THE buzz had been palpable for weeks if not months.
Star Wars had been released in American cinemas in May 1977 and had created box-office records. Film fans in this country couldn’t wait to see this new pop-culture phenomenon, but wait they had to. When it premiered in London a couple of days after Christmas, the queues stretched around the block.
Finally - in late January, 1978 - Scotland got to see the film.
Hours before the first screening on Monday the 30th, film-goers (above) were lining up outside the Odeon 1 in Renfield Street. First in the queue was a young man of 17, a self-confessed ‘Star Wars’ freak. He had already seen the film at a private screening after a cinema official saw a model he had made of R2D2, one of the film’s robots. “Great,” the fan declared. “The best fantasy film ever.”
To this paper’s film critic, Molly Plowright, Star Wars was “the most enchanting trip into space you’ve ever seen ... the inter-galactic battles which take place thousands of light years from Earth are breathtakingly visual ... What I found such delight in was the dovetailing of the ancient ways of chivalry into the techniques of today.”
The film, she added, would give people of all ages “the widest possible scope for imaginative flights of their own.”
The film took $775,398,007 at the worldwide box-office and generated a remarkable array of hugely popular prequels and sequels.
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