A Car Accident Is Responsible For George Lucas’ Entire Career

If you want to know how many hobbies a person has, ask them if they ever had sleep for dinner. Or if every pineapple they ever had came from a can. Or if they know exactly how long their car will run once the fuel gauge hits that E. Between work, chores, and the existential exhaustion that comes from realizing that those things make up the majority of your life, regular people barely have the time, energy, and income for one hobby, let alone several. So once you manage to find your passion and somehow make it fit into your life, that’s it. This will be your thing for the foreseeable future unless something terrible happens.

For most of his young life, George Lucas’ thing wasn’t filmmaking but cars. And then something terrible happened.

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Growing up in Modesto, California, Lucas had a thirst. A thirst for being first. First in street races. (Sorry, the “need for speed” line has been copyrighted and– Wait, did I just use it? Well, shit …) Saving up all his money, Lucas bought himself an Autobianchi Bianchina minicar and souped it by … overclocking the carburetor’s …  uh … rear transmission (look, this is Cracked, not Car And Driver) … and used it to enter a bunch of street races. This was his entire life, and it overshadowed everything else, especially school. Lucas was so uninterested in anything that didn’t have four wheels or run on liquid explode-saurs, he himself admitted that on the rare occasions that he went to the movies, he barely paid attention to the plot.

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But then, on June 12, 1962, his life basically became a movie when his classmate T-boned Lucas’ car, causing it to flip and wrap around a tree.

A Car Accident Is Responsible For George Lucas’ Entire Career
Source: Pinoy Daily News