Star Wars premiered 40 years ago today, 25 May 1977.
Time flies… doesn’t it.
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We were building our house from 1977 to 1978.
I placed “time capsules” in various places–such as under the drywall.
If I remember correctly, Star Wars memorabilia figured prominently in these time capsule items (as well as family photos and who knows what else!).
Majuscule said, “as well as family photos and who knows what else!”
If you find a highly entertaining singing frog put it back!
My parents went to see this movie as their first date! The auspicious beginning to a marriage of almost 37 years. :)
Wow! 40 years!! That summer my Aunt took my cousin and I (both 7 years old) to see it. It was cold and rainy out and the old theatre leaked. She went to get car and got two blankets and bundled us up as we watched it. Doesn’t time fly…..
My son and I have been texting about this this morning. He was four and was too young to enjoy it in 1977, but when he saw it again when he was six, he was absolutely hooked. We had every “action figure,” sheets and curtains in his bedroom, pictures of him in costume. What happy memories!
It didn’t get across the Atlantic to the British Isles until much later in the year, as used to happen back then. I didn’t actually get to see it until early 1978, and even then I only went because I was on my own and to pass the time. I remember I liked it well enough but considered it kids’ stuff, really. When I got back home at the weekend I was reluctant to admit to my “cool” mates that I’d been to it – and then discovered they’d all been as well.
I do well remember the beginning of the Star Wars whole story. WOW time does fly.
Thirteen months later it was still playing in theaters when I saw it for the first time on my tenth birthday.
…. oh snap. I guess that means I’m turning….sigh.
I first saw it as a kid at the drive-in with my parents.
It’s fortunate for George Lucas that he made that first set of Star Wars movies first, rather than the subsequent ones. If he had started out with Jarjar Binks and the hokey dialogue and storylines of the prequels, the world would never have heard of Star Wars.
That day was my 7th birthday and just after my First Holy Communion. After dinner and cake, my dad took my younger brother and me to an evening showing of Star Wars. I was wholly baffled by the “Episode IV” thing? I knew what episode meant so how could this film be number four?
@ HyacinthClare
“He was four and was too young to enjoy it in 1977”
In my experience, 4 is not too young to enjoy it. I know I watched and was enthralled by it before I started schooling, so I would have been about 4.
@ Anita Moore
” If he had started out with Jarjar Binks and the hokey dialogue and storylines of the prequels, the world would never have heard of Star Wars.”
If you were to ask Alec Guinness, that was exactly the problem with the original. In an interview in his later years, he claimed it was his idea for Obi-Wan to die. “What I didn’t tell Lucas was that I just couldn’t go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines.” He was also known to have written friends when he was offered the part that it sounded like “fairy tale rubbish.”
That said, I think Lucas’ view of what Star Wars should be changed radically as he got older, and even if he had started from Episode 1, the same basic plot would have been put to film in a very different manner. I don’t want to think what Mr. Guinness would have said about The Phantom Menace.
I had that poster on my wall….right next to the one of Leif Garret on a skateboard….sigh….
Alec Guinness wrote about the Star Wars phenomenon in his excellent memoirs. It’s quite amusing to hear from him about it (this clip is from the audiobook, recorded by Guinness himself): https://youtu.be/86eoCDjDnmc
Eheu fugaces…etc
iamlucky13, at least the writers of Alec Guiness’ hokey lines had somewhat of a command of the English language; and whoever wrote Yoda’s lines in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi could make his inverted syntax sound believable. (Too bad for Alec Guiness that killing off Obi-Wan didn’t spare him the fairytale rubbish dialogue in the end.)
Not born yet…
Alec Guiness was grateful all his life for Star Wars. The royalties allowed him to continue in the less lucrative art of theater, the which art gave him a revulsion for the cheeseball dialogue in Lucas’s script. For example, he changed Lucas’s horrid line, “You must do what you FEEL is right, you know.” to “You must do what you THINK is right, you know.” (Never saw the movie, but it’s in Guiness’s memoir.) One of my earliest memories is of not being allowed to go to this movie when I was four. (Eternally grateful to my parents for not letting me do all the things they did not let me do.) Alec and I share a deep entroublement about how this movie seems to ‘obsess’ the imagination of young children, with the smiling approval of their parents, who stoke the takeover of these young minds with ceaseless offerings to the god of Star Wars merchandise.