Turns Out Star Wars Doesn't Actually Take Place "A Long Time Ago" After All

So, full disclosure: I'm what you would call a Star Wars nerd. I've seen pretty much everything set in a galaxy far, far away — the movies, the cartoons, the live-action shows, the LEGO specials, you name it. And while I didn't love all of it (still recovering from parts of The Book of Boba Fett), I always loved spending time in that universe.
But it turns out that one of the most iconic things about Star Wars — that opening line, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." — isn't exactly the full story.

Originally, George Lucas had something way crazier in mind: Star Wars wasn't supposed to take place in the distant past. It was supposed to be happening in the present or near future, but told 2,000 years later by none other than R2-D2 himself.
(Yes, R2. Our little beep-boop buddy. The same droid who screamed his way through half the saga. he was actually speaking regularly in the original version)

In George Lucas's early drafts, the idea was that an ancient race of aliens called the Whills were listening to R2-D2's life story before the droid finally shut down. R2 would have been telling them everything — from the Clone Wars to the fall of the Empire — and that would explain why the movies feel so much like recorded history. The famous scroll at the beginning? Basically R2's introduction.

Lucas ended up scrapping the Whills framing device early on because it was a little too complicated for audiences back in 1977.
Instead, he left us with the simple fairy-tale version: "A long time ago..." like a space-age Once Upon a Time. And honestly, it works beautifully.

But still — if you really want to be nerdy about it — Star Wars is actually happening in our future. Somewhere out there, thousands of years from now, R2-D2 might be telling our great-great-great-grandkids about the Skywalkers, the Jedi, and that one time he set two droids on fire using a jetpack that he never used again.

It changes the whole vibe in the coolest way possible.
When we watch Star Wars, we're not looking back at the past — we're getting a glimpse of our own destiny, told from way, way down the line.
And somehow, the fact that R2-D2 is basically the galaxy's ultimate historian makes me love him even more.