that even people who aren’t Star Wars fans tend to like ANH or at least remember it fondly, so I was a bit curious about the critics who didn’t like it when it first came out. Turns out that back in 1977, the critics were already fretting over how superhero movies Star Wars movies were going to Ruin Serious Cinema Forever:

Serious film-goers (cinephiles who want something more substantial than cotton candy for their screen diet) may be in for hard times if Hollywood interprets the success of Star Wars as a poll of current entertainment tastes. … Lucas himself is unlikely to have intended it so, but Star Wars may become the seminal work in a new wave of anti-intellectual soap opera. In the name of escapist entertainment we may be inundated with all sorts of mindless, pre-digested, undegradeable junk.*

On the flip side, I vaguely knew ANH had been chosen for the National Film Registry, but I didn’t know it was in the very first group of films to be chosen in 1989 (and the most recent film in that group, too).

* Martin Malina, “A galaxy of fun”, The Montreal Star (25 June 1977) 44.

[yourlibrarian]

Well the first big superhero movie came out the following year so they were right about what was coming (though Superman was already in production before ANH was released). And Superman came on the heels of the Musketeers movies, which I guess didn't seem as threatening because it was, after all, a literary classic...