On a recent episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live," Harrison Ford, aka Han Solo of "Star Wars," mock-confronted Solo's old partner in crime from the movies, Chewbacca. He angrily told him "I'm done with that 'Star Wars' crap and I'm done with you. Haven't you heard? I'm in 'Cowboys & Aliens.' Daniel Craig is my Wookie (expletive) now."

He wishes. Ford and anyone else connected to the original "Star Wars" trilogy -- "Star Wars," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Return of the Jedi," which ran from 1977 to 1983 -- will probably never escape the franchise's gravitational pull. Nor, apparently, will we. Even 34 years after it first blazed across big screens -- and six years since the last film in the series was released -- "Star Wars" hasn't budged from its position atop the pop culture pecking order.

"People remember their youth," says Wheeler Winston Dixon, a professor of film studies at the University of Nebraska. "[George] Lucas has shrewdly positioned himself as the Disney of a new generation, rolling out sequels, updates and now all the films on BluRay with 40 hours of extras, to keep each new generation interested."

Naturally, interest in "Star Wars" reignited from 1999 to 2005 when the second trilogy was released, setting box office records, even if critics and fans of the first trilogy balked at what they perceived as the new films' trove of bad dialogue and overbaked computerized effects. If anything, the second go-round has intensified the fierce loyalty for the first three films.

Googling "Star Wars" produces more than 326 million hits. The film franchise is everywhere: cartoons, books, video games and other merchandise spanning both trilogies. The Cartoon Network just announced it has renewed a new season of its hit "Star Wars: The Clone Wars."

There are just as many, if not more, new goings-on related to the original trilogy. Dozens of parodies litter YouTube. Others have consumed whole episodes of TV shows. Disneyland just upgraded its popular "Star Wars" ride "Star Tours." This month, Lucas will release all six films for the first time on BluRay.

"There are two reasons it's still popular today," says Dave Dorman, who has illustrated dozens of "Star Wars" books, comics and magazines. "One, George Lucas created a story with a universal message of good versus evil and father versus son, interwoven into a story of high adventure.

"Two, while that could have died out within a generation, Lucas and his LucasFilm organization have made a number of very smart business moves in marketing and merchandising. They have kept those original ideas through subsequent generations of kids through comics, books, toys and animated adventures."

That merchandising accounted for $450 million in toy sales alone in 2008, according to MSNBC.com. A study published in June 2010 by the Licensing Book, a toy manufacturer trade magazine, said 5-to-10-year-old boys' favorite movie-based toys were from "Star Wars," beating out "Harry Potter," "Transformers," "G.I. Joe" and other blockbusters. And this was without having a live action "Star Wars" film in theaters for five years.