Monday, 5 May 2025

Star Wars Discussions: Star Wars (1977)

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So, initially I was planning on doing three Star Wars blog posts this month, one on Shadows of the Empire, one on Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, and one on Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith since it's that movie's 20th Anniversary in two weeks. However, I decided to begin my Star Wars Discussions and Star Trek Discussions series of posts that I started under "My Star Wars Experience" and "My Star Trek Experience". These will be more of a chronological look at each franchise. So, today I'm taking a look at the movie that started it all, Star Wars, now mainly known as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Let's get into it.


Following the release of his first feature film, THX 1138 in 1971, director George Lucas began working on a science fiction fantasy film influenced by science fiction serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and science fiction novel such as Dune, called The Star Wars. However, he wouldn't get a studio to back the movie until 1973 when his second feature film, American Graffiti was released and was successful.

Star Wars is one of those movies that could've bombed as easily as it succeeded. During production of the movie, everybody working on it, including George, thought would fail. Whenever I've seen interviews about the franchise, Steven Spielberg is interviewed since he's a close friend of George's, and he usually says that he always thought the movie was going to be successful. Of course, I kinda take things like that with a grain of salt because it's only one person saying it, and he had nothing to do with the production of the movie. 

The movie was released on May 25th, 1977, and ended up making a total of $220 million at the domestic box office, which is about $1.14 billion in 2024 money. With the earnings from the international box office, the movie made a total of $314.4 million against an $11 million budget, making it the highest grossing film in North America at the time, replacing Spielberg's 1975 film, Jaws.

At this point, fandom was not what it is today. Science fiction conventions were just becoming a thing, with San Diego Comic-Con having only started in 1970, there was no internet, and merchandising for films wasn't really a thing yet. the Star Trek TV series had a few toys by MEGO, as well as some novels and a comic book series, but movies were never marketed with much more than some movie posters and maybe a comic book tie-in or novelization. Star Wars had everything.


 The first piece of merchandise to come out was the novelization by Alan Dean Foster (though the book credits George Lucas as the author of the book), which was released on November 12th, 1976, about six months before the movie had even come out. This novelization included scenes that were in the movie's script and had been filmed, but the visual effects weren't working or post-production was tight, so they couldn't finish the scene. Two of those scenes, the Jabba the Hutt scene, and the scene where Luke speaks to Biggs at the Rebel base, were restored for the Special Edition re-release in 1997. Luke's scenes with Biggs and his other friends remained on the cutting room floor, but were included in a CD-ROM release in the '90s, as well as deleted scenes on the Blu-ray release of the first six movies in 2011. The novel also has a prologue that gives an early backstory for the fall of the Old Republic and the rise of the Empire. This prologue was the first time the Emperor is given the name Palpatine, as none of the movies in the original trilogy of films ever refer to him by that name, only referring to him as the Emperor.


George Lucas also made a deal with Marvel Comics to publish a six issue comic book adaptation of the movie in the vein of Marvel's other science fiction properties such as the Guardians of the Galaxy, Nova, and Captain Marvel.


Starting with issue #7 Marvel began publishing original Star Wars adventures set after the events of the movie. Issue 8 introduced a character named Jaxxon, who was a green space rabbit, who resembles Bucky O'Hare, and whose personality is a cross between Bugs Bunny and Rocket Raccoon. For decades Jaxxon was used as an example of how ridiculous the early Star Wars Expanded Universe was. Now, he's started to gain some respectability among Star Wars fans, and has begun appearing in comics again lately.


The movie also had a junior novelization in 1995. This is the one I owned when I was a kid. It included two extra scenes that aren't in the movie or in the main novelization. The first is Darth Vader beginning to board Leia's ship, and the second is Leia preparing to give the Death Star plans to Artoo as the Imperials board the ship.


There was a storybook which told a truncated version of movie.


Kenner released a line of action figures in 1978. They were supposed to be released in 1977, but production couldn't keep up with the demand, so the release was pushed back to Christmas 1978, a full year and a half after the movie came out in theaters. This toyline included all of the major characters from the movie, as well as background characters like the aliens found in the Cantina scene.


To go with the action figures, Kenner released a series of playsets including the Mos Eisley Cantina and the Death Star.


They also released a line of vehicles, including Luke's Landspeeder, Darth Vader's TIE Fighter, the regular TIE Fighter, the X-Wing Starfighter (pictured above), and the Millennium Falcon. All of which gave kids hours and hours of play as they didn't have the movie to watch at home.


While the movie did have a presence at the video arcade in the early '80s, it wouldn't recieve a home video game console release until 1990, which was a side scroller released on the Nintendo Entertainment System.


Nintendo would re-release the game on the Super Nintendo in 1991. I loved playing this game growing up. I've never played the original game, but I'm assuming it's similar in that you could play as either Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, or Chewbacca and go through various levels until you reach the Death Star battle, which you fly an X-Wing in a more three dimensional level, similar to the polygram design of the arcade cabinet.


With the movie being such a big success, George Lucas commissioned Alan Dean Foster to write a sequel novel to tie fans over until the actual movie sequel, then only known as Star Wars II. This novel was originally commissioned to act as a novel sequel that could be adapted into a low budget movie sequel, should Star Wars be only a moderate success, or as a novel sequel if the movie bombed and novels were the only way George could finish his story. This novel was Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and it didn't include Han Solo, in case it got adapted into a movie and George couldn't get Harrison Ford back for the movie.


Not every Star Wars thing was successful. George decided to allow others to make their own thing set in the Star Wars Universe, and we ended up with The Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978. It's so bad that it only aired once on CBS and has never been officially released on home video, though bootlegs do exist and the animated segment is available to watch on Disney+. Despite how bad it was, and despite George disowning it, the TV special was responsible for introducing us to Boba Fett, a character who was appearing in the movie sequel, in the animated segment produced by Nelvana Entertainment, a Canadian animation studio that would be responsible for giving us two full fledged animated Star Wars shows in 1985. It also gave us a glimpse of Kashyyyk, the homeworld of the Wookiees.


Star Wars got a home video release in 1982. This was how a lot people saw the movie as the theatrical re-releases came infrequently and by the mid '90s when I first saw the movie, there hadn't been a theatrical re-release since the movie's 10th Anniversary in 1987. Of course Star Wars has had numerous home video releases since then and I'll be talking about some of those releases another time.

Star Wars has come a long way since those early days. It's one of my favourite movies of all time because of how fun and exciting it is as a standalone movie, even if you take away everything that came after it in the franchise. I'm also thrilled that I got to be there for its revival in the '90s. I'm glad that I get to talk about it here on the blog this way. 

And that my friends is going to be it for me for today. I'll be back on Wednesday for my post on Avatar: The Last Airbender, the original 2005 animated series, as I'm halfway through season 3. A friend of mine let me borrow the complete series DVD boxset, and I've been watching through that these last few weeks. So I decided I'd come on here and talk about it. So until then have a great rest of the day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

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