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Which is better: Star Trek or Star Wars?
Star Wars. I saw the film opening week when I was eight years old. I had the action figures, toys, playsets, the lunch boxes, the pajamas.
I remember it as if it was yesterday.
Star Wars was really the beginning of the mainstreaming or dumbing down of Science Fiction.
The spring and summer of 1977 was an interesting time in history especially if you examine it from the perspective of the technology industry and from a sociological standpoint.
Star Wars came out before the PC Revolution. Apple didn’t have its first personal computer product until a month before the film’s release and there were no Intel PCs until IBM released one in 1981 — a year after The Empire Strikes Back came out.
If you mentioned “‘handheld device” more than likely someone would probably think you were talking about Mattel’s electronic football game or a Texas Instruments calculator.
The pinnacle of home entertainment technology, the Atari 2600, would not be available until a few months after Star Wars was released.
We were on the cusp of a technological revolution. It was on our minds, but out of sight for most of us. The Apollo program had ended only a few years before and space travel was very much been there, done that.
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Politically, we were in the Carter Administration, the “Empire” and our enemy was the Soviet Union. We were in a recession. There was an oil embargo and people were lining up for hours to buy gasoline. We were two years out from the end of Vietnam.
This was the backdrop against which moviegoers were trying to escape in air-conditioned comfort for two hours in what would be a very hot summer.
As I look back it as an adult, Star Wars was really the beginning of the mainstreaming or dumbing down of Science Fiction. And while I enjoy the newer films, and am eager to see The Last Jedi, I don’t have the same fondness for them as I do other popular sci-fi franchises, such as Star Trek.