Star Wars: A New Hope or Star Wars IV

Yes, in 1977, Star Wars boasted no roman numeral, no 'A New Hope' subtitle; it stood alone. Only later did it become Chapter IV of the saga of the Skywalkers, Luke and Anakin.

Even the opening credits were unusual. The epic crawl of the stage-setting text was an innovation - ignoring the conventional wisdom of 'show, not tell', producer/creator George Lucas opened his ground-breaking work with a lengthy passage of text, which scrolled ominously off into the distance, informing us that we were watching a story about a ragtag rebellion against an overwhelmingly superior galactic Empire.

Stunning Visuals

Immediately after the scroll vanished from the screen, we saw a small ship racing away as bolts of fire rained down upon it. Then the pursuing ship hove into view. And hove and hove and hove. The little ship is quickly captured and hauled into the enormous belly of the giant ship, and we visually received an indication of how massively outmanned and outgunned the rebel alliance was. Of course, the underdogs immediately receive our undivided support.

Lucas gets some justified critical heat for the hokey-ness of his dialog. But no one can deny he proves a master of the visual. Spaceports on podunk planets are suitably grubby. Spacecraft owned by odd-jobbing pirates are suitably ricketty. And heroes and heroines are suitably heroic-looking, if sometimes necessarily scruffy.

Archetypes That Resonated

The film follows three archetypical characters as their paths intersect and join:

Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), senator from Alderaan under the old Republic, rebel against the usurping Empire. Young and glamorous she might be, yet she is not above wielding a blaster when necessary.

Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), discontented farmboy who yearns to be a pilot and see the galaxy. Untraveled, naive, even a little callow, we are not surprised to discover the heart of a hero just waiting to be stirred to action.

Han Solo (Harrison Ford), mercenary, pirate, rogue, rake and racounteur. Han, he'll be the first to tell you, is in it for the money. Yeah, yeah, Han. Tell it to the Jedi.

Add Two Wizards, One Bad, One Good

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness), thought to be 'just a crazy old man', yet really a powerful Jedi, who can manipulate matter and energy at will through the judicious use of the 'Force', a Tao-like energy field that permeates everything

Darth Vader (voice, James Earl Jones, presence David Prowse), the black hat to Obi-wan's white hat, the only Force-user that calls upon the Force's Dark Side, from whence flows all sad and bad things.

An Empire To Conquer

The Empire, for which Darth Vader exercises his badness, grew out of the downfall of a democratic republic, and one man, the Emperor, rules with no constraints on his authority. The Republic remains in people's memories as a desired state to return to, but how to overthrow the evil emperor?

Star Wars starts our three heros on their quest to do just that.

Star Wars = An Audience Enthralled

Star Wars literally took audiences without any advance warning. Twentieth Century and the distributors, unwilling to throw a lot of money into advertising a product they didn't understand and clearly didn't appreciate, only released trailers that previewed in movie houses, and which presented the movie in a rather jokey light, almost as if it were a parody of a sci-fi movie, rather than an archetype of one.

It also only went into limited, rather than wide, distribution at first, with the moneybags holding back to see how it fared.

Word-of-mouth from viewers was the catalyst that took many of us to the theaters for the first time. And when the now-legendary 'a long time ago' appeared and John Williams' epic score thundered out of the speakers, we were transported.

The first time the stars radially streaked in the viewport to indicate that the Millenium Falcon had successfully entered hyperspace, audiences gasped and then cheered. When the credits rolled, audiences stood and applauded until the lights came on.

In pre-VCR days, some theaters kept Star Wars running non-stop for over a year. When it ceased to play, you tried to find a theater on the other side of town where it was still showing. When it was no longer playing in town at all, it was the occasion for mourning. And people kept count of how many times they saw it. (I'm too embarrassed to admit to my 'score' - suffice it to say that it's high enough to earn me a 'geek-loser' label.)