Home of Fred Delles's favorite games and original stories!
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Articles April 6, 2003: Star Wars is Still the Star There was an article on Monday, January 21, 2003 at USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2003-01-15-rings-stars_x.htm). It mentions how Lord of the Rings will take over the world of Star Wars, and how Star Wars will fade away as soon as George Lucas quits after Episode III. Okay, compare Gone with the Wind to Titanic. Or The Godfather to The Sopranos. Or the Ford Model T with SUVs. Better yet, compare the old 8-bit Nintendo with the Playstation 2. One stays, but one REALLY stays. And the one that really stays is not gonna be the more recent one. Back in 1977, it was boring. There were (almost) no video games, no Internet, no anime (unless you lived in Japan), no reality shows, and even the Super Bowl wasn’t that popular. You couldn’t even get a respite with politics like the 60s: Vietnam sucked, Watergate was over, and Carter was busy screwing up. You could either listen or go to disco, watch boring TV (it wasn’t until the early 80s when television sitcoms became popular again) or you could watch and live Star Wars. Today, we have all of the aforementioned diversions, and even TV Land or Nick-at-Nite has those classic shows if you missed them. The fact that none of the Lord of the Rings films even compares to Star Wars in adjusted ticket sales makes you think of how it can really be memorable in a decade of more diverse entertainment. (See http://main.put.com/gross/grad; it is old, but should give you a good comparison. As for the LotR flicks, think of its (American) gross and divide by 6 for the total audience. It pales to Gone with the Wind’s almost 200 million audience.) The writer “spins” with his misinformed ideology on why Lord of the Rings will stay. First, there is no major “female factor”, as the Fellowship of the Ring drew most of its (male) audience before the Academy Awards were announced. Approximately three out of five people who watched the film were men under 25 (like myself). And I guarantee that much of the rest were older men that knew Lord of the Rings in its heyday in the 60s and 70s onward. The film already made three-quarters of its money plus by the time the Academy Awards were announced (see http://us.imdb.com/Business?0120737). After Fellowship of the Ring lost most of its categories, the film stagnated and gained little more than pocket change through the next several weeks. Some hyped date movie. (For the record, my parents watched Star Wars during an outing. And it was my mother’s first American film when she immigrated to the United States from Japan.) Second, its theme of “evil vs. everyday underdogs” is the exact same theme that Star Wars conveyed. In fact, Star Wars beat Lord of the Rings to the punch almost 25 years ago! And we had evil in our doorstep in 1977, where it was for over thirty years counting: Did the Commie Soviets ring a bell? Or Reagan’s “Evil Empire” statement? And finally, the fantasy factor. The only reason sci-fi is having a hard time is that recently, it is full of hash. Star Trek: Nemesis should have been on television, or at least direct to video. Pluto Nash should never have been made in the first place. Clones is the fifth Star Wars film – and it is no surprise that lots of people don’t like it much. There are too many “perfect respites to everyday trauma” if you count anything beyond the movie theater. Watch some old films, like my favorite, now on DVD, Back to the Future. Play a few games. Or, read the friggin’ Tolkien original, which is much better than the film. No doubt, I liked Lord of the Rings and feel tempted to watch The Two Towers once more in theaters. Nevertheless, in the end, Star Wars will stick. And Lord of the Rings will be a passing fad, coming and going by the end of 2004, one year after Return of the King. I guarantee it. That said, I’ll probably watch it at least twice if Eowyn puts up a good fight against the Witch-King near the end.
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