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For me it was the blurring of all the influences.
As a very small child I already had a thing for fantasy (Doctor Who, Dracula etc) but I didn't really have anything to connect that basic yearning to the rest of culture.
Star Wars came along when I was seven years old and pow!
It has a basic legendary tale but coated in the genre markers of biblical epics, medieval fantasy, gothic horror, westerns, WWII movies and comic books.
It opened the door to Ealing comedies and David Lean epics (via Sir Alec), Hammer Horror (via Peter Cushing). I read about Kurosawa and Kubrick in the collector's edition booklet. I became hooked on orchestral music because of the score. I became hooked on history because of all the visual references to it scattered in the films (Star Wars and the films it prompted me to see).
It became the pushed domino that got the chain reaction of opening my eyes to the wider world going.
This was the second film I had seen in a cinema too.
The other thing that was great about it was it was everywhere.
I could talk about my new fascination with adults and they wouldn't feel the need to talk down to me about it because they were as much in a buzz about it as I was.
It got me drawing things, making things and collecting things (not just toys to be played with until the bits went missing these were items to cherish and look after). I read everything I could about how they made those images. The production paintings, the sculpting and modeling of the costumes, creatures and ships, the architecture of the sets and locations, the photography and lighting.
When Empire came out the characters were drawn with greater humanity they were vulnerable and bad things could happen to them.
It taught me that sometimes the good guys didn't win and that sometimes the best you can hope for is to get away by the skin of your teeth.
It promised that this wasn't going to just go away it would stay with me and be at least as good as it was before if not better.
Jedi kind of ruined it for me.
There were some moments where it was clearly the same thing but it lacked that internal integrity that hooked me in.
My dad was probably more wowed by ROTJ than I was.
I wanted more but I wanted more of the real stuff not the convenient plot resolutions and the cuddly toy adverts.
I wanted to see the same characters continue to struggle against the Empire and to continue to grow.
Once it became clear that there wasn't going to be another film in 1986 I tasted my first cultural plate of ashes (something that I would revisit when the BBC murdered Doctor Who).
It was like some exterior someone was insisting that fantasy was now kids stuff again and I had to grow up.
I wanted to grow up but I wanted to keep my imagination burning.
In a way everything I needed to learn (including the things I didn't want to know) snowballed from a movie I saw in 1977.
