Star Wars: The Complete WIRED Guide

A simple young farmboy gets a magic sword from an old wizard so he can defeat an evil knight, rescue a princess, and save the world. Granted, they don't always do it with knights. Sometimes the farmboy is a farmgirl. Sometimes the wizard is a scientist and sometimes the evil knight is a dragon or a cyborg. But Lucas knew all that. He was a Northern California kid who grew up watching movies and racing cars, a tyro moviemaker at a moment when American film had become very serious. The movies of the 1970s had genre goofs like The Exorcist and Rocky, but the gold-standard stories of were adult things about violence, sexuality, and the treachery of dreams. Heroes in these movies lost--like, all the time. Sometimes the whole movie got you to like bad guys, and sometimes they died anyway!