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![The original poster for 'Star Wars', without an episode number.](https://movies.xenite.org/files/2015/12/star-wars-original-poster-192x300.jpg)
In the summer of 1977 those of us who loved science fiction and fantasy had no real hope for “good” action/adventure movies in the genre. We had just come off the downward spiral of the “Planet of the Apes” movies, each worse than the last, and people were still talking about “2001: A Space Odyssey” as if it was anything other than long and boring, or occasionally someone would say something about “Silent Running” and “Soylent Green”. In the mid-1970s Science Fiction films were all about Charlton Heston and low budgets.
Oddly enough, “The Land That Time Forgot” was actually a better movie than most others, but this Doug McClure “B” movie was dead before it hit the theaters. So we never expected to see a summer blockbuster unlike anything before it. If you were lucky you saw a trailer for an upcoming movie called “Star Wars” that looked too long, too boring, and too much like a cliched advertisement for a cheap Irwin Allen film without all of Allen’s great special effects. See the original trailer below if you don’t believe me.
But what hit the theaters in May 1977 was something entirely different. The original trailer did not do it justice. The expectations for the movie were so low it only opened in 40 theaters inside the United States. Worse, without the Internet to help spread word-of-mouth approval for the movie, its prospects of turning into the first $100 million box office success in science fiction and fantasy entertainment were not even considered a possibility. But something magical happened. The Force was with George Lucas, who went vacationing in Hawaii rather than attend his own movie’s opening night. And by the end of the year the Star Wars franchise was assured a bright and profitable future.
A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away
![Rebel troopers in 'Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope'](https://movies.xenite.org/files/2015/12/rebel-troopers-in-star-wars-300x192.jpg)
The first words to hit the screen became instantly ingrained in the public’s imagination. The brilliant soundtrack, composed by the now-legendary John Williams, ensured that audiences would quickly forget that awful trailer. Now when Darth Vader stepped casually onto the rebel blockade runner his presence was ominous. As the rebel troopers lined up in the hallway awaiting the attack of the Imperial Stormtroopers, the audience got to see for the first time that this was not going to be two guys walking around a space wheel. This was an action movie.
That front rebel trooper has always made me wonder who the actor was and if I had seen him in anything else. In my mind he was always “Kevin” because he reminded me of Kevin Tighe, one of the stars on the television show Emergency! Whoever he was, he was destined to go down in history as the first rebel scum to be done away with by a stormtrooper. But his nervous face will forever open the Star Wars saga.
There were so many great things about “Star Wars” before it became “Episode IV, A New Hope” that one cannot do justice to them all. You know all the standard tropes in fan paeans to the movie, especially all the jokes about the stormtroopers. But honestly, in 1977, no one thought the stormtroopers were incapable of shooting straight; we just understood that something magical was keeping them from hitting their Force-using targets. Somehow the point of the Force jiggering the odds in favor of how it wants things to come out slipped out of the conversation, but in 1977 it was still mysterious, unexplained, and not clouded over by arrogant fan musings and ill logic.
![Jawas carrying R2-D2 to their sand crawler.](https://movies.xenite.org/files/2015/12/jawas-and-sand-crawler-300x219.jpg)
Every new shot was mind-blowing. We had seen nothing like this. Oh, there had been science fiction movies with spaceships and ray guns for decades. But all the science fiction fans were still drooling over “Star Trek” (the original series) and movies from the 1950s like “Forbidden Planet”, “War of the Worlds”, “When Worlds Collide”, and “First Men to the Moon”. These were all good movies and they remain classics well worth watching, but they were primitive essays in the craft when compared to what George Lucas was able to create with a handful of carpenters, painters, and technological engineering gurus at Industrial Light & Magic. When you saw the Jawas carting R2-D2 up to their sand crawler, you just knew there had to be something big like that on a back lot somewhere (ironically, the full-size mockup had been filmed in Tunisia, and it looked so real that Libya apparently threatened a military response to it).
What we did not know until the very end of the movie was that this was just an episode in a series of episodes. Oh, older film fans knew what the crawler meant. “That’s like the old serials,” they told us. And then they had to explain what a serial was because none of us kids had grown up with such things. By the mid-1970s the movie-going experience had been forever altered from a big experience to a casual pass time. You no longer saw a “double feature” except at the drive-in and there were no longer any “goodie reels” for kids to watch, such as Keystone Cops short films. You just got a couple of trailers and then a dismal movie. Don’t even talk to me about “Jaws”. There was no “Jaws”; there was only boredom.
With “Star Wars” we got spaceship after spaceship, alien after alien, creature after creature. And there were so many different locations. Suddenly alien worlds and galaxies came to life, proving once and for all that you really could find lush, green worlds in distant galaxies. But somehow the Tatooine desert scenery stayed with movie-makers’ imaginations. We poor science fiction film fans were condemned to more than a decade of badly written, poorly directed, terribly acted “science fiction” and “fantasy” movies that always took place in deserts. No one wanted to paint expensive matte paintings because they looked cheap compared to the “Star Wars” location shots, and getting permission to film in the desert was always easy and cheap (as anyone who knows about Spaghetti Westerns can tell you).
![Mos Eisley space port](https://movies.xenite.org/files/2015/12/mos-eisley-spaceport-300x245.jpg)
Tatooine was beautiful but it set the wrong pace for science fiction and fantasy film-making. Within 5 years I swore to myself if I never saw another desert-based science fiction or fantasy movie again that would be too soon. And none of those other movies was able to capture the mystical allure of Tatooine (whose name we did not even know at the time — it is never mentioned in the movie). Even the distant shot of Mos Eisley spaceport was intriguing if only because Obi-Wan described it as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”. But then the camera followed Obi-Wan and his companions down into the streets of Mos Eisley. We didn’t see just one street or even two but several. This was a real space town.
Just the name of the city makes space travel sound normal and ordinary. It’s no special thing for starships to be passing by overhead because they are constantly coming and going even on a remote desert planet like Tatooine. The Star Wars galaxy just feels complete by the time you are halfway through the movie. It is the hallmark of a Star Wars movie that you will visit several planets, even if one is blown up.
We were also captivated by the technology of the Star Wars universe, because it looked both cool and realistic. We know now, almost 40 years later, that the computer technology portrayed in the movie has long been surpassed by our own achievements. But maybe tactical battle systems for interplanetary fleets need to stay simple so they don’t use much computing power. After all, the pilot really only needs to know when his guidance systems have locked onto a target so that he can fire. The energy weapons looked great at the time but have since come under fire for being unrealistic. After all, you can’t see “laser bolts” because they travel at the speed of light and the light sabers cannot be using mere light.
![Obi-Wan Kenobi versus Darth Vader on the Death Star](https://movies.xenite.org/files/2015/12/kenobi-versus-darth-vader-300x168.jpg)
Troubled by these unscientific depictions of weapons technology scientists, engineers, and armchair experts have spent endless hours debating exactly how you could achieve these kinds of effects without defying the laws of physics. But it is essentially these kinds of debates that prove “Star Wars” was exactly what its earliest critics said it could not be: Art. Art moves the audience and “Star Wars” moved millions of people. It opened up the universe to imaginations by the multitude.
Star Wars is not about science. It’s about the mystical, what we believe in, and how we perceive things. George Lucas drew on many inspirations, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and classic Japanese Samurai movies, to create his fictional ancient galaxy. We just assume that whatever these weapons are doing they are allowed to do by a universe that tolerates a Force that is always with us even if we don’t know how to tap into it.
“Star Wars” introduced us to a simplified version of the Hero’s Quest, the journey of personal discovery that takes Luke Skywalker from an isolated moisture farm to the halls of a mighty rebel base. And yet it also introduced us to logical explanations for a lot of things that served as painted backdrops in earlier science fiction movies. What else would you expect people to harvest from the desert if not moisture? There are ecological implications in the simple economics of Tatooine that we are starting to explore today. George Lucas could not have known in the 1970s that global warming would expand our world’s deserts and compel us to rethink water management strategies and technologies. But now there are several low-cost water reclamation technologies on the market that could be used to create something like the moisture farms of Tatooine.
But the movie also explores themes that are relevant today in the political arena. The villains of “Star Wars” are the Imperial stormtroopers, thinly disguised metaphors for “Nazis in Space”. Nazis make great film villains because 99% of people in the audience hate Nazis. They were the most wretched scum and villainy of the mid-20th century and in 1977 the horrors of World War II were still only about 35 years old. The empire was viewed by many as a proxy for the Axis Powers and the Death Star represented what everyone feared could happen if the evil Communists started lobbing their nuclear weapons across the globe. We still had designated fallout shelters and evacuation drills across North America in the early 1970s, so world-ending power was very much on many people’s minds.
![Luke Skywalker in his desert speeder.](https://movies.xenite.org/files/2015/12/luke-skywalker-speeder-300x225.jpg)
There was even something for car buffs: Luke Skywalker’s desert speeder. How did they get that thing to look like it was hovering above the ground? Apparently by using mirrors to reflect the desert sand back toward the camera. Low budget “high technology” sometimes works the best because it works. It’s a bit like the Hogwarts letters scene in “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone”. Chris Columbus was expecting to use CGI to produce the effect but his special effects people said they could do it for less money and with better effect through mechanical devices, and they were right. It’s a great illustration of how computers are not always the best choice for special effects.
In the 1970s the cool guys were still the car mechanics, who could take their basic engineering skills and fix all sorts of machinery around the house and create gadgets that made everyday life a little bit easier. A simple bit of engineering created one of the coolest special effects in “Star Wars”. This movie made science fiction engineering look simple, cost-effective, and possible. It made everything look real. We no longer had to settle for painted backdrops and small-scale models in every scene (although both were used). If it could be done with a life-size mockup, especially one that worked, George Lucas went for that solution.
He even dirtied up the sets, making everything look used and “lived in”, which at the time was considered revolutionary. Now it’s standard practice (even to the point where Peter Jackson’s people planted whole gardens on the Shire set a year in advance to make them look real for “The Hobbit”). “Star Wars” was all about innovation. Everything was innovative, even the future costumes, which did away with the classic (and way overused) futuristic space tunic and umbrella head gear. People in “Star Wars” wore clothing that was practical and functional, not gizmo-like — except for the armor of the stormtroopers. Although they looked like cool bad guys the armor never seems to protect them from blaster shots or light sabers.
![Luke, Leia, and Han at the award ceremony after the Battle of Yavin.](https://movies.xenite.org/files/2015/12/award-ceremony-a-new-hope-247x300.jpg)
To this day we still wonder why these guys wear armor because it doesn’t work. Only when we arrived at Episode I did George Lucas turn back to overly elaborate costumes, dressing up Padme Amidala (or her bodyguard) in a different outfit for nearly every scene. The homage to the fantastic outfits worn by women in very old science fiction movies was missed by younger audiences but Obi-Wan Kenobi slipped in a little dig at the fantastic ensemble. In “A New Hope”, however, Carrie Fisher hardly changes outfits at all. Her wardrobe “WOW” moment came only at the end of the movie, in the awards ceremony.
If you’re going to dress up a princess in a white outfit, this dress was the right choice to make. It was simple, elegant, practical, and showed off Carrie’s womanly features in a way that made all the boys’ eyes pop out of their sockets. The effect was most likely heightened by the fact that in her other outfit (worn throughout most of the movie), Leia’s breasts were taped down to keep them from making immodest appearances. Carrie was not wearing much underneath that first white outfit, which presumably was made from some space age fabric that made at least some underwear unnecessary.
The attention to detail in “Star Wars” is so meticulous you know you could walk into any of the clubs, diners, fortresses, cities, or farms and feel right at home. Nothing is missing. The Lars farm is used for several scenes and we see the family going about their daily business. It’s a normal home (although in reality it was a low budget hotel). It’s just a really cool place to live (literally, since it was buried in the ground in the desert).
And there is one final note about “Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope” worth mentioning. One of the most powerful foreshadowing moments of all time is embedded early in this movie. And this scene is proof positive to support George Lucas in his claim that he had a much larger story in mind all the time. For some inexplicable reason, many so-called “fans” have declared for decades that Lucas only made up the rest of the story after he realized what a big success “Star Wars” was. There was no backstory, just the story, according to this myth.
But in 1977 audiences were left wondering just exactly what they were referring to when Aunt Beru said that Luke had too much of his father in him and Uncle Lars replied, “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Yeah, we finally figured that out near the end of “The Empire Strikes Back”. OMG, what a powerful clue, and no one saw what was coming. No one. But it was all there in the bits and pieces of the back story Obi-Wan told Luke. The only real lie he told him was that Anakin wanted Luke to have his light-saber. In truth Anakin did not know he had a son until Luke Skywalker’s name became known all over the galaxy. It would be hard NOT to put the name Skywalker together with his own history, especially given that Luke had grown up on Tatooine. But we had to wait 22 years to understand how Tatooine figured into everything.
The Original Trailer for “Star Wars”
This trailer was released in early 1977. It was narrated by Malachi Throne and lacked any of the music from the final production. Reportedly when Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher saw this trailer in the theater, they heard a heckler in the audience say, “Coming soon to the Late Show” (meaning the heckler expected the movie to fail quickly). George Lucas was so doubtful of the film’s success that he made a deal with Steven Spielberg in which they each gave the other 2.5% of the profits of their then in-production movies (Spielberg was working on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) and Lucas went on holiday to Hawaii with Spielberg instead of attending the opening weekend performance. Only 40 theaters agreed to show the movie in the United States on its opening weekend.
Why Did George Lucas Change the Han/Greedo Scene?
Fans have given George Lucas a lot of grief over the change in this scene. Originally Han shot Greedo as soon as Greedo made it clear that Han would never live to meet with Jabba. In the re-edit, Greedo fired and missed, and eventually Lucas changed the scene again so that they fired at the same time. But the scene was only changed because the MPAA objected to it. George Lucas was fine with Han blasting away at an unsuspecting Greedo.
Deleted Scenes from “Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope”
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