A Day Long Remembered: 40 Years of Star Wars

I was six in the spring of 1977. My parents were newly divorced and my mom and I had moved back to our old neighborhood to rent the house literally right next door to the one we had owned as a family of three just a year earlier.

I knew most of the kids from before, so making friends hadn't been a problem. But there was a bit of transition as my mom and I tried to forge a new life for ourselves that didn't include my father.

We both found comfort in movies, usually after errands on Saturday afternoons. I can remember seeing Rocky, Silver Streak and Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong on those days the previous winter, soaking up all the wonderful images and characters, forgetting the word "divorce" ever existed, at least for a couple of hours every weekend.

A new movie from American Graffiti director George Lucas was being teased by 20th Century Fox for release just before Memorial Day weekend of that year. It was a science-fiction adventure billed as "the story of boy, a girl and a universe a billion years in the making." It promised space battles, robots, aliens and a terrifying black-clad villain. It was simply called Star Wars (no episode reference or subtitle back then) and I made my mom take me that first Saturday of opening weekend.

From that pulse-pounding, ear-shattering opening scene where the mammoth Star Destroyer fills the screen as it pursues the tiny Blockade Runner, I was instantly hooked on the story of the farmboy son of a fallen Jedi Knight who fulfills his destiny and joins the fight against the evil Empire.

For the next two hours, I stared wide-eyed at the screen before me, captivated by one glorious scene after another, all enhanced by John Williams' magnificent, thundering score. It was the day I fell in love with the power of pure cinema and never looked back.

Star Wars officially opened on 32 screens May 25, 1977 to rave reviews and lines wrapped around the theaters. Audiences returned in droves for repeat viewings and over the next 13 weeks the number of theaters grew to over 1,000 with the gross reaching nearly $120 million, the most ever in that short a span.

The film held the top spot at the box office not just for the rest of the year but into early 1978 as well, with more than 60 theaters exhibiting it continuously for over a year. By the end of its initial theatrical run, Star Wars had grossed over $220 million, eclipsing 1975's Jaws as the highest-grossing film of all time.

To call Star Wars a cultural phenomenon would be a gross understatement. You really had to be alive at that time to experience just how popular the film was. I mean the brand and its characters were everywhere that summer: magazines, books, T-shirts, pins, you name it. Everyone (except my wife) had seen the film and wanted to talk about it.

And that was just the beginning. By early 1978 we started getting the toys from Kenner, TV specials (the Star Wars Holiday Special featuring Bea Arthur and Art Carney, anyone?), bedsheets, alarm clocks, the list went on. Seriously, from the summer of 1977 through the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983, Star Wars was one big, omnipresent blanket that never lost its comfort or appeal.

Star Wars has built quite a legacy over the last 40 years: eight feature films (with at least three more on the way), a handful of television incarnations, theme-park rides, comic books, novels and any other merchandise they could slap a Wookie or Ewok on. It's a culture that's past down from generation to generation, something to share with our kids, and later our kids' kids.

For me, in addition to igniting my life-long passion for cinema, Star Wars will always remind me of my childhood and those years when it was just my mom and me. A time that could have been fraught with despair and insecurity, but instead was filled with awe and wonder. I don't remember worrying about anything back then, mainly because my mom saw to it that movies like Star Wars were always there to make sure I had better things on my mind.