Those who saw the original Star Wars trilogy in the theaters..

Did they re-release Star Wars IV in theaters before Empire? I would have been 4 in 1977. I want to say I recall it well, so it must have been a re-release prior to Empire.

Jedi was AMAZING. I was 10 and completely ate up with it. Empire was just sad to me, but I was too young to get the point of the 3 volume trilogy and how #2 would be where the hero hits bottom.

The Empire Strikes Back was one of the first movies I remember seeing in the theaters. I already loved Star Wars, probably because of the toys, but I never watched that movie. I read books, listened to the stories on records, and saw the Holiday Special but I never was able to watch Star Wars until after I saw Return of the Jedi. It finally came on network TV and I was able to catch it. Something like that would blow a youngster's mind today.

Saw it in the theater when it was released, I was 16.

Kids at my school didn't know what to think of it. Growing up with 2001 and having Close Encounters as our most recent Sci-Fi film, some kids were looking for symbolism and were surprised that the movie was flat-out action.

I enjoyed it. But as a die hard Sci-Fi and Fantasy fan, a lot of it was extremely familiar. My reaction to people that flipped over it was "you know, there are a ton of books like this."

It got big fairly fast. Star Wars music was all over the radio.

Empire Strikes Back was even bigger. I had the Darth thing spoiled for me. The Muppets were huge then, so Frank Oz as Yoda stuck out like a sore thumb.

quote:

---

all of us kids thought the Ewoks were stupid

---

Best watch yo mouth

I was a teenager and it was great but you never know what kind of thing you just saw when you are that young. Im sure none of us thought that we would be talking about it 40 years later.

It was just another movie that we liked as a kid

When Star Wars was released the first time in '77, I was two. I'm not going to tell you that I remember anything. I really don't. I know it was the second movie that I was ever brought to, and I'm told that I sat still the entire time. The only memory of it I have is a vague flash of an X-Wing and TIE in a dogfight scene. By the time Empire came out, I was five. I definitely remember standing in line for it.

Remember, when Star Wars was originally released, "A New Hope" and "Episode IV" were not part of the crawl. There was no thought initially that this was going to be anything other than a standalone. Those elements were added after ESB was announced.

I think the difficult part for later generations to understand is that even as a kid my age who could not comprehend the entire story, we were inundated with the toys, read-along/cassette/record books, and the music.

We actually played with the toys in lieu of video games, etc. The original film stayed in movie theaters for 44 weeks at a time when multiple, multiple movie screen theaters weren't really a thing. Star Wars was burned into the subconscious of many of us.

Comics came out shortly after as did the release of the sequel book "Splinter of the Mind's Eye," the much-maligned Holiday Special, etc. So there were already expanded universe stories to consume. But there was definitely a build-up to ESB, and I can certainly remember the years between ESB and ROTJ everyone waiting to find out what happened.

By the time ROTJ came out, I was the age of Lucas' supposed intended audience. I was old enough to understand the Luke/Vader dynamic. Not having a lot of outlets that produced spoilers certainly helped, but I think I was able to go into ROTJ with just a sense of wanting to see what happened and not needing to dissect and posit what I was hoping would happen beforehand.

The other thing that was neat at the time for me that I enjoyed were the original "making of" documentaries that appeared. I always have enjoyed the process of seeing movies like this go from concepts to actual realized finality. So we had that and crappy plastic Halloween masks with an elastic string to appease us.

As hokey as it is to say, it really was a much simpler time when lulls were enjoyed. Binge watching didn't exist like it does now, and you really could take the time to appreciate and think about what you saw for a longer period of time before your brain was bombarded with more to overload it.

Recently, I watched the Despecialized Versions of Star Wars, ESB, and ROTJ. These are the versions that were shown in the theaters in '77, '80, and '83, respectively. I truthfully was excited to watch these and it felt like watching something new again...as weird as that sounds.

When the Special Editions were released in '97, I was in college. To have those movies come out in spans of like three weeks apart was cool at the time, but in large measure, I was in the theater searching for the "new" stuff or "upgrades." Some were fine. Some were just unnecessary. But there wasn't a sense of wanting to just see what came next. It felt processed and not organic.

The organic nature of what happened in '77 through '83, just simply cannot be replicated...particularly in today's world and even in today's Star Wars world. The intent behind the movies as a swashbuckling adventure and to a large degree modern myth has been overrun to fit modern agendas and shaped into something it was never meant to be.

The reality is, if George Lucas has not been limited by the technology of the time, I don't know that Star Wars would have become Star Wars.

quote:

---

Was also pre-internet..released every 3 years without the general public knowing what was coming next.

---

better

quote:

---

I loved the Ewoks

---

I'm sure had we known about the coming Jar Jar and Rose, we would have appreciated the Ewoks a little more.

I saw the original in theatres. Was a 12 or 13 when A New Hope Came out. It was definitely a phenomenon all its own at the time. I think the next two releases (Episode V and Episode VI) built on that (it also gave us Space Balls). I absolutely flipped out over Star Wars ANH and lost count how many times I went to wee it in the theatres. I remember going to see Close Encounters, released later that year, and being somewhat disappointed - even though I was an avid SiFi reader and Bermuda Triangle expert at the time.