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Star Wars Pop Culture Icon

Decent Essays

American popular culture has always been a market for sales. Everything that is and has made pop culture what it is in America has been built through commercialization. The ability to sell the main product and then the countless other revenue items that go with that product define American culture. Today in the United States a person would be hard-pressed to fined a movie showing in theaters that does not have a soundtrack out, t-shirt even action figures that go along with it. So where did this idea of marketing out come from? Simple. Star Wars. Thanks to the cultural influence of George Lucas’ Star Wars there is not a director in Hollywood that doesn’t look to cash in through other forms of movie sales. In late 1975 George Lucas began …show more content…

At the time of the 1977 release, Star Wars became a new and innovative film. Seabrook is right when he said that the film was successful because of timing. Lucas had captured something new and seemingly realistic. But he himself never could have imagined the success he endured. Seabrook hints that Lucas, who once set out to make his independence, was now becoming his own powerful self. The thing he had set out for in writing Star Wars was to have freedom to write. Freedom from the big guns of Hollywood. Now Lucas himself had become one of those big guns that controlled all the money. Seabrook describes Lucas as ' 'the first of the great content robber barons ' '. He has built up his fortune and is completely content with Hollywood’s failure. In concluding, Star Wars might be the pinnacle of the film industry. It gave us our first look at the film industries use of commercialization. Never before had a movie been so big that it was selling millions of dollars a year on things such as pencils and stickers with the Star Wars name on it. It showed what a movie is capable of and how much advertising affect can have on the general public. However through its success on the big screen Star Wars according to Seabrook is just another Hollywood get rich quick scheme. George Lucas sits on an empire worth 20.1 billion dollars (Wastler) and controls a great deal of the Hollywood market. However the concern for the small directors, as he too was once, is not

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