Amazingly I can’t find it. I don’t think it’s available. Which is shocking. It was only 1977
Now I’m not talking the December rereview. That’s everywhere. And apparently there’s a myth floating around that they gave it thumbs down.
Well it’s up to is to dispute that. I’ll tell you what I remember:
They loved it. They drooled over it. Saying it was unlike anything that had come before. They singled out the star destroyer dwarfing the rebel ship and the firefight near the millennium Falcon.
You all remember anything else? I know ebert in the paper gave it four stars and Siskel 3 1/2
Not surprised Siskel rated it lower, though only slightly, than Ebert. Siskel nearly always gave lower marks to sci-fi, for which he didn’t care, than Ebert, who did.
I’d be a bit surprised if they gave it a low rating. Star Wars came seemingly out of nowhere, with little pre-release hype, but suddenly it got a HUGE push. The issue of Time magazine that came out the week it was released actually had a notice on the cover calling it “The Best Movie of the Year”. I never saw them do anything like that before. Inside was a glowing review.
The Boston Globe ran an ad for it on the bottom of its front page the day it was released.
So Star Wars wasn’t some random SF or kids movie. There were already signs that this was an event.
I’d seen a trailer for the film in January of 1977, but it didn’t have the John Williams music or the yellow-edged logo, and didn’t convey the sense of excitement. There were posters that gave nothing away, and a low-key novelization with a confusing cover. But on the day i came out, theaters refused to honor passes, and the ushers all wore buttons reading “May the Force be With you”. Star Wars was clearly something else.
Looking at those photos, especially of the X wing and TIE fighter, take me right back to those thrilling days of yesteryear! EVERYONE used the same photos, must have been the press package. I couldn’t get enough!
I don’t doubt that you’re right about the press package, but it’s not QUITE right that everyone used them,
Fiercely independent Cinefantastique, who generate their own cover illustrations (most of the time) used their own painting for the special Double Issue on Star Wars:
In late April/early May of 1977, classical music station KFAC (in Los Angeles) played the main theme from Star Wars. I was driving to school when I heard it, and it was thrilling.
Probably mid-May at the earliest, actually. I do know that it was before the May 25 release date.
Yeah, Roger used to have a site that had every single video review Gene and he had done, but that was a long time ago and even in Roger’s lifetime, they lost the rights and shut down the site.
Here is their 1977 Holiday review since Star Wars was pushed back in theaters for Christmas time. Gene is shown liking it, but worrying Hollywood won’t put out serious movies(pictures, he always called them).
In Boston they didn’t have to push Star Wars back into the theaters – it hadn’t left the Charles cinema (where it opened) since the premiere. It would continue in the same theater for an entire year.
Wasn’t it released in May? I remember my brother and I standing in a long line outside our local multiplex for tickets. The movie was sold out two or three times before we were able to finally buy tickets and see it.
You want to remember what a frikkin’ big deal this was?
K-Mart (and I assume other places, but consumer-grade K-Mart!) sold two different Super 8mm films of Star Wars. One was B&W and silent, the other was color and sound. It was somewhere around appx 8 minutes of various scenes from the film. They were something like $8 for b&w and $24 for color.
And they sold!
I wanted them! It was only 8 minutes but I needed it! Too bad I didn’t have a super 8 projector. So I never got one.
An event for the film was a feature at the 1976 Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention) held over Labor Day weekend. It garnered a nice crowd but hardly an overwhelming one. Not surprisingly since most of the advertising consisted of five-foot tall cardboard cutouts of Darth Vader in the hallways. He did not look menacing. However, Mark Hamill was there to promote it, so the producers were taking the event seriously to try to get word of mouth going months before the official release. It may have come out of nowhere in other realms of society but that wasn’t because they weren’t trying to make it a bang.
I saw one of the workers on the movie do an interview and he said, “Our hope was that if we had good success, we could one day maybe have a corner booth at a Star Trek or Comic Book convention.”
They worked hard, but weren’t overly confident it would be a huge hit.
Anyone make a bigger sucker purchase than this?: I bought the LP The Story of Star Wars which was Roscoe Lee Browne narrating the story over dialogue and sound effects. Lame supreme!
