63 POPULAR AMERICAN FANTASY FILMS KOTTAK courage (the Cowardly Lion). Star Wars includes a structurally equivalent trio, Han Solo, C3PO, and Chewbacca, but their association with particular qualities is not as precise. The minor characters are also structurally parallel, Munchkins and Jawas, Apple Trees and Sand People, Flying Monkeys and Stormtroopers. And compare settings —the witch's castle and the Death Star, the Emerald City and the rebel base (at Tikal, in verdant Guatemala). The endings are also parallel. Luke accomplishes his objective on his own, using the Force (Oceanian mana, magical power). Dorothy's aim is to return to Kansas; that she does, tapping her shoes together, drawing on the Force in her ruby slippers. I have previously argued (Kottak 1978b) that these resemblances help explain Star Wars' huge success. It is likely that all successful cultural products blend old and new, draw on familiar themes, rearrange them in novel ways, and thus win a lasting place in the imaginations of whatever culture creates or accepts them. Star Wars successfully used old cultural themes in novel ways, and it came along at an optimistic time, a time for heroes, in American culture. It drew on the American fairy tale, one that had been available in book form since the turn of the century. The movie version of The Wizard f Oz was not immediately successful when it was released in 1939, the same year as Gone With the Wind, which found a much larger immediate audience. The Wizard's popularity had to await happier years, and annual telecasting that brings it into every home. Our familiarity with this narrative therefore comes more from television than from movies. In 1980 Star Wars' sequel TESB was rivaling the success of the 1977 film. Was TESB a structural transformation of any previous work of American culture? I considered Gore With the Wind and Casablanca, two popular old films with stereotyped and memorable characters, but I found only minor parallels. I soon did discover the source of TESB's structure in a previous film —Star Wars itself. In the case of Star Wars' transformation of The Wizard, most of the structural contrasts were simply those that logically followed from the change from female to male hero. There were only a few structural inversions (2 parts bad to 2 parts good, and goodmother versus badfather lives on). TESB transforms Star Wars differently, but also through a series of simple operations. Rather than the gender change, there is a partial shift in perspective from young hero to old villain, and a series of elements are converted into their opposites. (Note that being opposite or inverted is not the same as a gender change, since a male is not really the opposite of a female, though our culture sometimes considers them as such.) TESB is a negation, accomplished through a fairly consistent series of simple structural inversions of elements of the original. The trilogy awaits conclusion in the third film, to be, in dialectical terms, the negation of the negation, the synthesis of the thesis (Star Wars) and the antithesis (TESB). But let us look at TESB. There are some important general oppositions. First, in Star Wars Luke was preoccupied with freeing the mother-figure; here he is absorbed in relationships with fatherfigures. Second, Darth Vader dominates the second film much as Luke dominated the first. Third, Vader becomes more human in TESB (for example, through a quick shot of his pink head as his helmet is lowered, and through his emotional invitation to his son to join him in ruling the galaxy). Luke simultaneously becomes less clearly good as he flirts with the dark side of the Force (killing Vader's image which turns out to have his face, and becoming partially bionic like his father). Note that Luke is shown upside-down several times in TESB, symbolically suggesting the overall turnaround. That inversion (Table 2) is marked from the very beginning, the opening shot of a tall, spindly dark imperial robot landing on a cold, wet planet —the opposite of the Star Wars opening, in which short, squat, light rebel robot (R2D2) landed on a hot, dry planet. Luke is almost immediately hung up by an ice creature, as if to say at once that everything here is upside-down. In Star Wars Luke saw an image of the mother-figure that propelled him on his adventures. Here an image of Ben (an aspect of the father) serves the same function. In the first film Luke was gradually joined by a party of companions.