The Simpler Days of Star Wars

When we didn't know much about Star Wars

Long time ago in the late 70s after the Star Wars phenomenon had hit us I was able to get the following poster through a Burger Kings/Coca Cola promotion and I remember spending many hours just looking at it and taking in the details.

This was in the time between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back came out and there was not a lot of information on the Universe of Star Wars. This was a time when Darth Vader was a bad guy straight and simple who had killed Luke's dad. Darth Vader was simply his name and not a Title.
Those days were interesting and especially so for my 9 to 10 year old self.

I often think about and sometimes talk about paradigm shifts or Copernicus moments. When one day something is a certain way and has been for as long as people can remember and within a moment the world changes in a very real and perceptible way. Suddenly things are different. Sometimes they happen overnight but usually it’s within a year to a year and a half. In my lifetime I've gone through three of them that I can think of.


The first time being when Star Wars came out. It was actually Star Wars that was the "overnight" thing that happened but it was the few years that separated Jaws, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind that made up the moment. Hollywood would never be the same and even I at that tender young age realized it.

The second was the game console/arcade/micro-computer revolution (for lack of a better term). I think this one took a bit longer but by the early to mid-80s it was evident, to me anyway, where the world was going.

The third was the rise of digital effects in Hollywood that happened in the early 90s. I remember the dabbling of computer generated imagery in the 80s. Sure there was TRON and the Last Starfighter or the CGI stained glass Knight in Young Sherlock Holmes or even the morphing effect of Willow. But it was the early 90s when Jurassic Park came out when I realized things just changed forever and it happened so fast. One moment most everything was done practical and composited on an optical printer and the next everything is run through a computer. Simply crazy.

It's funny a simple Star Wars poster can lead to such tangents. Why not I guess. I kind of miss the days when Star Wars was rare and popular. There was no expanded universe and you hung on the words of George Lucas when he did interviews. When a piece of artwork came out, such as this poster, you would analyze it for the most minute detail. You would check out the novelization of Star Wars many times over and read and re-read it until you had almost memorized it.

Simpler times I guess.

Hours Spent staring at this.

A similar thing happened after The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. Some friends of my folks had a poster of the Millennium Falcon being chased by a couple of TIE Fighters and a Star Destroyer. I remember poring over that too whenever I got the chance. I kind of miss those days.