I sure baked a hot potato with my last post .  It's always interesting hearing everyone's perspectives and I figured I'll elaborate a little more with my perspective, and why I think stuff like Saga Journal is worthwhile.

My 11th grade English teacher was a film buff.  Ask this guy about the films of Woody Allen and he'd go on all day.  He made the argument that film *was* literature, just as much as a novel or a play.  Up until then, I thought movies were movies and books were books, and the twain didn't meet unless someone made a movie out of a book.  With that in mind, he one day taught us the chart that shows the progress of a story through seasons.  Most start in fall and end in summer.  This goes with rising action, apex or climax, falling action, etc, only with a different analogy.  Anyway, I thought to myself, "Hey, this is sort of like SW."  Using that example it made total sense.  Come to think of it, the snowy fields of Hoth are one big "look, we're in the winter part of the cycle now!"  But that got me started re-evaluating these familiar films based on stuff I learned about literature. 

In the summer of 1987, I saw an article in the paper about the famous PBS show, The Power of Myth.  The article mentioned the late Joseph Campbell drawing parallels between old myths and SW, and I thought, "Cool!"  I saw the series when it was re-broadcast in 1988 and read the book (actually a transcript) in 1991.  But the article alone got me interested in digging a little deeper with SW.  Believe it or not, I would while away time between some of my classes in college poking around the library for books, articles I'd missed while growing up, and essays that discussed SW.  The internet as it existed then wasn't available to very many people and I didn't know yet there were SW fanzines.  So that's all I had.  It was the first time I learned there were...gasp...people who hated SW and many of them did so for pretty crazy reasons.  Take the Marxist who wrote in some book of film criticism that ANH was meant to encourage American imperialism in space. I am not making that up.

For years since, I've grabbed and read anything exploring the SW saga from all kinds of angles. I think an important reason why SW resonates with so many people for so long lies within the films' subtext. Now, subtext alone isn't going to work. Taking the outline of Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces and just plugging a story into it alone isn't going to do it either. It has to be done well with memorable characters and competent filmmaking. But SW can be approached from many different ways and it's always great to see fans wake up to what else is going on besides hot Jedi and cool visual effects. And SW can be a great starting point for people who previously never appreciated literature, psychology, history, politics (not current partisan wrangling, but the general nature of politics), and so on.

That's why I think SW scholarship is worth it.