Commentary: My young sons can tell you tales of Jason pursuing the golden fleece, how Hercules died and how Odin lost his eye. They also know the tale of Luke Skywalker and how he left a farming community for other worlds in pursuit of a mysterious destiny (and learned how to use a really cool sword).
Is one world of mythology any more legitimate or elevated than the other? If a statue of Masau'u, the Hopi figure, is acceptable as folk art, would a statue of Yoda be less so, because it is associated with commercial entertainment? My kids could not care less.
Moreover, they merge ancient mythology with stories from commercial media without apology. They have seamlessly reconciled the recent movies about Thor and Loki with what they learned from me reading Padraic Colum’s “Children of Odin” to them at bedtime.
Which is the “true” mythology? You might ask my children, but they are busy playing.
Mingling different worlds is no problem for them. How might Bilbo Baggins have navigated the labyrinth of Knossos and evaded the minotaur? Give an imaginative child a few minutes in the back yard and they will return with a story.
Star Wars has always been a commercial enterprise and yet for a great many of us who were children in the 1970s it ingeniously wormed its way into the part of us that loves mythology, that takes sustenance from exploring a story-world that contains sagas and multitudes of characters with varying strengths, weaknesses and forms.
At the same time, yes, the whole thing was a business enterprise. We remember the frantic merchandising of toys by the Mattel company, the Star Wars themed drinking glasses that came with McDonald’s happy meals, the endless merchandising of each movie.
Those were days when movies had to be savored without pause and rewind, and could not be viewed on demand. The premiere day of a "Star Wars" movie was a holiday, as one had to wait three years for each new installment.
As children, if we were unsatisfied about something in the movie, we would make up our own stories. By the time George Lucas, the Oz-like master behind it all, produced three “prequels” in the 1990s, we were adults, presumably too old to make up our own stories in the back yard.
Somewhere we began to take it all seriously. Movie tickets were more expensive and it was our own money now. With so many stories told in books, video games and an animated series in addition to the movies, the concept of a Star Wars “canon” was even introduced. Will we find apocrypha in earthen jars somewhere?
We were less forgiving of the prequel trilogy’s bad dialogue and bland sentiment. Many of the directions in which Lucas took the story were rejected. The mighty Oz fell and Lucas sold the franchise to Disney. New storytellers took over and began churning out more movies.
This decade, the third trilogy arrives and the final installment comes in December. We are middle-aged. The characters we met as children have aged and are being killed off. New, younger characters have been introduced. We cannot play in the back yard because we’ve added storage units to rent on AirBNB. Instead of playing, we argue about the movies on the internet.
Personally, I was very fond of the most recent, controversial movie, and even more do I enjoy the outsized reactions of serious Star Wars fandom. Nearing 50, I identify with Yoda laughing as the Jedi temple burns, because Masau'u knows where Hercules went when he died.
Mythology is the common property of those who dream and play. Thankfully, my children are young enough to remind me.