'Star Wars' and me: 40 years of living with the Force

An anniversary passed without much notice last week, and I suppose with all the mayhem and madness, it is understandable that few people thought about the importance of May 25, 1977 — the date when the Force first awakened and a new era began.

It’s hard to believe that 40 years have passed since George Lucas first unleashed the “Star Wars” franchise on an unsuspecting world. It may be the fastest 40 years in the history of the world. I’ll check with Einstein on that, and get back to you, but it certainly zoomed by for this 61-year-old fan.

Forty years ago, I was a 21-year-old New Yorker who was a recent graduate from Tulane University in New Orleans. I had left school in December 1976 with a B.A. in anthropology and moved back to Spring Valley, New York, where I started a campaign to convince some graduate school to accept me for an M.F.A. degree in creative writing even though I was woefully ill-prepared.

I can report that I had to learn to cope with rejection as school after school informed me that my couple of semesters of freshman English did not equip me for the rigors of a master’s degree in Shakespeare’s tongue.

Fortunately, sometime in May, after I had already given up hope, I heard from the last school on my list — the University of Montana — telling me I had been accepted unconditionally in the writing program that had boasted Leslie Fiedler, Richard Hugo and A.B. Guthrie among its storied personalities.

Planning a trip west in August meant that I was in an adventurous mood that summer, but nothing prepared me for the pastiche of Greek mythology, the Old West and Buck Rogers that was “Star Wars.”

Mind you, I had been anticipating the film for more than a year. Lucas had caught my eye (and my heart) with “American Graffiti” in 1973, and I had been a science-fiction junkie since the summer of 1965 when I got run over by a bike walking home after seeing “Von Ryan’s Express” and getting lost in a daydream about that other Frank (Sinatra) beating those stinking Nazis. After a brief detour to the doctor’s office for 12 stitches just below my knee, I headed home for a week of R&R, during which I discovered my older brother’s collection of paperback science fiction, which included a couple of volumes of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s space opera Lensman series in which good soldiers (think Jedi knights) vanquished evil in all its forms (think “the dark side”).

Over the next decade, I had developed my interest in science-fiction books and movies to the point where I was something of an expert. I even subscribed to “Starlog” magazine when it debuted in 1976 and read with avid interest about Lucas’s plans for his own space opera. Could it be that a film would finally measure up to imaginative potential of the science-fiction genre?

I had high hopes, and for months planned a movie outing with one of my best friends from college, Larry Gandle, who happened to live in New Jersey. We picked the matinee showing in Paramus, New Jersey, as a convenient meeting place, and so when the movie premiered that Wednesday we were among the first in line, although my recollection is that it wasn’t a very long line at all.

Remember, this was before science fiction had gained respectability — when the high-water mark of the genre was still measured against black-and-white classics from the 1950s like “It Came from Outer Space” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” No one knew yet that an entire culture could be reshaped by a story of a farm boy on a desert planet “in a galaxy far, far away,” but we were about to find out.

As the words of the opening prologue drifted off the screen in the darkened theater, and the John Williams score tantalized us with its promise of grandiloquence and majesty, we were blown away when two spaceships roared overhead, the latter one as large and spectacular as anything in the imagination of that 10-year-old boy reading “Doc” Smith fantasies 12 years earlier.

Larry reminded me last week that when we bought our tickets, we were also handed a bit of “Star Wars” memorabilia in the form of promotional badges for the movie. As Larry said, “We had no idea what ‘May the Force be With You’ meant, but we put on those badges” and entered the theater proud to be on the front lines of film history. By the time we entered back into the light of that sunny May afternoon two hours later, we were full-fledged Force aficionados. Everything — literally EVERYTHING — about the movie was right when so much in science fiction movies had been terribly wrong up till that point. But now we had Luke, Leia, Han Solo, Chewie, C-3P0, R2-D2, Obi-wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Sand People, Jawas, Jabba the Hutt, a whole imagined world of wonder. But probably what had us screaming at each other the most when we stood in the parking lot was the now famous cantina scene in the spaceport at Mos Eiseley, where Luke and Obi-wan encounter a variety of rascally alien pilots, smugglers and bounty hunters. “Could you believe that? PERFECT!”

And though the crowd for that opening show was skimpy at best, by the time the Memorial Day weekend in 1977 had finished, “Star Wars” was approaching astronomical box office. Forty years and billions of dollars later, millions of people are now looking forward to the next installment of the adventure, “The Last Jedi,” which opens Dec. 15.

I’ll be standing in line with my 7-year-old son Huzhao to find out what Luke Skywalker has been up to, and how he will help save the Republic from the evil First Order. Huzhao and I binge-watched the original trilogy of movies recently, and like his father before him, he was hooked from the start. Maybe it’s the simplicity of the good versus evil plot; maybe it’s the soaring music, the vivid visual imagination; or the mix of humor and pathos — but whatever the cause, “Star Wars” is just as fresh today as it was when it premiered.

So get out your lightsabers, put in those old VCR tapes, and celebrate again the first time you enjoyed discovering the secrets of the Jedi. We’re not getting any younger, but fortunately “Star Wars” is not getting any older. It’s an eternal joy.

Darn it. Where’s that badge I got in 1977? I could sure use it now! “May the Force be with You.”

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. He can be reached at edit@dailyinterlake.com