Three rebels that didn’t make the cut.

* * *

In the first movie none of the heroes had skin darker than goat’s milk and there was only one token female, but she needed saving (which is odd, since Princess Leia, being Luke’s twin, theoretically could have saved herself if she had wanted to “trust her feelings.”) In the second movie it turns out there is only one black man in the entire universe … and he’s a con man. In the third movie there are some women with no speaking lines that appear in the beginning of the movie but they’re answering telephones in the background (making them more or less intergalactic secretaries, you’ve come a long way, baby). Women do not fly spaceships in the Star Wars universe. They don’t get glowing swords or have heroic music played in the background as they blow things up. Space … it’s a man’s place.

Except that this wasn’t always true. It might have taken George Lucas three films to get there but there were three female rebel pilots in the last of the movies, which were cut in the last minute. Huh.

You can say the movies reflected 1970s thinking, if you want to. You can say they helped expand the science fiction genre and gave children in China jobs by cranking out all the plastic crap Lucas sold (I’m not joking here, if you bought a toy in the 1970s with “made in China” on the back it came from a sweatshop) but selling Star Wars to Disney for $4 billion dollars? That’s just obscene.