Erasing Star Wars: A Journey down Memory Lane

I suppose the setting had a lot to do with it, and that would be impossible to recapture. Many of the people I saw it with the first time are now dead. So, this would involve a mind wipe coupled with time travel to make it happen again.

So, that movie! Drum Roll. Fanfare of Brass.

Star Wars!

And that’s before it ever became known as episode 4 – A New Hope.

A few years before, I’d heard 20th Century Fox was making Star Wars and I recall reading about it in Time magazine. There was even some McQuarrie production art with what looked like a flying saucer flying over a metal planet while being chased by these weird looking little spaceships.

Then we all went to StarCon Denver a few years later. Between marveling at the well-built Orion Slave Girl in the foil bikini, getting autographs from Grace Lee Whitney, and listening to talks given by some of the Star Trek Writers. we got to watch films.

They had some classics.

George Pal’s Time Machine and War of the Worlds. Leslie Neilson in Forbidden Planet (I caught it a few weeks ago. The thing is almost seventy years old, and it still looks good), and of course the standard for Sci-Fi movies, 2001.

But like any decent theater experience, they showed previews of things to come.

And then there it was. The trailer to Star Wars! Watch it on the link below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D8z8gWway4hC18c6nUqvN9bOBkqTkGMT/view?usp=drive_link

We all looked at each other in stunned silence, our eyes wide. And everyone in the room said almost the same thing! “My God, this is going to be huge.”

Several months later, my friends and I were all sitting in a darkened packed-out theater. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house. Sitting next to me was a blind guy with a cane who like everyone else had “Come to see the movie.”

The light dimmed and after some trailers that would soon to be forgotten, the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” flashed on the screen.

An explosion of sound and a roar of brass and kettle drums and the name Star Wars exploded on the screen and receded away. Then the crawl that told a piece of a story and sucked us into the make-believe world George Lucas had built. The words faded away and the music went low and the camera panned down to show us a few distant moons and the horizon of a world. From behind us the sound of thunder. Something was approaching from behind us.

Music rises!

A tiny, almost insect looking spaceship speeds from overhead, and towards the center of the screen and the horizon of the planet in the scene.

The music starts taking a menacing tone as explosions rock the tiny ship. Thunder is coming in from behind us. Growing louder. Menacing.

And arrowing onto the screen, filling it, dominating this universe, a Star Destroyer comes into the screen, the thunder of it’s engines almost drowning out the music. The size of it caused our eyes to go wide.

And movies would never be the same again!