THX 1138 at 50

Before Star Wars, before American Graffiti, George Lucas’s first feature film as director was THX 1138, released on March 11th 1971. It followed an earlier version he made at film school, Electronic Labyrinth.

It’s a chilly dystopian science fiction film - with love at its core.

The blank settings, constant surveillance including confessionals, and characters with ID codes for names and actively repressed sexuality owe a lot to the likes of 1984 and Brave New World.

As well as THX being the name for Lucas’s cinema sound company and 1138 and other references being scattered around the Star Wars films, the Geonosis factory birthplace of the Clone Troopers is a particularly clear callback to this antiseptic clean room of a world.

And a lot of its defining ideas (among others) are played for laughs in Paranoia, so Greg Costikyan and West End Games made an unofficial parody RPG for it before Star Wars. As far as I know they never made an American Graffiti RPG though...