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Post by vladtolenkov on Dec 19, 2015 11:41:51 GMT -6
So in this thread tell us how you first became aware of Star Wars and then tell us how it affected you. Give us you "origin story" if you will.
MY STAR WARS ORIGIN STORY:
Here is the story of how I first became aware of this thing called Star Wars.
So in late Spring 1977 my family was on a road trip, and we stopped at a convenience store. There, sitting on the wire comic book rack, was an issue of a comic book I had never heard of before called Star Wars. I was just about to turn five, and so I imagine my parent thought it would keep me occupied for a little bit on our trip. I was immediately both fascinated and scared of the big monster guy on the cover, but was he one of the good guys? They also had cool laser guns!
Star Wars issue number 3, which was in the middle of the story, was pretty confusing to me actually because there were these guys in white armor fighting other guys in white armor. Okay. . . And there was another guy in black armor talking to some general looking guy. Who were they? What was going on? I was a little foggy on the story as I was only four, but I was hooked anyway. It wasn't until a month or more later that I realized the comic was actually an adaptation of a movie! Which my parent took me to see after they had seen it and determined that it wasn't going to be too scary. The film invaded my imagination like nothing before. It might have been the purest and most affecting movie experience of my life.
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Post by ritt on Dec 19, 2015 12:10:18 GMT -6
1979. The re-release of the movie. I was eight. My big sister and her boyfriend went to see the film at the (Now sadly long shuttered) local drive-in. It was a beautiful warm Summer evening and my little brother and I sat in our pajamas on top of the car. Earlier in the day I'd seen a copy of the paperback novelization at my sister's house. The novelization's cover got me really excited because Chewbacca looked like Bigfoot (There was a Bigfoot/Mo-Mo/Skunk Ape craze in the Midwest in the 70's and as a kid I was really caught up in it). I was bummed out when Alderaan got blown up because my sister's boyfriend told me it was Earth (Whether he was being cruel or was simply confused I'll never know).
The second feature was the Burt Lancaster Island of Doctor Moreau, which I watched fading in and out of sleep, turning a pedestrian movie into a terrifying fever dream where the line between human and animal was blurred beyond all meaning. All in all it was a very memorable evening that made a weird, impressionable kid even weirder. I'd learned to read from Marvel comics but Star Wars was the atomic battery that supercharged my interest in fantasy, genre, geek stuff, whatever you want to call it and it really did have a remarkable impact on my life.
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Post by Otto Harkaman on Dec 19, 2015 12:22:56 GMT -6
I think I became aware of the original Star Wars movie (now renamed New Hope) a year before it was released in 1977. I was in fifth grade and in our class room we had the old National Wildlife juniors magazine named Ranger Rick. I remember reading in it an article about the movie Star Wars being made. I was very confused because the article talked about these two robots being main characters but the picture along with the article was of what I now realize are two Stormtroopers firing at Luke and Lea on the bridge crossing. At the time I thought they were suppose to be the two robots Of course I went on to watch the movie I think like eleven times in the movie theater or something like that, long before dvds and online streaming of video
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Post by vladtolenkov on Dec 20, 2015 14:28:22 GMT -6
I used to get Ranger Rick as well, but I think I didn't get my subscription until maybe a year or two later. So I never saw that!
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Post by geoffrey on Dec 20, 2015 21:54:29 GMT -6
It was shortly before my 7th birthday (which was on June 5, 1977) that my older cousin told me how cool some movie called Star Wars was. I begged my parents to take me to see it. Shortly after my 7th birthday my mother and father took me to the 10:00 pm showing because the earlier showings were sold out. In any case, we had to stand in a block-long line. I've never seen a line like that at a theatre before or since.
In the theatre I was blown away. It was like a religious experience. I watched Star Wars a total of 4 times that summer.
In the following years my imagination was dominated by Star Wars. When I first read the Marvel ESB comic adaptation shortly before the movie was released, I thought it seemed wrong. It was no longer "my" Star Wars universe. While today I enjoy ESB, it still doesn't feel "right" to me. Star Wars will always be for me the first movie and the imaginings it engendered within me.
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premmy
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Posts: 295
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Post by premmy on Jan 3, 2016 12:38:26 GMT -6
Preface: born in 1978.
You know how you can have some early childhood memories which are rather indistinct and fragmentary, and as you grow older you start to wonder how much of them are actual memories and how much are your own interpretations and fabrications that have been "copied over" the original memories? Well, one of my early memories is sitting at home watching TV with the family and being really sleepy because it was in the evening. And as far as I can access the memory, it was Star Wars on the telly.
Somewhat later on, my uncle got a VCR, which at this time (maybe/mid-80s) was really not a widespread thing in Hungary. I already loved SW, so whenever we visited him, I would always stay in the bedroom and watch SW on video. Every single time.
Also, while I didn't have any learning difficulties, I was just very lazy in the first years of primary school, and just refused to learn to read properly. That is, until I found a Hungarian copy of the Star Wars novelisation on a bookshelf at home, which finally gave me the impetus to read in earnest.
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