A Long Time Ago, With a Design Far Away...

...from the one we eventually wound up with.

Because George Lucas likes to sell the idea that Star Wars is a cohesive whole that sprang from his mind fully developed, from every Anakin pod-race Jar-Jar (sorry about the language) mistake to every "No. I am your father" brilliant moment, we can forget that the franchise really did develop over time.

This set of pictures and links at Visual News shows some of the development of the logo of the famous franchise. In initial publicity, the movie's name was simply printed in something like existing fonts, tweaked a little here and there. Over time, different logos came into being for publicity materials until Lucas commissioned someone to design something very close to the logo we know best today. A little bit of tweaking, and we have the font we have come to know and love -- except in the prequels, which we know and suffer through when we have to. The Visual News piece is an abridgement of a much more elaborate history here.

Of course, a geek-level overload of information about how Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Obi-Wan, Vader, R2-D2 and C-3P0 came to be the people we know today can be found here. You should probably have a lot of spare time before you start digging into it, though, because reading it from start to finish would bring you to a long time from now.