‘Jaws’ was boffo box office—and bad news for cinema.

That’s EXACTLY the problem, though: the fact that it can be metaphorically shoehorned in can cause the audience to unknowingly root for the Vietcong. Let me put it another way in terms you might understand: Currently in education right now, they try to paint the French Revolution as being the same thing as our War of Independence, despite being starkly different from even a casual glance, let alone an in-depth one, and many people end up believing those lies. And it’s in fact directly relevant because George Lucas when creating Star Wars specifically intended for its audience to be children of the seven year old range specifically to indoctrinate them to be leftists. Even Ian McDiarmid made that much clear around the time Revenge of the Sith was released.

Besides, even ignoring that, there were also some hints to the leftist agenda like, I don’t know, it’s perfectly alright to rob a person of their free will simply because they’re weak minded (bear in mind, absolutely NOTHING in the movie suggested there was any potential negative to the Jedi Mind Trick or whether it could lead to the Dark Side, and if anything, considering the only other explicit Force user, Darth Vader, didn’t even TRY to use the Jedi Mind Trick to, say, get the location out, it’s heavily implied robbing people of their free will is what good guys do).

It was an updated space opera with elements on hand from all sorts of sources. There is not a single element of SW that was unique to it. It was cowboys and samurai fighting Nazis in space.

If you look hard enough you can also say The Godfather was anti-capitalist propaganda (depicting organized crime as just another form of big business).

Correction, it was Vietcong fighting America in Space, which George Lucas has repeatedly made clear in various interviews after the first and even original trilogy (even Ian McDiarmid made it pretty clear that during filming of ROTJ, Lucas didn’t exactly make any secret about his trying to push that whole angle), and if that’s not enough, this, which was written by Lucas himself at that time, made that explicit: https://otnesse.tumblr.com/post/162081709399/this-is-from-george-lucas-1973-notes-for-star

Specifically: “a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire... The empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots aiding rebel groups and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a ‘total control’ police state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs””

For goodness sakes, even How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor made the Vietnam comparisons in the first movie VERY explicit.

Do I even WANT to believe Lucas created that movie to trick Americans into rooting for the Vietcong, especially tricking American children into doing so? Absolutely not! Heck, I’m actually sickened that I have to root for the villains of the film due to the so-called “heroes” being based on real life villains who masqueraded as heroes (I do not like having to root for villains). But guess what? Lucas said it, he created it, so it literally doesn’t matter what I want or think.

Quite frankly, I’m pretty sure the Godfather’s already bad enough trying to glamorize life in the mob, whether it was condemning Capitalism or not. Either way, this isn’t even looking that hard into Star Wars, considering Lucas and several of his associates, including Walter Murch, made it VERY clear that was EXACTLY what it was all about, and unlike, say, Lucas’s claim that Vader was always Luke’s father, or that Greedo always shot first, his claim actually WAS backed up by development notes for the first film that he had penned way back in 1973.

I’ve been back in the water since but I think about Jaws everytime I get in.

Lucas is notorious for self mythologizing. In any case, it doesn’t matter what he says. The film on screen is a broad, shallow allegory that recurs again and again in various guises. Only people looking for Vietnam in it would find it.

I didn’t even WANT to find Vietnam in it in the first place, so I wasn’t even looking for it when I learned it. Heck, I didn’t even WANT to hear Vietnam being involved at all, yet guess what, Bill Whittle exposed that in Afterburner when he said “Lucas has since said, BTW, that the Ewoks, the native little good guys, represented in his mind the Vietcong, while the Evil Empire, the guys we spent our entire childhoods rooting against, was in fact America!”. Unfortunately, this isn’t even one of his usual self-mythologizing moments unlike with, say, his claiming Greedo always shot first, considering that the 1973 draft notes penned by Lucas at that time made the Vietnam elements VERY apparent, which if anything backed up his claims (by contrast, even his shooting script made clear that if anything, Han shot first, and Greedo shooting first came later). It’s even in The Making of Star Wars by JW Rinzler. Not to mention he has explicitly compared Palpatine to Nixon in the 1983 blueskying session with Larry Kasdan and another guy for ROTJ. And I think that the fact that Walter Murch and Ian McDiarmid vouched for Lucas with similar stories would point to that as well.

Besides, you know that technically, the exact same argument can be made for the Metal Gear series, right? Especially when Kojima had Big Boss compared to George Washington in Metal Gear Solid 2 (comparable enough that Solidus explicitly modeled his actions on BOTH men), yet in Peace Walker, even when speaking out against Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace tract and some of his men engaging in pro-second amendment statements, he and Miller BOTH proceeded to sing praises to the likes of Che Guevara like sophomoric College students? And the game’s main theme was peace.

Sort of Hitchcockian. In the movie Psycho, he did not let Janet Leigh know that the water in the shower would turn ice cold, which made her scream more realistic. Also he used chocolate syrup poured onto her as blood.

Absolutely brilliant...