On Star Wars Eve…
Once upon a time in a town two counties north of here and most definitely a long long time ago, I discovered a passion for reading. Science fiction was my gateway drug. In fifth and sixth grade, I admit I dabbled in a Houdini obsession. And there were several months living only with World War I aces. Eddie Rickenbacker. Frank “Balloon Buster” Luke.
Then, one day, I picked up a book in the Danny Dunn series. “Danny Dunn and the Time Machine.” Or “Danny Dunn and the Shrinkifying Machine.” One of those. That lead to Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and on to the big guns, Heinlein and Asimov and Andre Norton and Larry Niven. By high school, I subscribed to Analog magazine and reveled in Vonnegut, since he gave me literary cred yet let me wallow in sci fi. (Quite honestly, I wasn’t paying attention to the literary stuff.)
What I could find in books in the early and late seventies, I could not in movie theaters or on TV. “Star Trek” was already long gone. Irwin Allen’s craptastic series “Lost in Space,” “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and “Time Tunnel” were in constant reruns, but they weren’t what my books conjured. In movies, aside from Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” there hadn’t been a good science fiction film since “Forbidden Planet” came out in 1954.
Amazing worlds in the books I read. A vast wasteland in film and television.
Sometime in the fall of 1976 or winter of 1977, I was grocery shopping with my mom at Shop Rite in Wappingers Falls. As I usually did, I wandered to the paperback book racks and browsed. I came across a novel called “Star Wars.” The back cover promised a film in May 1977. The front cover looked interesting enough. I’d learn later it was the first poster art created for the film by famous fantasy artist Hildebrandt. Luke Skywalker holds a light saber aloft with a buxom Princess Leia in front of him. Neither of the faces are those of the actors. A giant ghostly Darth Vader head floats behind them, with Tie fighters and the Deathstar in front of the star field.
That was my first inkling a “Star Wars” was coming my way. In those days a long long time ago, there was no EW or io9 or any of the rest of the media-entertainment-industrial complex. I next heard about the film a week or two before its May 25, 1977 opening. A full-page ad in the Weekend section of the New York Times. Same poster. I don’t remember any buzz—we didn’t do buzz then—only my own feeling that I needed to see this film.
I went with my dad and some of my siblings to the Roosevelt Theater in Hyde Park, a long drive for us to get to a big old-fashioned single-auditorium theater (it even had a balcony).
The prologue crawl rolled back into the stars. This already was intriguing. Crawls usually rolled flat, bottom to top. The back story sounded fantastically similar to the books I’d been reading for six or seven years. A planet hung in the darkness of space. The little ship flew into the shot from the top of the screen, the sound effects making it seem like it had flown right over us. It was being fired upon. More slowly, but still going menacingly fast, the Imperial Star Destroyer slid into the shot taking up more and more of my view. This was a big damn starship blasting away at the little one.
I will stop there. You know the movie. I want to write what was going on in my head in that moment. Someone—I’d later learn a man named Lucas—had finally taken those amazing images science fiction books put in my head and projected them onto a movie screen. A golden age began that day. Movies. TV shows. Hell, stage plays, puppet shows and theme park rides. Some good. Some bad. But everything changed when that big ship chased that little one across the screen. Science fiction came out of the ghetto.
I’m now off to see the nine o’clock show. It won’t change everything. But it’s welcome.
Update at midnight: It was good, and good enough. One big quibble later.
Update two days later: Samuel R. Delany’s preceptive 1977 review of the original film.