Solo: A Star Wars Story - 10 Reasons To Be Excited

9. American Graffiti Meets Star Wars

Lucasfilm

Star Wars might be George Lucas' most treasured creation, but the director was also responsible for another all-time classic years before that film's 1977 release: American Graffiti.

Centred around a group of teens on the cusp of adulthood in sixties America, the film was revered for its uncompromising portrayal of an America in transition, with Vietnam looming overhead, and with the fifties slowly ebbing away. It's a stunner of a film, and featured an early appearance from Harrison Ford as well. The comparisons with Star Wars, however, end there - until now.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is a tale of Han on the cusp of becoming the man he'd be in the original Star Wars trilogy, and while there are no hotrods to be seen, there are speeders, and one shot that derives heavily from Lucas' early directorial effort - which, lest we forget, also starred a young Ron Howard - in the trailer's opening moments.

If there's a kind of speeder/hotrod culture on Correllia, you can be damn sure that Han would be a part of it. That, and it'd form a neat callback to Graffiti, with Ford having played a prominent role in the film as an arrogant street-racer.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.