What if Star Wars never happened?

We certainly won't have May The Fizz Be With You


When I first played the advert in that link to make sure it worked the next advert happened to have Geoffrey McGivern in it. For those of you who don't know he was Ford Prefect in the BBC Radio version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which is currently being repeated on Radio Four Extra. Unfortunately when I tested it again it ran into a completely different set of adverts.

We wouldn't have this one either, "A second class return to Dottingham please."

 
No Star Wars means Blake's Seven seems that much fresher outside the British Commonwealth, making Farscape (if it happens) even gloomier.
IIRC from a BBC4 documentary about Blake's Seven the show was intended to be more like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers until Matt Irvine (who was in the documentary) told them how expensive special effects of that standard were.

No Star Wars and the big budget sci-fi and space opera films that followed it might help the likes of Dr Who, Blake's Seven and the Tomorrow People because there would be nothing to make them look cheap against. IIRC from a 1980s DWM interview, Ian Marter claimed that Star Wars killed the projected Dr Who Meets Scratchman film because it wasn't expensive enough.

Has anybody got the cartoon of Tom Baker standing outside Michael Grade's office with a speech bubble saying some thing like, "This story's monster isn't normal flesh and blood," that appeared in DWM in 1985?
 
Would Star Trek get a movie with no Star Wars?
Is there no Star Wars because Lucas did Flash Gordon?
Lucas wanted to put the emerging blue screen technology and special effects into Flash Gordon. Since he couldn't secure a license to do so, he created the new story line of Star Wars. In either case, a Star Trek movie would have been made to prove the Trek universe can also be upgraded to modern special effects. Star Trek enjoyed a unique vogue in the early seventies as the reigning space adventure in syndication. 1969 put the space adventure into remission because of the real moon landings, as science fact occluded science fiction. To further drive the matter home, 2001: A Space Odyssey was set near term and to this day appears to realistically depict the first missions to the moons of Jupiter. So sci-fi came back to earth (Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman) and horror went supernatural (Exorcist). Star Trek developed a faithful following and was ripe for upgrade.
 
Star Wars has been irreversibly influential on virtually ALL media since it came out, not just sci-fi--there's a million and one characters following it which were directly based on Darth Vader and just as many works which incorporate facsimiles of lightsabers into their setting
 
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