Long Ago

Who remembers Logan’s Run? It was a modest science-fiction film with a familiar plot: rebels and free-thinkers, lured by dreams of a world beyond, try to flee a tightly controlled society. In 1976 science fiction fans, who had memorized every line in every Star Trek episode, were so desperate for SF scraps that Logan’s Run became a mini-hit.

That winter you had to be a careful newspaper reader to find out about an outer-space movie being made by the same guy who did a film about growing up in the California Central Valley. Not promising, but you take what you can get. The movie was coming in May.

It was hard to gather more information because there was no Internet, no cable TV, no 24/7 news. “Buzz” was non-existent, unless one was referring to the second man on the moon. Marvel issued the “Star Wars” comic books in six installments, the concluding chapters timed to be released after the movie came out. (They’re in a box in my garage, part of my valuable and growing estate, unless the termites have gotten to them.) If the movie looked anything like the comic books, it was going to be a lot more interesting than Logan’s Run and certainly more fun than 2001: A Space Odyssey, still the gold standard for outer-space realism.

On the day after Star Wars opened—Saturday---we drove to the Coronet an hour before the first showing. Already the line stretched around the block.. We got in but had to take seats near the front. The familiar 20th century Fox logo presented, but what was that brass flourish that continued past the 20CF theme? And what were those words scrolling to the top of the screen? And why were those people behind us reciting the dialogue as if they had already seen the movie three times before?

Good movies immerse us in their world, and truly iconic ones make us wish that we lived there, not here. Who wouldn’t want to witness the magic of Hogwarts or the heroism of Middle Earth? And on that Saturday in May, long ago, we wanted to be with Luke, Leia, and Han, far, far away.