How did they deal with the ogres? 
Watch Star Wars. Now watch Annie Hall. Which one held up better?
You keep wanting to make science fiction less important than it is. Those films were actually major releases, not “drive-in fodder” (I didn’t even mention those – and there were a LOT of them). And, as I said, my list isn’t by any means comprehensive. There were quite a few more than a dozen science fiction films that went to the major movie houses. Star Wars did not, by any means, invent the genre.
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o. No they didn’t. The Outer Limits & The Twilight Zone first aired in the late 50’s and 60’s. Occasionally you could catch reruns of each (that’s how I got to see them first) and Star Trek from the mid 60’s too was rerun. But we only had THREE channels, a couple more if you were lucky and maybe a UHF channel or two. That’s it. Science fiction and fantasy shows were still thought of as a very small niche audience. Even local channels didn’t want to waste their air time with them on reruns.[/quoote]
Yes, yes they did. If you lived in a major city, you had one or more independent stations. (New York and Boston each had three or more at the time). Star Trek was running every day (people gathered in the TV room at MIt, with its 8’ diagonal screen to watch it every day). Outer Limits was running regularly on another channel, and so was Twilight Zone. I had watched all three on the indeperndent stations in the NYC area, as well. I’m sorry if you lived somewhere where there weren’t indy stations (Rochester, NY, I know, didn’t get one untyil 1977), but most large metropolitan areas – New York, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, LA San Francisco, etc. were served by independent stations as well.
In addition, day programming at even the big stations often included reruns and broadcasts of movies, as did late night programming. I saw plenty of science fiction films on CBS, ABC, and NBC during off-peak hours. Forbidden Planet even ran late night on CBS in the 1970s.
also, in that pre-DVD and pre-VHS era, movie theaters still showed matinees and the like. I saw several science fiction films on the Big Screen, many of which showedc up later on TV.
Nothing beats the greatness that is Turkish Star Wars. 
That’s classic! Especially the “ppt ppt ppt” from the guns!
See, I think this here is part of the problem with your point(s) about other good stuff being available on TV before Star Wars.
You are looking at it from your life experience. What fraction of America do you think could actually see all this good Sci Fi movie stuff circa 1977?
I saw Star Wars in a cinema at the age of 11 in 1977.
Until I went to watch Bladerunner five years later while under the influence of Liberty Cap mushrooms no movie had anything like the immersive quality of Star Wars.
The Force seemed a lot easier to get along with than any of the “Grumpy Old Man in the Sky” belief systems.
Annie Hall. Star Wars is a B film aimed at young audiences out for a good time. Annie Hall studies relationshiups and is about real human beings. Its the difference between a cheeseburger and a steak.
I’d say Star Wars, but I don’t understand the point of your question. My previous post wasn’t about the relative merit of the two films.
Just want to add that I love Star Wars. I think Lucas’s American Graffiti would be a better comparison to Annie Hall.
I was in my early 20s when SW was released and I saw it. Now, I had discovered the holy three, Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein in my elementary school library, so I was very familiar with Sci Fi. I probably had a complete collection of Heinlein paperbacks on my book shelf. So, when I first saw A New Hope, I thought it was a melange of old epic westerns and WWII movies about bombers and fighters all within a SF framework.
Han Solo was the giveaway to me. His rant about seeing all sorts of stuff but never seeing any Force told me he was the cynical gun slinger with a heart of gold. Luke, of course, was the Kid. Obi Wan was the old spiritual Amerindian chief. Leia was, of course, the Rancher’s Beautiful Daughter in Distress. C3P0 was Smiley Burdette or Pat Brady, the comic relief sidekick who’d stop his horse too quickly and do a forward flip over the horse’s head and land in the watering trough. Chewbacca was the useful sidekick, like Tonto. R2D2 was another useful sidekick, maybe he was Festus. Or better yet, maybe The Great Gabbaroo Himself, Gabby Hayes. Because Gabby’s speech was often difficult to understand. Though that would apply to Chewy also.
And among the Cliches by DeCarload, there were also elements of epic coming of age themes from the classics. Not “coming of age” of recent years, which is a “nice” way of saying “losing one’s virginity” but more like The Odyssey and Ulysses.
I think what distinguished SW from earlier, big budget studio SF films was the space opera element combined with the production values. There had been several cheesy space opera films. Some “serious” studio SF films (2001, The Time Machine, etc.). SW was outside those norms. It embraced the pulp SF adventure motif but didn’t have the crappy (i.e., non-existent) SFX of space travel films from the 50s. This was how studios categorized such things in those days.
In any one component it wasn’t new. It was the mix that made it stand out.
I loved the 16 (or so) page ad that Nikon had in Modern Photography magazine that year for its Nikkor lenses, showing how the filming process used for the miniatures was done. (Highlighting where their lenses were used, of course.) Lots of optical and editing work to simulate realism. That attentive effort on such a large scale made for a very visually appealing end result.
If he didn’t know about it then the middle section of the middle movie is quite a coincidence. The middle of the Monomyth is supposed to be the death, change and rebirth, the meeting with the Shadow and/or the Father.
I rewatched the middle of the middle movie with the hypothesis that it would reflect the middle of the Monomyth. You can read the description/graphic of the Monomyth, check out the middle section of The Empire strikes back and judge for yourselves but I’ll provide a summary:
The Empire strikes back is a 2 hour movie, around the 1 hour mark, Luke has been training on Dagobah, a strange world of swamps and jungle, completely isolated from everything except Yoda. It is a Netherworld, the belly of the whale. Luke has lost hope and Yoda is beginning to doubt. Luke goes out on his own further into the jungle, goes into a cave and meets an hallucination of Darth Vader. Luke slays Darth Vader/Shadow Father, the head rolls off and Luke sees his own face. Luke has slain his old self. He is dead and will be reborn. He comes back to Yoda and starts to master the Force. He then leaves Dagobah to bring back the Elixir/Promethean Fire/Force and eventually defeat the Empire and his own Shadow Father by killing Darth Vader’s Shadowness and changing the Shadow’s destructive thoughts and emotions.
That sounds like Campbell.
I do wonder where the entry in the Special World and coming back into the Ordinary World take place. I don’t have those movies handy so I can’t easily check. Usually, going into the Special World occurs about 20-25% of the way through when the 1st Act ends and the comeback into the Ordinary World occurs around the 75-80% mark when the 3rd Act begins. Either the trilogy has an unusually short 2nd Act and unusually long 1st & 3rd Act, it means that the 2nd Act spills into the end of the 1st movie and the beginning of the 3rd movie.
I saw star wars as a 9 year old.
As mentioned, the opening space battle told you what was going on in less than a minute without a word of dialog which set the pace for the film.
I thought the scenes on Tatooine (as a 9 year old) went on a little too long but they did a good job of establishing the characters.
Then once they hit the bar, the movie really took off.
Then as a 9 year old, I thought that when they escaped the death star, that was the end of the movie and I was expecting credits to roll.
Then to my surprise, there was another 15-20 minutes of a big battle which just kept getting better and better and more intense. It felt like we were with Luke in his fighter and then when Han comes zooming in to rescue Luke at the last minutethat was the big payoff and surprise.
In hindsight, the movie still holds up very well and the special effects are still very good 38 years later
Empire, I loved as well but was disappointed that it just ended without a definite conclusion and that really disappointed the 12 year old me although in hindsight I actually like Empire better than Star Wars
Return of the Jedi was also a satisfying film but somehow after the end of it, I felt like something was missing. The battle scenes were great but the rebels defeated the empire too easily and I didn’t really care that much for the Ewoks or the long initial scene on Tatooine which seemed to drag out the movie.
The prequels I also enjoyed but not as much as the original movies as they had almost impossible expectations to fulfill and Lucas spent too much time building up Anakin only to have not turn evil until the last half of the third movie. They are pretty to watch for the special effects but they don’t have the overall effect of the earlier movies.
I don’t think monomyth analysis quite works when applied to the trilogy as a whole, because each individual film (RotJ, perhaps less so) was written as a self-contained hero’s journey. If you take the first film on its own, the entry into the other world is pretty clearly Luke going to Mos Eisley. It’s even called out in the film as such, explicitly, after they escape the spaceport, when Obi Wan tells Luke, “You’ve taken your first step, into a larger world.” If you analyze the trilogy as a whole, though, at most you’ve pushed the threshold back from Mos Eisley, to actually landing on the Death Star - which as you note is still way too early in the arc for that to happen.
It also means that there really isn’t a moment when he returns home. If you look at just the first film, the return home is when they get to Yavin. It’s not technically a “return” for Luke, in that he’s never been there, but he’s now surrounded by friends and allies, and has brought back a powerful gift for them - the stolen plans. But analyzing the trilogy as a whole, there’s no real “return” scene. Luke coming back from the Death Star with Vader’s body is the closest, but the problem is, by this point it’s the third such return we’ve seen - both Yavin, and the medical frigate in Empire are also returns, and there’s nothing that really distinguishes the one in Jedi from the other two.
I think Campbell’s monomyth works best when applied to Star Wars as a stand alone story, and Empire and Jedi as a combined second arc.
That’s not to say you can’t make it fit. The whole point of the monomyth is that you can make any story fit it - even if you’ve got to bend it U shaped to do it. It just takes less bending if you do it as two arcs, instead of one.
Also, this is unrelated to anything in the thread, except “Star Wars” and “great.”
The first three are the kind that gives rise to a cult following, only to discover 20 years later it was a so-so production, mainly spiced up by good acting.
Showed Star Wars, the despecialized version, to my kids today. They are 5 and 7.
They loved it. Totally drawn in and both completely enjoyed it.
This is why the most perfect “watch order” for SW movies is:
- Star Wars (original theatrical version)