ABSTRACT
I Like the hamburger, Star Wars can be consumed by all the family, from the youngest to the oldest of both sexes. It is less a novel than a market strategy designed to scoop up as much cash and pocket money as possible. It was helped in this aim by the commercial fact that in modern America there is virtually no product which cannot be copyrighted, patented, registered under a trademark, sponsored or franchised. The consumer could watch, read, listen to, drink, or play with Star Wars products. It came as a Twentieth Century Fox film, and a range of book, pictorial and print items, from the Ballantine and Random House division of the RCA conglomerate. LP records and myriad wall posters, comics, drinks, drink vessels, toy laser guns, models, board games etc. were everywhere to be had. In 1978 one could even buy Darth Vader ice-lollies, a fraction of whose price-like all the rest of the brand-named commodities-found their way back to the ‘Star Wars Corporation’. A whole thematic industry was set up on the Star Wars logo (t.m. TCF. Twentieth Century Fox went so far as to protect by trademark characters’ names, like ‘Chewbacca’). Its turnover was incalculable; but by 1979 the film alone was estimated to have made getting on for $200 m. on its modest $6½ m. production costs.
