There are certain elements to a Star Wars movie that are non-negotiable; I think we can safely count on things like lightsabers, Artoo and Threepio, and the Wilhelm scream. It’s already going to be hard to accept “When You Wish Upon A Star” instead of the Fox Fanfare before the opening, so I’m sure I’m not the only one who breathed a sigh of relief over the fact that Mr. John Williams will indeed be scoring the new trilogy.

The importance of Mr. John Williams to Star Wars, nay, to movies themselves, cannot be overstated. I’ll relate a story from about ten years ago, during my film-school days; on the first day of sound-mixing class, our instructor was impressing on us the importance of music in film. To underscore his point, he started playing tracks from a CD and asking if we could identify them. I correctly identified the first one as the Jaws theme. The second one I identified as the “Raiders March“, AKA the Indiana Jones theme. I told him that I should probably excuse myself from the game, and to show why, I held up the “John Williams – Greatest Hits 1969-1999” CD that was in my backpack. It was the exact same one he was playing.

(It probably didn’t help that I was older than most of the class, who weren’t even born by the time Jaws 3D came out, let alone the original)

Star Wars? Mr. John Williams. Indiana Jones? Mr. John Williams.. Everything else Spielberg has directed? Damn straight Mr. John Williams. Fiddler On The Roof? Lost In Space? Gilligan’s Island? He may have been credited as Johnny Williams (when he was credited), but that’s Mr. John Williams to you. And just as it’s not Star Wars without unfounded declarations of plot holes, it’s definitely not Star Wars without the music of Mr. John Williams.



I know, I know, it’s old news that Mr. John Williams is scoring the new trilogy; this is one of the strips we had put aside early in our run when we realized we should probably talk about something other than Star Wars once in a while. Now, with the news that the script is done and Luke Skywalker’s son may be a youngling-killing sociopath (I guess it skips a generation), I guess we’re super-behind the curve.