There are only two movies that I saw at least a dozen times in the theater. Star Wars is one of them.
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The first time I saw it was with my parents at a Drive-In Theater—not the best venue, to be sure. Though others may have been deeply impacted by a similar experience, I’m afraid the distant screen and crappy speaker left me underwhelmed.
So when I finally did see it in a real theater, it had all the impact of a first-time viewing. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”; the trademark crawl (tedious, I still think) disappearing into deep space; and the camera panning down, punctuated by the John Williams score: a small planet (moon?) in the distance, then a larger one in the foreground, then the atmosphere and surface of a planet just below us—and then a space ship (Leia’s shuttle, we will learn), shooting backwards as it apparently flees pursuit.
And then… then the Imperial Star Destroyer rumbles in, shaking the theater with that new Dolby sound—just a nose at first, but it just kept coming, filling the whole width of that wide screen, going on seemingly forever.
That experience was the closest thing to the sublime as I’d experienced in a movie. It might still be.
The original Star Wars (I refuse to call it “Episode IV” or “A New Hope”) came out when I was a sophomore in high school, still solidly 15 years old, and its effects on me shouldn’t be too surprising: identification with the young Luke, awe at the imposing Vader, admiration for the self-assured Han and his loyal Chewie, major crush on the beautiful Leia.
Obi-Wan and the Force. The neurotic C-3PO, the devoted R2D2. Blasters, light sabers, X-Wings, Tie Fighters, the Millenium Falcon. The Empire. The Rebel Alliance.
God, I love Star Wars.
I drew the movie poster on my school notebook (pretty well, overall, given that my dad’s visual-art genes all went to my brother)—though there was perhaps more attention to Leia’s cleavage than I’d intended.
I bought two copies of the novelization, authored by George Lucas himself, so I could loan one out and still have a copy myself. (I stopped reading such books after the second Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, though I understand tie-ins have become a big thing.) I bought the comic series, even though I didn’t actually like the art that much.
And, of course, I went to the theater as often as I could scrape the funds together to do so—as I said, at least a dozen times. (This was a lot of money, for me; there was a reason the family had originally seen it at a drive-in.) For my birthday, my parents paid to take a handful of my friends to see it at the Mann’s Chinese Theater. (I questioned my memory on this, since the movie was released in May, and my birthday is in September. But it turns out that, after four weeks in May and June, Mann’s Chinese brought Star Wars back for a 47-week run, starting in August. I guess I wasn’t the only one who liked it.)
And, though I couldn’t wait for the sequels—I stood in line around the block for the openings of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi—the truth is that the first film is, and I expect always will be, my favorite of the series. There’s just too much psychological connection there for it to be otherwise.
None of the others stand a chance.
This is part of a series, echoing the “10 Day Movie Challenge” that I got sucked into on Facebook:
Every day I must select an image from a film that has impacted me in some way, present it without a single explanation and nominate somebody to take the challenge by starting his/her own post and selecting someone to continue.
Without a single explanation? Nice try.
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