Songfacts®:

• Before The Phantom Menace hit theaters in 1999, blink-182 did their part to revive the franchise with this song based on the original 1977 movie Star Wars, which was re-titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope when George Lucas added three prequels to the series.
  
  A band composition, "A New Hope" is a love song, with the dream girl being Princess Leia. While we'd like to think the lyrics are based on the common Princess Leia fantasy, they sound like they could be coming from Luke Skywalker, who dreams of her while wandering the moons of Endor and the deserts of Tatooine. It wasn't until Return of the Jedi that Luke finds out that Leia is actually his sister, and he does a bit of crushing on her to that point.
• The lyric, "drinking Colt 45's with Lando" is a reference to commercials for Colt 45 malt liquor starring Billy Dee Williams, who played Lando Calrissian in the films.
• Aside from A New Hope, this also contains references to the other films in the original trilogy - including the previously mentioned Lando Calrissian, Han Solo's gambling buddy who first showed up in the sequel The Empire Strikes Back, and the moons of Endor from the third movie, The Return Of The Jedi. In the lyrics, Hoppus claims he'd do anything for Leia, including searching the moons of Endor. That would be an impressive feat considering the planet is orbited by nine moons. The Forest Moon of Endor is inhabited by furry creatures called Ewoks, who take Leia in after she crashes her speeder in pursuit of an Imperial stormtrooper.
• Hoppus told Billboard he's been a Star Wars fan since his dad took him to see the first film back in 1977. His favorite movie in the franchise, however, is The Empire Strikes Back.
• For Dude Ranch, blink-182's major-label debut, the band chose Mark Trombino to produce the album because they liked his work on Jimmy Eat World's sophomore effort, Static Prevails, which came out the previous year. Blink already had some decent record sales under their belt thanks to their previous release, Cheshire Cat, which made the producer feel a bit intimidated.
  
  "Cheshire Cat had sold 70,000 records at the time we started making Dude Ranch," he told MTV News. "It was a much, much bigger record for me at the time. I was excited but also nervous and intimidated. I felt weird that there were these guys who had sold way more records than I had ever sold and I'm sitting in the producer's chair telling them what to do."
  
  Trombino didn't have much time to work with the band, but in just five weeks they churned out an album that boasted their first hit single: "Dammit."