Yeah, but I think Star Trek always had a very dedicated fan base, even if it wasn't quite large enough to keep it on the air. And I think Lucas took merchandising to a level that hadn't been done prior to Star Wars.
"George went to Fox with a proposition. He offered to keep his salary at $150,000 in exchange for two seemingly insignificant requests: 1) That he retain all merchandising rights, and 2) that he would retain the rights to any sequels...
"But the real money for George didn't come from box office receipts. Between 1977 and 1978, Star Wars sold $100 million worth of toys. 35 years later and Star Wars themed toys have generated $12 billion worth of revenue. Today, Star Wars licensed toys produce $3 billion a year in revenues."
Right.
I know in the 1970s there were "collectible" glasses in jelly jars that could be later reused as drinking cups. And a detergent company attached a series of Pogo plastic cups to sell their wares.
And some fast food burger joints would offer collectible glassware for sports teams. And 7-eleven went overboard with dozens and dozens of plastic slurpee cups in a year.
I seem to recall Happy Days glasses at some fast food joint but the Star Wars glasses (at Burger King?) really brought that trend into focus (at least for movie critics).
I think it was Roger Ebert who identified a class of movies that could have their plots summed up on 4 (or 6) glasses.
Now that I think of it, King Kong (1976?) also had such glasses.
It certainly became a standard for the Lucas films to come.
And while other movies might have a set of trading cards, I think the original film had 3 (or 4?) series of images from the film. At a time when there was no home video (and not even a telecast of the movie for years to come) it was one of several "home experience" ways of reliving a movie (there were also some sort of photonovels in the 1970s).
This was made decades ago but is case in point. Someone recreated the first Star Wars movie using the different merchandising products (toys, book on record, etc.).
The Star Wars (1994)
"Throughout the late seventies and early eighties, plenty of kids used toys to make their own stop-motion animated versions of Lucas's space saga, but it was 'The Star Wars', made in 1994 by Pez D. Spencer (aka Troy Durrett), Lance Robson, and Jon Ramos, that took the concept of the action figure movie to the ultimate level -thanks to it's structure, which was dictated by the merchandise it exploited. The short was a collector's fever dream, an experiment in metastorttelling, a commentary on the commercialization of 'Star Wars' and an insular artistic conceit taken to the extreme-far more than the sum of its (plastic) parts." - Homemade Hollywood by Clive YoungThere apparently was an attempt to do the same with Empire Strikes Back but it does not seem to be complete.
Including Slings and Qam for nostalgic Ping list considerations.