The Summer of '77. A Movie Fan is Born.

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2001)

Star Wars? What can I say about this flick? Plenty. This is the film that made me a die-hard movie buff. I was 10 when this was released in '77 and it changed my whole outlook on going to the movies. Until Star Wars, I mostly saw movies at home on TV, edited and with commercials, mind you. This was during the dark ages before VCR's and Cable TV. Sure, we would go to the movies every once in a while, but my folks weren't real big on checking the local listings or reading movie reviews, so we'd usually end up seeing whatever happened to be playing at the local theatre. As a result, I ended up seeing a lot of bad Kung Fu and B Horror films, which is probably why I didn't care if I went to the movies or not.
But seeing this movie on a large movie screen with an audience made me want to go to the movies EVERY weekend! I didn't want to wait until they were shown on TV anymore. I thought everything would be as amazing as Star Wars (It wasn't). The characters (Vader is still my favorite!), the cool story, the Special FX, the spacecraft, the aliens! It was almost too much for my 10 year old mind. Almost. To this day I still collect SW memorabilia, but more importantly, I still love going to the movies. Nowadays we get a movie that wants to be "SW for a new generation" on an almost weekly basis. But nothing can compare to the summer of '77 when we got the original.