Star Wars is really, really stupid. Also boring. People have an obsession with it because it hit them at the age when they were too young to realize how it's about as intellectually challenging as My Little Ponies in Space. They saw LASERS! and SPACE SHIPS! and EVIL PEOPLE! as 9-year-olds and it embedded in their minds as "cooler than cool." The same way that some adults have a huge nostalgia-on for He-Man or Gem and the Holograms. Or Dirty Dancing. Or JTT. Bleah!
Not quite as brilliant as the hype suggests after all this time, sure, but at the time all that stuff about the force and, yes, LASERS! and SPACE SHIPS! was pretty spectacular in its own right. But most of what keeps Star Wars going, I think (apart from, obviously, merchandising merchandising merchandising) is that thin vapor of pop-philosophy and Ralph McQuarrie's visual legacy. It looked like nothing anyone had ever seen.
Basically, Lucas did the funding on his second movie, which encouraged him to use clever marketing strategies (since the profit was all for him).
So he came up with this idea of selling his boring movie to nerds (even though it's entirely unrelated) and it worked! He simply spotted an under-exploited demographic, an age-old business strategy. He's comparable to Steve Jobs, who found the hipster design demographic, for fabulous marketing genius.
As for Steve Jobs, people have always loved beautiful and desirable objects. As long as there have been objects to love. And designers were hipsters way before Jobs' return.
Haha! (Thanks for the real-life laugh :) I admit - I have only seen the late 80s/early 90s versions of MLP (when I was a little girl). Which were about as intellectual as Care Bears. Care Bears hasn't gotten more intellectual in a reissue, has it?
Not defending Bond movies. I agree, they're pretty damn stupid. (Although at least the earlier ones were done with a sense of fun. I like stupid fun.) But... ewoks.
