A blog about Star Wars (Episode IV A New Hope) the first time around in the 1970s.
Including production, first release, reviews, merchandising, the novelization, Super 8 movies, Marvel comics and more.
Episode Nothing looks at the first Star Wars Annual, from 1978. It was the book which gave UK fans behind the scenes features about the film, plus a taste of something Americans had already had – Marvel's Star Wars adaptation in colour. (Or, if you prefer, color.)
Vader chokes Motti: Just one of the things the Force can help you do in Star Wars
It was Star Wars Day this week – surely the only fan event which owes its date to a pun: "May the Fourth be with you."
What better time to examine the Force, the "energy field created by all living things"? Is it George Lucas's unique and personal take on religion and spirituality – or just a lot of New Age mumbo-jumbo?
Sir Alec Guinness brought Star Wars gravitas and star power. In return, it garnered him an Oscar nomination, a new generation of fans, and a good deal of money. But the actor-knight would become increasingly curmudgeonly about Star Wars and its fans, deriding autograph collectors for their "idiotic hobby" and saying of the film: "I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned."
Here, Episode Nothing takes a look at Guinness's troubled relationship with his most successful film.
Mark Hamill voiced Corey in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Jeannie
How the animated series Jeannie introduced children to Mark Hamill
Back in 1977, which Star Wars performer was the best-known?
It would have been quite an easy question for adults to
answer, since it would just have involved a toss-up between Peter Cushing and
Sir Alec Guinness. But not so for children.
Star Wars makes the cover of Look-In on March 11, 1978
The last in our short series of posts about the British weekly magazine Look-In focuses on the mini-posters that adorned many a bedroom wall after the release of Star Wars.
This Friday, I'll be publishing the last (for the time being) in my short series of posts about how Star Wars was featured in the youth magazine Look-In in the UK. I'll be sharing some of the impressive colour posters that the magazine ran in 1977-78.
In the meantime, though, any child of Britain in the 1970s will find it impossible to resist this TV ad I found on YouTube. It's a commercial for the March 11, 1978, edition of Look-In, which featured plenty of Star Wars, including an interview with Harrison Ford. Watch it and be transported back to a time when 10p could buy you enough glossy entertainment to last a week. And don't forget to return to the 21st century for this Friday's post.
Gerry Anderson of Thunderbirds fame: What did he think of Star Wars?
Gerry Anderson was a huge figure in millions of childhoods from the 1960s onwards, giving us the television series Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Stingray, Space: 1999 and more. He also, unwittingly, cost Star Wars a fair amount of money.
But what did he think of the film that threatened to replace his series in kids’ affections? Fortunately, a cutting from the British young people’s magazine Look-In lets us know.
