h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The very first thing that an alien would need to know is that Star Wars is a work of fiction and not a documentary.

'Aliens', i.e. not like us, may not have a concept of art, creativity or fiction.

PP.

I always feel like an alien when you folks talk about Star Wars or Star Treck.
Icy´s question has reminded me something that I read a few days ago in one of those memes shared in facebook. It said something about the humanist philosophy that can befound in those works of fiction.

I didn´t read more, was busy, but it made me wonder if I was missing something really useful , something that can give you a bit of enlightment, as it happens with some classics of literature or any other creative domain (science is also included in the creative domain)

And now, after reading what you say, I think that I don´t feel any need to watch start wars for enlightment, although I feel curious about why people can feel so much passionated about a , apparently, simple piece of entertainment.

I've never seen the films but I grew up with brothers who were obsessed with them, and I live with people who know them inside out.

Whenever you pick up a torch (or a stick, or anything stick-like), you have to start pretending it's a light saber, and wave it around making appropriate noises. (Although if it's a torch you have to do a quick burst of the old 'Top of the Pops' music first).

The catchphrase used the most often here is 'The Force is strong in this one'(sometimes with another word substituted for 'force'), with 'These are not the droids you are looking for' (again, sometimes with a substitution) in second place.

It's useful to know the main characters and to be able to recognise the spacecraft, but it's OK to get confused about who actually comes from where and who does what in the films. You don't need to know much to be able to get by.

Mol

"You don't need to know much to be able to get by." [Mol]

I agree. I saw the movies once, and then went on to other things. There are many other things that can give you insights. Knowing the dialogue for Star Wars by heart might be useful if you're into going to conventions that will be attended by other fans, but how often is that likely to happen in your life? besides, Star Wars isn't the only thing people can become fanatical about. There are people who attend annual Jane Austen conventions. They come dressed up as their favorite Jane Austen characters [there was even a documentary about these conventions].

There are Comic Conventions that are attended by huge numbers of people [often in costume a well]. I have nephews who attend these conventions.

If I had to choose between Star Wars conventions and Star tr5ek conventions, I would opt for the latter, but only if they were held
in my state.

But don't forget the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe get-togethers. I've been to three so far: one in Manhattan, one in Pennsylvania, and one in London. My family has yet t figure out what *that* is all about.

As far as I can tell, fanaticism like that is not something you can really explain.....

But it's SO... COOL...


I don't know how you can live your life without having seen Star Wars at least once.

I've read the main Jane Austen books, seen the Star Wars movies, seen the first two Star Trek series, and plowed through the Terry Pratchett Discworld books. Also Harry Potter and the Tolkien warhorses. And the first six Donaldson Thomas the unbeliever books. They introduce new series faster than I can keep up with them, though.

My only saving grace is that the Young Adult literary genre accounts for a major share of the film adaptations. I see a lot of movies, so I'm spared from reading a ton of books that they are based on. "Dune," "Tuck Everlasting," "Hunger Games," "Golden Compass," "The Giver," "Percy Jackson & the Olympians," etc.

Yet I'll bet that almost any H2G2 researcher could name five series that I haven't even heard of, and the lists would contain very few duplicate titles.

paulh

The films of Dune are a very poor imitation of the books.

Golden Compass totally distorts the end of the first story and doesn't even hint at the two sequels (The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass). You should really read the real stories.

I am probably as guilty as you on the rest, but they are on my 'want to read list'.

F S

All one really needs is a Princess Lieah hand puppet.

Wiggle it about like a Punch and Judy doll and others
will fill in the blanks.


~jwf~

as I've mentioned, we're ploughing through films based on Philip K. Dick's works. I'm also doing my philosophy module for my PPE degree. The first part was about the self, which is something Dick wrote a lot about.

And actually, if you look at the stories/films as philosophical thought experiments (especially the ones like Imposter and Blade Runner - but many others too) it can be very interesting indeed.

This is the summary of Imposter - and the question is (since the title is a bit of a spoiler): who is Spencer Oldham?

Sci-fi is often merely a commentry on other things, in a different setting which can help to look at things from a different angle.

- Mr X

Well. I've a feeling that 5 or so years ago I did agree to sit down in front of Star Wars. And it turned out that actually I *had* seen it before, but in clips. I mean, I had never watched the film from start to finish before, but I had actually seen almost all of it in bits and pieces over the years.

I agree it's cool. But just not really my bag. They let me off watching the other Star Wars films.

Mol

I said at the start that this was an experiment - there were two things I wanted to test.

1. Is there any use for a repository of essential popular culture, i.e. "Things you really should know about x"

2. What would be the scope of this, choosing Star Wars as an example.


I'm not sure we categorically answered question 1. h2g2 researchers are a pretty enlightened lot - either you knew Star Wars in a lot of detail or you were comfortable not having to know about it. I still think this sort of repository might be useful for the general public, but I'd need to conduct more research.

As for question 2. I think we found around 30 "essential" facts for Star Wars which fell into the following categories:

Stars (names),
Principal characters (names, images)
Plot (brief summary)
Notable Props/scenes
Quotes
Public opinion/controversies.

I suspect we could fairly easily re-run this exercise for other genres: books, TV shows, magazines, Theatre, Bands, songs - even other things like celebrities, festivals, even politics maybe. The types of information we would see as essential would be different in each case.

These cultural touchstones are important to our ability to empathise with our fellow humans, even in the absence of a joint language. Michael Palin admirably demonstrated that connections can be established purely through a shared knowledge of Manchester United and Coca Cola and a willingness to laugh at ourselves.
One strength of this website is that we know we won't be asked to explain why doing impossible things before breakfast is important or the significance of towels. We hold these fictions to be self-evident.

"We hold these fictions to be self-evident."
If we still did Quote of the Day, that would be a dead cert, IMO.
When I read the question, I started from a different perspective: setting context. I would say that it was a series of films and associated works of fiction in other genres. I would characterize it as essentially fantasy adventure, overlaid with the thrappings of science fiction.

I would also add that they have strong nostalgic value because many people watched them when they were young, and that they are accessible to both young and old. If our hypothetical alien does not understand concepts like escapism and nostalgia, they have bigger problems fitting in than not knowing Star Wars.

I think your experiment highlights an important point, Icy.

It's easy to know nothing about a subject, and it is reasonably easy to know a lot about a subject, particularly if it is something as simple as Star Wars. But the real skill is knowing a lot but being able to imagine how the subject appears to someone who knows nothing or only a little.

That's the skill of an educator. To answer your original question I had to put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know Star Wars.

That's the skill we need to promote here on h2g2. It's the thing that makes our Guide better than an Encyclopaedia. I've told this story before but it is worth repeating. My daughter when she was young (about 9) was talking about an encyclopaedia of Mythology. She said "It's no good because it doesn't tell you what you want to know, it just tells you everything."

We must make sure that our Guide tells the reader not everything but what they want to know.

Another general point that could be associated with this kind of question is what sort of things can people discuss (in some cases on h2g2 with threads running ten years and longer!!) which are common knowledge.

Books, films, TV programmes (to a certain extent), products, services, everyday objects .... these are known to a large percentage of the population all over the Western world, and can be discussed and opined upon by all. The idea of this fascinates me. Just a selection of the thread titles on Ask alone shows up a plethora of subjects which we can all happily discuss. From Star Wars films to :

Advertisements
News items
What Films have you seen recently?
Predictions for 2015
Horrible bosses - which would you choose?
Which salt?
Do you carry a penknife?

Just to name a few from the first page alone.

The interesting and constructive part comes when people discover that they can even discuss what they thought was private, and suddenly find that they are not alone with their diabetes/depression/bereavement/MS or other plight.

I don't think the inventors of the internet can possibly have realised this when they started out.

The inventors of the internet were more concerned with American military communications, weren't they?

Manchester United rings no bells for me. Coca Cola is fairly well-known in much of the world. "Star Wars" came out when I was in my thirties, when I was happy about having moved on from teen angst. I didn't really want to relate to 12-year-old issues any more. And yet I watched it, as well as its sequels. Didn't want to be left out.

I'm okay with the idea of basic cultural knowledge that makes it easier for people from disparate backgrounds to connect. It takes a *lot* of work to have any familiarity with the broad range of things, though. It probably takes even more work to be familiar with multiple languages if you live in central Europe. Parts of the United States need to be bilingual, where large concentrations of people speak Spanish. Los Angeles is such a Tower of Babel that the court system needs translators in almost a hundred languages. I'm guessing that New York and London are in a similar situation. Compared with that, English-language cultural touchstones look almost easy.

Hi Gnomon, I agree that the skill illustrated here is valuable in writing for this site.

I'm not sure whether the site has plans to produce anything like this in future - Guide entries are fuller, stylised and readable as articles in their own right - but the community probably has the capability to do it. It's more of an encyclopedic product - a bit like a condensed Wikipedia.

A Weewikipedia