Er zijn een aantal films die een grote stempel op ons dagelijks leven hebben gezet, waar bij karakters vereeuwigd zijn als speelgoed of op T-Shirts en koffie mokken en nerds overal ter wereld de memorabele quotes foutloos kunnen ophoesten. Dit is nou wat popculture genoemd word. Veel van deze films zoals Star Wars waren op papier niet echt aantrekkelijk, sterker ze leken gedoemd om te mislukken. Maar gelukkig weten we ondertussen anders, en daarom heeft de website Cracked.com deze top vijf gemaakt.

#5.Star Wars

You are an executive at a movie studio. A young director is coming off a hugely successful movie about teens in 1960s America called Amerian Graffiti. For his next project, he wants more than 10 times that budget to shoot a huge special effects feature with the catchy title Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as Taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars. The original two-page treatment where he outlines the story begins, "This is the story of Mace Windy, a revered Jedi-bendu of Ophuchi, as related to us by C.J. Thorpe, padawaan learner to the famed Jedi."

Do you write this man a huge check? Or do you call security?

It Seems Obvious Now ...

When it comes to blockbuster movie franchises, Star Wars feels like cheating. A simplistic story of good and evil told over the backdrop of the greatest special effects ever filmed and featuring a smirking Harrison Ford in his prime? Add in the fact that everything you saw on screen could be turned into a kick-ass toy or action figure and it seems like the Hollywood version of an infinite money cheat code. That's how it looks now.

But at the Time ...

Actually, even George Lucas didn't really want to make Star Wars. He wanted to give us a 1970s reboot of the 1930s sci-fi adventure series Flash Gordon. But the rights had already been purchased by Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, so Lucas had to build his own version effectively from scratch. His own expensive, totally incoherent version.

And what reason did anyone have to think that Lucas could make a world-changing fantasy blockbuster? The only thing remotely similar on his resume was 1971's THX 1138, a bleak, weird film that had been dismissed as incomprehensible by the studio and bombed at the box office. So imagine being the studio executives when this bearded guy brings in his 200-page script that, as we have pointed out before, was a confusing mish-mash of insanity. Even personal friends of Lucas admitted that they couldn't understand what the script was about.

Sure enough, the studio, Universal, passed, but 20th Century Fox stepped in and gave Lucas $8.5 million, maybe because they were afraid of what he might do otherwise.

So then Lucas flew off to shoot in Great Britain and Tunisia, while in the U.S. a team of untried special effects artists gathered to start making movie magic. After a year, that FX team had blown half their budget and had exactly three usable special effects shots to show for it. Lucas and some Fox executives dropped in on them to find out what the hell was going on and found the crew standing around, having a refrigerator lifted and dropped on the concrete in front of them because "everyone kinda wondered how it would sound."

Things weren't going any better in Europe, where Lucas's British crew began to openly mock and rebel against him, taking breaks without permission and refusing to work the long hours they'd need to meet the deadline. The production soared over budget.

But once the actual movie was completed, everybody realized what a work of genius it was, right?

Nope. No theater chain wanted it -- the sci-fi fantasy was completely out of step with the sci-fi hits of the era (they were all dark, adult films like Soylent Green and Logan's Run). To avoid having to just sit on this expensive turkey, 20th Century Fox resorted to underhanded means to get it into theaters -- they told the theaters they couldn't have an upcoming hit (The Other Side of Midnight) unless they agreed to take this Star Wars turd along with it (a practice that is actually illegal).

Thus, Star Wars was booked into a whopping 39 theaters for its grand opening in the hopes that it would at least make a little bit of its money back. All but one of those theaters saw this weird sci-fi fantasy break their all-time attendance records. At the end of all that, the crazy bearded guy was right.