Oh, sure, despite yesterday's rhapsodic Star Wars memories, I'm willing to admit, some bad things happened as a result of its success.
I don't mean the usual tedious charge so many level against it, that it brought a screeching halt to the seventies renaissance of personal filmmaking and single-handedly created the era of the blockbuster.
This one gets bandied about a lot, in books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and documentaries like A Decade Under The Influence. Somehow George Lucas' massive commercial success killed the successful careers of more artistically valid directors like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman.
First off, most of the filmmakers of the seventies kept working through the eighties and nineties. If they didn't always find much commercial success in those decades, well, the truth is, they hadn't had much success in the seventies. It's not like Mean Streets or McCabe And Mrs. Miller were smash hits; audiences were too busy flocking to the likes of The Towering Inferno.
Besides, Star Wars was surely as personal an effort for Lucas as, say, New York, New York was for Scorsese. It was relatively low-budget, and the studio had almost no faith in it. Also, despite retroactive claims to the contrary, it was not heavily hyped or marketed at the time. Its popularity took everyone by surprise. Audiences embraced it because they liked it.
Having said that, once it became a pop culture phenom, the cash-ins began. One of the first was also the most blatant:
Lucas, of course, had nothing to do with this, and neither did poor John Williams. The copyright for his score was held by Twentieth Century-Fox's music publishing company, and if they thought this crap would sell...
The popularity of Star Wars set off a general interest in anything vaguely related to outer space, which, since it was the seventies, tended to meld with disco. Sarah Brightman, ladies and germs:
Wow. It's easy to think that was the worst thing in the history of the world, but no, friends, not by a long shot. The most blatant Star Wars rip-off was surely 1978's Battlestar Galactica. After its failure, producer Glen Larson unfortunately did not give up on the whole science fiction thing and immediately launched production on Buck Rogers, starring Gil Gerard, a mostly forgotten seventies irritant who made Ben Murphy and Marjoe Gortner look self-effacing by comparison.
Hope you enjoyed the brief appearance there from Twiki the robot, generally considered to be the most irritating character in science fiction history.
Well, except for Jar Jar Binks, but I really don't want to get into that...
