[The Australian Panther]

“ When I did Graffiti, I discovered that making a positive film is exhilarating. I thought, maybe I should do a film like this for even younger kids. Graffiti was for 16-year-olds; this, Star Wars, is for ten and twelve-year olds, who have lost something even more significant than the teenager. I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had- they don’t have westerns they don’t have pirate movies, the real Errol Flynn, John Wayne adventures. Disney had abdicated its reign over the children’s market and nothing had replaced it.
He wanted to do Sci-Fi, a fantasy in the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers tradition. …………………… ‘Star Wars ‘ was a conscious attempt at creating new myths,’ he continued, ‘I wanted to make a kid’s film that would… introduce a kind of reality. Everybody is forgetting to tell the kids, - hey, this is right and this is wrong.’
He was reading extensively through the literature of fairy-tale and myth, discovering Joseph Campbell. He pored over Carlos Castenada, recast Castenada’s hero, a Mexican shaman named Don Juan, as Obi-Wan Kenobi and his 'Life-force' into 'the Force.'”
George Lucas
quoted in,
Page 318 “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” – Peter Biskind 1998.