Star Wars, Campbell, Buddha, and The Wise Man's Fear

Rewatching Star Wars was a really enjoyable experience for me. It had been a while since I had last watched it and it was one of my favorite movies as a child. While I may not have seen the movie as much, I loved the other products it produced especially the amazing video games (Star Wars: Rogue Squadron being an absolutely amazing game and a sin on the video game industry for not reviving it) This is one thing I feel Star Wars was incredibly successful at doing. They make consistently great content beyond just the movies. As a gamer, videogames mean a lot to me and Star Wars, is one of the few movie properties, that was able to make multiple videogames, in multiple genres with some success.
 First Person Shooters(Jedi Outcast)

 Third Person Shooters (Battlefront)

Those ATATs? Yeah you can get in them

Ship Combat (Rogue Squadron)

 RPGs ( Knights of the Old Republic)

Racing (Podracer)

 There was even a Dance game that was made of it...

 whether its good or not depends on your sense of humor and how you feel about Vader and the Emperor having a dance-off but the mechanics were decent at least (admittedly completely ripped off)

Star Wars used a very classic narrative, the Heroes Journey, but I feel that so much of its success came, not even from the narrative, but from the compelling worlds and characters it created. It made a world you wanted visit, and a world that could be visited from some many different angles from action adventure, to resolving all the problems in the world through dance and it still holds up as a cohesive whole.


On a slightly unrelated note
Warning: Comparing Campbell to non-class Book read at your own risk
One thing that really struck me while reading Campbell was his description of Buddha and his interaction with the tree and how that fit into the Heroes Journey, as the resurrection of the bringing back of the boon. The thing that really struck me about it was that almost an inverse of that same event occurred in one current favorite books The Wise Man's Fear. In the book the main character, after entering the world of the Fae. He has certain... "encounters" in it, but eventually he goes exploring. In his explorations he comes upon a tree and talks to it. And the tree reveals many things that disturb and discomfort him. Later we find out that the tree houses a being that is evil and malevolent known as the Cthaeh. And this being knows everything, including all futures. Because of its knowledge it is able to know what words to say to cause the most devastation and destruction to the world. It is held as responsible for some of the worst tragedies in the world.
 I can not say for sure, but it seems likely that the author intentionally modeled the scene and the character after this idea. Both characters are all knowing, both represent truth, to get to both of them requires difficulties, struggle and going into an entirely different world. And both bring back something to the human world, that has the potential to change the world as it changed the hero. The only difference is in the heroic journey the change is positive, good wins out in the end. And in this story the change is decidedly the opposite