This website is pretty cool. It has a big section devoted to examining different origins and resources which George Lucas drew from in creating Star Wars.

Came across this originally through a section where they are talking about how Lucas was into Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”. There’s a nice chart on that page too which maps out the “Hero’s Journey” according to Campbell, and how it’s played out in both Star Wars and the Matrix.

They also have a cool statement about James Frazer’s, “Golden Bough”:

Frazer was the first person in the world to map out the mechanics of what we might call “magical thinking”, the essential building block of mythos (’sacred story’, Greek). If Tolkien, Campbell, Jung, Plato and the other heavyweights were right, magical thinking is one of the primary keys to understanding human consciousness.

I also want to come back through and read in more detail this page of “storytelling lessons.” Looks pretty worthwhile. Kind of a summary of a bunch of different things and techniques they talk about in the rest of the site.

This stuff is all really well put together. Kudos to this author for a wonderful job.