Buried Treasures: Star Wars Screen Superstars 1977

Star Wars Screen Superstars (1977)

Karen: I was sorting through some boxes in our garage recently and came across some old magazines I've been carting around with me for decades now. I thought it might be fun to take some of them out and give them a look, and share them with you. Back in the days before we learned everything the moment it happened, before Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, news traveled so much more slowly. As fans of what was then a minor and much maligned genre -science fiction - we jumped upon any morsel we could find. Those typically came from magazines. So I'm inaugurating a new feature, Buried Treasures, which will look at some of those goodies from the past. We won't be limited to just magazines, but they'll certainly have the lion's share of the spotlight.

Karen: There was a wonderful period of time in the mid to late 70s when there were just tons of science fiction film magazines on the stands. Starlog was probably the most prominent. The Star Trek Giant Poster Book magazine was another one I always picked up when I saw it. There was also Cinefantastique, which always seemed so serious.  But there were a lot of one-shot sort of magazines that would spring up for different films -and Star Wars probably bred more of these periodicals than any other. 

Karen: Today I'm going to look at one of these one-shots. It's called (I think) Star Wars Screen Superstar, and it was published in 1977 by Paradise Press. The writers include Jonathon Green, Doug Murray, and Allan Asherman, who has written books and articles on Star Trek. I suppose he was checking the new kid on the block out. Artists for this magazine include Dave Gibbons -I assume it's THAT Dave Gibbons - and Geoffrey Mandel, who is known for many contributions to Star Trek, from his fan days and the Enterprise Manual, up to becoming a production designer for the shows. The magazine is 62 pages long and is filled throughout with color photos, and many double-page spreads, some of which I will try to reproduce here, although my scanner bed can't quite fit the entire picture. I really read the heck out of this magazine when I first got it. I was hungry for anything on Star Wars back then (our little town didn't actually get the film for almost two months after it came out!) and I would read and re-read everything I had on Luke, the droids, and Vader.

Karen: I suspect that Mandel is responsible for the "Technical Readout" on the inside of the cover, which shows C-3PO and R2-D2 with detailed descriptions of all their mechanisms. I've printed it here for you to pore over. These are the kinds of things I would stare at as a kid and the information would be burned into my brain cells far more intently than anything I was looking at in my text books!

Karen: The magazine itself is broken down into four parts: a section on the making of the movie, another on the worlds of Star Wars, the third on the special effects, and the last on the cast and crew. The 'making of' part covers the difficulties George Lucas and crew faced in getting Star Wars off the ground. Although it seems like Star Wars fans have heard every story there is to hear a million times already, there were a few tidbits here and there that caught my attention. The article says that only one full scale x-wing and y-wing fighter were built -all the rest seen in the hangar shots are cardboard cut-outs. Could this be right? I suppose with it impossible to see the original Star Wars any more (Disney may change this soon, thankfully) it's hard to know if this is accurate. Another paragraph mentions Lucas' annoyance with the work habits of the British crew, which meant always ending the work day at 5:30 - of course, Lucas was under the gun and desperate to get the film completed. At the end of the article, when it recounts the films success, it claims that Lucas took his earnings and bought a $500,000 Lear jet, and had the interior redecorated to look like the Millenium Falcon. Could this be true? I never heard that before.

The next article, "The World of Star Wars," recounts much of the film, informed by interviews with Lucas and others, and perhaps, the novelization? It's fun to read some of this now, with a far different perspective -what was true then has become changed after so many years and those unnecessary prequels. We are told that the Republic has been taken over by Senator Palpatine, who has installed the Sith Lords and their high priest, Darth Vader, in the place of the Jedi. Unfortunately we never get any real sense of the Sith Lords in the original films, or the idea that Vader is a "High Priest" -the closest we get is the throwaway line from the unfortunate naval officer about his "Sorcerer's ways."   The author goes on to describe how the Star Wars ships "Looked right, in terms of say 'Star Trek' space technology" (what else did he have to compare it to?), and describes R2-D2 as "a technological wonder that is as common and everyday in the world of Star Wars as a pocket calculator is today." Does that take you back friends? But archaic tech aside, the author does well by discussing how very different the Star Wars robots, or droids, are compared to their cinema predecessors. There's no evidence of any of Asimov's Laws of Robotics at play here, and indeed, these droids are at least (if not more so) emotive as their human counterparts. The writer does a fine job throughout the article relating the movie back to its film and literary roots, without belittling it, which has become more common as time has passed. The article captures the feeling of elation and anticipation that Star Wars created when it first appeared, with the audiences hungry for more. It ushered in an era of sci fi films, many of which were crap, but there were also a lot of gems. After years of starving for science fiction and fantasy on the big screen, we would finally get our fill.

The third article is all about the special effects, and I hate to say it, but I skimmed over it. I just didn't need to know all the details, and I've seen a number of specials over the years that have shown the SFX wizardry on the films. Familiar names like John Dykstra, Dennis Muren, Richard Edlund, Stuart Freeborn, Rick Baker, and so on, all get their due here. 

The final section, "Who's Who in Star Wars," goes over the cast and some of the production crew. Each major actor is given a bio. It's amusing to read Harrison Ford's. Remember, this is 1977: "Of all his roles, there is no doubt that the one more remembered so far is his portrayal of Bob Faya -the tough-guy street racer in that smash-hit evocation of high-school fun and games: 'American Grafitti.'" After 37 years, does anyone even think of that role when they think of Ford? It's probably either Han Solo or Indiana Jones, then Blade Runner, then maybe the Fugitive, Witness, etc...There's a quote from George Lucas that I found very interesting, because I wonder if he would say it today: "I wasted four years of my life cruising like the kids in 'American Grafitti' and now I'm on an intergalactic dream of heroism. In 'Star Wars' I'm telling the story of me. It's my fantasy."