Here comes those first notes of soundtrack maestro John Williams’s iconic strut, blasting off mounted speakers into the growing crowd at Eastern Market Metro Park: duh-duh-duh-dun-da-duh-dun-da-duh.
Eyes shoot to the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 7th Street SE, where a quartet of white-armored Stormtroopers stomp into the park on this bright Saturday in Capitol Hill. Within moments, two of these evil Empire denizens from the Star Wars universe are bump-and-grinding to techno music in a PG-13-rated performance. More than 50 kids wave plastic lightsabers to the beat while they watch, confused but happy as parents in Jedi costumes and Han Solo vests bake in the midday heat.
The sacrifice is worth it, on this eve of May 4, a high holy day for Star Wars fandom (May the Force be with you — get it?) Fans, from obsessed to the casual follower, use the date as an opportunity to celebrate a franchise that crash-landed into pop culture in 1977 with creator George Lucas’s “Star Wars: A New Hope,” and has only gotten bigger generation after generation. Events, costume parades, academic panels, social media posts, think-pieces, Facebook love letters — in early May, they all pop up.
This year has more resonance for some fans who see echoes of Lucas’s scrutiny of power in the warp-speed changes to government coming from the Trump administration.
“The lesson from Star Wars is you have to fight fascism when you can,” said Pete Musto, 39, a Hyattsville resident who came to the third annual District’s Barracks Row neighborhood event with his wife and 4-year-old daughter.
The basic plot of Lucas’s original trilogy — how a farm boy from a nowheresville planet joins the scrappy insurgency battling the evil totalitarian Galactic Empire — pulled heavily from both the iconography of 1940s fascist regimes and the political cynicism of the Watergate years in America, Lucas has said in interviews.
When Lucas returned to the Star Wars universe with 1999’s prequel “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” the creator drilled into the political and moral circumstances that midwife a democracy’s willing slide into a more repressive form of government.
That first prequel film begins with — of all things — a trade dispute. The trilogy ends with a representative body, poisoned by misinformation and manipulated by crisis, voting for a dictatorship. This cues up actress Natalie Portman’s famous line: “So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.”
“The second trilogy is more aligned to the mechanics of democratic decline,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a former Obama administration official and current Harvard Law School professor who in 2016 published the book-length study “The World According to Star Wars.”
“I think it’s fair to say Lucas captured the patterns by which democracies have historically unraveled. He studied the 193os and he studied the fall of the Roman Republic. I think he hasn’t been given enough credit for capturing that.”
In 2012, Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney, which has since unleashed a regular bumper crop of new movies, cartoons and prestige live-action shows. Although those new stories are scattered among different time periods, before and after the original movies, they all thematically orbit the fall of democracy and the struggle to topple a repressive regime.
The franchise has seen an upswing in interest and activity in recent years, including the release in April of a second season of “Andor” — the Star Wars product that most directly addresses the terror and fear of totalitarianism.
For Musto, the show’s message is more important now than ever. “I know that the writer of ‘Andor’ has a very specific political message,” he said.
Where some fans see an event to bring the kids or an occasion to consider deeper trends, Brian Ready sees opportunity.
“This is going to be our big thing,” Ready, Barracks Row Main Street’s executive director and the main architect of the May 4 festivities, said in an interview. “We want to be ground zero going ahead for Star Wars events.”
The events spread over the weekend include staged lightsaber battle, film screenings, pop-up bars, costume contests and more.
On Saturday, as costumed actors dueled with plastic lightsabers and children chased around Chewbacca, some parents didn’t care to address the politics.
Clinton Lin, 36, who came with his 4-year-old son, said his interest was in the characters: “He loves robots right now. All about R2D2 and C3PO.”
But because Star Wars has been a pop culture fixture for nearly 50 years, there are generations of fans who grew up as kids loving space battles and Han Solo’s swagger, and now are adults watching “Andor” and zeroing in on a different message.
A resident of D.C.’s Bloomingdale neighborhood soaking through a Han Solo costume Saturday said he grew up a fan. Back then, the Empire — with its shiny uniforms — was cool. Now he has two sons, 5 and 8, both transfixed by boogying Stormtroopers, His boys recently became fans, the man said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the political climate. He was happy to share the world with them.
But his read of Lucas’s message has deepened with time. These days, he said, he thinks about the darker shades of Star Wars.
“We don’t have the Jedi to come save us,” he said.
