Peter Biskind: "Lucas was re-creating and re-animating these [pre-Sixties] values, and Star Wars, with its Manichaean moral fundamentalism, its white hats and black hats, restored the luster to threadbare values like heroism and individualism." "Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars was like when McDonald's got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared."

Joseph Campbell:"This then is the monomyth, the structure of a fundamental potential in our lives. It is the story of Buddha, Christ, and Mohammed. And today we see it in Star Wars, in which Luke Skywalker leaves the farm (ordinary reality), journeys to a realm of space technologies (fabulous forces), destroys the death star (winning a decisive victory), and aids the just cause of the rebels (enriching the world). " 'Old man': All myths, he wrote, are metaphors that suggest deep spiritual truths not speakable in ordinary words. All religious stories are masks that hide the same essential teachings. "That old man up there has been blown away," he said. God, to Campbell, was the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!" It's the essential energy of life -- the force we can find only inside us, much as Luke Skywalker did in "Star Wars." (Filmmaker George Lucus says that Campbell's work inspired his "Star War" trilogy.) When we cloak the "ah!" experience with the trappings of culture, we come up with gods and saints and sivas.

Harlan Jacobson: Seeing Star Wars again, I was struck by how hokey it looks now. The laser effects seem rudimentary. The live-action creatures that were once so stunning are now passe. The acting is bad. For all the hoopla 20 years ago over shifting into "light speed," when the entire audience would slam back in its chairs as if hit by a punch (is there a rating for "Subtextual LSD Sequences"?), much of the action is mired on a narrow set tricked up as a spaceship corridor. There Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewbacca, dressed in modified hippie regalia, exchange low-rent laser fire with the same six Empire storm troopers, who clunk around in white recycled refrigerator parts.

Joel Rosenbaum: Star Wars is grounded in the short-term rewards of TV watching, where every moment tends to be equal in emotional importance to every other and where the only serious continuity is in a consistency of mild diversion rather than in a persistence of personality. This form of entertainment can only be called lite--constructed out of ersatz familiar materials meant to be admired for their momentary cuteness or for details of their design. Consider the prospect: twenty more years of Star Wars movies, toys, comic books, weapons programs, video games, trailers, promos--and tons of New Age jive to link it all up with Homer, the Old Testament, Virgil, the Koran, Arthurian legend, Joseph Campbell, and even Walt Disney. What was once at best an OK diversion for ten-year-old boys has become a cornerstone of Western civilization. "There was something that happened to many people in their late teens and early 20s when they first saw it," muses Star Wars: Special Edition producer Rick McCallum in the press book. "It was a turning point where you actually realized that almost anything was possible and realistic at the same time." Even, one might add, a new form of mass annihilation experienced as a spectacle.

"A nostalgic dream without a discernible connection to the realitiesÉ" Robert S. McNamara "An illusion...the promise it holds out...is a fraud" Charles Krauthammer

"The end is unattainable, the means harebrained, the costs staggering" McGeorge Bundy and the "Gang of Four"

"It doesn't work, it's easily defeated by countermeasures, it's ruinously expensive" Carl Sagan

"Let's say enough is enough. The sky's the limit," Geraldine Ferraro

"Based on what we know now, Star Wars is a hoax. Why don't we stop this madness now and draw a line to keep the heavens free from war?" Walter Mondale

"Before we commit billions or trillions of dollars to 'Star Wars,' we've got to do the research that will tell us whether or not the system can work and whether or not it's essential to our national defense." Michael Dukakis

Bombast Prequel News World Without Star Wars Waiting in Line