I'm from Europe.I saw star wars in 1977 and I was 7. At 7 i naturally took everything for granted. At the time the whole NASA and space thing was quite new and was something that attacted the interest of the general population anyway.

Star wars was a brilliant ground breaking film in many ways, but what propelled it into cultural icon status was one simple innovation: movie merchandising.

For the first time I saw characters from the movie in the supermarket. On lunchboxes in my school. I remember once when my family was at catholic mass (church), my brother was wearing a star wars tee shirt and by chance he was chosen to bring some offering up to the altar, so everyone in the church ended up seeing darth vader .

A perfect combination of a faiy tale movie, based in space at a time when space was 'glamorous' with the goodies and baddies being foisted on the population through merchandising.

Merchandising is the conduit through which a great movie made it into the general awareness of the world. It hadn't been done before. There were great movies before. I honestly can't overstate the importance of movie merchandising at a time when movie merchandising wasn't being done.Take it from someone who was there!