What If George Lucas Had Chosen Tarzan Instead of Tatooine?

When Star Wars exploded in 1977, it didn’t just reshape cinema but it rearranged pop culture itself. Heroes like Flash Gordon and John Carter of Mars, once staples of pulp adventure, were suddenly relics. George Lucas had borrowed their DNA with swashbuckling space knights, daring princesses, exotic alien worlds, and transformed them into something bigger, brighter, and infinitely more marketable.

But here’s the thought experiment: what if young Lucas had been obsessed with something else? Suppose he’d poured that same passion into Edgar Rice Burroughs’ other major creation, Tarzan, or leaned into the masked justice of the Lone Ranger. Would we have ended up with a fantasy jungle epic instead of a space opera? Would masked riders through the desert have replaced lightsaber duels in our collective imagination?

Pop culture is full of what ifs like this, with one hit reshuffling what survives and what fades. Star Wars didn’t just succeed; it buried its influences while ensuring its own dominance. If Lucas had chased a different muse, would the pulp heroes we now call “forgotten” still be thriving? Or would they, too, have been eclipsed by a galaxy far, far away but just dressed in different clothes?