During this time, I kept hearing about this amazing movie that was in theaters called "Star Wars". Sometime during the summer, playing with my cousins at my great aunt and uncle's house, they told me the basic storyline, and we ran around playing "Star Wars" all evening. While it didn't feel like it at the time, the new house was really stretching our family budget, so we never went to the movies that summer. We actually waited until October, and my sister's birthday, when my parents offered her the option of dinner at a restaurant, or going to see "Star Wars". Thankfully, she chose the latter :)
Think about that for a minute - "Star Wars" was initially released on a few screens in late May, and I didn't see it until five months later. "Star Wars" was still playing in some theaters a year after it was first released. Five months after it was released, you still had to show up and get in a mammoth line to buy tickets, not knowing (in many cases) which showtime you'd get in for. Also, for almost a year after it was released, there just wasn't much *stuff* to buy if you were a "Star Wars"-mad kid. There were trading cards, and comic books, and the novelization, and cheap t-shirts, but there were NO TOYS. Nobody thought the movie would be anything special, so the toy license was sold, very late, to Kenner, and they weren't even able to get toys out for Christmas, leading to the famous "empty box" Early Bird kit, which had a display stand for the original 12 action figures, some stickers, and a certificate to send in for the first four figures (Luke, Leia, R2-D2, and Chewbacca - no bad guys!).
So, we finally saw "Star Wars" in October '77, and when the small ship and the REALLY, REALLY BIG ship passed overhead (nobody knew what they were called back then), the world changed again. Here was a fully-realized world, as big as my imagination, and it seemed so open and limitless. Given everything else that was going on in my life (taken away from school and friends, getting picked on at the new school, etc), I latched on hard to this galaxy "far, far away", and it remained a constant in my life for the next three decades.
When "Empire" came out in 1980, a group of friends and I were driven to the theater by somebody's parents, but we were unable to get in to the show we wanted, so we had to buy tickets for a later show. This happened again a couple weeks later! When "Jedi" came out in 1983, my mom actually called the school to say I was sick the day after it opened, and took me to see it on a Thursday morning, to avoid the crowds.
I won't dwell too much on the prequels. Like Anchorhead, I have very fond memories of being part of the original "Star Wars Generation", though my fondness for it extends a bit further, right up until Darth Vader reveals his identity in "Empire". From that point on, the limitless place that I fell in love with in '77 started to shrink, and has continued to do so ever since. What had seemed like a place that could contain unlimited stories has finally revealed itself to be unable to support the one story its creator decided to tell, and that's disappointing. However, there's no denying that the experience of being there 30 years ago was magical, and I'm glad I was there for it.