Happy Birthday, "Star Wars". Opened May 25, 1977 across the country.

Back then, it was just 'Star Wars'. Not Episode IV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorhead_Story_of_Star_Wars

...or what god-awful fashion i had on.

makes me smile :-).

we went to the first show on a Sunday and there were only 40 - 50 people in the whole theater. Of course, when we came out the line was literally 1/4 mile long and every show after that was sold out for the whole run.

We went to an evening showing and drove into the countryside and stared at the stars afterwards. The only other huge line I saw for a movie besides this one was the Exorcist :scared:.

and he was convinced it was filmed in "outer space" :rofl:

Especially the dog fights on Death Star. :)

I had a winter coat on. I sat there with my mouth hanging open and didn't take my jacket off or visit the men's room once.

It may have been that I saw it in Oct. or Nov. International releases were delayed.

Han shot first.

it was either him or greedo.

must have seen it 50 times.. I was 12 years old. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

spent the whole summer playing Star Wars. When my daughter started playing Clone Wars during recess with her kindergarten best boy friend, it made me smile, because it was just like how me and my friend used to play. Great memories.

with my wife. Star Wars, June 1977. Dinner at the Pelican. Smitten.

A group of us from the Eastern Arizona Junior College contingent had a free evening and went to see it. I was never the same again.

The movie didn't do a thing for me.

the action - a kid's film that was fun for the whole family.

EDIT - oops, Peter Cushing, not Peter Sellers!

:rofl:

(We're the only two people in the world who can say that, y'know.)

:shrug:

Hell, I had older sisters who made fun of me, endlessly, for being into Star Wars.

Meanwhile, they were convinced they were the epitome of cool, what with their Leif Garrett albums.

:rofl:

Early releases of "good" films took weeks or months before they'd hit the theaters where I grew up.

But a Science Fiction movie complete with good guys wearing white and the bad guys in black? Waaaaayyyy too hokey.

The late 60s then 70s were absolutely dominated by serious or artsy films. Movie-wise, it had been a horrible time to grow up. It seemed like there was no "fun" in the motion picture business during that era.

Star Wars had a whole lot of fun-deprived kids and teens to latch onto.


And, of course, for the first time ever, special effects were actually good!!! Like so many other posters here, I was in awe at what I was seeing. It is the only movie I have ever went to the theater for multiple times because it was so unlike anything we had ever seen before.

I didn't know what an orgasm was at that point, but it was sort of like that for my eyeballs.

There's a lot ripped off of Kurosawa and Reifenstahl (sp?).

Then there are all the bloopers and gaffes.

Empire was a far superior film.

Nevertheless, groundbreaking in many ways. And if you were, say, an 8 year old boy in that summer of 1977, it very likely redefined your expectations of what entertainment could be.

As for the rest, like they say, 'immature artists borrow- mature artists steal'

And I lol'd when I saw the shot Lucas ripped off the Searchers, when I saw the Searchers on Blu-Ray.

It's the shot of the homestead burning. Same smoke angles and everything.

It became a motif in the franchise. Attack of the Clones and The Force Unleashed also borrow/steal from that film.

:thumbsup:

Thanks for the heads up on The Searchers. I spent years working for an indie video chain, so I'm sure I've seen it, but it's been a while. Certainly not on Blu-Ray, yet.

Do you really think that Star Wars is cool?

Certainly cooler than Leif Garrett.

2 Tone was cool and the Sex Pistols were the bomb. Three Women was super cool (Shelly Duvall should have been a superstar). Opening Night was crazy cool.

Star Wars was a stale tale wrapped in plastic and blinking lights.

which is highly dependent upon doing and/or liking shit for the express purpose of impressing and/or pretending that you're better than someone else... an activity which is, IMHO, decidedly the epitome of everything that is uncool.

I mean, really, at this point in time, any grown up who still gives any sort of credence or mental energy to that concept of "cool" (look at me! look at me!!!) really ought to do some serious self-examination. If you were 12 right now, Justin fucking Beeber (Beiber?) would be the coolest shit evah. So I rest my case. But who am I to judge.

OTOH, *I* am talking about "cool" as a purely subjective experience, specifically the experience of a grade school kid walking into that theater in 1977 and seeing special effects light-years ahead of anything that had come before. And there is no denying, Star Wars fit that bill. Fucking COOL.

Beyond that, like I said, hopefully by now most grown ups have figured out that "cool" means liking what you like, and not giving a shit what anyone else thinks.


As for the Sex Pistols... C'mon. Anarchy in the UK is a fine tune, but even Mr. Lydon has acknowledged that they really had no -zero- talent. And Sid Vicious was just a fucking goober.

That took longer than I'd thought...

Waves hand.

"Move along."

Paid for it once. 15 at the time and if you didn't know anyone with a car, the only way to see a great flick like this was to sneak in. Only movie we never got chased out by the owners. I guess all the popcorn, pop, and junk food we bought negated the need for the $2 entry fee.

Princess Leia to General Tarkin.

One of my all time favorite move quotes.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/

Man, was I stoked by that time......

For the memories. :)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/

Mr. Laurel just finished watching the first 3 of the movies on DVD.

SW was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. I was 5.

A friend saw it early in the summer and tried to tell me about it but made a hash of it. I had NO IDEA what he was talking about, but to this day I remember him saying how cool Han was, with his "Sorry about the mess" line.

That summer, my mother, brother, and I drove cross-country to California--quite an adventure for 11 YO me, who had barely been anywhere. I was a big reader, but my mom wouldn't let me take all the books that I had gotten out of the library for the trip (I don't know why--we had room in the car), and sure enough, I had read them all by the time we got to Oklahoma. I demanded that we find a book for me to read, so there we were, in a run-down 7 Eleven, in a bad neighborhood, late at night, and my mom plunked me in front of the rack of paperbacks and said "Pick one!" I found myself facing Harlequin romances, Westerns, and...Star Wars.

Yep. I read the book before I saw the movie.
:rofl:

In L.A., it was all Star Wars, all the time. Chewbacca and Darth Vader walking around outside the wax museum. The movie showing at Mann's Chinese Theater. I begged and begged to see the movie but nope, nothing doing. I had to wait. And wait. And wait.

And in the end I saw it 11 times at the movies.

And I absolutely love it that my kid is as obsessed with it as I was. :D

yeah.

It would have been 3 months shy of my 8th birthday, but I still remember how packed it was and how awestruck we all were as kids. I had so many 3PO and R2 toys and figures.

:rofl:

For a boy in grade school in 1977, it was about as pivotal of a paradigm-shifting event as there could be, I think.

:)

I was the only one who didn't at least claim to have seen it multiple times. Luckily, my parents relented, and we saw it in late September or early October.

If I had myself a movie-tape watching machine

and I could play any movie I liked,

I go out and get me a Star Wars Cassette,

And I'd play that sucker day and night.



Fwemmm swooomsh

I remember my mother always used to have the TV tuned to the CBS Morning News when I was getting dressed and ready for school. One morning in early June or so of my sophomore year of high school, not long before school was due to let out, as I was getting ready, there was a story on the news about this movie that had been released a short while ago that was so popular people who had seen it were lining up to see it again and again.

This fact alone got our attention. Before 1977, unless a movie was some midnight cult classic like Rocky Horror or Reefer Madness, people didn't form long lines to go see it over and over. Here was a mainstream movie that ordinary people were lining up at the ordinary multiplexes to go see over and over, like it was a ride at Disneyland that they couldn't get enough of.

As a previous poster pointed out, this was during an era when movies were, for the most part, very solemn and serious, with the exception of maybe Disney (and Disney was in a lull at the time; they hadn't had a really big hit in ages). The few exceptions were movies like "Jaws," which everyone went to in order to be scared, and "Rocky," which was popular and uplifting. Now here all of a sudden was this sci-fi outer-space movie that was not only popular, but people were seeing over and over and quoting their favorite lines from. The news story speculated that maybe it was because the movie was a throwback to the fun of the old Flash Gordon serials and a simple story of good vs. evil.

At the time, my mom wasn't a big moviegoer, but she got the idea into her head that maybe we should all go as a family (which we never did anymore) and see this movie. So, at some point that summer after school let out, we did.

We all fell in love. Not in an extreme geeky way, but we all just loved the movie, Mom included. We came away talking about characters like "the golden robot" (we couldn't remember his name) and Han Solo. But even we couldn't have imagined that this one movie would turn out to be the beginning of, well, an empire. Or known that one day I'd be talking to college students who would look at me with admiring amazement, asking me what it was like to actually see the "first Star Wars" in a movie theater during its original release, the first time I ever saw it. Of course, most of them, as much as they loved it, hadn't seen it in a theater the first time; they watched it on a VCR in someone's house as small children, or on TV. They could only imagine what it would have been like coming to a theater with absolutely no idea of what you were about to see, and then seeing that.

Naturally, I did later on meet people who prided themselves on saying they didn't get Star Wars or they hated Star Wars. Oh well, to each his own.

It's just funny to me to look back now and realize I was of an age to experience something that later generations now envy me for: seeing the first-ever Star Wars movie for the first time in a little multiplex somewhere.

top grossers 1977:

#1: star wars
#2: close encounters of the third kind
#3: the rescuers (disney)
#4: saturday night fever
#5: the goodbye girl (neil simon comedy)
#6: the turning point
#7: the deep
#8: smokey & the bandit
#9: the spy who loved me
#10:julia

i'd count maybe 6&10 as "solemn & serious."


1976

1. rocky
2. a star is born
3. all the presidents men
4. the omen
5. freaky friday
6. silver streak
7. the enforcer (clint eastwood)
8. carrie
9. family plot (hitchcock comedy)
10.marathon man

also released this year:

network
harlan county usa
taxi driver


1975:

1. jaws
2. rocky horror
3. one flew over the cuckoos nest
4. dog day afternoon
5. shampoo
6. tommy
7. three days of the condor
8. funny lady
9. nashville
10.day of the locust


1974:

1. towering inferno
2. blazing saddles
3. young frankenstein
4. earthquake
5. chinatown
6. godfather 2
7. airport 1975
8. great gatsby
9. man with the golden gun
10.murder on the orient express

also released:

the conversation






I think what you're remembering as "solemn & serious" in the 70s is more that some quality films dealing seriously with then-current themes managed to gain a wide audience.

and even a lot of the lighter ones weren't pure mass-produced dreck.

a comparison with the top-grossing films last year is instructive:

1. avatar
2. harry potter & the half-blood prince
3. ice age: dawn of the dinosaurs
4. transformers: revenge of the fallen
5. 2012
6. up
7. twilight: new moon
8. sherlock holmes
9. angels & demons
10. the hangover



personally i think the films of the 60s & 70s will hold up better over the long run that almost anything made in the last decade.

IMO, the 60s-70s was one of the high points for US film, & no period since has touched it.

but then, i despised both ET & Titanic. Dreck.

i liked the first star wars, though. classic story, unpretentious, special effects breathtaking in their era, decent casting/acting.

wonderful take-along baby. He loved it. :)

When the Death Star blew up at the end, the whole audience stood up and cheered. I had never seen that before. I was astonished. My brother and I, and all of our friends, were obsessed with Star Wars from that summer on...

Can't seem to find one online to show y'all. It was kind of like a magazine with pictures and text about the movie. Probably 16 pages or so. I'm pretty sure I did something stupid to ruin its value, like cut out a couple pictures or something.

I also had the Burger King posters. They were paintings rather than photos. Wonder if those are stashed away in the basement? Here's what one of 'em looked like.

At the beginning of one of the showings, the projectionist announced "Welcome to our 277th showing of Star Wars. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did the last 276 times!"

I was about 14 months old, but I was there!!!























My mom fell asleep. *facepalm*

Oooh! High art! Only the cool kids understood it! Were you there?