This isn't the first time I've read Campbell - when I was a kid I had a battered paperback copy with a STAR WARS cover, and at the time I was one of those who would have read the phone book had Ma Bell put a stormtrooper on the front.
When I first saw STAR WARS, I was amazed at how complete the film seemed. The entire universe just seems to work, not the internal physics of spaceships and lightsabers, but on a thematic and structural level. It touches us in a primal way, in no small part because it is so strongly rooted in the monomyth. Beyond that, STAR WARS is in many ways a wholesale copy-and-paste of Campbell's formula. A reading of the section titles - The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, The Belly of the Whale, Atonement with the Father, The Master of Two Worlds, et al. - could double as a plot synopsis.
As kids, we immediately appropriated this myth, shaping our neighborhood play around it. Before STAR WARS hit screens, the kids on my block played - gods help us - LOGAN'S RUN. Some would be Sandmen, some would be Runners, and we would chase each other around the various houses looking for 29-year-olds. STAR WARS changed all that, and all of a sudden the playground clubhouse became the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon and every swing an X-Wing fighter.
STAR WARS even had its own apocrypha. Those who had read the Marvel Comics tie-in (with its deleted scenes) brought the image of Jabba the Hutt as a skinny green alien with whiskers into our game.
In those days before instantly-accessible films, our memories blended and played tricks on us. Most of the scenes with Luke's old friend Biggs Darklighter ended up on the cutting room floor, but thanks to production photos in the tie-in book our memories were altered to include him:
I remembered that scene clearly, though I never saw it. And man, I always wanted a spiffy cape like that.
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