“Space, the final frontier.”
That’s what many people spent their childhood watching as Captain James Tiberius Kirk and his second-in-command, Commander Spock, travelled throughout various parts of space and coming across different alien species.
However, this was not how I spent my childhood, instead with big, bold yellow letters running down my screen, giving me a summary of the stories passed and what’s to come.
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”
Rather than watch the crew of the USS Enterprise deal with their weekly issues, I enjoyed watching the Skywalkers and the crew of the Millennium Falcon face the greatest enemy in the universe, the Sith.
The “Star Wars” franchise is one of the largest and most iconic in history, spanning across nine films, three television shows and an almost infinite number of video games from the first film in 1977 to the present.
The original trilogy was one of the most innovative film franchises of its time thanks to its original and unique storyline of an evil organization moving to conquer all of the planets and rule the galaxy (very European colonization style).
But the original franchise films delivered one of the biggest and most notorious twists in cinematic history and is referenced numerous times throughout other movies and TV shows today.
Thanks to a revitalization in the mid ‘90s of the original trilogy due to Dark Horse’s comic books based on the movies, George Lucas (the creator of Star Wars) saw that audiences were still in love with the movies and decided to give the world the prequel trilogy, according to an interview Lucas had with Michael Kaminski.
Now granted, the prequel trilogy does not live up to the original films, but they serve an alternative purpose that is just as nice: it gives the newer generation their own “Star Wars” storyline.
The third prequel, “Revenge of the Sith,” gave the generation a “Star Wars” film with some stunning special effects and great character development, making it the “Empire Strikes Back” of the prequels.
The films and cartoon shows were fun to watch and this generation can now rest easy knowing we have our own franchise.
Even the younger generation can look forward to getting their own trilogy, as “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” opens in December and will be followed by two more films in 2017 and 2019.
The “Star Wars” franchise as a whole is a bigger and more important one than “Star Trek,” because not only has it had a bigger impact on the film audience as a whole, but because they’ve also had new entries into the universe for each generation.
Granted, “Star Trek” does currently have a rebooted film franchise at the moment, however it came after my generation’s childhood, acting as a new franchise that the current young generation will remember from when they were kids.
The tagline for the new film is even “Every Generation Has a Story,” reaffirming the point that there will always be new stories to tell in the years coming for future generations.
