"The REAL Star Wars Day" Topic

Star Wars debuted on May 25, 1977 at a three-screen theater known as the AVCO Center in the Westwood District of Los Angeles (near UCLA).

The world would never be the same.

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Wyatt

It's fascinating to personally witness and remember how one particular movie put Hollywood -- and the world -- on it's proverbial "ear" and changed science fiction and pop culture forever.

On a personal note, my older sister was going to take then-12 year old me, along with her friends, to go see 'Star Wars' at a local theater about a month or so after its official opening. The day I was going to see it she called me and asked if I could give up my ticket to a much younger sibling of one of her friends, with the promise that she would take only me another time. Surprisingly, I said "yes", and toughed it out.

I don't recall if she kept that promise, but that was alright since my now-sainted Mom (God bless her) and I went to a local drive-in theatre that evening, which was about 5-7 minutes away. The feature that night was the western fantasy movie 'The White Buffalo', which I thought was pretty cool and still like. A couple of days later my sister brought me an official 'Star Wars' program that I must have read through a million or so times! Sure wish I still had it.

I remember being so fascinated (OK, obsessed) with anything 'Star Wars' that a junior high friend of mine and I paired-up and began to design spaceships in our spare time at school. Even to this day, I still say he had some very neat and imaginative designs, while mine tended to be more "stiff" and "linear", although now, when I think about it, I figure they were okay – for a 12-year old. That Christmas my brother and his now-sainted wife (God bless her) gave me the album "The Story of 'Star Wars'", narrated by the great actor Roscoe Lee Browne. I must have played it so many, many times, and sometimes I played it as inspiration while I drew spaceships.

It seemed like everything afterward that was science fiction was "a la 'Star Wars'", but that was fine because that meant there were many choices for this sci-fi fan, including the original ABC series 'Battlestar Galactica' in 1978, and the NBC series 'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century' a year after that. I was already a fan of 'Star Trek' and sci-fi in general, but, in some way, the original 'Star Wars' just "opened it up" for me and infinitely enhanced my view, perception, and appreciation of science fiction.

Great stories Saginaw. I was younger (7), and it seems like it was the next school year where Star Wars really began to consume our lives (so I'm thinking I must not have seen it until the summer).

But some random memories:
- Paying 25 cents to a friend for an apparently rare Chewbacca figure without his boltcaster…or I was crazy enough to want Chewie so badly to spend that crazy sum of money on him.
- My friend Leon Chan um, bootlegging the SW album on cassettes and giving them out to his friends in grade 2. Pretty sure it was Leon who sold me Chewie too. Both Chewie and that cassette are still around somewhere.
- Building the Millenium Falcon out of Lego in class.
- A group of us in grade three making faux stormtrooper masks out of white paper bags and white toilet paper cardboard rolls and doing a play to the rest of the class.

The most interesting thing in hindsight is how consumed we were and yet our access to more info was so limited in 1977 – basically all just off of one viewing, a (very) few books, and the toys. No VHS tapes, no internet forums, no entertainment TV endlessly cycling stories.

You might be interested in this book (re: Star Wars' effect on ScifFi/Hollywood):

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Easy read and lots of fun.

Not to take anything away from Star Wars, but the really important date for Hollywood was was two years earlier, with Jaws. That marked one of the greatest upheavals in film history, when A and B changed places.

After that, Star Wars,Superman, and all that followed were inevitable.