Disneyland Paris is many things. A winning mix of European Union efficiency and American sophistication. A powerful reminder of just how relaxed planning laws are in France. And a more efficient, but not necessarily more enjoyable, way of getting rid of your savings than handing them over to Sir Victor Blank or sorting them into a neat pile and then burning them.

It is also, to an extent I thought impossible outside North Korea, or North Lanarkshire, a one-party state. All the food, every drink and every, every, every piece of merchandise appears to be Disney's. You imagine you can no more get a non-Disney item for purchase in any one of their hundred-plus stores than you can get the guy playing Mickey to sing the love-death duet from Tristan. The coats are Disney, the hats are Disney, the gloves are Disney. It seemed impossible to escape the Disney product tyranny. Which is why I didn't order the confit of duck at lunchtime.

But, at the end of my time in this magical fairyland where dreams really do come true, I discovered one exception to the rule of Walt. In, I think, the 666th store we visited I chanced upon shelves of stuff from a rival franchise. It was a departure from the tyranny even more shattering than seeing a size 10 woman on the catwalk or a kosher deli in Tehran. There was row upon row of non-Disney toys. How could this be tolerated?

The answer lay in the nature of the toys. They weren't a random sample of competitors' products placed there out of genial charity, nor were they items that had been shoehorned into a corner by a sales exec who had bought the shelf space to capture a slice of a captive market. No, they were items Disney had been compelled to include because the power of this franchise was so great that children would have felt robbed not to see it represented.

And that franchise was, as I am sure you will have guessed, Star Wars. More than 30 years after the Millennium Falcon swooped over the planet of Tatooine Lord Vader's hold on our world is firmer than ever. From intricately designed Lego models of Anakin Skywalker's Jedi fighter, to ever more elaborate light-sabres the Star Wars Empire hasn't just struck back, it has reached undreamt of dimensions. The biggest event in the world of toys this month is the arrival (at £166.35 a throw) of the new Lego Republic Dropship on March 30.

No other popular culture creation of my lifetime, not Harry Potter, not Tracy Beaker, not Bob the Builder nor Hannah Montana, has anything approaching the hegemonic status of Star Wars. Star Wars cartoons have colonised children's TV, there's a torrent of new Star Wars merchandise every Christmas toy-buying season, YouTube is overrun with a series of brilliant homage videos referencing everything to do with Star Wars, from an orchestra of Lego storm troopers playing the movie's theme tune to fans re-creating light-sabre duels in deserted multistorey car parks.

We've now reached the point where the Star Wars penetration of our culture is so total that it deserves to be seen as a fully developed myth world, more influential on our children's mental development than the Norse, Greek or Celtic tales with which we grew up. And yet the basic plot lines behind the original movies are thinner than Lily Cole while the politics of the later films is more confusing than a conference call on credit default swaps conducted in Korean. How can Star Wars have triumphed so? And do you know where I can get Count Dooku's Solar Sailer at discount?

Art of Lovecraft

On the subject of fully realised myth worlds, it can't be long before we're ready for the rule of Cthulhu. For those of you who presume I must just have sneezed all over the keyboard, I should explain that Cthulhu is a fictional alien deity, the creation of the early-20th American fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft was a man of eccentric political views and fragile health whose brief life was marked by a prodigious output of what was generally thought at the time to be pulp fiction. But for aficionados, like the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, Lovecraft is a still neglected genius.

In his books Lovecraft created a brilliantly conceived alternative pre-history of the Earth, built around alien gods of unremitting evil, buried in cities built according to the perverted rules of non-Euclidean geometry and still worshipped by individuals who see through the cant of contemporary morality and perceive the darkness at the heart of our wantonly unjust universe. You can see why he'd appeal to the French.

But actually I think anyone with a bent for the uncanny or the noir side of sci-fi and fantasy would adore Lovecraft and I think it can only be a matter of time before Tim Burton makes a Cthulhu movie. In the meantime, Penguin publish several of his stories. Just be careful when you're buying his work in public. Asking at Waterstone's if they have any Lovecraft books can lead to some surprising recommendations.

Rare sightings

Talking of extinct exotica, it is difficult now to know which is rarer. Someone seen smoking indoors. Or someone answering a call on their land line.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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