I wanted to talk about this:
It is, as you can see, the original Star Wars soundtrack from the late 1970s. The outline of the vinyl album can be seen pressed against the jacket, as was quite common, similar to how you might see the outline of a tobacco tin through a pair of jeans. As a young person, the double-album above was one of my most cherished possessions. It also had a bunch of cool stills from the movie inside:
I was reminded of this when I was thinking how exceptionally easy it is for anyone today to see just about any clip, from any movie (or any entire movie) just about any time and anywhere.
Now, honestly, I try to avoid writing one of those “back in MY day..…….” posts, but I can’t really help it this time. Because I was thinking about what it was like to be a kid who was really, really, really into this new Star Wars movie, and whose friendships were anchored in talking about and re-enacting the movie.
See, I was proud of the fact I had seen it a dozen times, and I never missed a chance to tell people that. It was a way to instant establish my bona fides, particularly since EACH instance of seeing a movie involved:
- Getting my parents to take me to the theatre;
- Spending the money on a ticket (and we didn’t have much);
- Getting my parents to pick me up
So doing that one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and then twelve times was no mean feat.
Of course, in the 1970s, there were no DVDs, no YouTube, no Laserdisc, no Betamax, no VHS, and studios were years away from issuing their products for anything resembling reasonable prices. The closest I got was that I scraped together ten bucks to buy a clip from Star Wars that was advertised in the back of a magazine. This product:
- Was in black and white;
- Was on 8mm film stock;
- Had NO SOUND;
- Was only about four minutes long;
- Had just a few random clips from the movie.
But my GOD, I was the coolest kid on the block for having that thing. We could pull out my father’s film projector, thread this thing up, and project goddamned STAR WARS right there in my OWN HOME on my wall! Oh my GARD, it was glorious. It felt like we had our own nuclear reactor.
Just think of that. We’re watching a few minutes of random clips with NO sound in black and white, and we’re all running around with raging hard-ons and thinking this was the coolest thing in the world.
But it wasn’t enough. We wanted to experience the whole movie. And going to the Broadmoor Theatre in Baton Rouge again wasn’t going to happen.
So we used the soundtrack.
What I mean by that is, in the style of Rocky Horror Picture Show performers, we would put the music on and, to the best of our abilities, act the whole thing out. We knew all the music cues. We knew every line. It’s actually pretty damned cute, when I think about it.
The point I am making is this: if we had today’s technology back in the 1970s, we wouldn’t have done ANY of that stuff. We would have just sat on our asses watching the goddamned thing. Passively. Mutely. Stupidly.
Intuitively, I think it was more constructive for us to have to “suffer” and actually have the John Williams soundtrack as the only media available to us. We experienced Star Wars as often as we liked, but only because we had to re-create it ourselves, with our own minds and bodies.
I’m glad I grew up before things were this easy.
