Star Wars and How I Got There
I dragged my parents to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey for its original theatrical release. I was five years old and in love with the Apollo program. I had seen advertisements on television for the film and insisted I go. We saw the film at the old drive at Bailey's Crossroads right across from the airport (legend has it one pilot scraped his wheels on the screen making a landing) that has been gone for many years. I fell asleep halfway through, what I have always since called the most boring film ever made. I did wake up in time to see Hal get his comeuppance. It was years later before I began to understand the film's subtleties. My parents didn't get any of it.
The film represented the epitome of realistic depiction of space and space travel within the solar system. The praise it won for special effects was justified and was in strong contrast to the usual science fiction fare in the cinema.
As I grew up, I began in my teenage years to read science fiction. I fell in love with the golden age of pulp science fiction of the 1930s and with the expansive age of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, I discovered through anthologies and old pulp magazines along with newer ones like Analog. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s science fiction grew in sophistication and my reading list grew to include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Chariots of the Gods and other stuff pulled from my older brother's stash of books. I read the first Anne McCaffery story, Weyr Search, I believe in Analog I picked up second hand and that started my interest in the science fantasy genre. I watched Star Trek whenever an episode would come on, usually fighting to adjust the television antenna to tune in some high numbered UHF station that would carry it in later years. I had seen Star Trek in its original run and first syndication, but was a bit too young and it didn't really attract me then like the real space program did. I watched Space 1999 and other shows. You had to take what you could get for a fix.
I saw Star Wars in first run at the Arlington Theater in old downtown Arlington, Virginia (a beautiful art deco building that still exists). I went with my brother and his girlfriend. I was stunned by the opening sequence with the grand Imperial ship overhead and subsequent gripping battle scenes aboard the cruiser. Here was everything I had ever read and image in science fiction come to life. Not some cheesy Buck Rogers spaceship on a string with a firecracker up its tail and not the slow, boring hyper realism of A Space Odyssey. Even as good as the special effects were on Star Trek television series or a film like Planet of the Apes or the lovely Forbidden Planet, nothing could approach this for "realism" in bringing an imaginary world to life before my eyes. Scenes that had only lived in my imagination were realized in a way that did not diminish them, as often happens when the events and characters you imagine in books are made into a film. Since I had never read the story before, I could revel in the scenes that were like those every science fiction fan had read and imagined, but not exact enough to disturb a treasured memory.
I never became a Star Wars fanatic. I collected a few figures I liked, such as an R2D2 and C3PO, the robots, which as a computer enthusiast (geek) I was attracted to. I never really got into it as life philosophy or profound familial story as others did. Star Wars was a life changing experience for me, perhaps in some subtle way that Sgt. Pepper was for my brother, only much lesser. I loved the Williams score for the original film, a work that stands on its own and listened to it literally hundreds of times over the years. I still like Star Wars and play some of the better video games that came out of the series. In Star Wars Battlefront I get to relive the movie and its locations. I get to run around Mos Eisley. How cool is that? It's pretty novel for someone born in my generation to be running around in a world they saw in a film one time, not that those born in the last fifteen years would understand that. The closest I could ever have gotten to that is either in my imagination reading book or being on the set of movie. The three dimensional first person computer video game did realize what I saw as the ultimate potential of the "microcomputer" back then. I had faith in that, that we'd get there someday, back when the closest thing was Star Raiders on the Atari or Flight Simulator on the Apple II. Having neither of those I had to content myself with spacewar or Asteroids clones on a black and white monitor. So there it is, here and back again. It is hard to believe that Star Wars is thirty years ago.
The film represented the epitome of realistic depiction of space and space travel within the solar system. The praise it won for special effects was justified and was in strong contrast to the usual science fiction fare in the cinema.
As I grew up, I began in my teenage years to read science fiction. I fell in love with the golden age of pulp science fiction of the 1930s and with the expansive age of science fiction in the 1950s and 1960s, I discovered through anthologies and old pulp magazines along with newer ones like Analog. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s science fiction grew in sophistication and my reading list grew to include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Chariots of the Gods and other stuff pulled from my older brother's stash of books. I read the first Anne McCaffery story, Weyr Search, I believe in Analog I picked up second hand and that started my interest in the science fantasy genre. I watched Star Trek whenever an episode would come on, usually fighting to adjust the television antenna to tune in some high numbered UHF station that would carry it in later years. I had seen Star Trek in its original run and first syndication, but was a bit too young and it didn't really attract me then like the real space program did. I watched Space 1999 and other shows. You had to take what you could get for a fix.
I saw Star Wars in first run at the Arlington Theater in old downtown Arlington, Virginia (a beautiful art deco building that still exists). I went with my brother and his girlfriend. I was stunned by the opening sequence with the grand Imperial ship overhead and subsequent gripping battle scenes aboard the cruiser. Here was everything I had ever read and image in science fiction come to life. Not some cheesy Buck Rogers spaceship on a string with a firecracker up its tail and not the slow, boring hyper realism of A Space Odyssey. Even as good as the special effects were on Star Trek television series or a film like Planet of the Apes or the lovely Forbidden Planet, nothing could approach this for "realism" in bringing an imaginary world to life before my eyes. Scenes that had only lived in my imagination were realized in a way that did not diminish them, as often happens when the events and characters you imagine in books are made into a film. Since I had never read the story before, I could revel in the scenes that were like those every science fiction fan had read and imagined, but not exact enough to disturb a treasured memory.
I never became a Star Wars fanatic. I collected a few figures I liked, such as an R2D2 and C3PO, the robots, which as a computer enthusiast (geek) I was attracted to. I never really got into it as life philosophy or profound familial story as others did. Star Wars was a life changing experience for me, perhaps in some subtle way that Sgt. Pepper was for my brother, only much lesser. I loved the Williams score for the original film, a work that stands on its own and listened to it literally hundreds of times over the years. I still like Star Wars and play some of the better video games that came out of the series. In Star Wars Battlefront I get to relive the movie and its locations. I get to run around Mos Eisley. How cool is that? It's pretty novel for someone born in my generation to be running around in a world they saw in a film one time, not that those born in the last fifteen years would understand that. The closest I could ever have gotten to that is either in my imagination reading book or being on the set of movie. The three dimensional first person computer video game did realize what I saw as the ultimate potential of the "microcomputer" back then. I had faith in that, that we'd get there someday, back when the closest thing was Star Raiders on the Atari or Flight Simulator on the Apple II. Having neither of those I had to content myself with spacewar or Asteroids clones on a black and white monitor. So there it is, here and back again. It is hard to believe that Star Wars is thirty years ago.
posted by Steve Knoblock at
11:37 PM
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