On this weekend 35 years ago Star Wars was released and changed the way we view space travel, space aliens and spaceships. Â Probably one of the most important movies of the last 50 years.
To borrow the words of a Washington, D.C. resident whose Cleveland Park neighborhood was overrun that summer with “Star Wars†fans, waiting in line over and over to see Luke, Han and Leia at the Uptown Theater: “It’s … it’s an invasion.†(Read this whole Washington Post article about the neighborhood consternation back in ‘77. The quotes in it are a riot: “I told my wife, ‘Hey, some clown is blocking the driveway.’ The funny thing is that it turned out to be a friend of my wife whose car was blocking the drive, a person who had just graduated from clown school.”)
Indeed, “Star Wars†was an invasion, and not just on the once pleasantly serene streets of D.C.’s Cleveland Park. It firmly established the power of the summer blockbuster, surpassing “Jaws†as the highest-grossing movie of all time and making every studio executive in Hollywood anxious to replicate its secret Skywalker sauce. It ushered sci-fi into the mainstream. It made us believe that wearing buns on either side of your head was inÂcredÂibly cool. It gave us the best movie theme song ever, and the best villain’s theme song ever, and made us giddy every time we saw words written in Franklin Gothic font soaring off into a black sky.
It also proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that Han shot Greedo first, since we saw the movie in the ‘70s and didn’t even think there would be a debate about this 20 years later when a special edition came outbecause, for God’s sake, Han totally shot first.
But perhaps the biggest game-changer that “Star Wars†led to is this: it created a generation of people desperate for pop culture merchandise.
As hard as this might be for young ’uns to believe, there was a time when movies were released without a cavalcade of products to accompany them. Maybe there were T-shirts here and there, a re-release of the book that provided a film’s source material (see “Jaws†or “The Exorcistâ€) or maybe a soundtrack. But usually, that was about it.
“Star Wars†changed all of that. Kids absolutely loved this movie and they wanted anything they could find that would allow them to recreate its universe of Stormtroopers, Death Star blow-ups and awesome singles bars on Tatooine. Thus, the action figure was born. And the radio-controlled R2D2. And a Death Star space station with a working trash compactor. Seriously, look at all this stuff Kenner successfully sold us!
[wp]
