Modesto is known the world over as the birthplace of George Lucas, but until 2013, most of the town’s residents had never seen him. Even in 1997, when the town unveiled a statue dedicated to the wildly popular coming-of-age movie that made Lucas his first fortune, the movie based on his teenage years there, American Graffiti, Lucas declined to attend. It wasn’t a snub; it was just George being George. He had more movies to produce, three kids to raise, and a world to fly around. Plus, for all his fame, Lucas has never been all that comfortable in front of an audience. “He’s a behind the scenes guy; he’s not out front,” George’s little sister Wendy, who still lives in Modesto, told the town in 2012. “People mistake that as being aloof.”
Finally, for the fortieth anniversary of Graffiti, Wendy persuaded her big brother to be the grand marshal of Modesto’s fifteenth annual classic car parade. On June 7, 2013, crowds braved the 103-degree heat that marks the height of a Modesto summer, lining the parade route three hours ahead of time. Here and there Modesto-ites chattered about the visiting VIP, trying to get his story straight. One might have expected a tall tale or two from his contemporaries, now in their late sixties, but classmates from Downey High had little to offer. “A nerd, but he was very nice,” recalled one. Another remembered Lucas reading comic books between classes. A third, MaryAnn Templeton, barely knew the slight kid who hid behind his camera at high school games. “We all called him a little dork,” she said. “Little did we know.”
Inside the air-conditioned Gallo Center for the Arts stood Lucas himself, in trademark flannel shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Normally, when this most private man goes into public at a press-attended gathering, he wears the face best described by Variety editor in chief Peter Bart, who compared Lucas to a small-town banker: “impeccably polite and implacably distanced, as though fearing you might ask an inappropriate question or request a loan.” But on this day, reunited with his sisters, he seemed almost giddy. The mood lasted for roughly one question from a reporter, and you can see it deteriorate in the follow-ups. What brought him back? His sister, “the small one,” twisting his arm. Did he have a favorite memory of cruising? “It’s like fishing,” he said. “Mostly sitting around talking, having a good time.” Did people here mostly talk to him about Graffiti or his other films? “I don’t really talk to people on the street.”
Finally, the Modesto Bee reporter pressed the question most residents were eager to ask: Did Modesto somehow influence Star Wars?
Lucas offered a smile that was one part pained grimace to two parts practiced politesse. “No, not really. Most of these things come out of your imagination.”
Thus dogged once again by his most famous creation, Lucas stepped out into the street. A great roar went up, and a crowd of teenagers who had previously been dissecting the latest rumor of a Boba Fett spin-off movie pressed up to police barriers to get his autograph. Lucas signed their posters and fan club cards, his features once again arranged in the small-town banker configuration.
Certainly, the Star Wars films weren’t conceived in Lucas’s hometown; that happened a hundred miles to the west, in San Anselmo, where Lucas wrote the scripts for the films in the mansion that his Graffiti fortune had afforded him. Modesto did inspire the movie that allowed Lucas to purchase the home where Star Wars would be born. (The original Star Wars, as we shall see, was the indulgence of a multimillionaire director who would never really need to write a word, or direct a picture, again.)
Modesto gave Lucas his stepping-stone movie and much more besides; it was also the physical location for early Star Wars inspiration. But all that visionary stuff technically took place inside one boy’s head. So if you want to glimpse the earliest glimmerings of the Star Wars universe, you’d be better off reading about World War II, or grabbing a pile of comic books from the mid-1950s, or (best of all) hopping on a rocket ship to Mongo than cruising around Modesto.
One place Modesto is not: Tatooine. The analogy to Luke Skywalker’s desert-covered, double-sunlit home world has been drawn many times over the years by journalists who clearly don’t live in Northern California. Their comparison seem reasonable enough, given that Luke is a character based on the naive side of Lucas’s personality. But if the Tatooine experience on Earth is what you want, you’d find a much better candidate in the desert town of Mojave, hundreds of miles to the south: literally a spaceport, it also offers a roughneck equivalent of the Mos Eisley cantina, with curious-looking locals and sand that gets everywhere.
No, Modesto is verdant. The climate is positively Mediterranean. The town stands atop of California’s central valley, the fruit, nut, and wine basket of the world. There’s a lot of farming here, but you wouldn’t call it moisture farming—unless you like your moisture infused with fermented grapes. The Gallo winery was founded here in 1933 by a couple of brothers who were so by-the-book that they waited until the moment Prohibition officially ended before digging up old winemaking pamphlets in the town library. By the twenty-first century, Gallo held 25 percent of the US wine market. It is still family-owned. A little education, a lot of hard work, and you can build a global empire: the example was not lost on Lucas, who just happens to grow pinot noir grapes at his own winemaking operation, Skywalker Vineyards.
Another misapprehension about Modesto: that it is extremely remote. “If there’s a bright center of the universe, you’re on the planet it’s farthest from,” said Luke of Tatooine. But the Bay Area is less than ninety miles due west of Modesto. If I-580 traffic is light and you have a lead foot, you can be in San Francisco in an hour and change. Sacramento is less than an hour to the north, Yosemite the same distance to the east. You can get to Hollywood faster from Modesto than from the Bay.
This doesn’t mean it is easy to leave Modesto. The town exerts a strong cultural gravitational pull. It’s just that, to see what else the world has to offer, you must be determined, and you must like fast cars—two qualities that the young George Lucas had in spades.
When George Walton Lucas Jr. was born, in the early morning of May 14, 1944, droves of German bombers were attacking Bristol. General Rommel was preparing a plot to assassinate Hitler. Britain’s cryptographers were uncovering a plan by Göring to trick the RAF into bombing unused airfields. Japanese fighters harried American bombers over the Truk Atoll on their way to Wake Island. The British XIII Corps consolidated a bridgehead over the Rapido River, helping to open the road to Rome. In a school hall in London, workers prepared a giant map of Normandy as General Montgomery prepared to explain to Churchill and the king exactly how he and Eisenhower intended to liberate Europe.
The planet was on fire, but Modesto was about as far away from the conflagration as you could get. Lucas’s father, George Walton Lucas Sr., had volunteered but was turned down—he was too slender, and he was married. The Lucases were even more insulated from the horrors of the war than they might have been. Still, the war left no one untouched, and its after effects—the warm glow of victory, the posttraumatic stress—went on for decades. Lucas later remembered growing up in a world where the war was “on all the coffee tables”—in Time, in Life, in the Saturday Evening Post, in living Technicolor.
The 1950s and 1960s were filled with war movies, each one a repolish of legendary heroics on the ground and—increasingly—in the air. The Dam Busters (1955), 633 Squadron (1964), Tora Tora Tora! (1970)—These were the movies Lucas would record and splice to create the ultimate dogfight, a 25-hour reference reel that would form the basis for all the special effects of Star Wars (which would be shot by the same cinematographer who filmed Dam Busters).
If you look closely enough, you can see that wartime influence throughout the franchise. It’s in the one-man fighters, the rebel’s helmets and boots, the Stormtrooper’s modified UK Sterling submachine guns, Han Solo’s German Mauser C96 semiautomatic, the tall fascist in the black gas mask. “I like to say Star Wars is my favorite World War II movie,” says Cole Horton, who runs the website From World War to Star Wars, which has documented hundreds of callbacks. “The story comes from myth. The physical, tangible things come from history.”
The war’s aftermath wasn’t all coffee-table entertainment for young Lucas. Another conflict, this one on the Korean peninsula, broke out a month after he turned five. His sister Ann’s fiancé was shipped out and killed in action there when George was nine. Even before that tragedy, Lucas had been subjected for years to the specter of an even more frightening war. His year of schoolchildren was the first to be shown the civil defense training film Duck and Cover (1951). Imagine seeing this at age five: not just a cartoon about a clever turtle who hides in his shell when the atom bomb drops, about also two schoolchildren who, “no matter where they go or what they do, are always trying to remember what to do if the atom bomb explodes right then.”
Future war took terrifying shapes under the wooden desks of John Muir Elementary School. “We did duck and cover drills all the time,” Lucas recalled later in life. “We were always hearing about building fallout shelters, about the end of the world, how many bombs were being built.” No wonder, then, that he once called growing up “frightening” and said he was “always on the lookout for the evil monster that lurked around the corner.” It couldn’t have helped that he was a scrawny kid, an occasional target for older and larger boys at John Muir who liked to throw his shoes at the lawn sprinklers. More than once, Wendy had to step in and rescue him.*
War fears and bullies aside, Lucas was hardly suffering. He was the son of an increasingly successful and wealthy small businessman, George Walton Lucas Sr., who knew and supplied stationery to everyone in town. He was in the store at seven A.M., six days a week. Evenings were for golf, for the Rotary club; on Sundays, he and Dorothy, his wife and high school sweetheart, would do the accounts.
George Sr. had once dreamed of being a lawyer, and the career may well have suited him. Thin and ramrod straight, fond of dispensing Shakespeare quotes at the dinner table, he could have been a courtroom Lincoln. But he had been glad to have a job in a stationery store in 1933 when unemployment hit 20 percent. He talked himself into a 10 percent stake in the company, L. M. Morris, which the store’s eponymous owner had founded in 1904. George worked his way up to a 50 percent stake and then took over and renamed the company when Morris retired. By 1950, the Lucas Company grossed a very respectable $30,000 a year (about $300,000 today). George Sr. made all that from stationery and—crucially for Star Wars, as it turned out—toys.†
George Lucas Sr. was no Darth Vader, despite the suggestion from Lucas biographer Dale Pollock that his relationship with his son inspired the paternal revelation in Empire Strikes Back. In fact, the young Lucas—Georgie, as he was affectionately called—seems to have been doted on. Lucas owned the best train set in Modesto, a three-engine Lionel Santa Fe, and all the Lincoln logs to go with it. Georgie got a great allowance for the time: 4 cents a week at the age of four, rising to $4 a week (that’s $94 in 2013 dollars) by the age of eleven. In July 1955, George was packed off on his first plane ride—to Anaheim for the grand opening of Disneyland. He just missed Walt Disney opening the park in person but arrived in time for day 2. “I was in heaven,” Lucas said of the trip. In the shining realm of Tomorrowland, the nameless monster that haunted him back in Modesto was banished. The Lucas family would return to Disneyland every other year.
Certainly, George Sr. exerted a powerful influence over his children when he was around. “His dad was stern,” says Patti McCarthy, a professor at the University of the Pacific in nearby Stockton, California, who thoroughly researched Lucas’s life for Modesto’s American Graffiti Walk, a series of video kiosks around the town. “But parents were stern then. Wendy Lucas always says, ‘He was a stern man and a good father.’” Georgie and his sisters were expected to do chores; the boy detested having to mow the lawn with the family’s battered old mower. His way of dealing with that was to save up his allowance, borrow $25 from his mother, and buy a new mower. Dale Pollock painted that incident as defiance. Hardly: it was the stuff of budding business genius—a sensibility that Lucas surely soaked up from his entrepreneurial dad. “My first mentor was my father,” Lucas would tell Bill Moyers years later. (He named Francis Ford Coppola his second and Joseph Campbell his third.)
If anything, Lucas’s mother was a more mysterious presence than his father. Dorothy, the daughter of a Modesto real estate magnate, was bedridden with inexplicable stomach pains throughout much of Lucas’s childhood. At the age of ten, Lucas came to her with his first existential question: “How come there’s only one God, but so many religions?” No satisfying answer was forthcoming, and Lucas would spend a good chunk of the next twenty years developing a new name for God that was embraced by religious and nonreligious alike.
Before Lucas Sr. became wealthy enough to move the family to an isolated walnut ranch outside town, Lucas enjoyed their modest tract home at 530 Ramona Avenue. Its most important feature was the alley out back, which Lucas shared with his tight knot of childhood friends: John Plummer, George Frankenstein, and Mel Cellini. The friends later called it “alleyway culture.” They’d run in and out of each other’s houses, always involved in some creative endeavor, constructing toy rail tracks and backyard carnivals. At eight, they made a roller coaster ride out of a telephone wire spool. “I liked to build things,” Lucas recalled in 2013: “woodshop, treehouses, chess boards.” He constructed forts and 3-D landscapes with papier-mâché mountains. He filled his room with drawings: landscapes, mostly, with people added as an afterthought. If asked what he wanted to be, he would suggest “architect.” There was one exception to Lucas’s impersonal artistic creations: in art class at school he drew—earning a rebuke from his teacher—pictures of “space soldiers.” Such disapproval would not stop him for a second.
Lucas’ writing and directing abilities were skills he had to acquire later in life with great effort and pain. His early years yield few portentous examples of either pursuit. But one of his surviving stories, from the third grade, foreshadows his love of speed, his lifelong sense of urgency, and his stick-to-itiveness: the qualities that would compel Lucas to complete every creative project he ever started. The story is called “Slow Poke,” but the setting is the “land of Zoom”—in retrospect, a perfect name for the chrome-plated 1950s.
Once upon a time in the land of Zoom, there was a little boy who was always slow. All the other people in the land of Zoom were fast.
Once this little boy was walking down a trail when he met a horse. He wanted to talk to the horse, so he started to sit down on a stone where a bee was sitting.
No sooner had he sat on the stone than he was up with a yell, and running down the trail.
From then on, he was never slow again.
Brevity aside, this was quintessentially Lucas: a dreamer of a boy, slow at school, motivated by sudden moments of fear to be fast, an inveterate tinkerer restlessly searching for something cool in the Land of Zoom. “He was bored with school; he needed a bee sting,” says Professor McCarthy. “The bee sting was the accident. It’s almost a foreshadowing.”
As for films, the focus of his later life? He went to the movies once every other week, if that, and while he enjoyed Disney movies—20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a particular favorite—he said that in his teenage years he only went to Modesto’s two picture houses to chase girls. Filmmaking was just one of many happy pastimes he tried out with Mel Cellini during the alley years. The pair had tried writing and editing a newspaper on Lucas’s return from Disneyland, printed in George Sr.’s store; it lasted for ten issues. Cellini’s dad had an 8mm movie camera, which could be used to make stop-motion animation. The boys played a lot of war games with toy soldiers, so they recorded their tiny green army moving across the alley a frame at a time. For special effects, Lucas would light tiny fires. “It was very critical to him that everything would look right,” Cellini would remember. “It had to look real.”
Even as a young auteur Lucas was learning to link art and profit. One fall he and Cellini built a haunted house in Cellini’s garage. It was a sophisticated affair, with ghouls dropping out of the roof and strobe lights. Neighborhood kids were charged a nickel to see it. “We’ve got to change it around so it’s different,” Lucas said when the crowds started to drop off; then he relaunched the enterprise as a new and improved haunted house. “He did this a couple or three times; I marveled at it,” said Cellini. “As soon as sales fell off, George would go back and redo it and retweak it, and the kids would come back again.” It was a trick he would repeat many times with Star Wars.
Lucas turned ten in 1954—a transformative year, and one he has hearkened back to on many occasions. It was the year George Sr. bought a television. (He was not the first parent in town to do so, and George had been getting his Flash Gordon fix at John Plummer’s house for years.) It was the year Lucas first declared his intent to become a race car driver. And it was the year he realized something he revealed publicly years later, in his first promotional short movie.
In 1970, when he was twenty-six, Lucas would make the ten-minute film Bald to promote his avant-garde dystopian movie THX 1138. The film opens with Lucas and his second mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, gravely introduced as “two of the new generation of filmmen,” discussing what influenced the movie. Lucas could have mentioned many dark influences that would have resonated with his generation, such as Brave New World and the speeches of Richard Nixon. Instead, he proudly planted his flag in nerd territory. THX “actually came from reading comic books when I was about ten years old,” Lucas said. “I was always struck by the fact that we were living in the future. If you wanted to make a film about the future, the way to do it would be to use real things, because we’re living in the future.”
By the age of ten, Lucas was already a voracious reader of comics. His and his sister Wendy’s hoards grew so large that Lucas Sr. devoted an entire room to their comics in the family shed—more than five hundred comic books in total. Even that wasn’t enough. On Sundays, while his parents did the accounts, he would go over to Plummer’s house and read a stack of comics Plummer’s dad got for free from the Modesto newsstand Nickel’s News. The covers had all been torn off so they couldn’t be resold. Lucas, however, wasn’t about to judge a comic book by its lack of a cover.
The year 1954 was the tail end of the postwar zenith known to comics historians as the Golden Age. Superman and Batman were in the prime of their second decades. Subjects were diversifying—cowboy comics, romance comics, horror comics, humor comics, science fiction comics. This was the soup that Lucas swam in: supremely visual, wild, horrific, hilarious, boundary-stretching, authority-defying, and out of this world.
The comic book hero Lucas would recall in his earlier interviews is a largely forgotten character: Tommy Tomorrow of the Planeteers. For decades, Tomorrow clung tenaciously to the pages of Action Comics, the title that had given birth to (and in Lucas’s childhood was still dominated by) Superman. In comic book terms, this was like opening for the Beatles.
Tommy Tomorrow sprang to life in 1947 as a cadet in what the comic called the “West Point of space.” He then became a colonel in a solar system–wide police force called the Planeteers. At first young and naive, Tomorrow soon gained assistance from a sassy female character, Joan Gordy, and an older sword-wielding mentor, Captain Brent Wood. The most shocking twist in the strip: Wood learns that a notorious space pirate, Mart Black, is in fact his father.
Think that was shocking? If you really wanted to be shocked, there was EC Comics. Brash iconoclast William Gaines inherited the company from his father in 1949, and immediately instituted a long line of titles that delved into the smart and the spooky, from horror (Tales of the Crypt) to Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, which delivered four science fiction short stories per issue, each with a twist in the tale. “EC Comics had it all,” Lucas later wrote in a foreword to a Weird Science collection. “Rocket ships, robots, monsters, laser beams. . . . It’s no coincidence that all of those are also in the Star Wars movies.” EC’s storytelling style was inspirational, too: “mini-movies that managed to keep you enthralled and wanting more until the final page. . . . You read them with your eyes open wide, your mouth agape and your brain racing to take it all in.”
But EC didn’t have long to live. From April to June 1954, as Lucas sat on a blanket in the back yard reading comics, a Senate subcommittee grilled Gaines over an EC Comics title—one that would have been on newsstands on Lucas’s tenth birthday—featuring a grisly image of a woman’s severed head. Gaines spoke passionately in his comics’ defense, but behind the scenes he was fatally eager to compromise. He helped found the Comics Magazine Association of America, which created the Comics Code Authority, which specifically targeted EC’s distribution. Gaines’s distributor went bankrupt the following year.
One of Gaines’s publications survived unscathed, however, and would prove to be far more damaging to the established order of things than EC Comics. Mad Magazine, so quaint today, predated the great satirists of the 1960s. “Mad took on all the big targets,” wrote Lucas in 2007:
Parents, school, sex, politics, religion, big business, advertising and popular culture, using humor to show the emperor had no clothes. This helped me recognize that just because something is presented to you as the way it is, doesn’t mean that’s the way it really is. I realized that if I wanted to see a change in the status quo, I couldn’t rely on the world to do it for me. The impact this had on my worldview was enormous. I have spent much of my career telling stories about characters who fight to change the dominant paradigm. . . . For that, Alfred E. Neuman bears at least a little of the blame.
Carl Barks, a veteran Disney artist who created Scrooge McDuck and gave him his own comic book in 1952, was also partially responsible for sharpening the young Lucas’s contrarian sensibility. The first piece of art Lucas ever bought, in the late 1960s, was a page of Barks’s Scrooge. Barks comics were passed around at the very first Star Wars shoot in the Tunisian desert.
One of the earliest and most sophisticated Scrooge strips, a 1954 parody of the utopian novel and film that introduced Shangri-La, Lost Horizon, would find echoes in Lucas’s later years. The strip opens with the billionaire duck being harassed by phone calls, letters, charity requests, speaking engagements, and the taxman. Seeking a respite, he and his nephews take off in search of the mythical Himalayan land of Tralla La. Scrooge is overjoyed to have found a society where friendship is the only currency. It all goes hilariously wrong when a local finds a bottle cap from Scrooge’s now-discarded nerve medicine. A tidal wave of avarice rips through Tralla La, the bottle cap becomes the land’s default currency, and the ducks are forced to escape again when the market is flooded.
The ten-year-old Lucas could not have guessed how much this strip fore-shadowed his later life. He too would learn the peculiar isolating harassment that comes with being a famous billionaire. He too would use wealth to escape wealth, building his own whimsical Tralla La in Skywalker Ranch. Yet the need to sustain this utopia, and the people he hired to work it, would lead to a life that was far from carefree—and eventually he would sell his main enterprise to the same company that owns Uncle Scrooge.
Scrooge McDuck, Tommy Tomorrow, EC, and Alfred E. Neuman were all key influences on Lucas’s growing mind, but they paled in comparison to Flash Gordon. Edward Summer can testify to this. Summer is a New York filmmaker, author, and former owner of the New York City comic book store Supersnipe; he became Lucas’s friend and business partner in the early 1970s, when they were introduced by mutual friends and bonded over Flash Gordon. Lucas was looking for original Alex Raymond artwork, and Summer had the connection. In 1974, Summer managed to sneak Lucas in via the back door at King Features, where two friends of Summer’s were tasked with scanning Raymond’s original strips to microfilm. They were then supposed to destroy it, but luckily for posterity Summer and his pals created an underground railroad that found the strips safe new homes.
Seeing those strips again—as well as borrowing reels of the serials for his own private screening room—allowed Lucas to realize how “awful” his favorite series was; he loved them still, but he came to the conclusion that he had been under a kind of spell as a child. He began to understand how rickety were the foundations of space fantasy. For modern viewers, the appeal of those cheesy, grainy old serials remains something of a mystery. But they connected strongly in children’s minds at least until the end of the 1970s (which is when I first saw them). “It has to hit you when you’re a kid,” says Edward Summer. “When it hits you at the right age, it’s indelible.”
Flash’s popularity with the first TV generation had a lot to do with the serial format itself. In the 1950s, newborn TV stations across America were desperate for content. There were a lot of live shows, and a surprising plethora of live TV science fiction (all of it sadly lost to posterity): Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949–1955), Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950–1955), Space Patrol (1950–1955), Tales of Tomorrow (1951–1953). The people behind these shows were no dummies: Captain Video’s guest writer list reads like a who’s who of 1950s science fiction (Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Walter Miller, Robert Sheckley). But while the talent may have been top-notch, the shows had too much time to fill—thirty minutes a day, five days a week—with almost no budget. “They had really cool spacesuits and really dumb sets,” says Summer. “The production values were very poor. So when they started to rebroadcast the Flash Gordon serials, it was like being hit by lightning.”
Serials had been enormously popular on the radio for years. This was the era of weekly hours with mysterious crime-fighters such as The Falcon and The Shadow. So it was hardly surprising that their cinematic counterparts turned out to be exactly what TV stations were looking for. Each chapter ran for about twenty minutes. That left time in a half-hour segment for a cartoon, or a local host recapping the story so far, or, most importantly, the sponsor’s commercials. (Coca-Cola was a frequent Flash Gordon sponsor.) Between the original, 1936 Flash serial and the follow-ups from 1938 and 1940, there were forty episodes of Flash Gordon. You could run them end to end for two months every weekday with no repeats and then go back to the beginning—which was exactly what many stations did.
Flash Gordon isn’t the most well-made or well-received production from the golden age of movie serials, the late 1930s and early 1940s; The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), a twelve-episode superhero serial from Republic Pictures, usually wears that crown. But Flash had twenty-eight more episodes, it was way more action packed, and the kids went crazy for it. Every true believer on the set of Star Wars remembered it fondly. Producer Gary Kurtz, four years’ Lucas’s senior, caught the tail end of Flash’s run in Saturday movie matinees before it even came to TV. “Flash Gordon definitely made the biggest impression of all the serials,” said Charley Lippincott, Star Wars’ marketing chief, who watched Flash Gordon projected onto the side of a library in Chicago. Howard Kazanjian, Lucas’s friend and the producer of Return of the Jedi, said that visiting Mongo in a rocket ship was his childhood dream, to the point that he and his brother once tried to build their own rocket cockpit out of toothpaste tops. Don Glut, a film school friend of Lucas’s and author of The Great Movie Serials, says Flash just seemed more alive than the protagonists of other serials: “Buster Crabbe was light years beyond any other actors in serials. He was handsome, he had the physique, he had charisma. Most serials had no connection between hero and heroine. Flash had personality, characterization, and an incredible sexual dynamic. When Dale says to Princess Aura ‘I’d do anything for Flash,’ it’s pretty clear what she’s talking about.”
The world of special effects had barely advanced since 1936; there just wasn’t that much call for it. “Nowadays you can see the spaceships are on wires, and it looks a little klutzy, but this was state of the art stuff,” says Summer. “And on TV, the resolution was so poor you couldn’t see the wires anyway.” For years, Summer would dream of making a movie version of Flash Gordon. He wasn’t alone; as we’ll discover, Lucas only proceeded to pitch Star Wars after he couldn’t get the movie rights to Flash Gordon. One early draft of Star Wars used a Raymond panel, Flash and Ming engaged in a fencing duel, for its cover.
Lucas has never been shy about refering to Flash Gordon as the most direct and prominent inspiration for Star Wars. “The original Universal serial was on TV at 6:15 [P.M.] every day, and I was just crazy about it,” Lucas said after shooting Star Wars in 1976. “I’ve always had a fascination for space adventure, romantic adventures.” The serial was the “real stand-out event” in his young life, he said on the set of The Empire Strikes Back in 1979. “Loving them that much when they were so awful,” he said, “I began to wonder what would happen if they were done really well? Surely, kids would love them even more.” Lucas paid direct homage with his roll-up—the words that scroll at the beginning of every Star Wars movie, just as they do in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.* His elaborate screen-wipes are recognizably inspired by the serial, too. Indeed, the thread between Flash Gordon and Star Wars is so obvious to the Flash Gordon generation that it sometimes even sees connections that aren’t quite historically accurate. For example, Lucas friend Howard Kazanjian believes Luke Skywalker is Flash, Princess Leia is Dale Arden, Obi-Wan is Dr. Zarkov, and Darth Vader is Ming the Merciless.
The origins of those characters are actually more complicated, as we shall see. But there is one kind of masked Star Wars character whose origins may indeed go all the way back to Flash Gordon. In 1954, another Flash Gordon series had been produced directly for television. Made in West Germany by an international production company, it diverged significantly from the original; Flash, Dale, and Zarkov work for the Galactic Bureau of Investigation in the thirty-third century. There is no Ming, only a succession of villains in silver suits. Although this version of Flash only lasted for a single season, it had licensed the TV rights to the name “Flash Gordon,” which had reverted from Universal back to King Features. This meant that Universal’s Flash Gordon serial from the late 1930s, the one authorized by Alex Raymond, could not call itself Flash Gordon in the 1950s. Thus, when the original Flash Gordon serial was aired on TV, it bore a replacement title card that called the show Space Soldiers.† Those space soldiers that Lucas drew in art class, then, may have been his first Flash Gordon tributes. And in a way they are also a key—the first of many—to understanding why George Lucas made Star Wars. A young child’s mind is set on fire by a serial story; he is drawn in by the dastardly villain, the love interest, the knowing sage, and most especially the clearly drawn hero. He is hooked on adventures with rocket ships in wildly different settings, with monsters everywhere and peril never more than minutes away, with a cliffhanger every reel. But he surely wonders, as most literal-minded children would, why the title card always says “Space Soldiers,” “Space Soldiers on Mars,” or “Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe.” Who are these space soldiers? They don’t seem to be anywhere in the show. There are Ming’s guards, who walk around in Roman Centurion helmets with strange faceplates. But there never seem to be more than one or two of them hanging around at any one time. Tommy Tomorrow? He’s more of a space policeman. There are soldiers in all the magazines and books lying on coffee tables—heroic, charismatic soldiers, a soldier who became president—but they’re not in space yet.
Then came the day Lucas picked up a 1955 copy of Classics Illustrated, issue 124: “War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells. At the bottom of page 41 is a panel showing the future that the human survivors of the Martian invasion are afraid of: being hunted down by a futuristic army that has been brainwashed, trained, and outfitted by the Martian fighting machines. The soldiers wear sleek round helmets and carry ray guns. Years later, Lucas would leaf through original artwork from that comic at Edward Summer’s house, turn to the page, and say that’s it—that panel is where a lot of Star Wars came from.
Space soldiers also cropped up in Forbidden Planet, the movie Lucas saw for his twelfth birthday, in 1956, at Modesto’s State Theater. Leslie Nielsen was the dashing captain of a whole flying saucer full of space soldiers visiting the mysterious planet of Altaria IV, with its hilarious deadpan robot, Robby, and its cavernous Death Star–like interior.
“He was really taken with it,” remembered Mel Cellini of that birthday screening, to which Lucas brought a small gang of friends. “We were just enjoying the moment. He was learning it.”
Lucas kept drawing space soldiers in art class, apparently even after the teacher implored him to “get serious.” Years later at the University of Southern California, according to his roommate, Lucas would prefer to “stay in his room and draw star troopers” rather than go out to parties. His first wife, Marcia, would remember him talking about space soldiers on the silver screen from the day she met him. Little did any of them know what impact those space troop sketches would have, not just on the films themselves, but also on the foot soldiers who would prove instrumental in spreading Lucas’s vision around the world.
After all, what do space soldiers fight in, if not star wars?
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* One older and larger boy in Modesto at the time was named Gary Rex Vader. No connection has yet been drawn to the Vader of his later years, but Lucas once said that he came up with the name “Darth” first and then tried “lots of last names, Vaders and Wilsons and Smiths.” There are plenty of Wilsons and Smiths in Modesto, but only a handful of Vaders.
† In time, George Sr. became the 3M corporation’s district agent and would focus on his corporate accounts, renaming his company Lucas Business Systems. Later sold to Xerox, it survives in Modesto to this day, with five branches across Northern California. Its website claims it has operated under the Lucas name since 1904.
* Star Wars replicated the exact angle of the Flash Gordon roll-up and ended with the same unusual four ellipses.
† Ironically, “Space Soldiers” would have made a much better title for the West German series, which involved far more interplanetary travel than the original serial.