Well, if you want to go back a couple decades in time, Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers started the marketing of their characters in the 50s, with boots, hats, clothing, lunchboxes and toy guns. Davy Crockett hats and rifles were very popularly marketed toys as well.
Gene Roddenberry continued the tradition in the 60s with his Lincoln Enterprises, marketing early Star Trek merchandise. This continued into the 70s as the show gained in popularity in reruns.
But, the more I think about it, PT2k is probably right.....Lucas really has perfected the art of merchandising by flooding all aspects of our society with his vision. There's Star Wars everything. All who've come after are simply emulating him.
The only rival, from what I've heard at least, would be Japan's "Hello Kitty". I guess that anime-looking cat is on just about anything you can think of over there.
As for the movies themselves, I was there in the Victoria Theater in Wheeling, WV in the hot summer of '77, nine years old, and loved every minute of it. I watched the whole phenomenon grow. "Star Wars" was THE topic of converstion among the boys on the playground that first day back to school in the fall.
I had thousands of Star Wars trading cards, I had action figures, a Darth Vader necklace, the soundtrack album....I had it all. I read voraciously anything I could find dealing with the movie and its (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) planned sequel, which, "according to creator George Lucas" would "definately NOT be called "Star Wars 2".
I saw and enjoyed the sequels, though by the time "Jedi" came out, I was 15 or 16, and felt I was a little old for it. The teddy-bear-looking Ewoks, obviously included simply for the pure cutesy, warm-fuzziness they evoked, kind of made my opinion seem true.
Through the years, however, as I watched the movies on video and enjoyed them over and over, I grew to appreciate them again. The dialogue was often a little lame, I realized.....dialogue is not one of Lucas' strong suits. However, the basic storyline.....good versus evil, friendship, blood is thicker than water.....it all appealed, in a different way, to the adult in me.
When he rereleased them with the digital tweaking, I kind of had to admit that I liked some of the changes; added backgrounds, more activity in the streets of Mos Eisley, the stormtroopers riding their Dewbacks in the quest for the the Droids, the more powerful-looking explosions of Alderaan and the Death Star....I liked all that.
But it seems that Lucas is unable to stop in his quest for what he sees as perfection.....he keeps fucking with it all, and that makes me mad. For this reason, I will steadfastly avoid the DVD collection, wich features Hayden C. at the end of "Jedi" instead of the original guy (whose name escapes me right now), and God knows what other changes I haven't heard of. I'll stick to my VHS versions of the '97 rereleases. I used to have the originals, in a boxed set, on VHS, but my (now-ex) wife lent them to a co-worker to watch, and needless to say, I never got them back. She lent my boxed set of the first five Trek movies at the same time. I never got them back, either. Grounds for divorce if ever there was one.
I own the VHS boxed sets of both again, but had to buy the digitally tweaked version of Star Wars, rather than the original versions, which I'd love to have, but are not available any longer. This is due to Lucas' increasing megalomania.
Hey George! Why not just remake the entire series?! You could recast all the roles with newer, hipper, younger actors! Tobey Macguire as Luke Skywalker? Hillary Duff as Leia, maybe? Ben Affleck as Han Solo? Yao Ming as Chewbacca? Anthony Hopkins as Ben Kenobi?
Hey....why not? If you're gonna keep screwing it up, let's do it right!