What it was like to be a young “Star Wars” fan in the late 1970s…

“A long time ago…”

As the name of this column alludes, these are the recollections and inspirations of a middle-aged geek (now in his 50s), who was a ten-year old kid in the summer of 1977 when a certain sci-fi space-fantasy blasted onto movie screens across the country and changed everything that came afterward.  Literally. Movies and later TV shows that followed would never be the same.

For clarity, I did not see “Star Wars” (no “Episode IV: A New Hope” title) on opening day of May 25th, 1977. No one I knew did, at first.  But word of mouth built over summer vacation, and eventually my sister and I would see it with family friends of ours (it was the day before the media shattering-death of Elvis Presley, in fact). That day at the movies in August of 1977 inarguably changed my entire life. You have to understand, there were  literally no movies even remotely like “Star Wars”, with the sole exception of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which wasn’t exactly geared for younger audience members (and which I wouldn’t see until a re-release in 1983).

The effect of “Star Wars” on my then ten-year old self was profound.  I’d never seen such an awesome array of finely-realized robots, spaceships, costumes and dazzling space vistas in my young life.  Pre-1977, I would watch reruns of “Lost in Space,” “Star Trek,” and of course, “The Twilight Zone,” and “The Outer Limits.” These were (and are, to this day) very significant, intelligent and lasting chapters in the history of science fiction media, but they lacked the energy, jaw-dropping visuals and vicariously transportive effect of “Star Wars,” which held a firm grip on my imagination and would not let it go. “Star Wars” was my ticket out of the mundane 1970s suburbs, and into “a galaxy far, far away…”

For context, the late 1970s had only movie theaters and broadcast television (three major US networks, and a few scattered UHF local channels) for visual entertainment.  Home video was not quite a thing, and only a few homes had video cassette recorders, which were prohibitively expensive ($1000 and up, in 1977 dollars). Certainly no one in my circle owned one at that time. So, if we liked a movie?  We had to see it theatrically as often as we could, which meant spending a lot of allowance money on matinee screenings (about $1.50-$2 a seat in those days).  Ultimately, I must’ve seen “Star Wars” theatrically at least a dozen times between 1977 and its multiple rereleases through the early 1980s (the “Episode IV: New Hope” title came in 1981, after “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back,” in 1980).

Despite going to see the film repeatedly in cinemas, it wasn’t enough.  I didn’t want to randomly visit George Lucas’ dazzling universe during cheap matinees. I wanted to return with souvenirs! 

I had been in love with a theatrical sci-fi franchise before Star Wars, with the “Planet of the Apes” movies and TV shows. That franchise had a lot of merchandising as well.  In fact, my favorite Christmas present of all time was given to me on Christmas Day in 1974, when my dad spent a long night after work at a Los Angeles Toys ‘R Us to buy me a “Planet of the Apes” treehouse playset (with action figures).  But in the summer of 1977, there was no merchandising blitz standing by when Star Wars premiered, save for a series of greasy little trading cards found hidden in loaves of Wonder Bread. Despite this short-term dearth of products, there were still a few other things to fill the void until 1978, when Kenner toy company would unveil its official line of action figures and other toys…

“I stumbled across a recording…”

My first major Star Wars purchase was the double gatefold “Star Wars” soundtrack LP album.  With music by John Williams, this was both my first LP and my first soundtrack purchase.  Opening the gatefold revealed 12 high-quality stills from the film, as well as a bonus poster featuring the attack on the Death Star.  The back of the album featured a ghostly Darth Vader against a starry background; an image I never forgot. Vader made quite an impression in those days, despite his limited screen time in the original film (eight minutes).  The Death Star attack poster was created by famed sci-fi artist John Berkey, and it would remain tacked on my bedroom wall for at least a year or two (this was before I discovered girls, of course…).

I cherished that album, and I held onto it until 1998, when my then-bachelor apartment was flooded by a broken pipe behind a wall, and the album was ruined by mold and warping.  I was heartbroken, even though my LP player in those days was on its last legs.  At that time, I already had the entire trilogy soundtrack in a CD boxed set (and still do), which was given to me by a friend at Christmas in 1996, but that original LP album was precious to me.  I still remember many hours of doing homework while listening to it, in fact. Wish I could’ve saved it somehow…

Another curiously anomalous collectible from the late 1970s was electronic disco music maestro Domenico “Meco” Monardo’s album, “Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk,” which was a savvy attempt to cash in both on Star Wars and the 1970s disco craze, which hit an apex in 1977 with the release of the (underrated) John Travolta film “Saturday Night Fever,” which was a “Rebel Without a Cause” for the 1970s (it also had a bestselling soundtrack album, featuring music from the Bee Gees, Tavares, Yvonne Elliman, composer David Shire, and others). Side one of the Meco album featured a lengthy, 15 or so minute Star Wars musical medley covering the entire film (including a Death Star explosion that sounds like a loud toilet flush), while the flip side had “Other Galactic Funk,” a nondescript collection of spacey-sounding disco music. Meco made other albums adapted from popular sci-fi/fantasy films, including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” and even “The Wizard of Oz.”

Note: Yes, I owned this record. And yes, I’m a teensy bit ashamed of it; it’s like having your closet door slid wide open to reveal a beige leisure suit, tan bell-bottoms and a pair of earth shoes. Moving on…

In 1978, I also bought “The Story of Star Wars.” That nearly-hour long album contained not just music from the movie, but also sound effects, dialogue and a terrific narration by renowned character actor Roscoe Lee Browne (who also played “Box” in 1976’s “Logan’s Run”). In that age before home video, this was the closest to owning the film, and I would simply let my imagination fill in the missing images. A few years later, I would tape the movie’s entire audio track off a premium TV channel’s FM simulcast onto a single 2-hour audiocassette (still didn’t have a VCR back in 1982). Through that cassette, I eventually committed every sound effect of the film to memory. Sad, but true…

Another short-term palliative was the Kenner Star Wars MovieViewer; a hand-cranked toy which ran a few seconds of actual film clips from the movie (albeit flipped), when viewed in decent lighting. Owning a full home video version of Star Wars was unimaginable to me in the late 1970s, and sounds from the movie were as close as kids of my generation (and income bracket) could hope for in those days.  Once again, no video cassettes, no laserdiscs, no DVDs, and no Blu-Rays. The only ‘streaming’ I knew of then was when my young bladder informed me that I needed to pee.

The Sacred Jedi Texts

In early 1978, I was eager for more written material on the Star Wars universe. I’d already bought the “Star Wars” novelization, famously ghostwritten by sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster, which I remember reading multiple times. I was intrigued with the novelization’s introduction, which mentioned the rise of the Emperor, as taken from a mysterious “Journal of the Whills.” Other tidbits, such as Han’s in-person encounter with a shaggy, humanoid Jabba, the missing scenes of Luke and his friends on Tatooine, and Luke not knowing what a duck was, really tickled my imagination. Such details made the onscreen universe feel even larger.  I craved more.

Note: This was long before the sequels, Ewok TV-movies, cartoons, prequels, sequel trilogies, one-off movies and made-for-Disney+ content filled in every crevice of the Star Wars universe to such a mind-numbing degree that it’s become nearly impossible to keep track of it all. At my age, I’ve long stopped trying. These days, anyone can Google the name and birthday of the bartender from the Mos Eisley cantina, or translate a song from English into Huttese. One thing I miss from earlier Star Wars fandom was the mystery of it—of letting our imaginations fill in those missing pieces. Now it’s all laid out for anyone to see. Be careful what you wish for, indeed…

On a trip to a B. Dalton Bookseller at our local mall in the spring of 1978, my sister and I stumbled across a new Star Wars novel, which promised to be the further adventures of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia (though Han Solo and Chewbacca were conspicuously absent).  This novel, also written by Alan Dean Foster, was titled “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye,” and it was a curiously non-epic story which saw Luke and Leia forced to land on the planet Mimban (a muddy bog planet later seen in 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story”), along with C3PO and R2-D2, after a mysterious space storm.

On Mimban, they meet an old woman named Halla, a con artist who’s posing as a force-sensitive in order to have Luke help her find the Kaiburr crystal (not Kyber, as it would later be spelled in 2016’s “Rogue One”). After clashes with local Imperials, the somewhat middling story eventually climaxes in a showdown between Luke, Leia and Darth Vader—who’s also on Mimban seeking the Kaiburr crystal.  Luke is temporarily pinned, and Leia takes his lightsaber to duel with Vader until Luke is freed.  Vader then falls into a pit and disappears.  No mention yet of any familial connection between Vader, Luke and Leia. At that time, I sincerely hoped this book’s astonishingly average story was not the actual sequel to my then-favorite movie.

Note: In short, the book was a dud; it read more like a so-so TV movie rather than a legit sequel to the most exciting movie I’d seen at that time.  It was only many years later that I learned “Splinter…” had been prepared as a lower-budget sequel in case “Star Wars” underperformed at the box office.  

Soon there were other Star Wars books, including a standalone Han Solo novel called “Han Solo at Star’s End,” by Brian Daley, which was a prequel to the original movie (with two more books to follow), that saw Han and Chewbacca traveling to an asteroid prison called “Star’s End.”  Ugh.  Even in those days, space prisons were already one of the oldest and hoariest sci-fi cliches in existence.  “Lost in Space” already had a space prison episode, as would 1978’s “Battlestar Galactica” a year later.

Note: 1978’s “Battlestar Galactica” (and ABC-Universal) would be unsuccessfully sued for copyright infringement by Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox a year or so later.

One really good thing did come of this otherwise average book; author Brian Daley would go on to write the scripts for National Public Radio’s “Star Wars” Radio Plays, which presented audio-only expanded versions of the original trilogy, beginning with a five-hour version of the first movie, broken up over multiple chapters with many scenes filling in missing unseen moments from the films.  The first “Star Wars” Radio Play debuted in 1981, with adaptations of “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1983 and “Return of the Jedi” much later in 1996. Of the original cast, Mark Hamill would return for the first two as Luke Skywalker, while Anthony Daniels would reprise the role of C3PO for all three radio plays. (Hamill was unavailable for the 1996 version of “Return of the Jedi,” but the late Ed Asner would provide the voice of Jabba the Hutt!).  Other actors included Brock Peters (“Soylent Green”) as the voice of Darth Vader, with Billy Dee Williams returning as Lando Calrissian for “The Empire Strikes Back,” and Perry King voicing Han Solo for all three (King was also a contender for the role of Solo during the original movie’s auditions in 1976). Daley’s radio play scripts were a clear labor of love.

Another fond memory I have from those early days involved the Marvel Comics’ Star Wars movie adaptation, which I came to own only because I was gifted with one large (now highly collectible) softback copy (with all of the single issues in one volume) for free.  I received my copy thanks to a kindly Rexall drugstore manager who’d ripped the cover off the book (standard retail protocol in those days; destroy anything used, returned, defective, etc so that it couldn’t be resold) and he was going to trash it, before he quietly gave it to my mother to give to me.  This book restored the novelization’s reunion between Luke and his buddy Biggs on Tatooine, which was the first time I’d seen this now famous deleted scene from the movie graphically realized. While the comic book made some interesting stylistic choices for characters and settings, it was also free, and it was a lot of fun.  Coverless or not, I wish I had the foresight to hold onto it back in those days.

Note: Once again, for context, this was a time when we didn’t have DVDs or Blu-Rays of our favorite movies filled with bonus features and deleted scenes available only a few months after seeing them theatrically.  It was five years before “Star Wars” came from theatrical release to pay-TV channels, and a year after that before it came to broadcast TV (CBS), let alone with any extras. Back then, being a Star Wars fan was an exercise in patience…

In 1979, there was also a short-lived Star Wars comic strip syndicated in newspapers across the country (which briefly returned in 1984, but by then I’d long since lost interest).  My parents had a subscription to The L.A. Times, and I read a few of these comic strips. The first one I read was a framing story by Russell Manning, which featured C3PO trying to input stories of the Skywalker adventures into a persnickety computer. All I remember is that the computer offered data on Luke’s parents, referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Tan Skywalker (a falsified record…?).  I quickly realized these strips were not related, nor were they ever going to be related to any future Star Wars films, so I quickly lost interest.

Note: Even back in those days, I was a bit of a canonist nerd.

Other books I would collect in the late 1970s included the “Star Wars Storybook,” a book clearly created for younger kids (with wildly inaccurate dialogue and much of the story absent), but which I bought, mainly because it had great stills from the movie, including a few actual frame blowups.  Short of a “PhotoNovel,” this was as good as it got for “Star Wars,” which never got a PhotoNovel release.

Note: PhotoNovels (aka Fotonovels) were a series of Bantam and Pocket paperback books of that era, which were filled with screencaps and captions from popular movies and TV shows. These were sort of a pocketbook version of a videocassette or DVD, which one could easily read in class while pretending to listen to a boring lecture. Despite a lack of smartphones, kids of my generation had other more creative ways to not pay attention in class…

The Star Wars Holiday Special

I’ve already devoted an early column to this 1978 made-for-TV abomination, which managed to feature most of the hit movie’s lead cast members (yes, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and yes, even Harrison freaking Ford), so you can hit the following link for details on this CBS network hate crime: Taking a look at the “Star Wars Holiday Special” on a special Star Wars holiday…

“What about that blue one? We’ll take that one…”

While my parents couldn’t afford the crude but expensive ‘official’ Kenner toy lightsabers available in 1978, I do remember getting the far-cheaper, red-handled knockoffs called “The Light Beam” (with pink and green plastic blades) from a retailer and company who’d probably both be sued today. I remember having to turn out the lights in a room to even see the beams on these silly things. Nevertheless, they were the best a family on a budget could afford at that time, and they couldn’t even remotely compare to the screen-ready props you can have custom-built for a few hundred bucks at a Disney park.

Eventually, the Kenner action figures trickled in around early 1978, and I would gather up my allowance money and buy a few at a time, getting the major characters first (Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker all had those oddly needle-pointed lightsabers—and Luke’s was yellow, for some reason).

Later on, I would collect some random Imperial officers, some Mos Eisley cantina denizens, as well as some of the large play sets, including the aforementioned cantina along with the Death Star play set—complete with a compactor filled with bits of foam rubber ‘trash’ and a plastic green ‘Dia Noga’ monster.

Note: For real trash to play with, I could’ve just as easily gathered up bits and pieces from my own bedroom floor.

There were also Kenner toy spaceships (such as Luke’s X-wing, a huge Millennium Falcon replica, and the Imperial TIE fighter), as well as my personal favorite; Luke’s landspeeder. I also had an MPC model kit of Darth Vader’s special TIE fighter, which included a tiny Vader figure visible from the cockpit window! Yes, the spaceships were pretty neat, but for some reason, I had a real fondness for the landspeeder… maybe because it felt closest to something that could almost exist here on Earth.

Save for the detailed model kits (some of which were used in the sequels), Star Wars toys of that era were generally much cruder and simpler than the screen-matching replicas made today. However, none of that really mattered to my generation, since most of us played with our toys—we didn’t collect them. Sadly, not many of those original toys I owned survived into the present day.  I remember once making the painful decision to sell a handful of them to a memorabilia shop in the mid-1990s, when I was hard up for rent money one month.  A shortsighted decision I’ve since come to regret.

“We would be honored if you would join us…”

In late 1979, the publicity machine was already in full swing for 1980’s Star Wars sequel, “The Empire Strikes Back,” including a Kenner mail-in action figure for a new bounty hunter character named “Boba Fett.” In addition to mailing off Kenner proofs-of-purchase for the tiny plastic toy, my local mall was promoting a “personal appearance” by none other than Darth Vader and the aforementioned Boba (who’d already made an intriguing animated appearance in the otherwise dreadful 1978 holiday special).

These characters were coming to my corner of the universe, or rather two cosplayers in Lucasfilm-approved costumes (as I cynically suspected, even at age 12).  Nevertheless, I brought my Polaroid One-Step camera (a sixth grade graduation present) to my local mall, and took a few washed-out Polaroids of Darth and Boba, which have been long since lost to time. However, I did manage to find online photos of these Darth and Boba cosplayers taken during their 1979 publicity tour (above).

In later years, at various conventions, I would meet many of the actual actors behind Darth Vader (the late Dave Prowse), Chewbacca (the late Peter Mayhew), R2-D2 (the late Kenny Baker) and more recently, C3PO (Anthony Daniels).  Other original trilogy cast members I’d meet would include the legendary Billy Dee Williams (“Lando Calrissian”) and Ian McDiarmid (“Emperor Palpatine”). Though I was much older when I would eventually meet these actors from my childhood, I could still feel my inner ten-year old self involuntarily beaming with joy.

It’s a good thing these encounters happened much later in my life, because I’m not sure I could’ve handled them as a young, prepubescent Star Wars fan growing up in a boring little SoCal suburb in the late 1970s.  The late 1970s were a heady and exciting time for Star Wars fandom, because the Star Wars universe—at that time—remained largely unmapped, and few things are more thrilling to kids than the unknown.  All that existed (officially) of onscreen Star Wars was one amazing blockbuster movie and one terrible TV special. Nevertheless, I was hooked.

To quote Sir Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, these were my “first step(s) into a larger world…” 

Where To Watch

The original Star Wars trilogy movies (1977-1983) are all available to stream on Disney+, and are also available for purchase on physical media (DVDs/Blu-Rays, etc) through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others (prices vary by seller).  And yes, my inner ten-year old self still squees a bit inside whenever I place my copy of the original movie into my Blu-Ray player…