By Jim Emerson
Special to MSN Movies

Thirty years ago, on May 25, 1977, "Star Wars" changed everything. Every once in a while, that's what happens. Something comes along and it makes you realize -- either at the time, or sometime thereafter -- that things after that thing were not the same as things before that thing. Like, for instance, the wheel. Or the Enlightenment. Or The Beatles. Or TiVo.

For 22 years, between the release of the original "Star Wars" film ("Episode IV: A New Hope") and the release of the first prequel ("Episode I: The Phantom Menace"), the "Star Wars" phenomenon had an impact on American popular culture like nothing else before, or since. A heroic celluloid myth based (according to auteur George Lucas) on Joseph Campbell's studies of cross-cultural archetypes, it was released early in the Carter administration when, as it happened, we really could have used something like that. But it was also a prescient, anti-imperialistic fable in an anti-imperialistic age, with scruffy insurgent freedom fighters (insurgents?) taking on a corrupt authoritarian Empire -- headed by the morally weak, sociopathic Emperor Palpatine and his even more powerful, right-hand iron fist, the dark Lord Darth Cheney -- er, Vader.

The "Star Wars" phenomenon wasn't really so much about "content," though. It was more about capturing zeitgeist-lightning (or hyperspace star fields) in a bottle. And then, merchandising the hell out of them. Aesthetically, "Star Wars" was hardly a revolutionary picture, patterned as it was on lowly sci-fi cliffhanger serials, the kind they used to show at Saturday kiddie matinees. That was part of the joke: The thing even began in media res, with "Episode IV" -- trumpeted with a now-familiar fanfare and a crawl that assumed previous installments. (The prequels later destroyed this joke -- and the magic of the "Star Wars" mythology -- for many.)

What "Star Wars" did best was combine corny stock characters and "Amazing Stories" plotlines with state-of-the-art Industrial Light and Magic visual effects and Dolby (later replaced with Lucas's patented THX) Surround sound. No more rockets made out of cardboard toilet-paper tubes with sparklers stuck in the rear for thrusters. Mix that with a wisecracking, almost postmodern sense of humor (more gung-ho earnest than the arch self-awareness William Goldman pumped into the Western in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" eight years earlier) and an old-fashioned Hollywood military-symphonic score by John Williams, and you have a rousing, roller-coaster space adventure for children of all ages, as the marketers like to say.

Sure, the movie was criticized for being infantile, but that misses the point. It's aimed at a sensibility somewhere between infancy and the second year of college (or high school). A space fantasy with the emphasis on interstellar swashbuckling (and with romantic mush kept to a minimum), "Star Wars" appealed to the 8- to 12-year-old boy in all of us -- and still does.

But although all those things may have contributed to the "Star Wars" phenomenon, they don't explain why it "changed everything", or what accounted for "the mania" (as George Harrison used to call that unaccountable epochal thing that engulfed him and three other lovable mop-tops). Because it wasn't really the movie itself that shook the world (not like the Beatles' music shook up pop/rock music, anyway); it was the popular response to the movie, and the motion picture industry's response to that response.

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