Clearly, Star Wars is a grand, galaxy-spanning mythological epic. Except no, wait, it’s a family-sized fairy tale in the land of far, far away. Unless it’s a Samurai story, or possibly a World War II-style action adventure.
Since the first film in 1977, fans and critics have contorted themselves in all sorts of directions explaining the appeal of Star Wars by reference to a dozen different genres. No one is more adept at this than George Lucas, who variously compared it to a Spaghetti Western, Sword and Sorcery, 2001, Lawrence of Arabia, Captain Blood, and the entire James Bond franchise—and that was all before the original movie was even filmed. Navigate past this asteroid field of influences, and what you find at the center of Star Wars is a simple, whimsical subgenre: space fantasy.
Space fantasy is to its parent genre, science fiction, as Luke Skywalker is to Darth Vader. George Lucas came closer to science fiction with his first movie THX 1138, and then abandoned it as too real, too dismal, too unpopular at the box office. Science fiction projects an image of the future through the lens of the present. The focus is on technology and its implications. There is some effort to adhere to the physical laws of the universe. It is fiction about science, whereas space fantasy is, well, fantasy set in space.* Science fiction echoes our world; space fantasy transcends our world. It is nostalgic and romantic, and more freely adventurous, and it takes technology as a mere starting point. It casts aside the laws of physics in favor of fun. “I was afraid science fiction buffs would say things like ‘you know there’s no sound in space,’” Lucas said in 1977. “I just wanted to forget science.” In space, everyone can hear you go pew pew.
This great divide in speculative fiction, the possible versus the merely enjoyable, goes back to the fin de siècle rivalry between French science fiction pioneer Jules Verne and his upstart English contemporary, H. G. Wells. Verne was avowedly no scientist, but he wanted to be scientifically plausible. In From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Verne sends his lunar explorers off in a capsule shot out of a giant cannon; he includes pages of precise calculations in a brave attempt to prove that such a thing were possible.* Wells, like Lucas, was always much more interested in the workings of society and the individual than in the mechanics of science. When he got around to writing his own protagonist lunar novel, The First Men in the Moon (1901), Wells had his scientist declare that he’d never heard of Verne’s book. He proceeds to discover an antigravity substance called “Cavorite” that simply floats his capsule, with him and a visiting businessman in it, moonwards. Verne sweated the details so much that his adventures didn’t get to the moon until a sequel novel; Wells wanted to ship his heroes there as fast as possible so they could explore a fanciful lunar civilization he had invented. (This irked Verne to the point that he made a mocking and rather point-missing demand of Wells: I can show you gunpowder; show me the Cavorite!) When Lucas decided to make his version of outer space noisy with laser fire and screeching jets, he was establishing himself in the Wellsian tradition.†
They were at odds over means, but what united Verne and Wells was a crying need to expand the landscape of the human imagination. Myths, as Lucas once observed, are invariably set in “that place just over the hill”—the next frontier, real enough to excite interest but unexplored enough to be mysterious: distant Greek islands in the classical age, the dark forest in medieval fairy tales, the Americas in the wake of Columbus. By the twentieth century, with most of the planet explored, space became the last remaining place just over the hill. And one corner of space in particular fascinated authors and readers, and solidified the lineage that led to Star Wars: Mars.
The Mars craze spread steadily after an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, famously spotted channels (canali) on the Red Planet in 1877. British and American newspapers, not understanding or caring much about the difference between canali and canals, loved to print large, illustrated, speculative features on Martian civilization, especially after amateur astronomer Percival Lowell wrote a trilogy of “nonfiction” books detailing what that civilization might look like. Writers with no scientific background started to pen novels of Martian exploration. Their methods of reaching the Red Planet varied wildly. In Across the Zodiac (1880), English journalist Percy Greg sends his explorers off in an antigravity rocket called the Astronaut (he coined the term). Gustavus Pope, a Washington, DC, doctor whose previous book had tackled Shakespeare, wrote Journey to Mars in 1894. In it, an American naval lieutenant encounters Martians on a small island near the South Pole; eventually they take him back to their planet in an antigravity “ethervolt car.” (Wells, meanwhile, confounded genres by having his Martian invaders in the 1897 classic War of the Worlds arrive via capsules shot from Martian cannons—Verne in reverse.)
But where Mars first met space fantasy was in a book that is the unlikely great-granddaddy of Star Wars. An English writer and son of a newspaper baron, Edwin Lester Arnold, decided to cast aside spacecraft altogether; in Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905), he takes another fictional US Navy lieutenant and packs him off to Mars on a magical Persian carpet. Arnold’s Mars is surprisingly medieval. The people of Hither, indolent and soaked in a strong wine, are beset by the barbarous hordes of Thither. The Hitherites have a slave class, a king, and a beautiful princess. When the princess is taken in tribute to Thither, Jones sets off on a planet-wide journey to free her. He is an oddly unappealing protagonist, prone to long speeches: too smug to be a hero, too upright to be an antihero. He carves “USA” into the side of a mountain during his journey. Arnold seemed torn between adventure story and anti-American satire, and the novel was a flop. Dismayed, he quit writing. (It would not be published in the United States until 1964.)
Arnold’s idea of a fantasy Mars was rescued five years after he wrote it by an unlikely savior: a thirty-five-year-old manager of pencil sharpener salesmen in Chicago. The pencil guy had a lot of time on his hands, a lot of stationery in the office, and a desire for greatness that wouldn’t quit. He read pulp fiction magazines, and noting that most of their stories were “rot,” he tried his hand at one. Like Arnold’s tale, it is narrated by an American officer who is magically transported to Mars—this time in the blink of an eye, by sheer willpower. No Cavorite, no carpets, just a man “drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space.” Like Jones, the pencil guy’s protagonist meets outlandish humanlike characters and apemen, and fights heroically for the hand of a princess. The pencil guy thought his story childish and ridiculous. He asked for it to be published under a pen name intended to telegraph his sanity: Normal Bean. His real name he thought unsuitable for an author. It was Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The serial that became A Princess of Mars was first published in February 1912 in a monthly pulp magazine called the All-Story. It was a runaway success. Captain John Carter, Burroughs’s larger-than-life hero (and fictional uncle), found a following that Gullivar Jones could only dream of. No confused satire, this; in Burroughs’s book, lines of good and evil are clearly drawn. Carter is less wordy—there’s not a line of dialogue in the first third of the book—and more consistently placed in peril than Jones. From chapter one, when he is attacked by (of all people) Native Americans in Arizona, Carter is beset by spears, swords, rifles, and claws. The lesser gravity of Mars (which Burroughs dubs “Barsoom”) gives Carter just enough of an advantage in strength to help him overcome these considerable odds. He can leap buildings in a single bound. As well as kicking the space fantasy genre into high gear, Carter has a good claim on being the first superhero: he’s the progenitor of both Superman and Luke Skywalker.
Burroughs bought a ranch called Tarzana in present-day LA, quit the pencil job, and churned out three more serialized sequels—plus the story he named for his new home, Tarzan of the Apes—before Princess of Mars even made it to publication in book form. Over the rest of a productive, affluent lifetime, Burroughs would return to Barsoom in eleven more books. Barsoom is a fascinating planet, and unprecedented in its mixing of past and future concepts. It is a dying and largely barbaric world, but an atmosphere factory keeps it breathing. It has military flying machines, radium pistols, telepathy, domed cities, and medicine that makes lifespans a thousand years long, but it also offers plenty of sword play, courtly codes of honor, a medieval bestiary of creatures, and a succession of chieftains carrying lances on their steeds. The exotic desert setting is straight out of One Thousand and One Nights.
Barsoom stories follow a trusty formula. Escapes, rescues, duels, and wars are the main attraction, but in between them Burroughs reveals aspects of this curious world with the confidence of a good travel writer. Territories are clearly delineated. Green Tharks are largely barbaric nomads; the red inhabitants of Helium are rational aristocrats. In his second book, Gods of Mars, we find blond-haired, white-skinned Barsoomians who are evil, decadent murderers, preying on the planet’s inhabitants with the false promise of heaven.
Burroughs was modest and careful to say he was only writing for the money. But that’s an understatement. Read him today, and you can easily get infected by the same powerful, pure, childlike enjoyment that enveloped the author as he wrote. Barsoom offers morally clear heroics with as much mythological depth as you care to invest in its mysteries. The thrill of exploration and the wonderment of a world that is able to cause us to suspend our disbelief are rendered with the same spirit Lucas would later describe in his movies as “effervescent giddiness.” You can find this spirit in the work of artists as diverse as J. R. R. Tolkien and Stan Lee: ideal for the adolescent mindset, yes, but accessible to all and capable of greatness. Arthur Conan Doyle’s epigraph to The Lost World (1912) would explain this principle so well that it would also later grace the press materials for the original Star Wars:
I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man
Or the man who’s half a boy.
That statement was wrong in one respect: it turned out early on that women and girls liked this stuff too. Dejah Thoris, John Carter’s Barsoomian wife, who has his eggs (how that’s possible, we don’t know, except to reiterate: it’s space fantasy) is hardly an empowered heroine by twenty-first-century standards (Carter has to rescue her from implied rape dozens of times in eleven books). But the eponymous princess of the first book is a scientist, an explorer, a negotiator; her famously bosom-filled portraits by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta in the 1960s turned her into a sexual icon, but they barely did her justice. By the standards of her day, Dejah Thoris was a suffragette. Princess Leia has a long line of antecedents, and they go back to Dejah.
Burroughs published his last Barsoom stories in 1943, and the last in a similar Venus series in 1942, eight years before he died. By then, the genre was variously known as space fantasy, space opera, planetary romance, and sword-and-planet, and had been taken over by Burroughs’s many successors. Most memorable was his fellow Angelino Leigh Brackett, later known as the queen of space opera. She burst out of nowhere in 1940, at age twenty-five, selling an astonishing streak of twenty-six stories to pulp magazines in four years. All were set in what became known as the Brackett solar system. Her conception of each planet was fairly derivative—her Mars and Venus looked a lot like Burroughs’s—but where Brackett excelled was in describing the interplanetary conflict between them. The scope had expanded, from Mars wars to solar wars. Brackett’s scope was expanding too, and she started working on Hollywood screenplays such as The Big Sleep. She was unable to bring her two careers together until 1978, when she was named the writer of the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back.
Brackett’s husband, Edmond Hamilton, would also contribute to Star Wars, albeit in a more nebulous fashion. His 1933 story in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, “Kaldar, Planet of Antares,” contains this groundbreaking description of a weapon wielded by its hero—a saber made of light:
The sword seemed at first glance a simple long rapier of metal. But he found that when his grip tightened on the hilt it pressed a catch which released a terrific force stored in the hilt into the blade, making it shine with light. When anything was touched by this shining blade, he found, the force of the blade annihilated it instantly.
He learned that the weapon was called a lightsword.
Hamilton’s story was reprinted in paperback in 1965, eight years before a young filmmaker named George Lucas would begin to devour every pulp science fiction story he could get his hands on.
Alongside Burroughs, the pulp magazines that published Hamilton, Brackett, and their ilk were, in many ways, the other grandparents of Star Wars. Two of the most important stories in the prehistory of the franchise both appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. The cover showed a man with a jetpack. He was the star of “Skylark of Space,” a story written by E. E. “Doc” Smith, a food chemist who wrote fiction as a hobby when he wasn’t trying to engineer the perfect doughnut. Smith had Burroughs’s fizzing enthusiasm plus the desire to go farther in space. His heroes pilot a spaceship powered by “element X”—Cavorite on steroids—which shoots them out of the solar system and into the stars for the first time in fictional history. They bounce from planet to planet as if out for a day trip in a jalopy; a planet-wide war causes them less trouble than the double wedding and medal ceremony that follows. All the speed, romance and humor of Star Wars are in “Skylark.” Smith would go on to write the Lensman stories—tales of mystical interstellar knights that would influence Lucas’s concept of the Jedi. Smith expanded the scope of conflict to our entire galaxy.
That issue of Amazing Stories was even more important for another story, “Armageddon 2419 AD.” The name of its hero, who is accidentally gassed to sleep in the twentieth century and wakes up in the twenty-fifth, was Anthony Rogers. He wasn’t given his now-legendary nickname until his creator, the newspaper columnist Philip Nowlan, approached a national comic strip syndicate about doing a regular strip based on the character. Well, said the syndicate, “Anthony Rogers” sounded too stiff for the funny pages. How about something a bit more cowboy-like—say, Buck?
Buck Rogers is, essentially, John Carter in the future: a plucky, heroic fish out of water. But simply being five centuries old grants him no superpowers. And that provides an opening for his version of Dejah Thoris, Wilma Deering. Wilma is a soldier, like all American women of the twenty-fifth century, in which North America has been invaded by Mongol hordes. She is more intelligent and adept than Buck. In one early strip, she is shown fashioning a radio from a pile of electronic parts, to Buck’s amazement. Captured and forced to wear a dress by the Mongol emperor, she exclaims, “What is this, a musical comedy?” What a difference suffrage had made.
Buck endures and evolves. After a few years, the Mongols are replaced as enemies by the traitor Killer Kane. Buck and Wilma are given a rocket ship and head for space—the first time this frontier had been portrayed in the comics. The strip took on new scope with Martian pirates, Saturnian royals, and interstellar monsters. In 1932, Buck Rogers became a CBS radio series, broadcast four times a week. This time, the Mongol plot was erased altogether, and Buck is simply resuscitated from five centuries of sleep by the Space Corps.
Other comic syndicates couldn’t help but notice Buck Rogers’s lucrative cross-media success. At King Features, owned by the world’s leading newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, artists were told the company was looking for a Buck Rogers rival. A young artist named Alex Raymond answered the call. His contribution to the space fantasy genre would lead directly, in time, to Star Wars. Like Lucas in later years, Raymond had to rework his idea several times, but when he got it right, its popularity exploded overnight. Once again, a derivative retread of the space fantasy idea would go further and faster than the original.
Buck Rogers was about to meet his match in Flash Gordon.
Flash Gordon was so vital to Star Wars, and such a sensation among Lucas’s generation, that it’s surprising to find there is little scholarship about the character. The comic strip and the movie serials it spawned formed a vital bridge between literary and visual space fantasy, but if Flash is known at all to most modern Star Wars fans, it is in his campy 1980 movie incarnation. Flash is unfashionable, for many good reasons, yet he deserves greater recognition. He was, after all, the first man to conquer the universe.
Flash debuted on January 7, 1934, five years to the day after Buck Rogers, and determined to go his rival one better in every area. Buck was a black-and-white daily; Flash was a color Sunday strip. Buck Rogers built slowly; Raymond raised the stakes right from his first panel. Astronomers find a strange planet rushing toward Earth (just like the one in the popular 1933 novel When Worlds Collide—this was a genre that liked to recycle plots). We meet Flash on a transcontinental plane hit by meteors from the strange planet; he saves another passenger, Dale Arden, from certain doom by bailing out with her in his arms. They land near Dr. Hans Zarkov’s observatory. At gunpoint, Zarkov forces them aboard a rocket ship he intends to crash-land on the approaching planet. There our trio is captured by Ming the Merciless, Emperor of the Universe, who apparently never intended to crash into Earth at all (or at least Raymond seems to forget about that part of the plot; his early strips have a fuzzy, dreamlike logic to them in the style of Little Nemo). Thus begin decades of adventure on the planet Mongo, with only the briefest of pit stops back on Earth during World War II.
Eight decades have now passed since his debut, and Flash has not aged well. Casual forms of racism and sexism filled the strip from the start. The second panel of the first strip shows African jungles where “tom-toms roll” and “howling blacks await their doom.” Flash is introduced as a “Yale graduate and world-renowned polo player”—1930s code, observed Roy Kinnard, coauthor of The Flash Gordon Serials, for the fact that Flash is “a WASP in good standing.” Ming the Merciless is a barely disguised Mongol warlord with a Fu Manchu mustache and yellow skin. (Ming made the strip attractive to Hearst, purveyor of stories about the “Yellow Peril.”) Dale Arden, meanwhile, is no Dejah Thoris—and certainly no Wilma Deering. We never learn Dale’s occupation. Her sole motivation is to stay by Flash’s side. “Men must adventure,” writes Raymond in an early strip, paraphrasing a nineteenth-century poem, “and women must weep.”
Despite its retrograde aspects, Flash Gordon set the gold standard for visual space fantasy. If you can make it past the early years of the strip, during which Flash spends a lot of time in his underwear wrestling various creatures Ming has set upon him, Raymond’s increasingly confident representation of Mongo and its inhabitants is your reward. He starts drawing his characters in close-up, their overwrought faces reminiscent of Norman Rockwell paintings. He becomes devoted to drafting a world, its technology and scenery: rocket ships like submarines and cityscapes that anticipate the 1939 World’s Fair, jumbled up with Arthurian towers and castles. On Mongo, as on Barsoom, science and chivalry, past and future, fairy tale and science fiction blend seamlessly.
The plots again followed a trusty formula, designed to produce a cliffhanger every week. Flash, Dale, and Zarkov are forever crashing their ships. Flash and Dale constantly declare their love without ever consummating it. They rush to rescue each other from peril. Flash sustains more concussions than an NFL player (which, as polo began to sound too snobbish, is what he would retroactively become). He tells Dale to stay behind because it’s too risky; Dale tells him her place is by his side. Queens and princesses fall for Flash everywhere he goes. Dale is always walking in on compromising scenes and “naturally misunderstanding” them. Traitors are in the midst of each court; Flash is forever being suckered by their treachery, overcoming it, and forgiving their crimes, only to have the traitor escape again. It’s space fantasy as soap opera.*
Flash is even more of a heroic cardboard cutout than John Carter or Buck Rogers. We never see him give into temptation or fail to forgive. (Only once, when Queen Fria of the frozen north of Mongo convinces him that Dale despises him, does Flash offer a willing extracurricular kiss.) One might call him Superman-like; the superhero arrived on the scene two years later, and Superman’s early artists were clearly influenced by Raymond. But at least Superman spends half his life in his bumbling reporter guise, Clark Kent. The only time we see Flash’s vulnerability is when he is unconscious. Still, that same relentless heroism that tends to make Flash boring to a modern adult audience still endears him to children—and it certainly endeared him to the adults of the late 1930s, a time when both relentless heroism and escapism became urgently necessary.
Flash Gordon quickly eclipsed Buck Rogers in the speed at which he crossed over into other media. A Flash Gordon radio series debuted a year after the strip, running for thirty-six episodes and staying faithful to Raymond’s story throughout. A pulp magazine—Flash Gordon Strange Adventure—arrived the following year. Universal Pictures hastily acquired the movie serial rights for $10,000, and production began in 1936 on the first Flash Gordon serial: thirteen twenty-minute episodes with a budget of $350,000. (That would be $6 million in today’s dollars). This was a record for a serial and more than the budget for a major feature film at the time. It wrapped in two months, shooting an incredible eighty-five scenes a day.
The star of the Flash Gordon film serial, Larry “Buster” Crabbe, a former Olympic swimmer, was himself a huge fan of the comic strip before taking the role. “When I went home in the evening I’d pick up the paper and find out what old Flash had gotten himself into with Ming,” Crabbe recalled years later. Hearing about a casting call for the serial at Universal, where he had friends at the casting office, he went along out of curiosity: Who could possibly portray this hero? Crabbe himself, it turned out, once the casting office talked him into dying his hair blond. No expense was spared on the costumes, made to match the colors of the Raymond strip—even though the serial was shot in black and white. (Just digest that for a second. It was a different age.)
When Flash Gordon debuted, the film serial—like the comic strip—was an immediate sensation. First-run movie houses, which normally didn’t screen serials at all, showed Flash as their main evening feature. The serial boasted state-of-the-art effects: two-foot miniature wooden rocket ships with copper fins, matte paintings, and split-screen shots that allowed Flash to fight a giant lizard. The city of the Hawkmen floated in billowing clouds of white smoke. The serial also offered some of the more revealing costumes yet seen on screen, particularly the Dejah Thoris–like outfit of Ming’s lustful daughter and Flash’s eventual ally, Princess Aura. The Hays Office, which enforced a set of moral standards agreed on by the studios in the hopes of heading off government censorship of the motion picture business, made its displeasure known. In future serials, Aura and Dale would look positively demure, while Flash would stop stripping to his shorts.
A second serial, Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, followed in 1938, based on another Raymond storyline. Film historians have often assumed the setting was changed from Mongo to Mars to cash in on Orson Welles’s sensational radio broadcast of War of the Worlds that year. But the timing doesn’t add up: the serial was released in March, while Welles’s fear-inducing play was a Halloween performance. Mars continued to excite the popular imagination no matter the month. Besides, Buck Rogers had been there, and anything Buck could do, Flash could do better.
That said, Trip to Mars is probably the weakest of the Flash Gordon serials. It adds comic relief in the hapless form of Happy Hapgood, a photojournalist who tags along for the rocket ship ride. The serial is most notable for the Martian enemies of Ming, the Clay People, who are eerie shapeshifters able to fade into cavern walls.
In 1939 came a Buck Rogers serial that cemented the relative position of the two franchises: it had a smaller budget and used Flash Gordon’s hand-me-downs. Also made by Universal, also starring Crabbe (with his natural hair this time), it reused Flash’s Martian sets and costumes. These days, serial fans consider it pretty much a fourth Flash Gordon. Somewhere in the home for retired space fantasy characters, Buck and Wilma must be livid.
Finally in 1940 came Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. The slowest-moving and most cheaply made of all the Flash Gordon serials, it was also the most mature. Of course, mature is a relative term in a story that opens with Ming’s rocket ships seeding “Purple Death dust” in Earth’s atmosphere. But Ming, now dressed in the regalia of a European royal, was no longer the Fu Manchu stereotype; he was a stand-in for the real-life tyrant conquering Europe while the cameras rolled. Mongo’s dissidents, we discover, have been locked up in concentration camps. Drunk on his own mad ambition, Ming has gone beyond declaring himself Emperor of the Universe; he now claims to be the universe. Thus, from the last line of the serial came its title, as Zarkov radios the outcome of their titanic struggle to Earth: “Flash Gordon conquers the Universe.”
Plans were laid for a fourth Flash Gordon, but World War II intruded. Production stopped on all serials, and the format fell out of vogue when peacetime resumed. Alex Raymond had quit the comic strip to join the Marines; when he returned he focused on other cartoonish heroes, such as Jungle Jim and Rip Kirby. Flash Gordon, continued under the stewardship of artists Austin Briggs and Mac Raboy, was to outlast them all—including his creator. Raymond’s life ended prematurely and tragically, thanks to his love of fast cars. Unhappy in his marriage, with his wife refusing to grant him a divorce so he could marry his mistress, Raymond reportedly managed to get involved in four automobile accidents in one month in 1956. The last one killed him. Raymond was forty-seven.
As he met his end, Raymond had no idea that his most famous creation was reverberating around the head of a twelve-year-old boy in the unassuming town of Modesto, California. The boy also had a passion for fast cars and was just six years away from his own fateful appointment with an automobile accident. The flaming torch of space fantasy was about to be handed down to another generation—and this time, it would set the world alight.
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* Arguably, every movie Lucas ever made or had a strong hand in producing was some kind of fantasy or fantasia. American Graffiti was the latter; the genre he once offered for THX was “documentary fantasy.”
* Brave, but ultimately mistaken. It is not possible to shoot yourself to the moon via cannon. Do not try this at home.
† This Verne-Wells split can be seen in the earliest short, silent science fiction movies, too. This time the divide was the Atlantic rather than the Channel. Georges Melies made A Trip to the Moon in 1902, shooting his explorers in a cannon. Thomas Edison made A Trip to Mars in 1910, in which a scientist covers himself in antigravity dust and floats to the Red Planet.
* The term “space opera” entered the language in 1941, used as a pejorative by snooty science fiction writers. Later, Brian Aldiss would reclaim the term in his seminal 1974 anthology Space Opera—just as George Lucas was constructing a space opera of his own.