When the Time magazine came out, I was enthralled. For example, they mentioned the droids walking across the desert with a huge worm skeleton in the background, like a sand worm from Dune. That led me to buy and consume the Dune books, which I would had not considered before.
One thing that confused me from the article was the names Artoo Detoo and Threepio. What weird names! It took me several viewings until I came across another article that spelled them as R2-D2 and C-3PO, like Newsweek did. Oh! That makes sense! Duh.
Different magazines spelled them either way, or both ways. Back then, it was all new. Confusion reigned! Was Vader a robot? Were Stormtroopers? Was a lighsaber beam solid? How big IS the Deathstar? Why is Leia kissing her brother? Oh wait…
All I’d heard was a comment on the news that there was a new movie coming that was “basically a western, but in space.”
(After slow-paced Sci-Fi movies like 2001, that was great news).
And that was enough for a friend and I to bike downtown and get in the very back of the longest line I’d ever seen. We got the last two tickets and had to sit in the front row. Which in that old theater (converted to show big screen movies), meant we were sitting five feet from the bottom edge of a huge screen.
In my entire time my mom was married to my stepfather & I was a kid, she was always the one who took me to movies, with one exception where all three of us went: Star Wars.
Come to think of it, that is the only movie I ever recall him seeing in the theater. The line wrapped around the building, but we got there early, and we got in.
Heck, due to writer’s strike it didn’t go out of the theaters in my area for something like 18 months. I’m pretty sure I only saw it and The Apple Dumpling Gang during that year and a half. I only saw TADG once, but I’m reasonably certain my parents were sick of seeing Star Wars.
It totally messed up my idea of how long a movie is normally in the theater.
I had that issue! I used to love Starlog as a kid, but I never did/could get a subscription, and it wasn’t at my local grocery store or drug store, so I was limited to the issues my dad would grab when he was getting a newspaper during his lunch hour or when we were at a bookstore or something like that.
It sorta, kinda looks like a TIE Fighter and X-Wing, if someone was trying to evoke Star Wars back in the day without violating any copyrights. It would have been recognizable in say… 1977 as a bad Star Wars knockoff painting anyway.
I was there! My dad actually had taken the day off work and took me to see it at the Galleria that Wednesday afternoon for the first showing. I had the commemorative button and everything.
70s sci fi movies to that point were very…70s-ish. Depressing downer movies like The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Rollerball, Westworld, which matched depressing downer non-sci fi movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Three Days of the Condor, and The Parallax View. Star Wars saved the 70s and sci fi.
Of course it is also responsible for Battlestar Galactica and Biddybiddy Buck Rogers, so there’s that.
I had that too! Lame as it was, it was pretty awesome for an 11 year old back in the days when you couldn’t pop in a VHS tape/DVD/go to Disney Plus+ if you needed a Star Wars fix.
I had no idea it was Roscoe Lee Browne though. “Fish, and plankton, and sea greens, and protein from the sea!”
As I’ve said before, most science fiction movies prior to this point were too damned timid to really plunge into science fiction culture and ideas. Movie producers were afraid of alienating viewers out in the boondocks with things they weren’t familiar with. The few science fiction films that did embrace SF tropes were great – Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, 2001 – but too few and far between (I have annoyed thought about This Island Earth, despite taking my Dopername from that film, but I won’t go into that here). And Star Trek gave us a good dose of that, but didn’t last long.
Then along came Star Wars and gave us fans what we’d been craving for years – FTL travel, lots of aliens that didn’t look remotely human, robots, ray guns, spaceports, the Spaceport Bar (with its menagerie of aliens and Wild West morality), planet-destroying weapons, exciting space battles.
It wasn’t really science fiction, of course, it was science fantasy, with the trappings of SF gracing a kids’ fantasy with a space princess and Ruritanian faux nobility and mystic forces. But who cared? We got to see exciting SF stuff we’d read about for years in Edmond Hamilton and E. E. Smith and a host of other writers, and it didn’t matter that there wasn’t a lot of substance, or that the spaceships swooped around like the fighter planes they were modeled after instead of like ones moving in zero-G vacuum, or that you could hear the explosions in space and th roar of whatever was propelling them.
Lucas succeeded because he was gutsy enough to give his audience real SF tropes without pussyfooting around or apologizing for it or explaining it.
Look at that digital watch! It’s the little things you forget, the little details that take one out of period piece movies made by people who weren’t born at the time. But when you see them, yup, that’s correct!
Its hilarious how Robert Wise came from a reality where Star Wars never existed and made Star Trek TMP. “How do you do fellow kids! Imma make me a 70’s Sci-Fi!!”
“Hey Bob, this is Star Trek. It has to have an uplifting ending.”
“Ok…but I’m gonna melt two guys in the transporter then.”
Ebert liked some sci-fi. He tended to give high ratings to swashbuckling treatments like the Star Wars films, but was very nitpicky about more cerebral offerings like the Star Trek series. I always considered this to be a double standard, since many of the faults he fixated on in the latter films were also evident in abundance in the former.
Wise may have “come from a reality where Star Wars never existed”, but he was no stranger to science fiction film.
He directed the Classic The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Pretty Good But Not Classic The Andromeda Strain
He also directed West Side Story , The Sound of Music, The Magnificent Ambersons, Run Silent Run Deep and a slew of other unrelated films in a variety of genres. Diverse director, that Wise.
Ebert gave 2001: A Space Odyssey 4 stars, and that’s as cerebral as it gets. But then, 2001 was first and foremost a visual and aural experience, not an intellectual one. As he once said:
I’ve always felt that movies are an emotional medium – that movies are not the way to make an intellectual argument. If you want to make a political or a philosophical argument, then the ideal medium exists, and that medium is the printed word – a movie is not a logical art form.
