Assuming "romantic comedy" was just an arbitrary dichotomy to serve as linkbait, I think you can find other genres that penetrate just as deeply as sci-fi that might make the point more clear.
If you look at jane austin, I think you'll find her influence on the generic female psyche is at least on par, but probably far stronger than the impact of lucas on the generic geek psyche.
The difference is the geeks make it visible so that they can share in the "mythology of exploration" together, whereas the femmes just make it implicit as a more natural "understanding of how the world should be". (I acknowledge i'm making some grand assumptions here, this is a sunday morning thought experiment)
Now, obviously its far easier to believe that "you'll find a perfect man who'll do everything for you" than it is to believe that "you'll run around in spaceships blowing up deathstars", simply as a consequence of the latter being a very explicit detachment from reality (and while the former is much more implicit, at the same time, I might add, it may quite possibly be just as detached and with its own set of moral consequences, but I digress). But I think that's where the real difference is: science-fiction is an explicitly unrealistic escape from the way things are, whereas most other genres are intended to blend in with out existing perceptions of the world around us to convince us of the realistic possibilities of an achievable fantasy.
Space in particular is coded very deeply in our cultural sense of the unknown and journey, and its often frightening to make journeys alone. So we bring companions: we build subcultures.
I'm not really convinced that Jane Austen inspires the same level of fandom that Star Wars does.
There is, of course, one genre that inspires the same sort of crazed-geek fandom as science fiction, and that's "fantasy". Both genres, of course, are based in worlds very different from our own, though not too different (there are always humans or human-analogues, at least in popular examples of the genre). What's more, what these worlds have in common is that they allow people whom the reader considers analogous to themselves to become ridiculously powerful and important in a way that they just don't in the real world. An entire universe is provided for readers to escape into, and this becomes particularly addictive for those who aren't finding much success in the real world.
Now I guess Jane Austen is interesting in that it wasn't originally set in a world all that different from Jane Austen's own, but with the passage of time the world of Regency England has become almost as foreign as Middle Earth. I can see how someone tired of a world where wooing is conducted by misspelled text message might prefer to escape into a world where every girl seems to wind up with a handsome millionaire without trying too hard.
Maybe in two hundred years, American Pie will be escapist fantasy as well. "Man, I wish I lived back in the days where you could have sex (or eat a pie) without having to get a license from the government..."
Rudyard Kipling wrote an entertaining story, "The Janeites." The characters in the story, for what it's worth, are not girls but rather officers and men of British battery at the front in 1917 or so.
American Pie ostensibly takes place in the real world. That's no use to a geeky personality--if a geek wants to get into the real world, he does programming or learns about science or gets into trainspotting or something. But a fictional world means you get to speculate about physics and categorize all the different alien races and starship types you see and so forth, and build vast databases and just lose yourself in what is ostensibly an entire world. This is the type of person who watches Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and makes a mental note of each time they see an Akira-class starship, and then complains when Enterprise comes out because they anachronistically made the Enterprise look like an Akira-class starship. American Pie doesn't have anywhere near this kind of depth of subject--it's just a bunch of dumb teenagers in the real world. (Which is exactly the kind of setting geeks are escaping from in the first place!)
(There's another, largely unrelated appeal to Star Trek and Star Wars: they have genuine heroes. It's very hard to find a TV show or movie today that has genuinely heroic people, it being considered "more realistic" to have flawed heroes.)
Right. American Pie is a movie, Star Wars is a universe. Just about every movie or book with an obsessive fanbase is actually an entire universe.
The only obvious exception I can think of is Rocky Horror, and I don't claim to understand that fandom at all (I've never actually seen the movie). I guess it's still much more divorced from the real world than American Pie is.
I think Star Wars has been exceptional at pulling in young boys. The story line and characters are part of it, but I think the light saber has had an outsized impact on its popularity.
As an eight-year-old in 1977, I liked Star Wars but wasn't a true fanatic (I liked reading sci-fi more, and when I was a teen became hooked on Blade Runner).
However, my best friend who was just a year younger went crazy for 1977 Star Wars. He saw the movie dozens of times and bought every piece of merchandising he could convince his parents to buy.
When I introduced my own son to the original movie at age five, he was similarly hooked. I noticed that the light saber concept seemed to be especially attractive to him. I didn't indulge him on the merchandise, but did spend $20 on Lego Star Wars for the Wii and have rented or borrowed the remaining movies and Clone Wars discs, which he also likes. We also discovered what seems like hundred of YouTube videos showing boys and teenagers acting out lightsaber fight scenes:
A few months ago I showed my son the 2009 Star Trek movie, which he liked but not nearly as much as Star Wars. The sword scene on the Romulan drill bit did not really register with him. I wonder if Kirk and Sulu had been carrying light sabers if it would have been different?
Science Fiction appeals to the male brain's obsession with structure, order, pattern recognition, and penchant for legalism. You can see a sci-fi movie and then spend hours pondering how to fill in the rest of the blanks in the galaxy that the movie introduced.
Romantic comedies, on the other hand, don't ping those same pleasure sensors.
I think this was one reason why Firefly, though definitely beloved by many, remained a cult show and failed as a movie, it was half story and half mythology, so neither the nerds nor the mainstream could ever totally embrace it.
I agree with the other posters who said science fiction creates a 'universe' for the imagination to dwell upon, whereas other entertainments might just create some characters to remember. Also in creating a universe the author can leave many details out, creating the opportunity for debate amongst the fans. People still debate character motivations in normal entertainment etc. but they don't involve the same interconnectednesss and logicality usually (those things are apparent in Shakespeare though, which of course is endlessly discussed).
Anyway what's eveyone's favourite universe? Mine's probably Frank Herbert's Dune novels. I've been looking at them again recently and realised how much of he writing, especially the epigraphs before each chapter, went over my head. He's writing about the deepest trends in human history and behaviour. I thought it was just a bunch of cool scifi ideas. I also love the Marathon universe for its AI characterization though.
The underlying answer is that SW, also Dune, LoTR, even Harry Potter, create sophisticated alternate universes.
Those universes have self-consistent rules that are quite elaborate, languages, but also, of course, touch and evoke common mythological motifs:
* good vs evil
* father vs son
* sacrifice of self for the good of others
* romantic love
* coming of age
* the journey of the hero
* the faithful friend
* revenge
* supernatural adversaries
In other words it combines good, well established literary motifs with an intricate, self-consistent universe. It lets geeks and nerds with their well developed imagination completely escape the reality into this universe.
I disagree with the idea that "the second and third functions are no longer relevant".
"The second function is to explain the phenomenon like the seasons and functioning of the cosmos. The third function is to ordain and maintain some kind of sociological order."
The second function is constantly being refined as we discover more and challenge existing ideas. The third function is the basis for any civilization. One might be tempted to mark the end of Western Civilization in the 20th century. Hence, the third function must, once again, function.
Merchandising, and who says it didn't? I encounter loads of cases where American Pie is injected whether it makes sense or not. It's way beyond cult status from how often I see it around.
Reading the abruptly truncated article, it looks like he's going for the idea that Star Trek evokes a mythological reaction that causes people to be religiously obsessed with it.
Personally, I think he's overstating things. Everything has a fanatical fanbase somewhere. I'm sure there's people who watch American Pie repeatedly, marveling at this amazing piece of cinematography and wondering why other people aren't doing the same.
However, combine that with the following:
1. There is a certain mindset that seems to come out more in the geeks of the world. The obsessive, driving force that makes us dedicate days and hours of our time to a single project, instead of passively consuming, say, romantic comedies. There are people who watch Star Trek and say "Mmm, Star Trek.", and there are people who watch Star Trek, write out technical plans and compare the sizes of all the ships in the series, and recreate scale models of them. There are people who calculate how fast the ship is actually going, how hot a phaser would have to be based on the length of time it takes to burn through material X in episode 1, material Y in episode 2, and call out the writers when it burns through material Z in episode 3 too slowly.
2. In the 70s, there wasn't an internet. There was no real form of escapism for the bullied geeks, no way for them to gather together from across the country in forums based on shared interest. There was just the hope that someday, the brains would win out over the bullying brawn, and Sci-Fi in general, and Star Trek in particular, was the crowning jewel of that time.
3. To that end, the sense of awe you had when you first saw the Enterprise swoop out over the screen, the gasps when Kirk was about to get pummeled by the Gorn, the cheering when he turned the fight the other way-- those feelings are the reason Star Trek was popular back in the '70s. Too, possibly, The Next Generation in the 80s/90s. But after that...well, the honeymoon was over. And it's not really that surprising. As an adult, you can never completely recapture the feeling of nostalgia you had when watching the series for the first time. And instead of realizing that, fans lashed out at the followup series- DS9, Voyager, Enterprise...is it any surprise the franchise had a reboot? But it's too late. The future is literally more fantastic than they could have guessed when Star Trek first came out, and kids are too used to seeing personal communicators with more functionality than Star Trek's from the age of five.
Anyways. The upshot of all of this is that Star Trek managed to hit a sweet spot of mindset, escapism, and time period (pretty much the same as Star Wars did), and that sweet spot is now taken up by other, more interactive media of varying types. It was more a matter of luck than any real sense of the "mythological", and the only reason anyone would think that would be because of their attempt to recapture the nostalgia of their youth, the first time they saw the series.
Edit: I realize that anecdote is not the plural of data, but for me personally, I don't know a single person my age (22) that is a Star Trek geek. The only people I know that collect Star Trek memorabilia, watch and debate the shows, etc. are people who were teenagers when The Original Series came out.
Voyager and Enterprise got (and deserve) a lot of criticism, but DS9, at least while it was airing, was very widely respected as possibly the best Star Trek series ever produced. And that's because the writers realized that, at the time, the premise of space travel to strange alien worlds was not fantastic enough to hold viewer attention. Where TNG and especially TOS featured some new, strange thing each week (be it a fantastically powerful noncorporeal entity or a planet killer or a Dyson sphere), DS9 mostly took its world as a given and built a compelling, continuous drama out of those elements. It's quite similar to how the new Battlestar Galactica was constructed, and BSG developed a small, passionate fanbase during its run. (Not coincidentally, BSG had a number of DS9 writers on its staff.)
I also disagree that it's too late for a reboot. The reboot was the single most successful Star Trek movie ever produced.
I haven't seen American Pie action figures, but it is interesting to note that there are action figures for some decidedly non-SF/fantasy/horror movies. There are Reservoir Dogs action figures, for instance, covering all the major characters, and including sets for scenes like the ear scene (including removable bloody ear).
If you look at jane austin, I think you'll find her influence on the generic female psyche is at least on par, but probably far stronger than the impact of lucas on the generic geek psyche.
The difference is the geeks make it visible so that they can share in the "mythology of exploration" together, whereas the femmes just make it implicit as a more natural "understanding of how the world should be". (I acknowledge i'm making some grand assumptions here, this is a sunday morning thought experiment)
Now, obviously its far easier to believe that "you'll find a perfect man who'll do everything for you" than it is to believe that "you'll run around in spaceships blowing up deathstars", simply as a consequence of the latter being a very explicit detachment from reality (and while the former is much more implicit, at the same time, I might add, it may quite possibly be just as detached and with its own set of moral consequences, but I digress). But I think that's where the real difference is: science-fiction is an explicitly unrealistic escape from the way things are, whereas most other genres are intended to blend in with out existing perceptions of the world around us to convince us of the realistic possibilities of an achievable fantasy.
Space in particular is coded very deeply in our cultural sense of the unknown and journey, and its often frightening to make journeys alone. So we bring companions: we build subcultures.