We can say a lot about George Lucas but the iconic director has always pushed for diversity, both in Star Wars and outside of it. While the director has released a number of misguided films, the filmmaker’s push for diversity has been centre stage, and anyone who thinks that Lucas hates “being woke” has clearly not watched Star Wars properly.
Twitter user Okiro celebrated Lucas’ legacy of diversity on the social media platform. The fan explained that Lucas funded one of the first all-black movies when Hollywood wouldn’t as well as putting black people in major roles in Star Wars.
George Lucas also created fan-favorite character Ahsoka, who remains a popular character with the fandom and is even getting her own live-action series. Lucas was also heavily involved with The Clone Wars animated series, which got to explore more political and mature themes, albeit with better writing.
Fans have also brought up how Lucas made Star Wars a bit more political with the prequel trilogy he directed. Granted, a lot of the politics in those movies were poorly-written and didn’t match the tone he was angling for but he gets points for effort. Despite being fundamentally flawed, many fans quote certain political lines from Revenge of the Sith and that’s worth something.
Lucas’ politics throughout the entirety of Star Wars would be seen as “woke” nowadays be detractors. While many fans deem the villainous empire to be an allegory of Nazi German, Lucas has explained that the Empire represents America whereas the Rebels represent Vietnam, which makes a lot of sense for the time Star Wars was created.
In an iconic interview with James Cameron, Lucas and the Terminator director discussed the politics of Star Wars at length.
“The good guys are the rebels. They’re using asymmetrical warfare against a highly organised Empire. I think we call those guys terrorists today. We call them Muhajideen, we call them Al Queda,” Cameron says.
“When I did it, they were Veit Cong,” Lucas responds.
Needless to say, despite all his faults, George Lucas helped make Star Wars a more diverse franchise and that cannot be denied. There might be some weirdo fans who complain about “wokeness” running their childhood franchise but they clearly never watched it intently. It really is funny seeing these supposed fans call for George to take action when he would have done similar things that Disney did.
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Regardless of what fans think, Disney is going to keep milking Star Wars for what it’s worth and George Lucas can’t do anything about it. After all, he accepted the deal, makes bank from it, and even occasionally contributes creatively.
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