It’s not sci fi! Just because it shares elements of the genre doesn’t mean it’s sci fi!
I’d suggest moving this argument to a different thread.
Starting it elsewhere might be good, but if you do, I challenge you to name one aspect of Star Wars that can’t be found in something clearly acknowledged as science fiction. Find one thing. I’ve read science ficton that goes back to the 30’s and you can’t do it because everything Lucas did has been done before in science fiction. Everything.
I don’t think you’re looking at it the right way at all. We’re talking about a genre here. A genre is more than just a collection of components that are found in the story, it’s how the story is told.
Not to mention, if I said “look at Braveheart and tell me one thing it does that can’t be found in Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings,” that doesn’t make Braveheart a fantasy film. There’s a lot of things that sci-fi does that SW doesn’t.
Well, as both science fiction and fantasy were born from the old Romance (not to be confused with the modern Romance genre) tales, the flaw is not in the way I am looking at it. Science fiction and fantasy are part of a larger genre called speculative fiction. They share a huge amount, especially in how they tell the stories. What has become known as Space Opera is virtually the same as epic fantasy except for the science/magic aspects being interchanged. Experts at genre classification label Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, Foundation, Babylon 5, Stargate, Doctor Who and John Carter of Mars as Space Opera. It involves long, epic tales, magic with a scientific explanation, faster than light travel, and many other tropes. It is what makes good movies and TV. Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings are Epic fantasy which has the exact same type of story telling. Space Opera by its nature contains many implausible things that have, in that universe, been found to work. Faster than light travel and teleportation are two of the biggest with telepathy and telekinesis not far behind. Artificial gravity being another.
This is different from urban fantasy, high fantasy, fairy tales, dark fantasy, gothic fiction, hard science fiction, cyberpunk, dystopian, alien invasion, or the true crossovers between fantasy and science fiction. Lucas made up Space Fantasy in 1977. Star Wars is space opera. It fits that sub-genre of science fiction in every single way, from the tropes to the story telling. I think Lucas was trying to say Star Wars was different, but as it turns out, he is very much a copy cat and nearly everything he included, especially in OT, was borrowed from one of the pillars of science fiction. He added campbell’s heroes journey and mixed in some samurai (neither of which have nothing to do with fantasy). But plenty of science fiction is based on retelling those ancient legends from which Campbell drew his theories. The place you will find reference to a space fantasy is Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series (John Carter), but that is an old genre category before any of the modern categories were defined. Lucas may have dredged up the old label, but in modern genre classification the Barsoom series is Space Opera. Hard science fiction purists like Arthur Clarke claim that all Space Opera (see the list above and he specifically cited Star Trek) is space fantasy. But the problem is that fantasy doesn’t claim those stories and rejects them as fantasy because they don’t fit. But when you look at the big names of science fiction, you find space opera after space opera. They are the stories that capture the imagination and sell books. And there is a real crossover area where you have science and magic (not explained away with science) in the same stories that borrow from both fantasy and science fiction and merge the two. Star Wars doesn’t fit that category at all.
So if you must insist on calling Star Wars Space Fantasy, that is a sub-sub-genre of Space Opera which is a sub-genre of Science Fiction, not fantasy. That is where Star Wars fits in the slew of genres and sub-genres. The key is in Star Wars itself when Ben talks of the force. He calls it an energy field created by all living things. Fantasy would never use the phrase “energy field”, but science fiction would. That is a classic Space Opera explanation of something that is beyond science.