I'll be lazy and quote myself from back in June, from a thread title "Your Very First Time" (I've done my best to remove my typos):
I was nine in 1977, and hadn't seen very many films in the theatre by that time. I was an avid comic book reader, mostly following the silver age marvel stuff and the chessiest cornball DC stuff I could get my hands on. I used to collect the Jimmy Olson and the (far superior, though corny as hell) Lois Lane stuff, as well as Flash and Shazam, of all things. For some reason I had no tolerance for cornball Batman, so steered clear of all the stuff from a decade before; fortunately in the seventies Batman was on his own again and often quite serious.
I encountered STAR WARS first as a comic book series, although of course I knew it was out there. The toy revolution followed long after the films, so it wasn't like the kids at school were running around with the Kenner action figures and generating interest. The closest I came to a pop-culture awareness of the film was seeing C3P0 on the cover of TIME magazine and wishing I had the $2 or whatever it was to grab a copy to read. No way; all of my money I spent on comic books.
By 1978 I had the screenplay, a year's worth of further adventures from Marvel (including a Roy Thomas(?) story about a water world that would later figure prominently in the Holiday Special), and the novel. It was high time I saw the damned thing. I told my parents, and they they packed all the kids into the station wagon and we went to the drive-in, where it was playing in a double-bill with BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (I shit you not). Of course in those days the drive-in didn't broadcast on AM radio, so you had to grab that little speaker and hook it on to your car window.
It was a gorgeous summer night and I watched the movies from the roof of the car with my younger brother and a friend from his school. They were equally enthralled by the back-up feature, but I had no interest in it. Even at that tender age I knew a lame ripoff when I saw one, and frankly I was also a little scandalized by how blatantly it ripped off the Bible. I knew lazy writing when I saw it, and there I was, looking at it on the big screen.
It was just getting good and dark when STAR WARS started; BG had been washed out somewhat (even though it was the new release, they'd played it first, as a back-up to STAR WARS). The opening text crawl looked just like it had in the comic (no "Episode IV;" no "A New Hope"), and just like the Flash Gordon serials that had been rerunning on a local station in the wake of STAR WARS. I had seen THE LION MEN OF MONGO and was I think well into FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE. It had never occured to me that the opening text in the comic was an homage to Flash Gordon until I saw it on the screen. I was instantly enthralled.
EMPIRE I saw after school when a good friend's maiden aunt rushed us out from the three o'clock bell all the way from the the suburbs to the city. Those of you familiar with Vancouver may know that at that time the Stanley Theatre showed movies, and damn it was a classy joint. Much nicer now, of course, that it is back to being a venue for plays, but as a kid I was impressed by the great architecture and not yet sophisticated enough to know that a stage theatre just doesn't have the acoustics for film. The screen was so big that the movement of the snowspeeder gave a real sense of vertigo. I knew nothing going in, since I had doggedly avoided spoilers (in those days, this was pretty easy to do), and of course this is the formative filmgoing experience of my life. In the months that followed, I bought up all of the non-repetitive EMPIRE literatre I could, including a journalistic piece writen by some guy they invited to document the filming. I was still buying the comics of course, which had matured ever-so-slightly, and I saw the film in the theatre nine times in its initial run.
I've said enough of my opening-day JEDI experience: suffice to say I was pleased and yet simultaneously underwhelmed. Luke/Leia left me cold, the die-hards actually booed when Kenobi said "certain point of view", and it was really just another movie, since by that time I was more intrigued by the idea of a RAIDERS follow-up than by a ho-hum STAR WARS finale. I can say, however, that I saw an opening-day film in the days when that meant something: playing in only one theatre at that time of day, that was the screening that ALL the die-hards went to. These days opening day is such a big deal that the first-screening crowd is dispersed in different rooms all over town. I saw Tim Burton's BATMAN in a JEDI-style opening-day experience as well: there is nothing like all that concentrated fanaticism to make the moment memorable.
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nostalgia buffs may view the original, with the typos intact, and the entire thread here:
http://www.chefelf.c...p?showtopic=948-----------------------------------------------
I think I said a lot there about my first impression, but just to make sure it's clear, STAR WARS became a bit of a fixation for a while. I avidly anticipated EMPIRE and JEDI, read the comics and wrote fan fiction, and followed the careers of the actors as though that were somehow in support of the films I loved (I even ran out to see UNDER THE RAINBOW). Affiliated material was of great interest as well; when I heard 2001 was being rereleased in 1980, I was there, and seeing that for the first time at the age of 12 was probably as bewildering to me as it was for anyone who saw it in its day. I blame STAR WARS for my later interest in roleplaying games, and Carrie Fisher (And Kate Jackson) for my lifelong attraction to the smarter gals, with strong opinions and quick wits.
And that's my initial impression of STAR WARS.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).