And, of course, there is the declaration that all of this happened “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. There are references to an “ancient religion” and an “Imperial Senate”. We hear that Obi-Wan Kenobi served Princess Leia’s father in something called the Clone Wars, that Darth Vader was Obi-Wan’s pupil, and that Han Solo has fallen out with a gangster named Jabba the Hutt. Nodding to the Saturday morning science-fiction serials that inspired him, Lucas included a so-called “opening crawl” of introductory text which explained what went on in the previous notional episodes: “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.” And from then on the film maintains the mischievous illusion that, if we’d come to the cinema a week earlier, we might have seen those Rebel spaceships striking from that hidden base. When it was released, it wasn’t labelled Episode IV – that tag was added for the 1981 reissue – but it did give the impression that its story was already well underway. Paradoxically, one of the cleverest aspects of A New Hope is that it always seemed to be part of a series.
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