Then, around the Special Editions, people started pushing the “A New Hope” name hard, and also episode numbers.
I thought the use of episode numbers only really started catching on when TPM was released, becoming firmly entrenched once AOTC arrived.
You’re probably right. So, my timeline looks a little like this:
“Star Wars” near-exclusive: 1977-1995 (~18 years)
“Star Wars” or “A New Hope”: 1995-2000 (~5 years)
“Star Wars”, “A New Hope”, or “Episode IV”: 2000-present (~15 years)
If this is more-or-less accurate, we’ve only really recently hit the milestone where people have been calling Star Wars something other than “Star Wars” longer than they were calling it simply “Star Wars”.