Posted on 05/18/2007 10:32:23 AM PDT by fgoodwin
At least 10 for me.
...which is about what I thought of it.
The Star Wars series is really not great science fiction. Its good science fiction that appeals to a wide audience.
Nevertheless, I thought it was good fun and the special effects were somewhere between outstanding and breathtaking. And it made me appreciate how really good “2001” was for its time (and still is).
I wasn’t really into the toys & collectibles (I was in my first year of grad school in ‘77).
But I did collect certain magazines like Time, etc. I wish I still had them, but I long ago threw them all out. Those and my Farah Fawcett poster collection!
I was in the 8th grade in ‘68 when 2001 came out.
Yes I thought it was awesome film-making, but honestly, I didn’t understand the psychedelics of the scenes of Bowman going into the atmosphere of whichever moon it was.
I thought the action and story of ANH made it a far more exciting movie than 2001. The spaceship scenes in 2001, while technically brilliant, were slow and ponderous (”Blue Danube Waltz”, anyone?). The dogfight scenes in ANH were much more fun and engaging.
No one is claiming ANH is great sci-fi — but it was awesome storytelling and movie-making, in a different way than the grand sweep of 2001, but grand in its own way.
My brother broke his leg that winter and a friend gave him the novelization - we were so raring to go when the movie came out. We drove up to Paramus (where the writer saw it), one of only two theaters in the state that had it. The movie went far beyond our expectations.
Now, it seems so hokey - we’ve been spoiled by all the special effects that Lucas pioneered. There’s so much dumb stuff mixed with marvels in the later movies that you could wish Lucas had never been let near his own films.
Mrs VS
My favorite story is when we took our kids to see TESB in 1980.
Our daughter was 7. After Yoda had been on screen for a few minutes, at a point where nothing was being said on screen, our daughter pipes up in her little girl voice that carries thru the theatre and says...
“Daddy, why does Yoda sound just like Fozzie Bear?”
The laughter went on for several minutes.
I remember it and it made sense to me. I remember Lucas saying he started where he started because it had a planet blowing up.
If I’m a film maker, and I have this massive story I don’t know if I’m going to be able to tell the whole thing, I’m going to want to start with blowing up a planet.
Of course, after Return of the Jedi, I wanted it to stop there. I hated the whole “cute puppy” things and I wasn’t too thrilled with the redemption of Darth Vader. And after suffering through the first three episodes, I don’t really think he deserves redemption. Especially not such a hokey redemption
Lucas had “cute” things in Star Wars from the very beginning: R2D2. But I agree that he started to go overboard after introducing Yoda in ESB.
The Ewoks were too much for me, and of course, Jar Jar was inexcusable. Seems like there were fewer “cute” things in Eps II and III, but by then, the damage had been done.
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