Samuel Delany reviews the first Star Wars movie, 1977, in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy.
“In the film world of the present, the token woman, the token black, or what-have-you, is clearly propaganda, and even the people who are supposed to like that particular piece of it smile with rather more tightly pursed lips than is comfortable. In a science fiction film, however, the variety of human types should be as fascinating and as luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer’s paint box. Not to make use of tht variety, in all possible combinations, seems an imaginative failure of at least the same order as not coming up with as interesting sets as possible.”
