Star Wars and (to a lesser extent) Indiana Jones have taken on lives of their own as some of the most popular franchises in the world. After the first Star Wars became a smash hit, it launched a commercial empire that saw two sequels, a pair of Ewoks TV movies, two animated series (Ewoks and Droids), toys, merchandise, comics, vinyl records, tie-in novels, that star-crossed Christmas Special, and the Star Tours attraction at Disneyland. By the late Eighties and early Nineties it had been all-but forgotten except by a relatively small handful of dedicated fans, until Timothy Zahn wrote the blockbuster Heir to the Empire trilogy of novels and Dark Horse Comics picked up the licence to publish the Dark Empire series. Star Wars entered the public consciousness again, exploding with comics, books, and merchandise, multimedia campaigns like Shadows of the Empire and culminating in the release of the "Special Edition" trilogy and the infamous prequel trilogy (which, oddly enough, is right around the time I stopped being a Star Wars fan, even trading in my Rebel Mission to Ord Mantell record). Now, with Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm, we are looking down the barrel of not only a new sequel trilogy, but a whole Star Wars "cinematic universe" to rival Disney's Marvel brand. Despite four films, a series of books and merchandise, and Disney rides of its own, Indiana Jones was never the same powerhouse as Star Wars. Nevertheless, Disney is also looking to 007 the brand by starting a new series of films with Chris Pratt rumoured to don the hat and crack the whip.
With all of that, it is easy to forget that, at one time, there was only Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the pet projects of the auteurs of 1970's "New Hollywood." It's clear just from watching the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies that these first films were never really intended to be more than they were. The legend that Star Wars was always supposed to be a nine-part saga is absurd on the face of it: "Episode IV" went through a belaboured process of four different screenplays with countless rewrites and refining of the concept. Before becoming Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the last draft was titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars. Even without that background knowledge, its pretty clear that Luke and Leia being siblings was made-up on the fly, as was Darth Vader being their father. There is nothing in the first film to indicate either, and plenty to indicate otherwise. As Red Letter Media observed in their marathon analysis of the prequel trilogy, part of what undid episodes I-III was the undue emphasis on The Dark Lord of the Sith, who is presented in Star Wars as merely the black-clad gestapo creep who roughs people up, the SS occultist operating sideways from the rest of the Nazi regime. Darth Vader is essentially the same character as Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark, who was himself an homage to the sinister characters played by Peter Lorre in many films of the Forties. There was a definite reason why George Lucas called Star Wars "Episode IV" and it had nothing to do with having eight other scripts in his back pocket. The episodic pretense at least gave him an opening for The Empire Strikes Back and Revenge Return of the Jedi; when it came time to do a follow-up to the neatly wrapped-up and happily-ever-aftered Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucas resorted to a prequel.
This is why it is valuable to look again at Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark in context. What was going on, specifically in the mind and career of George Lucas, that gave rise to these two films as the standalone pieces of cinematic art that they originally were?
