Having got the sci-fi out of his system for the time being, in 1973 George Lucas went on to document his other big love on the big screen: CARS. Specifically big, loud American muscle cars. You know, the sort he used to drive around at illegal speeds, earning tickets during his misspent youth. American Graffiti ended up being a coming-of-age film about the transition from rebellious adolescence to responsible adulthood, a wistful and nostalgic picture which belies Lucas's later inability to put anything close to a real emotion on the screen. It was a surprise hit, too, and was basically the reason the studios entrusted him with the budget required to make Star Wars. Hollywood wasn't so different back in the day to how it is now so, of course, when American Graffiti was such a box office smash they were keen to make a sequel to capitalise on it. 1979 saw the release of More American Graffiti, which picked up a year after the first film left off, seeing what happened to the characters once they'd left for college. It was a pretty poor cash-grab that Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss, who appeared in the original, didn't both turning up for. Lucas totally did, though, hand-picking Bill L Norton as writer and director and staying on as a producer himself. Which we imagine was to get as much money from the project as possible, because it sure didn't make for a good film. He was tarnishing the reputation of his most beloved films even back then!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
