Long has been the wait for a Star Wars experience which fully incorporates those two most coveted of Jedi activities: using the force and swooshing a lightsaber. Alas, the wait goes on.

Toy firm Hornby has admitted its profits have been knocked off track by weak demand for train sets and Scalextric racing cars over Christmas.

Yesterday a Supreme Court copyright ruling cleared the way for Andrew Ainsworth, the UK designer who made the Star Wars stormtrooper helmets, to sell his replicas of the famed costumes.We look at other icons from the sci-fi saga that have permeated pop culture.

A British prop designer who made the original Stormtrooper helmets for the first Star Wars film won a Supreme Court battle to continue producing replicas – but faces a damages payout to the creators of the science-fiction blockbuster.

In a new documentary, George Lucas is accused of ruining his Star Wars franchise with poor prequels and gratuitously tweaked reissues. James Mottram reports

Hypatia of Alexandria was a historical figure, a neoplatonist philosopher of the fourth century who was torn apart by a Christian mob because of her supposed influence on the local Roman governor at a time of religious conflict.

Deep inside a Californian valley is Skywalker Ranch, the nerve centre for Star Wars and its offshoots, another of which begins tonight

George Lucas's never-ending sci-fi saga gets an animation makeover, which at least spares us the agony of watching perfectly decent actors sporting hideous costumes and spouting banalities to one another.

How did an obscure scholar called Joseph Campbell inspire so much of our mass culture?

KINGSLEY AMIS often urged the dictionary habit, never let a word slip by. Chances are that many a trainbound reader of Robert Hughes's recent elegant demolition in these pages of The Phantom Menace forgot to look up what he meant by George Lucas's being "able to gussy it up with special effects that didn't exist 75 years ago".

They've queued for days and nights for tickets. They claim it is the Woodstock of their generation, a symbol of the eternal triumph of good over evil. Andrew Harrison touches down in an LA riddled with `Star Wars' fever. Photographs by Robert Yager

HAS WORD reached you yet? Later this month, George Lucas's new film, Star Wars, Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace, will open all over America - the rest of the world to follow. The signs could hardly be more propitious. Movies playing the trailer for The Phantom Menace experienced a terrific increase in business. Many authorities are sure it will gross $100m in its first weekend; and that by the end of the summer it will have pushed Titanic into second place on the all-time box-office list. An executive at Toys'R'Us, anticipating the related merchandising, has called it "the biggest consumer-product opportunity of 1999". There goes the century.

If `Star Wars' was the death of film, it must prepare to die once more. Andrew Gumbel reports from Los Angeles

AMERICANS ARE such lucky bastards. I've spent most of my adult life envying their huge cups of coffee, low-priced electrical equipment and 24-hour showbiz news cable channels, but I have never envied them more than I did on 17 November. Because that day, anyone in America who could take the day off work, be in line by 10.45am and pay $7 for entry to an Arab-bashing Denzel Washington film called The Siege, got to be among the first in the world to find out whether Ewan McGregor really knows what to do with a lightsabre.