36. A Good Old Fashioned Love Story
Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Boys meets other boy with hairy dog-faced sidekick who also falls in love with girl. Girl kisses first boy. Boy and girl turn out to be siblings. Second boy and girl fall in love. It's a universal story that has played out again and again across Hollywood's long and illustrious history.
37. The Star Wars: Holiday Special
It is probably the most derided thing from the entire Star Wars universe, apart from JarJar Binks of course, but the Holiday Special is in fact a work of absolute genius. For a start it introduced Boba Fett, but aside from that one moment of genius, the Holiday Special is pretty much only notable for its crimes against Star Wars - and therein lies the kicker: A New Hope is so great that one of the most awful spin-offs in the history of the world wasn't able to take any of the gloss of it.
38. The Dog Fights
I've already mentioned how generally incredible the work ILM put in on A New Hope was, but it was in the dog fights that the visual effects team particularly shone, and introduced a whole new world of sci-fi action that the genre would be far poorer without today. Inspired by World War II air dogfights the sequences in which the Empire's TIE Fighters take on the amassed squadrons of X-Wings are among some of the most stunningly designed and choreographed in the entire Star Wars franchise, and it is even more astounding that they had no direct precedent before George Lucas approached the wizards at ILM to make them so.
39. Quote:
"May the Force be with you."
40. Han Solo v Luke Skywalker
There are some intriguing ideas about masculinity and patriarchal responsibility within A New Hope, but the best plays out between Han and Luke, who represent contrasting sides of the masculine coin. Han is an abrasive, cock-sure and cynical older brother type, a space cowboy who revels in adrenaline-fueled exchanges, and his masculinity seems to belong to an older Hollywood time - from Westerns and War epics. On the other hand is Luke, a far more feminised masculine identity, who is naive and innocent, essentially good and driven by a more traditional sense of romance and chivalry. Who we root for would probably indicate out own ideas concerning masculinity, or so a psychoanalyst might suggest - but the fact that it is Han who eventually "gets the girl" further down the line, and who saves the day when Luke is in peril might just suggest what George Lucas thinks of the masculine identity.