I recently saw a very interesting exercise on box office receipts. If you just take raw figures, practically all the top 10 grossing films are modern and most of them are franchises. Only one old film, Gone with the Wind, gets in.

But if you correct for inflation, the figures become quite different. Gone with the Wind is at the top of the list and a number of other famous old films are also present. The only franchise film left is the original Star Wars, and that's not really a franchise because it was the first of its line.

Call me "an old Southern (US) boy" if you want to, but Gone With The Wind was damned-good storytelling, and the movie picked an excellent cast and then spent enough money to do the story justice. (BTW: the book doesn't have "a sequel.")

If you want a good story to carry you through several(!) "long winter's nights," I will recommend GWTW without reservation. Never mind the number of pages ... they'll speed by, at times.

The original Star Wars, too, was good – Saturday-morning serial – storytelling, as well as a tour de force of visual special-effects at that time and an introduction to symphonic scores.

Sure, movies are expensive and risky to produce, so everyone likes what they see as "a sure thing." But too much of a sure thing is not a good thing.

And, "special effects" won't drive a movie anymore. Neither will bug-eyed animated creatures doing slapstick.

Archetypal hero mythology resonates in all of us -- the archetypal unconscious of Jung being activated -- this is why Star Wars and any other such tales succeed, apparently, and IMHO.
Good thread!

What I liked about the original Star Wars was that the archetypes came from so many different places. It was real fun tracing them. For example Luke was partly Siegfried/Arthur/Aragorn, with the broken sword that once belonged to his father. But he was also Eisenhower, the boy from the dust-bowl farm who grows up to become president. That's a very American archetype, as is Han Solo, a version of the hellraiser who rides shotgun on the Wells Fargo express. Obiwan Kenobi of course is Gandalf/Merlin, the wise old man who counsels the hero. And C3PO and R2D2 are the archetypal English civil servant and his dog. The later films are far less original.

so funny, never thought of C3PO as a dog before. :D

Yeah I always assumed he was The Tin Man, from The Wizard of Oz?

R2D2 is the dog! He can't speak but he can make himself understood.

as you said like the civil servant... :p
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9N133ziYEE

Actually Tahei and Matashichi, the two bickering peasants from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. They get caught up in a war, escape, fall out with each other, both depart in opposite directions, get captured and then meet up again - and happy to be reunited. The peasants find and carry the Akizuki clan's secret cache of gold (which the enemy are hunting for).

Just as the droids get caught up in the firefight on the blockade runner, escape in the escape pods, fall out and head off in different directions and then both get caught by Jawas and reunited - while all the time carrying the plans.

The essence of The Hidden Fortress plot is that the wise Samurai general (Rokurota) in exile, travelling incognito, must escort the princess (and Akizuki clan gold, enlisting the two peasants to help) back to a friendly allied clan's territory - her own clan (Akizuki) having been completely defeated ("totally blown away").

I actually don't see any Tolkien inspiration in Star Wars. I see a lot of other earlier sci-fi literature, film, TV series, comic books, etc, playing a big role. Obi Wan Kenobi is more of a teacher (or sensei) than a merlin.

I think symphonic scores were made acceptable by 2001: A Space Odyssey - admittedly not written for the film.

Edited to add:
Someone should tell Hollywood that sequels and remakes aren't necessarily a good idea from the point of view of either taste or good business decision making (annoying your customers rarely works well in the long term).

True archetypes must transcend human cultures and hark back to an ancient time like, say, before the languages were confused, or before a worldwide flood. So, the more generic the archetypal reference, the more correct, it seems to me.

The Hero's Journey -- Lucas payed homage to Jos. Campbell for it inspiring Star Wars -- it's a fact.

George Lucas freely admitted in interviews that he gave at the time – when [the] Star Wars movie had shown itself to be one of the greatest blockbuster films ever – that he deliberately took elements of the story from sources like Saturday Morning serials, as well as classic archetypes.

Right down to "A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away®." The very first thing that the audience saw was just like the classic sign at Disneyland: "Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy."

Dr. J. R. R. Tolkein did much the same when he purposely created The Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings with elements taken from the tales that were, in fact, among his many professional scholarly pursuits at Oxford. He said that he wanted to create a modern-day version of these things that was nevertheless entirely his own, and that's exactly what he did.

In many ways, I view [the] Star Wars movie as a stand-alone tale, although it was obvious from the moment that Darth Vader regained control of his spacecraft that Lucas hoped that there would be sequels. (Serials always had sequels ... the same characters returning again and again.) When money suddenly became no object, he selected the classic structure of a trilogy.

Classic storytelling is always about "the Hero," and "the Villain." Lucas' trilogy was always about Luke and Darth Vader, and one of them had to finally defeat the other. Maybe this is what I can't stand about the Mouse movies, particularly this one: Luke Skywalker® isn't the hero anymore, and it is inconceivable to me that he would not be. As Hamill put it, his character became someone else, in order to facilitate Disney's new vision for the story franchise. But, a hero that has single-handedly delivered three movies simply can't be allowed to cease to be what he is. Yet, IMHO, that's precisely what I saw Disney doing with perhaps its most-important character.

The new set of movies really didn't need any of the original cast, and I'm not sure that they ought to have been included ... especially now that so many years had passed. And I would not have brought back "Darth Vader's melted mask," either. Annakin Skywalker himself turned away from his evil, sacrificing himself in the process to save his son. He shouldn't be brought back now as a personification nor a continuation of that evil, nor as a symbol of it that the new evildoers almost worship. To me, that's polluting the other "most-important character." And, once again, completely unnecessary.

What's next, I wonder? Jar Jar Binks? ;)

Dont we have enough of this on youtube?

Its the same crap "WAAAA! They ruined Star Wars!"

Uh ever think that some of us actually like this movie and applaud it for trying something new?

No wait thats ruining childhood, I forgot.

No cant sit back and have fun with a movie anymore, no have to nitpick every frame and every line of dialog and if a prop is off center in one scene and is fixed in the next.... movie ruined!

I personally really liked the Last Jedi, it was daring experimental and it did the same thing that Empire strikes back did by subverting expectations and giving us something new.

But hey the is the star wars franchise where people say that The force awakens was too much like a new hope and then whine when something new is offered.

I swear its the most manic depressive fan base sometimes.

I personally think that they should have simply left the original cast completely out of it – including Darth Vader. Put the story a hundred or more years in the future, instead of a mere thirty years after the previous set of movies must have ended. I know that they were trying to appeal to old farts like me "the original fan-base," but that wasn't necessary. The essential story is universal.

I think that Disney made excellent casting choices in these new movies. They hired really good screenwriters, and refused to let George Lucas fill the movies with little children and little creatures. But the decision to incorporate the original cast-members and characters, in my humble, simply didn't work.

The "bad guy," being the improbable son of two original-characters' improbable marriage, is in a more awkward position than the "good girl," who has none of this baggage. (Fortunately, the actor is fully in command of his character and he can work his way through any screenwriting gaffe. Just let him take his mask off. Just let him take his mask off, so we can see his most-interesting face ... this is how this actor acts.)

Now, for the third movie, they actually do have a "clean slate," albeit due to most-unfortunate and unforeseeable real-world tragedy. (Carrie one day, and her mother the next. :cry:) They can't do "Han's movie, then Luke's movie, then Leia's movie," as originally planned. Maybe they will think of something much better. I hope so.

Honestly, my requirements are simple – I've got my wife and a bag of popcorn and we still know how to "neck." ;) It's too <hot|cold> to be outside, and this place is air-conditioned and has a $10,000 sound system. Just tell me a really good yarn. But, don't tamper with fictional characters. It's far better to simply omit them entirely, than to corrupt them. Especially when the franchise does not need to do any such thing.

There were actually only 12 people in the audience out of about 500 seats where I saw it (Last Jedi). I mean too convoluted to be a simple yarn.