Yes, you're spot on there. Excellent point about Yoda as well. And it's notable that the prequels don't do the thing that Star Wars does of drawing on all the different genres of cinema--there isn't an equivalent of the Western moment in the Mos Eisley cantina. They're entirely based in their own iconography. I think that's why they feel so familiar and so different at the same time.
Yes, I'd say there are at least two deliberate visual references to A New Hope, and plenty of other bits and pieces that get tied together. Plus, of course, someone gets to say "I've got a bad feeling about this." :)
it's all sort of the pictures in Lucas's brain, which must be lovely but don't have that cultural resonance
Actually, I think what's interesting is that some of them almost do. The shape of a star destroyer, the scream of a TIE-fighter, the hum of a lightsaber, that sort of thing. I will admit to a feeling a little thrill when someone said "Lock S-foils in attack position"! And it's not like Lucas isn't stealing liberally (even sometimes offensively) from other cultures, present and past, in creating his world. It's more that it doesn't give anything back in the presentation of them. It's far more concerned with resonances within its own story than with resonances elsewhere in art or history.
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Yes, you're spot on there. Excellent point about Yoda as well. And it's notable that the prequels don't do the thing that Star Wars does of drawing on all the different genres of cinema--there isn't an equivalent of the Western moment in the Mos Eisley cantina. They're entirely based in their own iconography. I think that's why they feel so familiar and so different at the same time.
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(The comment has been removed)
it's all sort of the pictures in Lucas's brain, which must be lovely but don't have that cultural resonance
Actually, I think what's interesting is that some of them almost do. The shape of a star destroyer, the scream of a TIE-fighter, the hum of a lightsaber, that sort of thing. I will admit to a feeling a little thrill when someone said "Lock S-foils in attack position"! And it's not like Lucas isn't stealing liberally (even sometimes offensively) from other cultures, present and past, in creating his world. It's more that it doesn't give anything back in the presentation of them. It's far more concerned with resonances within its own story than with resonances elsewhere in art or history.
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Vader's first breath got a barely audible ripple through the audience.
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