A New Hope/YMMV

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Aunt Beru has a fond smile when she remembers Luke's father. Is she remembering who he used to be or did Obi-Wan also leave her and Owen Locked Out of the Loop? With The Reveal, in his self-titled series, that Obi-Wan thought Anakin had died on Mustafar, might it be that he told them Anakin was dead and never corrected them when he learnt the truth?
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Multiple studios turned the film proposal down and most of the management of Twentieth Century Fox outside of Alan Ladd Jr. thought it would be a final embarrassment before Fox closed its doors. After the film exploded into the public consciousness, everyone else changed their tune saying this film was the kind of unorthodox creative dare that company founder, Daryl Zanuck, often won big with.
• Angst? What Angst?: Everyone gets over their sorrows; Leia losing Alderaan, Luke losing Owen, Beru and Obi-Wan; pretty easily. Semi-justified by the high action stakes meaning that there's no time to grieve properly but still.
  • The 2015 comics eventually explained that Leia is grieving but that there's no one she can really confide in and she needs to put on a strong face for the troops. A 2015 novel, Heir to the Jedi, had Luke suffer another personal loss and the dam he'd built over his aunt and uncle's demise finally burst as a result of it.
• Anvilicious: Zig-zagged. While George Lucas was partly inspired by the Vietnam War, the film itself is pretty light on direct comparisons to it (tonally it's more Flash Gordon meets Dune meets Foundation). Lucas himself though was very insistent about these comparisons and mentioned them to anyone who would listen when asked about the early days of Star Wars, even as late of The New Tens.
• Award Snub: It lost Best Picture to Annie Hall.
• Fan Dumb: Tarkin gave the command that destroyed Alderaan. It was not done at the order of Darth Vader or the Emperor nor was it Leia's fault. You'd be amazed how many fans misremember what may be the most iconic scene in Star Wars.
• First Installment Wins: It's without a doubt the best known Star Wars film in the public's collective consciousness and the most popularly referenced.
• Harsher in Hindsight:

Aunt Beru: He's just not a farmer, Owen. He has too much of his father in him. Uncle Owen: That's what I'm afraid of.

• Not only did Luke's father become Darth Vader, but we later see in Attack of the Clones that, the same day Owen met Anakin, Anakin killed a whole tribe of Tusken Raiders out of anger. Evidently he's afraid Luke will do something like that. And in the old Expanded Universe, Luke becomes Palpatine's apprentice for a while. To say nothing of the influence that Palpatine had on Anakin's grandson in the Sequel Trilogy.
• After watching the prequels, seeing Vader so callously shoot R2 with a TIE Fighter blast makes him seem all the more cruel. He might not have known it was R2 or even aiming for him but it still jerks a tear.
• Also, Darth Vader, later revealed to be the father of Luke Skywalker, had Luke's Uncle and Aunt murdered by stormtroopers, meaning he had his (step)brother killed. Several years later, with The Lion King, Simba's father ends up killed by his uncle. The connection between the two? Both Vader and Mufasa (Simba's father) were portrayed by James Earl Jones. And let's not forget that he tortured his own daughter.
• Garven Dreis, aka Red Leader, was shot down by Darth Vader in the last moments of the film. A New Hope also proved to be the last acting role that Drew Henley, the actor who played Dreis, would partake in, retiring shortly thereafter due to being diagnosed with Manic Depression.
  • Also, Deris being shot down by Darth Vader is even more harsh after the revelation that he and Vader (then known as Anakin Skywalker) were originally comrades.
• When the film was being drafted back in 1973, development notes indicated that the Rebels were inspired by the Vietcong while the fascist Galactic Empire was meant to represent America, appealing to the segment of Americans who thought the Vietnam War was unjustified and imperialist. Whether or not it was, this mindset would ultimately make rooting for the Rebels a bit... uncomfortable when the movie was released in 1977. By that time, news had broken about the aftermath of Vietnam with the fall of Saigon, the emergence of the Boat People, the reeducation camps, the resulting invasions of Cambodia and Laos and the mess with the Khmer Rouge.
• While the Rebel-Vietnam comparisons generally drifted away from the public consciousness as more time passed since the Vietnam War, especially if the viewer wasn't from the USA, the idea of the fascist Empire being a stand-in for the United States gained quite a bit of ground when Donald Trump entered the US political arena. Supporters of Trump had no issue endorsing policy similar to the Empire and real life fascists, including his support from outright Neo-Nazis, while Trump repeatedly praised autocratic regimes before he himself payed homage to Nazi designs. Seems George Lucas was sadly quite right about the rise of fascism in America.
• When Luke asks Obi-Wan how his father died, Obi-Wan has a brief moment of hesitation before answering. You can see the exact moment Obi-Wan decides to go the "That Man Is Dead" route.
• While the Death Star is described as the "ultimate power in the universe", later Star Wars media makes clear that a better term to describe it would be "prototype". As The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker show, there are much deadlier ways to make use of superlaser technology.

• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Seeing the Death Star blow up becomes very satisfying after watching Rebels and Rogue One which showed how much blood, sweat and tears was poured into learning about the Death Star and its weakpoint.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Obi Wan's line that the blaster marks are too precise for Sand People and must be from Stormtroopers gets funnier as the series goes on. We see (Justified and not) stormtroopers miss nearly everything they shoot for, while the Tuskens are able to hit pod racers moving at hundreds of MPH in The Phantom Menace.
  • Given what we later discover about Vader's policy on employee mistakes in the next movie, Admiral Motti comes off as exceptionally stupid for picking a fight with Vader, especially by mocking the religion the Emperor holds to. This is even lampshaded by Grand Moff Tarkin in the Death Star Technical Manual, where he expressed that if Motti didn't keep his opinions to himself regarding the Force, he wouldn't last long under Palpatine's Empire.
    • Rogue One adds a delicious layer of irony to the whole statement by revealing that the Death Star makes use of Kyber Crystals to generate its deadly beams. Motti's "ultimate power in the universe" owes itself to that "ancient religion". The basic idea for it was even dreamed up by the Sith Empire.
    • Even in the Legends continuity, the basic premise of the Death Star's power source was derived from a crystal utilized by a renegade Dark Side force user group called the Heinsnake Cult.
  • The ending has Leia presiding over a ceremony that looked like it was taken from Triumph of the Will, a propaganda film out of Nazi Germany. Obviously a case of Early Installment Weirdness, but somewhat amusing given that the Nazi imagery would later be reserved for the Empire. And it was hilariously not the only time that Leia had some Nazi association.
  • In the opening, Leia bluffs that she's on a diplomatic mission. This was always a pretty obvious lie but Rogue One upgrades it to full on Blatant Lies given that Vader saw Leia's ship flee the Battle of Scarif.
  • While Vader's torture of Leia is quite Harsher in Hindsight with the Reveal that she's his daughter, it is absolutely hilarious that he doesn't take note of her Strong Family Resemblance to Padmé or that she takes after her mother's personality. Disney's EU all but leans into this, suggesting that he's the only person who knows both Padmé and Leia and hasn't figured out, or at least doesn't suspect, that Leia is Padmé's daughter. The EU even has him recognize other Padmé lookalikes, including her body double Sabé from The Phantom Menace, but he's totally blind to Leia's resemblance to Padmé.
• Hype Backlash: Fans of the later Darker and Edgier entries in the franchise, particularly Revenge of the Sith and the Sequel Trilogy, can be left cringing a tad when they come back to see where Star Wars started and all the unironic Narm, lackluster fight scenes and cheesy effects.
• Memetic Mutation: "These are not the droids you're looking for."
  • "I have you now!"
  • "Use the Force, Luke."
• Never Live It Down: Remember. Han shot first.
• Signature Scene: The Death Star destroying Alderaan.
• Special Effects Failure: The infamous "Han Shot First" scene is a victim of this in the remastered editions. The digital editing isn't so great at convincing you that Greedo shot first, and Han's attempted "dodging" is particularly bad.
  • It doesn't even look so much like "dodging" as much as it does "Greedo misses at point blank range."
  • The stormtrooper rifles were made from fully-functional British Sterling submachine guns, and fired "Hollywood blanks" to provide smoke and muzzle flash. During the gunfight across the chasm in the Death Star (where Leia kisses Luke before swinging across) the sound of the blank cartridges is heard when Leia takes a few shots, instead of the usual sound effect dubbed in.
  • In many scenes involving Lightsabers, there's always bound to be errors. These were fixed in the special editions.
    • As was a matte painting of a hallway and most of the optical lines around the ships.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: This is some fans' reaction to the Special Edition, particularly the above-mentioned Greedo Shot First scene. However, it restores the scene with Jabba and a scene with Luke and Biggs, so it's not all bad.
• Win the Crowd: For many, it was the first Star Destroyer shot.
• Woolseyism/Bilingual Bonus: In the Italian versions of the movie, the Death Star was called the Morte Nera, which means the "Black Death." It's a very fitting name, as like the Death Star, the Black Death also resulted in a large extermination of people in Europe.

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