I was already a science fiction fan when the summer of 1977 rolled around. Star Trek had been cancelled eight years earlier, which to someone as young as I, was a very long time. There was little SciFi on TV and less at the movies. Oddly enough, what SciFi there was at the movies was more adult oriented fare, like Rollerball and Soylent Green. Needless to say, I was primed and ready for something like Star Wars.
I had just subscribed to Starlog Magazine and about 10 days before the movie hit I got my first copy in the mail: Issue #7 with a Star Wars cover story. It had loads of pictures, for most of us, it was the first real glimpse of Darth Vader and the Millennium Falcon, etc. One week before the movie was released I bought the paperback novelization by “George Lucas” (even though most everyone now knows it was ghost written by Alan Dean Foster). I had also really gotten into film music, so when I saw the Star Wars soundtrack on sale a week before the movie was in theaters, I took a chance on it. It was a double album, very much a rarity for film scores. The main theme is so iconic these days, it is hard to fathom buying that album, taking it home with no idea what the music was going to be, putting it on the turntable (in those pre-CD days my choice was vinyl or 8-Track), slipping the headphones on and hearing the first bars of the legendary theme music. It was a thrilling moment. While I have always been a much bigger fan of Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams deservedly earned a great deal of his reputation with that one score.
I spent the next few days reading the novelization while the soundtrack music played, so by the time the film actually premiered, I knew the whole story – actually more than the whole story as there were a few things in the novel that weren’t in the film itself. All this might lead you to believe that the first Star Wars film had the kind of build up and hype that is common place for those kinds of movies today. The truth is quite the opposite. Since I was already a science fiction fan, I was aware of the film, but until the phenomenon got rolling, most other people weren’t aware of it at all. The big movie in the summer of 1977 was supposed to be The Deep. Jaws had been a blockbuster two years earlier and The Deep was based on a book by the same author with a stellar cast. Nobody knew who Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher or Mark Hamill were.
Luckily it happened that my family was going to be in Lubbock on a shopping trip on the day of Star Wars release, May 25, 1977. No one else in my family cared much to see it, but I talked them into taking me. There was no line, no sold out showings. We simply walked up and got tickets to the second showing that first day. The theater was not empty, but it certainly wasn’t full either. After all my anticipation, after reading the book and listening to the music in advance, I was finally going to see the film. While the first moments of the Rebel Blockade Runner zooming across the screen were great, I was oddly disappointed after that. My expectations were built up too high. In reading the book, I played the story out in my mind in a far more spectacular fashion then the screen was able to recreate. I left the theater happy to have seen it, but all too aware that it hadn’t quite lived up to my preconceptions. My grandmother went to the showing with us and she hated the film. She thought the aliens were “ugly”.
So you can imagine my surprise when the popularity of Star Wars grew to epic proportions over the coming summer. Suddenly the T-Shirts were everywhere. Suddenly everyone was a science fiction fan. Who knew? It ultimately changed the way films were developed and more importantly, marketed. It was a landmark film that still resonates today, but at the same time it was a uniquely 70’s phenomenon. In today’s internet publicity-driven world there is little chance of walking into a film like that without having already been assaulted by the hype.
So if Star Wars did not exactly blow me over as it did many people, it still changed my life. It made science fiction cool, leading to a host of other science fiction films and TV events that would likely never have happened had Star Wars not blasted open the doors for them. It also taught me to curb my expectations. It showed me that the movie that takes place in your mind is something that is hard to match on any screen. Viewed in that respect, it is a shame that Star Wars’ other legacy is that films grew more and more spectacular to the point that most people are content to experience these things passively. Reading has become passé for too many people. Star Wars has stimulated the imagination of a generation, but at the same time it has stunted it in a way.
Of course, once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no forcing it back. For better or worse, we live in a visceral world and I really think Star Wars doesn’t get enough credit as one of the primary instigators of that. Oddly enough, as I have grown older, I now find myself pretty jaded toward those all too common spectaculars on the screen, and even after all these years, I still find things play out more spectacularly in my mind. No matter how magnificent the images on the screen, one thing Star Wars should have taught it is that ultimately it is imagination that has no limits.