Cultural impact of Star Wars

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Star Wars began in 1977 as a single film by George Lucas. Within months, Fox's stock price jumped from $6 to $25 per share. A studio close to bankruptcy suddenly had cash to buy the Aspen ski resort and the Pebble Beach golf courses. How does one film move a company's balance sheet that fast, and keep moving culture for decades afterward? Its vocabulary slipped into ordinary English, turning up in courtrooms, election ads, and NASA news releases. New religions formed around its ideas. A president invoked its characters during a public policy debate. What started as a screenplay would reach judges, astronauts, and animators alike. This program follows that reach outward from the movie theater.

• 2. A Common Tongue

  ›

  Darth Vader became the villain most people picture first, whether or not they've seen the films. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2 are recognized by name across much of the world. Phrases like evil empire, May the Force be with you, Jedi mind trick, I am your father, and clanker need no explanation in casual conversation. The original film pulled in an unusually broad audience, enjoyed by people who otherwise had little in common at the theater.

  Countless science fiction films and shows now carry visible fingerprints of the original trilogy. That influence extends to the prequels, sequels, spin-offs, series, games, and books it spawned. Sound design, visual style, and the film's score became fixtures within American culture in their own right. This success helped ignite a science fiction boom across the late 1970s and early 1980s, turning the genre into a reliable blockbuster category.

  Steve Oedekerk's short parody Thumb Wars turned the franchise's reach into a running joke rather than a threat to take seriously. Being spoofed became a mark of cultural reach, not an insult. The money that reach generated flowed somewhere specific: back into the studio that had first taken the gamble on Lucas's screenplay.

• 3. Rescuing 20th Century Fox

  ›

  20th Century Fox optioned Star Wars for theatrical release without expecting much from it. The film earned over $100 million in its first three months, catching Fox off guard. The studio still declared excess profits in 1977, even after its new spending. Money kept arriving well past opening weekend: re-releases, sequels, and merchandising added income across the following decades. Fox turned into a thriving media conglomerate on the strength of a script by George Lucas. That windfall proved to Hollywood that a single film could remake a studio's fortunes overnight, a lesson the rest of the industry was about to learn firsthand.

• 4. Redrawing Hollywood's Blueprint

  ›

  Before Star Wars, special effects in film had not meaningfully advanced since the 1950s. Star Wars pushed the industry toward computer-generated imagery, a shift few effects teams had attempted at that scale. Its commercial success triggered a boom in state-of-the-art special effects work through the late 1970s, drawing new investment into the field. Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Productions were founded specifically to meet that demand.

  Star Wars also pioneered genre pastiche, blending several classic film genres into a single story. Here, science fiction combined with the Western, the war film, and a quasi-mystical epic in one script. Alongside Jaws, it established the modern summer blockbuster, where films open across many screens at once and franchise potential drives the business. It also set the template for the modern film trilogy, and proved that merchandising rights could out earn the movie itself.

  Joseph Campbell's concept of the monomyth, the hero's journey popularized in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is often used to explain the film's pull. Star Wars followed many of these mythic and archetypal patterns closely, which helped make it broadly accessible to audiences unfamiliar with science fiction. These structures existed long before the film's release, but its success renewed interest in mythic storytelling frameworks across screenwriting.

  A 2017 episode of The CW series Legends of Tomorrow, titled Raiders of the Lost Art, built its plot around Lucas's films affecting the show's own heroes. That premise, of Star Wars reaching into a story that isn't really about Star Wars at all, turns out to describe a whole category of screen tributes still to come.

• 5. Parodies, Tributes and Send-Ups

  ›

  A 24-minute mockumentary called Return of the Ewok appeared in 1982, built around Warwick Davis's decision to play Wicket in Return of the Jedi. R2-D2: Beneath the Dome followed in 2002, a 20-minute mockumentary made as a side project by crew from Attack of the Clones. It aired on television in three installments before its release on DVD.

  Mayored to the Mob, a 1998 episode of The Simpsons, built a plot around Homer Simpson and actor Mark Hamill facing a stampede at a fan convention. The Force Awakens from Its Nap, a 2021 short built around Maggie Simpson, marked Star Wars Day with its own parody. Plusaversary, also from 2021, celebrated Disney+ Day by mixing Simpsons characters with other Disney-owned properties, Star Wars included. Rogue Not Quite One followed in 2023, another Maggie Simpson short timed to Star Wars Day. May the 12th Be with You arrived in 2024, combining Star Wars Day with Mother's Day in one short.

  Robot Chicken produced three television specials spoofing the saga, titled Robot Chicken: Star Wars, Episode II, and Episode III. Their popularity led to an animated parody series, Star Wars Detours. Family Guy answered with its own trilogy, known collectively as Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: Blue Harvest, Something Something Something Dark Side, and It's a Trap. Blue Harvest opened the sixth season in September 2007, timed to the saga's 30th anniversary. Something Something Something Dark Side parodied The Empire Strikes Back, and It's a Trap took on Return of the Jedi. The first two specials were released direct-to-video on the 22nd of December 2009 and the 21st of December 2010. They later aired on Fox on the 23rd of May 2010, as season eight, episode 20. The second aired on the 22nd of May 2011, as season nine, episode 18.

  Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars, also called Episode IV: May the Ferb Be with You, aired in mid-2014, shortly after Disney's acquisition of the franchise. Rick and Morty closed its fourth season with Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri, which premiered on the 31st of May 2020. The sixth-season finale, Ricktional Mortpoon's Rickmas Mortcation, worked in its own jabs, including Morty dropping a lightsaber perfectly vertical and a president lashing out at Disney's new projects.

  Hardware Wars, a 13-minute spoof from 1978, is the parody George Lucas has named as his personal favorite. Director Rian Johnson paid tribute to it in The Last Jedi with a brief shot of a robotic steam iron framed to look like a landing spaceship. Mel Brooks parodied the first film outright in Spaceballs, a feature that used special effects supplied by Lucas's own Industrial Light & Magic.

  Kevin Smith has returned to Star Wars across several of his own films and shows. Clerks builds a scene around the ethics of destroying the two Death Stars, a debate Lucas later addressed directly in his commentary track for Attack of the Clones. In the premiere of Clerks: The Animated Series, Randal Graves cross-examines George Lucas about plot holes in Phantom Menace and demands a refund. After succeeding, he does the same to Steven Spielberg, Joel Schumacher, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee. In Zack and Miri Make a Porno, from 2008, Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks's characters plan to shoot a Star Wars-themed film called Star Whores before switching to a coffee house theme instead. Studio Creations reimagined Smith's own characters as stormtroopers for the parody Trooper Clerks. It sends Dante Hicks and Randall Graves to the first Death Star and the planet Tatooine. There, the two argue over whether Mallrats or Chasing Amy has the better story.

  Mad magazine ran its own spoof, Star Roars, in January 1978, dressing mascot Alfred E. Neuman in a Darth Vader helmet. Pinky and the Brain contributed Star Warners, and Fanboys built an entire film around friends anticipating the release of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.

  Lucasfilm and outside studios have also produced straightforward documentaries about how the films were made. These include The Making of Star Wars, SP FX: The Empire Strikes Back, and Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi. Others are From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga and Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy. Star Wars Tech, Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed, and Science of Star Wars round out the list. Fans have made their own versions too, among them Elstree 1976, I Am Your Father, and The People vs. George Lucas. Plastic Galaxy and The Prequels Strike Back: A Fan's Journey round out the fan-made side.

  Ninjago, an animated series built around a line of LEGO products, carries the fingerprints of co-creator Tommy Andreason's own admiration for Star Wars. In the episode Day of the Great Devourer, a character replies with Han Solo's own line, never tell me the odds. In Darkness Shall Rise, master Wu says outright that he fears a great disturbance in the force. In Child's Play, the protagonists defeat a creature with Illuma Swords, weapons closely resembling lightsabers. These swords return later in The Day Ninjago Stood Still and The Corridor of Elders. The special episode Day of the Departed centers on a portal called the Rift of Return, which opens once every 3,721 years. That number nods to C-3PO's line in The Empire Strikes Back, giving 3,720-to-1 odds against navigating an asteroid field. Ninjago's Lloyd and Garmadon mirror Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, with the Overlord standing in for the Emperor. In the Crystalized season, the Overlord tortures Lloyd with electricity and says, "All that has happened was by my design." The line echoes the Emperor's own words: "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design."

  Oggy and the Cockroaches: The Movie, directed and written by Olivier Jean-Marie, folds in a CGI segment called Oggy-Wan Kenoggy. It is based on Xilam's series, formerly Gaumont's, created by Jean-Yves Raimbaud. Oggy plays the Obi-Wan role, Bob stands in for Darth Vader, and Jack takes on Han Solo. The 1980 kaiju film Gamera: Super Monster gave its own spacecraft a first appearance nearly identical to the Star Destroyer. The 1987 Star Wars video game adaptation returned the favor with a character based on Gamera's own adversary, Gyaos.

  That same appetite for borrowing Star Wars imagery would soon show up somewhere less expected: inside video game worlds built for entirely different stories.

• 6. Digital Playgrounds

  ›

  The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, from 2006, hides Anakin's charred body as a nod to Revenge of the Sith, discoverable through the game's first portal. Its 2025 remaster kept the reference intact. Soulcalibur IV, a fighting game from 2008, made Darth Vader, Yoda, and Starkiller into playable characters. Team Fortress 2 added a lightsaber in October 2015, reskinned as a bat for the Scout class. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 cast Darth Maul as a guest skater.

  Fallout New Vegas hides the burnt bodies of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru in the town of Nipton. Players with the Wild Wasteland trait can find two skeletons bearing their names outside a burned home. The Sims 4: Journey to Batuu, an expansion released in September 2020, let players meet Kylo Ren and Rey and join the Rebels, the Empire, or the Scoundrels. Fall Guys teamed up with Star Wars for a May 4 promotion, dressing players as Boba Fett, Han Solo, and other characters. Goat Simulator 3, from 2022, hides a two-sided lightsaber inside its world. Players unlock it by playing the Imperial March on a set of church bells, which opens a mausoleum holding a six-bladed lightsaber.

  Every one of those references stayed earthbound. The next place Star Wars turned up was considerably higher.

• 7. From Screen to Orbit

  ›

  The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum once hosted an exhibition called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth, built around original production models, props, costumes, and characters from the first three films.

  NASA sent an original lightsaber prop into orbit aboard a Space Shuttle in October 2007, the same handle used as Luke Skywalker's weapon in Return of the Jedi. After two weeks circling the planet, it returned to Earth on the 7th of November 2007 and went back to its owner, George Lucas.

  SpaceX named its first successfully launched rocket the Falcon 1, a choice Elon Musk made in reference to the Millennium Falcon. That rocket's success led to an entire Falcon family of vehicles. The Falcon 1 itself has since retired in favor of the Falcon 9.

  The DART mission's companion spacecraft, LICIACube, carries two optical cameras named LUKE and LEIA. Naming a spacecraft camera after Luke and Leia is a quiet joke between engineers. Elsewhere, Star Wars's name got attached to something with far higher stakes, on the floor of national governments.

• 8. Politics, Faith and Everyday Life

  ›

  When Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, a system of lasers and missiles meant to intercept incoming ICBMs, critics quickly nicknamed it Star Wars. Historian Frances FitzGerald has said the label annoyed Reagan. Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle told colleagues the name "was not so bad." His reasoning: "It's a good movie. Besides, the good guys won." The comparison gained more traction once Reagan later applied the franchise's own villain-nation label to the Soviet Union.

  Public interest groups used the Star Wars nickname in television commercials to mock the SDI program, and supporters eventually adopted the same nickname themselves. Lucasfilm sued to stop that usage of its trademark and lost. The court's ruling read in part: "plaintiff has no rights as owner of the mark to prevent this use of STAR WARS.... Since Jonathan Swift's time, creators of fictional worlds have seen their vocabulary for fantasy appropriated to describe reality. Trademark laws regulate unfair competition, not the parallel development of new dictionary meanings in the everyday give and take of human discourse."

  Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives celebrated her win in the 1979 United Kingdom general election, held on the 3rd of May, with a newspaper ad reading, "May the Fourth Be with You Maggie. Congratulations." On the 4th of May 1995, during a defence debate in the UK parliament, MP Harry Cohen worked the same joke into the record, telling colleagues, "May 4 be with you."

  CNN borrowed the franchise's holographic video effect for its 2008 Election Night coverage. Reporter Jessica Yellin and musician will.i.am appeared to stand face to face with hosts Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer inside the network's New York studios. In reality, Yellin and will.i.am were in Chicago at Barack Obama's rally. Thirty-five HD cameras filmed them inside a special tent, in front of a blue screen.

  On the 1st of March 2013, President Obama addressed the sequestration debate and joked that some people expected him to perform a "Jedi mind meld" on Republicans who refused to negotiate.

  The Internet Party of Ukraine tried to nominate a candidate legally named Darth Vader for president in the 2014 election. His registration was refused because his identity could not be verified. A man named Darth Vader ran for mayor of both Kyiv and Odesa on the 25th of May 2014, for the same party. That year's Ukrainian parliamentary election saw the party field Darth Vader alongside candidates named Chewbacca, Padmé Amidala, and Yoda. The party still managed only 0.36% of the vote, short of the 5% threshold, and won no constituency seat. During Ukraine's decommunization process in 2015, a statue of Vladimir Lenin at the Pressmash plant in Odesa was refashioned into a monument to Darth Vader. A Darth Vader candidate ran again for Odesa mayor in 2020, this time scoring 0.48% of the vote.

  Jediism, a real religion built on a modified version of the Jedi Code, teaches that the Force is an energy field that "surrounds us... penetrates us" and "binds the galaxy together," minus fictional elements like telekinesis. Census forms in Australia and New Zealand have recorded especially high percentages of citizens listing their religion as Jedi. A petition in Turkey seeking permission to build a Jedi Temple on a university campus drew international media coverage. In England and Wales, 390,127 people, almost 0.8% of the population, listed their religion as Jedi on the 2001 census. That was enough to surpass Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism, ranking Jedi as the fourth largest reported religion in the country.

  Museums in Japan, Singapore, Scotland, and England hosted an exhibit called Art of Star Wars between 2002 and 2004, tracing how the original trilogy was made. In 2013, Star Wars became the first major motion picture translated into the Navajo language. Professional sports teams across the United States and Canada now hold regular Star Wars-themed promotional nights. In 2015, Star Wars-themed Major League Baseball games drew higher average attendance than typical games. Minor league teams often wear Star Wars-inspired uniforms for these nights, and opposing lineups are sometimes introduced to The Imperial March over the public address system. Organizations including Ludosport now teach lightsaber combat as a competitive sport, using life-size plastic replica weapons that emit lights and sounds.

  At the 2012 Emerald City Comicon in Seattle, six voice actors performed a parody radio-play reading of A New Hope. Rob Paulsen, Jess Harnell, John DiMaggio, Maurice LaMarche, Tara Strong, and Kevin Conroy each stayed in a signature character voice. Paulsen and Harnell read as Animaniacs' Yakko and Wakko, while Strong voiced the Powerpuff Girls' Bubbles and Fairly OddParents' Timmy Turner. LaMarche and DiMaggio became Futurama's Kif and Bender, and Conroy narrated the whole reading as Batman.

  After Disney acquired the franchise, it opened a themed area called Galaxy's Edge. The land opened at Disneyland in May 2019 and at Disney World that August. Both versions were built around the Millennium Falcon ride and Oga's Cantina. The phrase Star Wars bar has entered everyday English to describe a disreputable pub, a nod to the Mos Eisley Cantina scene from the original film. In 2023, a judge on the Akron Municipal Court announced he would officiate Star Wars-themed weddings on the 4th of May, complete with A New Hope playing in the background and Star Wars-inspired vows.

  Somewhere, an airline still flies a jet painted in special Star Wars livery. Its passengers may never look up to notice the reference over their heads.