![]() “Star Wars” became a new national mythos it rebooted America’s revolutionary origin story and liberty-or-death values using the tropes of science fiction. When “Star Wars: A New Hope” was released, the Vietnam War had just ended in traumatic ambiguity, Richard Nixon had resigned under the threat of impeachment, and the old American dreams didn’t fit our changed reality. Lucas’s series about interstellar superweapons became a way of talking about American power in the world. But it forever changed the way an entire generation thought about the “Star Wars” movies. Officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Star Wars weapons system never came to fruition. Years later, I was thoroughly disoriented when I found out on the news that Star Wars was no longer a movie it was a nuclear missile defense system described by Ronald Reagan as the most futuristic arsenal ever built. I got so excited as a little kid in 1977 about seeing “Star Wars: A New Hope” that I threw up outside the theater. ![]() ![]() Like a lot of Americans, I have formative memories of my first exposure to George Lucas’s epic tale of space Rebels defeating a planet-destroying Empire. ![]()
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