George Lucas

You have to wonder what it is about men like George Lucas that makes what they have to sell so attractive to your ordinary person. I suspect that phenomena like the Star Wars movies have largely to do with a kind of mass hysteria, where individuals feel compelled to like something because a large number of other people like it, but still, what is it that gets that all started?

Lucas was no trailblazer, not in the true sense of the word anyway,he had the smart idea of using the old stories, the ones that have always worked and reworking them in new contexts, kind of like Bill Gates (maybe I am on to something here). He paid homage to old movies (writer's euphemism for "stole from"), who had paid homage to other older tales, everything from Vaudeville to Shakespeare.

The thing is that your average America youngster knows very little about what came before him, so even the corniest, played-out shit is new to the next generation. The average older person is not inclined to like anything new because that's just the way you are when you get old, so stuff that feels familiar is attractive to them. You can recycle everything to make it popular, in fact, that is the only thing that will be popular, shit that people have seen or heard before (see your latest Top 40 charts for confirmation of this). You can re-make Casablanca as an interracial romance or a sci-fi western and somebody will think it is fresh. George Lucas is a genius, yes, but at recycling, not creation.

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