Ok, so maybe this has been painfully obvious to all of you, but I just recently re-realized that the whole Star Wars franchise is built upon the same ground as 'American Graffiti'- George Lucas's expression of the sexual frustration of adolesence.

C'mon- think of the symbology of the conclusion of the original-flying down a trench and shooting a torpedo into an exhaust port. Hell, he might as well have cast Hugh Heffner as Darth Vader.,

I'm sure there's a master's thesis in there somewhere.

There's Lucas's positioning of women as only desirable when they're unattainable-the blonde in the T-Bird, Princess (fill in the blank) in the Star Wars films. There's the oedipal thing, the father cutting off the son's hand with a fallic device, the teen-age angst; the feeling of being powerless, either because of the restraining hand of Obi-Wan or getting stuck with the kid sister for the evening . There's the transference of manhood to machines, be they hot rods or hover bikes.

I envy George. It's not everyone who gets to work out his issues in public and become rich in the process.