Castle’s objective since selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 has become his life’s work, taking the work of populist painters, commercial illustrators, comic artists and paperback cover-makers and treating it with the respect normally reserved for the Rembrandts.

“That’s really the mission, is to take these incredibly familiar pieces that haven’t had the opportunity to be staged in this way, housed in this way, curated in this way, so that people can really see the genius behind it,” museum CEO Tracy Bates said in an interview with The Associated Press inside the museum.

This building will open to the public on September 22.

Lucas, 82, made an unannounced appearance at the museum’s media preview day on Wednesday with his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, the museum’s co-founder. He said he can’t believe the site no longer exists after being envisioned 17 years ago and has been “ruled out” from proposed locations in cities including San Francisco and Chicago, where previous sites had fallen through.

“Part of the problem is that I’m contradictory. I don’t like doing work that people think can be done,” he said, wearing a T-shirt that read “Dedicated to the people’s art.”

“I’m used to doing the impossible,” he said. “It almost broke me.”

Visitors to the new museum will be welcomed by the bright yellow Naboo N-1 starfighter from 1999’s “The Phantom Menace” that hangs in the lobby of the public research library. The opening exhibit, “Star Wars in Motion,” features a production version of Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder from the original film and the speeder bike from 1983’s “Return of the Jedi.”

But Bates points out that “‘Star Wars’ actually only takes up 7% of the museum.” And one of the main tasks for the CEO and his staff in the final days before the inauguration is to spread the word about all that it has to offer.

Nearly everything in the vast museum’s 100,000-square-foot galleries comes from the private collection of Lucas or Hobson, a major collector of African-American art.

The filmmaker began collecting original comic art from newspaper strips such as “Alley Oop” when he was in college and could use it for pocket change. When the blockbuster money started coming in, he started buying paintings from commercial artists, including Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, who were considered the height of worthlessness at the time. He joked at a San Diego Comic-Con panel last year that he needed a museum, somewhere to house it all.

Bates, who joined the project in 2020, spoke to a crowd seated in a gallery dedicated to Rockwell, the 20th-century illustrator and painter who embodies the spirit of the museum more than Luke Skywalker or C-3PO.

“He is truly one of the greatest storytellers of our lifetime,” he said. “I mean the level of nuance and depth in Rockwell, I constantly get lost in them.”

Best known for his weekly covers of “The Saturday Evening Post” with images of the Boy Scouts and family Thanksgiving dinners, Rockwell’s paintings were quintessential small-town Americana, which made them wildly popular, but earned them scorn because of their squareness.

Senior curator Ryan Linkoff explained that when he joined the museum in 2018, he was only aware of the consensus view of the painter.

Linkoff said, “I really loved the work while working here and I found him to be just incredibly sophisticated as an image-maker, as an artist, as a personality, as a cultural icon.”

The Rockwell Gallery gives special prominence to a painting that shows he had more depth than many people realize: his depiction of Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old black girl surrounded by marshals as she entered a white New Orleans school in 1960. It’s titled “The Problem We All Live With.”

The gallery also features a sculpture by the artist, recently commissioned for the museum, which recreates a famous caricature of himself.

Lucas also archived the work of Parrish, another painter and commercial illustrator whose imagination helped define the 20th century, but who could be dismissed as cloudy. His work is ethereal and angelic, marked by a distinctive shade of blue, and the brightness of the paintings gives them a glow that seems made for a museum, even though one of the most ornate paintings in the collection was made for a chocolate box.

Linkoff walked through the Parish Gallery, a favorite of many early visitors, calling it “a little sanctuary, in some ways a little chapel, devoted to the work”.

“He was known for creating really gorgeous lighting effects and these atmospheric landscapes,” the curator said. “We wanted to respect that and create a space that really allowed the paintings to create a sense of peace.”

Many galleries are organized not by artist, era or genre but by aspects of everyday life, merging eras and styles. Checks out a game. Another civic activism.

Linkoff said, “We’re interested in the stories they’re telling, not in these somewhat artificial categories defined by discipline.” “The grand idea of ​​these myths, the myths of everyday life, the stories we tell ourselves.”

The museum also has its share of high-brow artists, with works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Andy Warhol. If it tells a story, it has a place.

Visitors will wander through a museum designed by architect Ma Yansong after eight years in Exposition Park, next to Lucas’s alma mater: the University of Southern California.

Ma and his firm were selected in 2014, and an architecture gallery in the museum shows their proposed models for San Francisco and Chicago, along with the origins of the Los Angeles project.

Given the name on the outside, it’s hard not to think of a spaceship when looking at the building. The architect acknowledges this, and says that visitors will especially feel it when standing in front of the wide oval windows that overlook Los Angeles from spaces spanning the galleries.

But Ma’s style is more organic than mechanical, and the museum gives the feeling that it looms above surrounding buildings like the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the California Science Center.

“For me it’s like a cloud or like a tree canopy floating above you,” Ma explained. “It seems almost formless. But you want to explore. So you have to start a journey. You have to start moving around.”

As he looked around inside the museum, he said he couldn’t wait to see people flowing through it.

“We designed an architectural space with feeling,” he said. “We want to see people’s reaction to those spaces.”

The museum features as much science-fiction and fantasy from Lucas’s collection as it does his own work. There is a dedicated space to the sword-and-sandal comic book and paperback art of artist Frank Frazetta. Nearby are huge, heavy-metal-epic paintings of JRR Tolkien’s images by Paul Raymond Gregory, complete with skull-studded frames.

The children’s section includes a painting of Eloise from the famous “Eloise at the Plaza” by illustrator Hilary Knight, a painting of Pikachu based on Pokemon illustrator Naoyo Kimura’s Van Gogh Self-Portrait, and rooms filled with anime and manga images.

And the comic art that started Lucas’s collection has several halls dedicated to it, with some early drawings of “Star Wars” inspiration Flash Gordon on display, as well as proto-“Peanuts” panels from Flash Gordon’s own inspiration, Buck Rogers, and Charles Schulz, as well as edgy alt-comic work from artists including Robert Crumb.

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