"Have you heard about that movie called 'Star Wars'?"

I’d be willing to lay money that all you had to do was glance at the above photo of the Beatles, and, even with some other guy sitting behind the drums pretending to be Ringo, you immediately thought, “Hey, look! It’s a photo of the Beatles!”

You may have also thought, “Why are they dressed like a motorcycle gang?” But you definitely knew they were the Beatles.

Of course you did. Once someone or something reaches the point of iconicity, babies practically sluice out of the womb with a full awareness of them (or, as the case may be, an awareness of it) instilled in their baby noggins. Right off the bat, it’s pretty much eat, drink, poop, Marilyn Monroe, and the Beatles. But icons weren’t always iconic.

As Paul McCartney himself has said, when he and his pals John and George first changed their struggling beat group’s name from “the Quarrymen” to “the Beatles,” everyone told them they were nuts.

When you said “Beatles” back in 1960, people thought of these things.

That right there was—and if you want to get technical about it, still is—a beetle. (There are many variations of beetles. This one obviously comes from their psychedelic period, which started roughly around the tail end of 1966 before kicking into full gear in 1967.)

But bug-style beetles couldn’t compose, play, and sing “She Loves You” (yeah, yeah, yeah) and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” They didn’t even have hands, and they seldom, if ever, took part in witty press conferences after disembarking from privately chartered jets.

They were beetling at a deficit.

Once the Fab Four conquered America with their mythical Ed Sullivan Show appearance, bug beetles were the second creatures the masses thought of when they heard that particular word, if they thought of a second creature at all.

That’s how it works, even with landmark movies. As hard as it may be to grasp for millions of people today, I’m ripened enough to recall when there was no such thing as a Star Wars!

Before the summer of 1977, when someone uttered the phrase “star wars,” which they never did, you wouldn’t think of anything at all, unless you conjured groups of luminous plasma spheroids accumulating weaponry, breaking off into opposing groups, and shooting at each other.

What kind of shit would you have to be smoking to think of that?!

Or, perhaps a tad more realistically due to the participation of human beings, you might envision famous Hollywood actors accumulating weaponry, breaking off into opposing groups (maybe MGM vs. Warner Bros.), and shooting at each other. But even then you’d have to have a pretty spirited imagination.

The words “star wars,” then, didn’t mean a thing until there was Star Wars. There was no C-3PO, no R2-D2, no Darth Vader, and no Luke, Han, or Leia, either. There was no Greedo to shoot first, second, or never. There was also no Alderaan going kaboom, no structurally flawed Death Star, no light sabers, and no cantina scene.

“The Force” just meant a bunch of fucking cops.

The first time I ever heard of Star Wars, my family was up in Cleveland visiting relatives. We were at my grandmother’s house.

She handed me the May 30, 1977 issue of Time magazine with Israeli leader Menachem Begin on the cover. “Here, Paulie,” she said. “I saved this because I know you like movies. I thought you might want to look at this article.”

Contained within was a big, photo-filled feature about an upcoming sci-fi film called Star Wars that was written and directed by George Lucas, who was the whiz kid behind the mega-successful 1973 nostalgia comedy American Graffiti.

I was a big fan of American Graffiti’s oldies-filled soundtrack album but hadn’t watched the movie yet, although I knew what it was about. I didn’t see it in the theater, and it had never been broadcast on network TV. And, just as there were no Star Wars pictures in those days, there were no home video cassettes!

Even without having seen his previous work, though, I could tell that Lucas had created an entirely different beast with Star Wars. To my 14-year-old mind, it seemed like an entirely different beast from everything ever filmed!

I can remember being both fascinated and deeply puzzled by the beat-up look of the world the Star Wars characters inhabited, since every sci-fi movie before then featured immaculate surfaces and what appeared to be straight out of the box, pristine technology.

This image was included in the magazine article. It’s hard to explain how disorienting it was at the time. The story was supposedly set in outer space, but there were clouds in the sky, and this guy, whoever he was, didn’t require a helmet or an oxygen tank to breathe. And he was actually driving a used space vehicle! That heap looked like some redneck’s El Camino.

Since when?!

Previous sci-fi films were all buffed and polished and ready to go!

HAL the computer wasn’t asking Dave or Frank to download an updated operating system, and Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still—seen above, having just realized he locked his keys in the house—didn’t look like he’d been serial-dinged with a monkey wrench.

It was also pretty difficult for me to follow exactly what Star Wars was supposed to be about via the contents of the article. I kept getting thrown off by all the weird names, for one thing.

Who or what was an Obi-Wan Kenobi? How do you even say that?! And Time kept referring to...wait a minute…Artoo Detoo and Threepio?! Was that a misprint? There were actually characters in this movie called Artoo Detoo and Threepio??!! Really??!!

I had to see it.

And, as you well know by this point, so did everybody else in America. Most of them had to see it more than once, as well as eat its pudding packs, suck its lollipops, don its t-shirts, sleep on its bedsheets, carry its lunchboxes...

...and even buy this R2-D2 necklace that I still have in its original box! I got it at the mall somewhere.

They drew the line, though, at watching its holiday special.

I valiantly and quite proficiently hauled in fly balls for my Pony League baseball team in 1977 and had been picked as a member of the All-Star team that year; we’d soon be competing against other squads from towns all over North Alabama. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal now, I know, but at the time it was a major thing for me, because I was a kid, and what the hell else did I have to worry about?

Well…movies, that’s what.

I was way more interested in movies than I was in baseball, and one day my big sister Dianne volunteered to haul me, my brother Jim, and my sister Christine down the mountain to Huntsville in her dirty green Maverick with 8-tracks spread around the floorboard to see this new Star Wars movie everybody was carrying on about.

So, at the risk of my very existence, because I knew if my coach found out I was skipping practice to go see a movie, he would have literally murdered me, I danced en pointe and pirouetted like Baryshnikov down the gravel driveway to that beckoning green Maverick.

Then we popped in a tape (let’s say it was Carole King’s Tapestry) and gunned it north on Highway 231 to get in on the fun.

It was a hot June day in Alabama, my friends. The kind of hot where if you’re wearing cutoffs, the backs of your thighs stick to the car seat the way the cheese on a Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza sticks to the roof of your mouth.

I remember the theater’s air conditioner was cranked up high, so it was extra cold when we grabbed our seats. But during the movie’s now-famous opening scroll, I forgot all about the climate!

And then this…

I know you’ve seen the following clip before, probably more than a few times, but try to rid your mind of those memories. Re-enjoy this, then we’ll discuss.

Imagine sitting there watching this sequence before these characters were known the world over, with nothing outside of 2001: A Space Odyssey ever having special effects that were this overwhelming (I had also read about 2001, but had not yet seen it. I doubt more than a handful of other kids in the theater had seen it, either.)

Understand, there was no concept of a “special effects picture” at this point. I know nowadays you get glistening CGI stuffed into every available orifice when you watch most movies, but this was a thoroughly newfangled, honestly staggering thing to see!

Regardless of what Kinsey said, size mattered here.

Watching that Imperial Star Destroyer slowly reveal its full bad-ass self to the audience on a giant screen is one of my favorite movie-going memories. Top five, easily. You just couldn’t believe what you were seeing, and the still new Dolby stereo system, coupled with John Williams’ spot-on mutated Holst score, made for a mind-blowing experience.

Plus, there was major weirdness going on. You don’t think it’s weird now, of course, but it sure was back then.

First of all, the rebel forces look like terrified school teachers. I suppose many real-life rebels actually have been terrified school teachers, but I was a youngster and expected, you know, an army to be doing this kind of thing, not a bunch of wimps who should be grading your civics test!

This guy looks like Steve McQueen’s dad!

And what about these crazy bastards?! What the hell was this??!

When the Stormtroopers first came stumbling through that smoking doorway, everyone in the theater burst out laughing! It was all just so damn wacky!

I’m not saying the audience should have been shuddering with fear, but come on! There was no precedent for what we were looking at! Were they robots? Good guys? Bad guys? Was this supposed to be taken seriously?!

Who the hell knew?

Then here comes Vader with his padded shoulders and heavy breathing, like a demonic Joan Crawford about to get down on her kid with a wire coat hanger. If the rebels reminded me of school teachers, Vader was the comically mean principal!

And now, nearly fifty years later?

People have credit cards with Darth Vader on them. Lucas, it appears, was onto something. His current estimated net worth is $5.5-billion.

I don’t think I need a Darth Vader Visa card, as my commitment to the teachings of Star Wars has waned considerably over time. I couldn’t care less, for insatance, about Baby Yoda. But the second biggest box office draw of 1977 was Smokey & the Bandit.

If Visa were to come out with a Sheriff Buford T. Justice model, I’d apply for that sumbitch!