[troutman]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Key Scene number 1 - "I am your father", this changed movies forever, this was the twist before the twist became popular. I remember seeing that and thinking, not wow, or even believing it. Vader was the ultimate evil trying to seduce this powerful kid, and to me, he was lying. Only to have it slammed in your face with Luke accepting it.

http://www.moongadget.com/origins/myth.html

Campbell's contribution was to take this idea of archetypes and use it to map out the common underlying structure behind religion and myth. He proposed this idea in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which provides examples from cultures throughout history and all over the world. Campbell eloquently demonstrates that all stories are expressions of the same story-pattern, which he named the "Hero's Journey," or the "monomyth." This sounds like a simple idea, but it suggests an incredible ramification, which Campbell summed up with his adage "All religions are true, but none are literal." That is, he concluded that all religions are really containers for the same essential truth, and the trick is to avoid mistaking the wrappings for the diamond.

Lucas had already written two drafts of Star Wars when he rediscovered Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1975 (having read it years before in college). This blueprint for "The Hero's Journey" gave Lucas the focus he needed to draw his sprawling imaginary universe into a single story.

Note that the Wachowski Brothers' wonderful film The Matrix is carefully built on the same blueprint: