61 POPULAR AMERICAN FANTASY FILMS KOTTAK Warsa' writer and director George Lucas and how many were manifestations of a collective unconscious that Lucas shares with us through common enculturation. Thie Wizard Qo O and Star Wars both begin in arid country, the first in Kansas, the second on the desert planet Tatooine (see Table 1). Star War changes The Wizard's female hero into a boy, Luke Skywalker. As in fairy tales, both heroes have short, common first names, and second names that describe their ambience and activity. Thus Luke, who travels aboard spaceships, is a Skywalker, while Dorothy Gale is swept off to Oz by a cyclone (a gale of wind). Dorothy leaves home with her dog Toto, who is being pursued by, and has managed to escape from, a woman who in Oz becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. Luke follows his own "Two-Two" (R2D2), who is fleeing Darth Vader, the witch's structural equivalent. Dorothy and Luke both live with an uncle and aunt, but because of the gender change of the hero, the primary relationship is reversed and inverted. Thus Dorothy's relationship with her aunt is primary, warm and loving, whereas Luke's relationship with his uncle, though primary, is strained and distant. Aunt and uncle are in the tales for the same reason. They represent home (the nuclear family of orientation), which children must eventually leave to make it on their own. Yet, as Bettelheim points out, disguising parents as uncle and aunt establishes social distance; the child can deal with the hero's separation (in The Wizard of Oz) or the aunt's and uncle's death (in Star Wars) more easily than with the death or separation of the real parents. Furthermore, this permits the child's strong feelings toward his or her real parents to be represented in different, more central characters. Both films focus on the child's relationship with the parent of the same sex, dividing that parent into three parts. In The Wizard, the mother is split into two parts bad and one good: the wicked witch of the east, dead at the beginning of the movie; the wicked witch of the west, dead at the end; and Glinda, the goodmother, who survives. Star Wars reverses the proportion of good and bad, giving Luke a good father (his own), the Jedi knight who is dead at the film's beginning; another good father, Ben Kenobi, who is ambiguously dead when the movie ends; and a father-figure of total evil. It is easy to note the phonetic resemblance of Darth Vader to "Dark Father." In a New York Timea interview (May 18, 1980), just before the opening of The Empir Strikes Back, Lucas claimed that he chose "Darth Vader" because it sounded like both "dark father" and "deathwater." As the goodmother third survives The Wizard off Qz, the badfather third lives on after Star Wars to strike back in the sequel. The child's relationship with the parent of opposite sex is also represented in the two films. Dorothy's father-figure is the Wizard of Oz, initially a terrifying figure, later proved to be a fake. Bettelheim notes that the typical fairy tale father is either disguised as a monster or giant, or else (when preserved as a human) is weak, distant or ineffective. Children wonder why Cinderella's father permits her to be treated badly by her stepmother and siblings, why the father of Hansel and Gretel doesn't throw out his new wife instead of his children, and why Mr. White, Snow White's father, doesn't tell the queen she's too narcissistic. Dorothy counts on the wizard to save her, finds that he is posing seemingly impossible demands, achieves significantly on her own, and no longer relies on a father who offers no more than she herself possesses. Luke's mother-figure is Princess Leia Organa. As Bettelheim notes, earlyOedipal boys commonly fantasize their mothers to be unwilling captives of their fathers, and fairy tales frequently disguise mothers as princesses, whose freedom the boy-hero must obtain. In graphic Freudian imagery, Darth Vader threatens Princess Leia with a needle the size of the witch's broomstick. By the end of the film, Luke has freed Leia, vanquished Vader, and the princess seems destined to become Ms. Organa-Skywalker. There are other striking parallels in the structures of the two films. Fairytale heroes are often accompanied on their adventures by secondary characters who personify virtues needed in a successful quest. Dorothy takes along wisdom (the Scarecrow), love (the Tin Woodman) and