Phill Jupitus talks about his memories of Star Wars

Just two years before A New Hope was released, Steven Spielberg had invented a new phenomenon: the summer event movie.

With this in mind, a young filmmaker and friend of Spielberg's went on to take the idea one step further. For George Lucas, Star Wars wasn't just an event movie – it was THE event movie.

So much so that nearly thirty years later, the bearded director was still trying to relive those heady days of 1977.

The special effects were there to grab the attention of a billion teenagers, but Lucas' inspiration for the movie had a much more innocent origin – a desire to bring fairytales back into the mainstream.

This is, perhaps, the main reason A New Hope is considered superior to the prequels. The trick lay within the story.

Episode IV (as it was later re-titled in 1982 when Lucas realised where he could take his success) is nothing more than a fairytale, albeit retold with a space station instead of a castle.

The princess, the wizard, the rogue, the wet-behind-the-ears hero... it's all here. Sure, Lucas' film borrowed heavily from a number of science fiction works, such as Flash Gordon and the stories of Asimov, but he somehow managed to blend a hundred ideas so intricately that you'd hardly notice you'd seen it all before.

The plot follows Luke Skywalker's search for excitement and adventure, something he finds in abundance when a wise old man (Obi Wan Kenobi) informs him of his family’s complicated past.

Urging Luke to take up arms and join him on a quest to save a princess from the grip of the evil Empire, and after his adoptive family are wiped out, Skywalker has nothing left to do but meet up with a band of merry men and take on the evil-doers in their own castle/ space station.

Kenobi served the same purpose any other wizard or mentor in any other action movie, but, somehow, Lucas tinged the character with enough mystique to make him the most popular mentor ever created.

And so it goes throughout the movie: Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia et al. The special effects were the grab, but deeply layered characters with back stories and history – a product of 5 years' preparation – are what make A New Hope what it is: a perfect science fiction fantasy movie.

Rich Phippen