LITERALLY
Watching Star Wars as a kid is LITERALLY one of many reasons I give a fuck as an adult.
I paid attention to the fucking story.
also: george lucas said as much
My favorite example of this.
Hint: George Lucas has stated in the most plain-English unambiguous terms that the empire does in fact represent US imperialism in A New Hope. It's in a director chat interview thing with with James Cameron if you feel like searching it up.
Oh boy now I can add this to my “Americans being so far gone that they don’t realize a movie about US imperialism is a movie about US imperialism”. Almost like MAGA thinking Homelander is a celebration of Trump for 3 whole seasons before realizing it may actually he the opposite.
For people that say "don't make x media political" I think that almost all media is inherently political, your making a statement about something that has real world connotations and people are going to form an opinion from it.
I was just thinking of the ex-gf who didn’t believe Star Wars was about Vietnam. I should add that to the list of reasons for the break up.
Never date a centrist. If they’re not a militant leftist, don’t bother kids. 😂
Not good thoughts, not good thoughts by the way. Thinking about the writing group I dropped because “that’s always been my thing”.
The story goes that George Lucas was supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, but the studio didn't like that he was gonna make it a 35mm black and white documentary instead of a blockbuster movie, so he said he'd make his own Vietnam war movie...with spaceships, and lasers!
I'll direct my own movie! With blackjack and hookers!
And eventually he really did.
I thought that was lady gaga on the far right
I don't think that's a George Lucas work.
I love this meme with stormtroopers, because instead of the guy in front being about to die he's in the safest possible place.
There was a bit of fan-lore I read a while back that the stormtroopers intentionally missed because Vader didn't want them to kill his kids.. really its because it would make for bad cinema if the NPCs killed the main characters 30 seconds into their first scenes...
It wasn't because of his kids, but as later explained (in expanded material) the Millenium Falcon had a tracking device installed soon after it was detained.
Otherwise, consider that the Death Star could've blown the freighter out of the sky the moment it exited the hanger with its thousands of Point Defenses.
It was pretty awesome when that Suicide Squad movie did it.
And unlike the original Star Wars film, which made the parallels to the Vietnam War paint the US in a bad light, the latest Star Wars film riffs off the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now!, but instead of presenting napalming the shit out of people as a bad thing, presents it as a good thing.
Which film?
TMAG
I had to look that up, "The Mandalorian and Grogu" is the name of the film for anyone else curious. I guess they learned all the wrong lessons from the success of The Mandalorian.
That's so true.
Glad to see a new spin on this meme format.
Too bad the stormtrooper on the right still missed.
No. It's literally just space Nazi's.
Guys... There are STORMTROOPERS in the Empire. It's not subtle lol.
george lucas has stated very plainly it was about US imperialism in vietnam
NO! THEY are the space nazis!
Space nazis of the US empire.
Just like Starship troopers are space nazis of the US empire to it's filmmaker.
Now excuse me while I cut off your hand.
Sorry, it's pretty clearly stated in this interview by Lucas.
And what exactly is the difference between Western imperialism and other kinds of imperialism?
I know your question is rhetorical, because you always, always cape for the imperial core, but: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
“Western” is inaccurate. The fascist Japanese empire was a monopoly-stage capitalist empire much like the others, and Japan is still a junior partner today’s neocolonialism, but it’s never been “Western.”
This isn’t about cultures or genetics or location on the map, but about ownership of the means of production, international power dynamics, and sovereignty. It’s about imperialism vs anti-imperialism.
One is an actual problem for the world and the other exists as a hypothetical?
So Chinese military presence in Africa is not imperialism?
Is that what imperialism means to you? Can you show me this Chinese military presence? Because it doesn't fill me with confidence that you can't get any more specific than the name of the continent.
Depending on the context, it could just be who's doing it. Star Wars was originally specifically an allegory for the Vietnam War, which was a war of Western imperialism because the two countries making it a war rather than a country gaining its independence were France (who'd conquered Vietnam as part of their empire and weren't happy that the Vietnamese didn't want to be in their empire) and the US (who wanted to stop communists gaining power anywhere), both of which are Western countries. It was about that war in particular rather than imperialism in general because that war in particular was the one that was a big deal for the target audience at the time - if Lucas had been Japanese and making the film decades earlier, maybe he'd have made it an allegory for something else, but he wasn't, so he made the film he made.
Hot take:
The Galactic Empire is portrayed as bad mainly due to it's execution of power. The Empire's ideals of order and stability don't actually seem so bad in theory. Even the Mandolorian spin-off show supports this perspective.
Whose order, stability for who? Order and stability are features of a system, not ideological beliefs. Pretty much everyone wants order and stability in the abstract, the problem is when the order is an extractive fascist police state that devastates planets and wipes out cultures so that the people perpetuating it can enjoy stability at everyone else's expense.
