Pfc Hayes

Note: The page contains spoilers for the original I Survived and Blood Heat, as well as the original Night in the Woods.

If not for the scenes with the pair, George Lucas’ long-gestating Star Wars novel trilogy could have been history. The only thing holding it from being the first big success for a Disney-owned film company was going to be a deluge of nasty backlash from fans.

Back to the future, it’s a great story. The book was inspired by a life event that George Lucas had been having a hard time getting off his chest, and the events of The Original Trilogy prefigure and mirror the bigger, grander scale of the whole saga for comic and film fans. Then, in 1980, someone approached Disney about retelling the story in a film — and instead of one man or just a group of people going out on some kind of epic, multi-generational journey to destroy the galaxy by burning the universe, the entire trilogy was pitched simultaneously to the two companies and Lucas immediately went into an overhaul of the story, with a different cast and big-scale changes, and something that was closer to a musical. Needless to say, it wasn’t a complete success, and when the next two instalments — Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, were announced for 1977 — it wasn’t exactly the first time a massively successful saga had been re-created in three films.

Today we look at George Lucas’ 1980 I Survived, one of the only attempts at trying to realise the fictional ‘New Trilogy’. The film is still slightly creepy, but overall it’s a pretty successful action / thriller, and to date it’s not his best written work. There is clearly still tension in what is basically a buddy cop movie with a theme park theme — we don’t exactly know what’s going to happen after the movie’s pretty simple linear plotline, but Lucas has done an extremely good job of getting an action-adventure feel — and the fact that Lucas had an official ‘New Trilogy’ story to create an action film that would go as close as we possibly can to replicating the entire decade.