Fact File
Name: Star Wars (the phenomenon)
Address: A cinema near you (sometime after May 1999 but start queueing now)
Occupation: Entertaining a generation of new fans, satisfying a generation of ageing recidivists . . . and making lots of money
In the news because: The latest mutation of the phenomenon, a two-minute trailer for next year's film, has itself become a box office hit in the US
Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away (Oh all right then, Hollywood) a bunch of movie executives are rubbing their well-manicured hands together in glee. The two-minute trailer for a film that won't be released here until midsummer has already become a box-office smash in the US.
The force is with us. Again.
The Star Wars series has no parallel in terms of the feverish excitement it generates in fanatics, but even box-office analysts were dumbfounded at their reaction to the teaser for Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Men- ace. The film explores the childhoods of the Star Wars characters and documents how a young Anakin Skywalker became the heavy-breathing supervillain Darth Vader.
In New York people camped out on the pavement to be first in line for the 10 a.m. showing of the trailer. Star Wars buffs paid $9 to see 120 seconds of special effects and battleships before hotfooting it to other screens where the trailer was also on view. The main feature films it preceded, The Rugrats Movie, The Waterboy and Enemy of the State were in the top five in box-office earnings last Tuesday due to a reported 1,147 per cent increase in ticket sales at the 75 cinemas where the trailer was shown.
On the Internet, the preview of the film that is the first Star Wars epic to be created since The Return of the Jedi in 1983 can be downloaded, with some difficulty, from the official site which is currently recording 400 hits per second. All across the world, fans are dusting down their light-sabres and remembering how to tell the difference between an x-wing and a TIE fighter.
This time they are in for an even bigger treat. The first Star Wars films, created in the 1970s and 1980s by George Lucas, could have found themselves in a cinematic black hole were it not for the world-wide cult that sprang up around them. The scripts were basic, the acting for the most part wooden - only Harrison Ford (Han Solo) and to a lesser extent Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) went on to greater things. And while the special effects were pioneering, paving the way for a whole new sci-fi audience, by today's standards they are unimpressive.
After Star Wars, Phantom Menace will be only the second of the series that Lucas directed himself. The original trilogy, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, earned $1.5 billion on film and video sales - and a massive $2.5 billion on merchandising spin-offs. The new Star Wars film is the first of three prequels and is expected to become the first to earn a billion dollars in the US in its first weekend when it is released in May. Starring Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson and Samuel L. Jackson, the script is far less cringe-inducing and the special effects are estimated to have cost around £80 million.
When George Lucas first pitched the idea of Star Wars he did so by swooshing toy spaceships in front of film executives, who viewed his vision as a non-starter before it was reluctantly taken up by 20th Century Fox.
The original trilogy was only the middle three of what he envisaged as a nine-part series. Now his Skywalker Ranch studio outside San Francisco boasts more computers than the Pentagon and only slightly fewer than NASA. Since the 1980s his company, Industrial Light and Magic, has had a hand in some of the most successful films of the last decade, from ET to Forrest Gump.
Lucas is thought to be worth about £2 billion but he raised the bulk of the money for the new series of films by releasing digitally enhanced versions of the trilogy last year. Not surprisingly they were a massive success, although some science-fiction purists viewed the idea of adding extra battleships or greater numbers of storm-troopers to be as useful as adding more aircraft to the final scene of Casablanca.
There are perhaps no other films which have been subject of such detailed examination by fans, with everything from script blunders to science facts being trawled over. For instance, there was the moment in Star Wars when a storm-trooper bumped his head on the door of the planet-destroying spaceship Death Star, and then there was the potato that flew incongruously towards the Millennium Falcon spaceship.
While most of the stars were American, the actors who depicted some of the most enduring characters hailed from Britain - Luke Skywalker's golden protocol droid C-3PO (voice by Anthony Daniels); Chewbacca, Han Solo's 200-year-old Wookie copilot (voice of Peter Maymew); and Darth Vader, the dark lord of Sith (body by Dave Prowse of Britain, voice of American James Earl Jones).
What will be interesting, say Star Wars aficionados, is whether Lucas can make the prequels as meaningful to the 20-something fans who form the global cult audience as well as a whole new generation of cinema-goers. Stunning special effects - the film is 95 per cent computer-generated - and a celestial cast are all very well but what made Star Wars different was that era's thirst for this new style of science fiction and the myriad of messages it contained.
The original trilogy was, at its core, a simple morality play, a tale of good versus evil with Biblical undertones. There was redemption and then resurrection, displayed to greatest effect in the last scenes of The Empire Strikes Back where the ghosts of Jedi Knight Ben Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and Yoda, master of the Force, smile down benignly at Luke Skywalker.
Writing last year in the Sun- day Tribune, the journalist Paul Howard put his finger on the wayStar Wars became a seminal experience for a whole generation. He wrote that his father had taken him to see Star Wars the same day he took Holy Communion and that there was no doubt which of these occasions had the most profound effect on him.
The question is, after seeing blockbusters on everything from Jurassic dinosaurs to end-of-the-world scenarios and countless natural disasters, will new audiences feel the same? The boxoffice cash is secure, but capturing the hearts and minds of another generation of six to 16-year-olds would be Lucas's finest achievement.