Isegoria

Star Wars borrows heavily from many sources, including a French bande dessinée called Valerian et Laureline:

In Sci-Fi Chronicles: A Visual History of the Galaxy’s Greatest Science Fiction, contributor Matt Bielby details some of the designs and concepts in the Star Wars films that are similar to elements that first appeared in the French comic: “The slave-girl outfit that Laureline wore in a 1972 adventure appears to have inspired Princess Leia Organa’s costume in The Return of the Jedi (1983). Other elements of Star Wars that seem indebted to the French strip include the Millennium Falcon, Luke falling from Cloud City, Han in carbonite, Darth Vader’s scarred face and the concept of clone armies — indeed, on first seeing the George Lucas film, Mézières was said to have been ‘furious.’”

A recent comment sent me down the Internet rabbit hole, where I soon found this:

J.G. Ballard called Star Wars the first totally unserious s-f film:

Although slightly biased, I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. S-f has been one of the few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change — social, technological and environmental — and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias. Why, then, has it translated so uneasily into the cinema? Unlike the western, which long ago took over the literary form and now exists in its own right, the s-f film has never really been more than an offshoot of its literary precursor, which to date has provided all the ideas, themes and inventiveness. S-f cinema has been notoriously prone to cycles of exploitation and neglect, unsatisfactory mergings with horror films, thrillers, environmental and disaster movies.

The most popular form of s-f — space fiction — has been the least successful of all cinematically, until 2001 and Star Wars, for the obvious reason that the special effects available were hopelessly inadequate. Surprisingly, s-f is one of the most literary forms of all fiction, and the best s-f films — Them!, Dr Cyclops, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Alphaville, Last Year in Marienbad (not a capricious choice, its themes are time, space and identity, s-f’s triple pillars), Dr Strangelove, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Barbarella and Solaris — and the brave failures such as The Thing, Seconds and The Man who Fell to Earth — have all made use of comparatively modest special effects and relied on strongly imaginative ideas, and on ingenuity, wit and fantasy.

With Star Wars the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way, towards huge but empty spectacles where special effects — like the brilliantly designed space vehicles and their interiors in both Star Wars and 2001 — preside over derivative ideas and unoriginal plots, as in some massively financed stage musical where the sets and costumes are lavish but there are no tunes. I can’t help feeling that in both these films the spectacular sets are the real subject matter, and that original and imaginative ideas — until now science fiction’s chief claim to fame — are regarded by their makers as secondary, unimportant and even, possibly, distracting.

Star Wars in particular seems designed to appeal to that huge untapped audience of people who have never read or been particularly interested in s-f but have absorbed its superficial ideas — space ships, ray guns, blue corridors, the future as anything with a fin on it — from comic strips, TV shows like Star Trek and Thunderbirds, and the iconography of mass merchandising.

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In many ways it is the ultimate home movie, in which Lucas goes back into his toy cupboard and plays with all his boyhood fantasies, fitting together a collection of stuffed toys, video games and plastic spaceships into this ten-year-old’s extravaganza, back to the days, as he himself says, when he ‘dreamed about running away and having adventures that no one else has ever had’.

I haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie yet, but I suspect this is how many people feel right now:

The Force is with us — and us too:

For his birthday, we should all listen to some lovely, lovely Ludwig Van. Walter Carlos’s Clockwork Orange famously included an early-synthesizer version of Beethoven’s Ninth:

It’s a sin, using Ludwig van like that.

Walt Kelly famously created Pogo — “We have met the enemy, and he is us” — but before that he worked as a Disney animator on Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo.

Between those two jobs he produced fairy tale comics, now collected in Walt Kelly’s Fairy Tales — and promoted in this video:

The universal symbols for escalators, restrooms, etc. were created just 40 years ago, for the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), as the bicentennial approached:

To determine what these symbols ought to look like, DOT approached the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the nation’s oldest and largest professional design organization. Together, they reviewed hundreds of symbols in use around the world and set out to develop their own set that could convey diverse messages to America’s tourists.

Designing the initial 34 symbols took nearly a year, and the project was so intense that the firm worried they might lose other clients. In the pre-computer era, Cook and Shanosky drew hundreds of sketches on tracing paper and discussed them with the AIGA’s project committee, turning in version after version of each symbol. The committee discussed each draft in exacting detail, returning pages of notes to Cook and Shanosky, which today fill a giant, overstuffed binder that Cook has kept for years.

Simplicity began with the male figure. The character built upon previous stylized figures from earlier symbol sets, but Cook and Shanosky’s own sleek, no-details figure set the tone for the other symbols in the DOT set. The figure has since been dubbed Helvetica Man by the designers Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, a name Cook appreciates. Like many designers, he has a deep respect for the font Helvetica and its clean, no-frills appearance.

Creating simple, easily understood symbols required that the designers grasped the essence of what they were trying to communicate. Understanding the basics of the human form is relatively easy, and even differentiating gender with Helvetica Woman’s dress seemed a straightforward enough task. But the design team also needed to tackle more complex, abstract subjects. For example, how do you portray authority—what makes Helvetica Man official? Apparently, a hat is the answer, and a sash across his chest and waist, as shown in the symbols for customs and immigration (in the pre-TSA days, the design group dismissed a similar symbol for airport security, noting that it’s “not an official person who does security”). It’s strangely effective; there’s nothing like an official-looking hat to give a person an air of authority.

There was also a debate about whether to include Helvetica Man in the symbol for stairs. Look at the design we know today—a single line, bent into ascending or descending right angles—and it’s hard to think anything except “stairs.” But before there was a universal symbol, it was unclear how much detail was necessary, and the committee thought a figure using the stairs might make the symbol clearer. Eventually, they took him out, concerned that his inclusion leaned too much towards an illustration, rather than a symbol. But they made the opposite decision for the escalator symbol, deeming the escalator without Helvetica Man too abstract to be specific.