Happy Star Wars Day!

I was travelling home from my annual computer convention in Chicago today when I noticed all the electronic road safety signs in Illinois were getting in the spirit of the day by advising, “Trust the force, but always buckle up.”

Since this is the day for celebrating all things Star Wars, let me pontificate on that a little bit.

I’m not sure everyone knows just how big a phenomenon the first Star Wars film was back in 1977.

Before I was even aware it existed, I remember some radio DJ trying to fit references to the film into his patter and wondering what he was on about. “Artoo? See-Threepio? What in the…”

And when I heard the name of the movie: Star Wars? I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard.

But then I noticed that people were lined up around the block to see it in the theatre, so I decided to give it a whirl.

I was blown away. This was the first film to really do special effects right; it was light years (see what I did there?) beyond what had come before.

Alice thought it was okay but once or twice was enough for her. Not me. I got back in line and saw it 26 times over the next months before I’d had my fill.

On subsequent viewings I noticed the theatres were cutting scenes here and there to be able to fit in more viewings. The cute joke about “close the blast doors,” followed by “open the blast doors” got cut, for example.

There was some Rocky Horror-like audience interaction with the movie back then, such as everyone hissing when Darth Vader first appeared.

It wasn’t “Episode IV” back then; it was just “Star Wars.” When that changed the opening crawl got butchered. Originally each paragraph of the crawl synced up perfectly with the music—that was lost after the title changed.

I saw the film while attending college in Chico, CA. At the time, Alice had a job doing housecleaning for various people, among whom was a dear elderly woman in a wheelchair who really wanted to find out what all the hullabaloo was about.

This was way before theatres were required to be handicapped accessable with ramps and all that, so this proved impossible, I’m sad to say.

When Revenge, errr, I mean Return of the Jedi came out, I was maybe fifth in line on opening day, arriving many hours before daybreak that morning. When I arrived there was an empty cot right under the ticket window.

The guy who placed it there was asleep in his truck in the parking lot; he showed up much later, yawning, to take the coveted “first in line” spot.

A photographer and reporter from the local paper showed up to interview the first person in line, who for some reason was judged not to be the slightly disheveled guy with his cot, but the pretty blonde just behind me.

I found this amusing.

Going back the next day, I noticed a number of pivotal scenes had already been cut, including some that established friction between Darth Vader and his underlings, and others that made it seem much more dicey whether Luke was going to be seduced by the dark side.

Much later I found out I had seen a rare early print of the film only shown in a few theatres that included scenes deleted from the studio’s official version.

Thus these scenes remain missing to this day, although you can find them on Youtube and Disney+.

One scene was during the confrontation between Luke and the Emperor.

The Emperor asked Luke who it was who trained him. When no answer was forthcoming, he gleaned the answer from Luke’s mind, to Luke’s obvious dismay.

Then: “This Yoda… lives he still?”

Luke resolutely stared past the Emperor into empty space, trying to empty his mind.

“Ah, he lives not. Very good; you almost hid that from me. And let this be my first lesson to you, my young apprentice. There is nothing you can hide from me. You, like your father before you, are now… mine.”

People have insisted this scene never happened, but this is what I clearly remember. The other deleted scenes I remember have turned up later, but not this one.

We had to wait years between the first three movies, which I liked a lot more than the sequels and prequels, as you might imagine. My friends and I marvelled that, “You know, some day we’ll be able to watch all the movies back to back… won’t that be wonderful?”

And now here we are, although the movies have been altered so much over the years from the originals as I saw them so long, long ago (in a galaxy far away).

Lucas considers the movie I saw in that theatre 26 times to be “incomplete,” so it’s no longer available.

But I was there, 48 years ago. Han shot first.