I was born just a year before the first Star Wars film came out, and I became aware of the franchise in the very early 1980s, in between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I remember that most of the toys in the school playground were Empire-era toys, e.g. AT-ATs and Snowspeeders, and everybody seemed to have the poxy Bespin cloud car, which I assume was cheap.
That and C-3PO with removable limbs. And the medical droid, which was just a plastic tube with arms. And, er, the 12" Boba Fett, who towered over the other figures. Which is entirely fitting because he was incredible. It was a shame his rocket didn’t fire.
I can remember the hype surrounding Jedi - the features in comics, the toys, the novelisation etc - but I had a distant impression that it didn’t feel special. It felt like the same hyper for any other big film at the time. I was only seven years old but it just didn’t feel like a particularly big event; just more toys. From that point onwards Transformers took over and Star Wars vanished from my mind until the 1990s.
Now, I’ve always been curious about the build-up to Empire Strikes Back. Did people expect it to be any good? Franchises back then generally didn’t work out very well. The original Star Wars is open-ended, but the storyline doesn’t lend itself to a natural sequel (the Rebels won, right?). And there had been a three-year gap, which felt longer then because of inflation - that three years would actually be fifteen years today. I think of the late 1970s as a fantastically bleak, dark time without much light, and I suppose Empire fits this mental stereotype, because it’s a bleak film.
Without the internet I assume fans communicated with fanzines, CB radio, hidden messages in cakes and perhaps those heliograph things. Did people speculate about Empire? Was there a hype industry with people posting mock-ups of how Darth Vader might look without the helmet? The fact of (spoiler) one of the main characters having an unexpected familial link with one of the other main characters (spoiler) was presumably so far off-the-wall that no-one expected it, but was there a general assumption that Empire would take a certain form?
Did people queue to see it? Reading through Google Books it seems that there was a mass of hype and a lot of people were expected something special; the original film was re-released just beforehand, the soundtrack album was still in the charts etc. Splinter of the Mind’s eye and the Marvel comic were all still in print. The Holiday Special must surely have endeared itself to one and all.
It’s fascinating in retrospect because we know now that Empire was a classy piece of work, well worth the wait; and that although George Lucas gambled and paid for the film with his own money, and chose to give it a downbeat ending and put all the action at the beginning, it worked out. It could so easily have been an unambitious pile of cack.
