Lucasfilm George Lucas's "Star Wars" film universe and the associated toys, comic books, TV shows, video games and other ancillary products have earned billions of dollars since his original film debuted in 1977. But "Star Wars" is more than a commercial juggernaut which helped to create the very idea of the "Summer blockbuster." For many people around the world it is generation-defining film that influenced their lives in ways both small and large. "Star Wars" is also an example of what literary scholars, anthropologists and others have described as the "monomyth" (or "the hero's journey"), a set of omnipresent storytelling conventions and archetypes in (Western) storytelling.