Protected:

From the Archives: George Lucas Tells the STAR WARS Origin Story

With STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS hitting theaters this week, we dug up a vintage American Film™ magazine interview with George Lucas published just before the release of the first STAR WARS film in 1977.

Long before the space opera franchise would land in the hands of director J.J. Abrams, Lucas started developing STAR WARS in the early 1970s, even before he piloted his sophomore feature AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973) to worldwide success at age 28.

When talking about STAR WARS in this interview, Lucas revealed he “wanted to do a modern fairy tale, a myth” that explores the “bigger, mysterious world in space that is more interesting than anything around here.”

“Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film…I realized there was another relevance that is even more important — dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing…Once I got into STAR WARS, it struck me that we had lost all that — a whole generation was growing up without fairy tales. You just don’t get them anymore, and that’s the best stuff in the world — adventures in far-off lands. It’s fun.”

Well, STAR WARS certainly succeeded in handing a whole generation and future generations a much-loved fairy tale.

Read the original article in full below: