Imaginary Worlds - 1977

Episode Date: November 4, 2015

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire... Before those words crawled up movie screen screen in May 1977, what did people think the future was going to look like? What did pop culture sound like on the eve of Star Wars? This is Episode I in a V part series on how Star Wars changed the way we imagine the world. With Kurt Andersen of Studio 360, Annalee Newitz of io9 and Gizmodo, Alyssa Rosenberg of the Washington Post, and Chris Taylor, author of "How Star Wars Conquered the Universe." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now.

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. There are stories about what happened.

It's true. All of it. It's almost here. But I'm actually surprised how many people still don't know that The Force Awakens is a continuation of the original trilogy with Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford. I mean, seriously, I've talked to a lot of people, and not geeks, but like, you know, civilians, who actually think it's another prequel or that it's set like a hundred years later. And I'm like, hello, did you not see Harrison Ford? But we know it's coming. Like, hello, did you not see Harrison Ford?

But we know it's coming. Not just episode seven, but episode eight, episode nine, Rogue One, the Han Solo prequel, the rumored Boba Fett prequel, the Max Rebo band behind the music rockumentary, the police procedural set on Tatooine. Actually, I'm sure you guys can come up with funnier jokes than that. Seriously, put them on the Imaginary World's Facebook page. I want to read them. It's funny. Lucas and the fans and Disney have worked so hard to place that original film in this epic, sprawling context with games and comics and novels.

But I want to try something. So, you know, there's a sort of whole genre of film, sort of inspired by the novel From Here to Eternity, which looks at sort of what America was like on the eve of Pearl Harbor. What were our hopes and dreams? What did we think the world was going to be like before it completely changed? This is not a one-to-one analogy of like Pearl Harbor to Star Wars, but I kind of want to do that now. What was the world like on the eve of Star Wars? What do we think the future should look like? What did the world sound like? What do we think was cool?

So you might be thinking, actually, I think I've heard this before. It was the late 70s. America was feeling beaten down and demoralized. We had a massive hangover from Watergate and Vietnam. We were craving something uplifting to feel good about ourselves. And that is true. Oh, my God. 1977 was so depressing. Chris Taylor wrote a book called How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. I spent a lot of time reading the newspapers of that month, May 77.

It's like, you know, the Nixon-Frost interviews were on TV. What did Haldeman tell you during the 18 and a half minute gap? Haldeman was a very good note taker. You know, there was news about large quantities of Agent Orange being dumped into the Pacific. I mean, it was just dismal. I mean, this is how depressing 1977 was. The only glimmer of hope was our new president, Jimmy Carter.

At the time, he was making speeches from the Oval Office, telling us that we're running out of oil. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices. The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. And when I look back at the pop culture of 1977, the first thing that struck me was that it was all trying to be uplifting. They were all like fantasies of escaping, to sort of leap off the ground.

But it just seems like people couldn't really imagine leaping very far. I mean, the big real-life hero of the time was Evel Knievel, who could leap over cars with a motorcycle. He puts his life on the line with every death-defying jump. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. He puts his life on the line with every death-defying jump. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. This $6 million man also had leaping abilities. And very often the entire episode would build up to the big moment where he would jump over a fence.

John Travolta's superpower was moving across a dance floor in a dingy Brooklyn neighborhood. For teenagers in the 70s, kids who lamented the fact that they were too young to have really lived it up in the 60s, sex, drugs, and rock and roll were the coolest things in the world. But if you're a rock fan, a disco fan, Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were the coolest things in the world. But if you're a rock fan, a disco fan, one thing is pretty clear in 1977. Science fiction is nowhere near the center of coolness.

It was getting respect, though. Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, they're all in their prime, proving that science fiction is not just kid stuff. It could really explore urgent existential fears at the time. The science fiction that had been popular, at least in books, in the early 1970s, a lot of it was set on Earth in the near future. It was a lot of political dystopias. Annalee Newitz, the co-founder of the site IO9, is now the editor of Gizmodo.

I mean, even Doctor Who, which is a show where you can travel through space and time, like, the Doctor got stuck on Earth in the 1970s, and all he got to do was just hang around on Earth and do a bunch of boring stuff with UNIT. Whatever it is I'm suffering from seems to thrive on intellectual activity. Non-thinking is the only way to shake it off i can't stay mindless for eternity logan five you were assigned to find a place called sanctuary the previous year you had

logan's run there is no sanctuary that was that was the big science fiction movie of 1976. And Logan's Run, you look at it today, it's like, you know, on the one hand, they're being way too serious about the whole concept behind it. And on the other hand, they're wearing these ridiculous silver jumpsuits. You gotta tell them Soylent Green is people! You had Soylent Green, you had The Omega Man, and also in 1977, you know, expected to be a bigger movie than Star Wars was Damnation Alley. If you've never heard of this movie and I hadn't, you've got to watch the trailer.

It's amazing. This is a major studio movie. Like somebody actually walked in to a movie studio exec and said, babe, I got a hot idea. This is going to be a blockbuster. Everything man remembers is gone. Everything he has achieved is forgotten. It's about five people who survive a nuclear war, and they spend the whole movie battling giant cockroaches. And the mutations of nature gone wild. And yet there it was, released in October

1977 by 20th Century Fox. And they had much more of their hopes in this movie. That they gave almost exactly the same budget as Star Wars 2. And it's basically depressing stuff. Meanwhile, if you're at a movie theater in March or April of 1977,

you might have seen this preview. Somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now. 20th Century Fox and George Lucas, the man who brought you American graffiti, now bring you an adventure unlike anything on your planet. Star Wars. Here they come. Notice, they're not using John Williams music. In fact, it's kind of the weirdest bait-and-switch ad campaign ever. This very sweet, simple, good-versus-ev evil movie is masking itself as a weird dystopian

thriller. It's a big, sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance. But George Lucas knew what he was doing. Star Wars was, in fact, the first movie that came to Comic-Con in San Diego. At the time, it was smaller. It was mostly comic books. And Lucas said, you know, the first movie that came to Comic-Con in San Diego. At the time, it was smaller. It was mostly comic books. And Lucas said, you know, we're going to take the cast there. We're going to show the film there. We're going to get a grassroots movement going around this movie. And at the same time, he also kept all of the rights for product tie-ins because he knew he wanted to make toys. And as a result,

now when we look at Star Wars, we always think of the toys. But we don't remember that back in the late 70s when Lucas was putting this together, all the big toy companies passed on it. The Luke Skywalker X-Wing Pilot from the Star Wars Action Figures Collection, each sold separately. The only company that took him up, of course, was Kenner. I remember playing with the Kenner action figures before I ever saw Star Wars, making up my own stories without even knowing who the characters were. So I clearly had a sense that these toys are really interesting and things that I wanted,

and like nothing else I'd ever seen. And when you see the Star Wars movie at participating theaters, you get Kenner's cash refund booklet. In fact, my parents had seen Star Wars over the summer because there was so much hype around it. And they asked my older brother to go see it to make sure it wasn't too scary for me. He thought I might be scared when Darth Vader shows up,

but he figured I'd probably be okay after that. So for my birthday, we all had dinner on top of the Prudential Center, which still has this amazing panoramic view of all of Boston and Cambridge. Then we went down to the theater across the street. My mind was a blank slate. Unfortunately, my mother has a really strange habit of not really quite being able to follow movie plots. And at the very end, she whispered in my ear that Princess Leia was about to decide who she was going to marry. And she ends up putting a medal on Luke and Han Solo. And I was totally confused.

I was like, OK, I guess that's how things work in space. I guess that's how things work in space. But I wanted to talk to somebody who was an adult in 1977 and was heavily steeped in pop culture at the time. I didn't have to look very far. Here's my boss, Kurt Anderson, host of Studio 360. I saw it, in fact, before it opened because I had my first job, which was being jack of all trades for the movie critic Gene Shalit, who was on the Today Show. So it was a great job because I got to go to screenings. So I saw it before it opened and everybody applauded.

And I was blown away by how great this was, as was my girlfriend, wife-to-be. And then I was entirely aware in the world of, you know, fellow young journalists and so forth that there was enormous anticipation. Now, some critics dismiss Star Wars as a Western in space. Actually, I know, Star Trek fans, I'd still call it that. But Kurt never felt that way. I think we'd already been softened up. You know, even we college educated people who were supposed to,

you know, like French new wave films and did and all that, we would already been softened up not to, not to dismiss or be snobbish about pop culture. That, that was a thing that had already happened. So I, you know,

it wasn't like, Ooh, I must go see the new Truffaut. Forget this George Lucas business. All of us who had been teenagers in the late 60s and early 70s who never wanted to grow up, who were like the Lost Boys and Peter Pan, suddenly were indulged by the mass culture. Like, we can keep loving the stuff we loved as kids.

There were no movies like Star Wars that adults were supposed to see. Actually, Star Wars was technically beaten in its first week at the box office by Smokey and the Bandit. Again, here's Chris Taylor. Boy, I tell you where I am, Sheriff, there's just one thing I want to say. That's because Smokey and the Bandit was on about, I think, 1,000, 2,000 more screens than Star Wars was. Star Wars famously just opened on 32, and then expanded to 40 the next weekend.

I saw it in Newport Beach with my dad over the summer. And my dad loved cult sci-fi movies. And it was just a tiny movie at that time. Nothing was really in the media about it. Annalee knew it. It was so good that we basically, once we finished watching it, we wanted to just stay and watch it again. But the theater was too cold with air conditioning. This is Southern California. So the only reason we didn't watch

it twice in a row was because of the punishingly cold air conditioning. A lot of theaters instituted a new policy where they would kick you out after the screening, you know, ostensibly to clean the theater, but really so that you didn't sit through it three or four more times. And they'd never done that before. There was no movie that people actually wanted to sit through again and again. I mean, you know, Gone with the Wind, you know, Adjusted for Inflation, best box office of all time. You don't want to sit through it three times. So the John Williams music has often been called the oxygen of Star Wars. And it really was refreshing.

I mean, it was a total rejection of the modern sound of science fiction. Everything that was trending in the 70s. But it's almost like the 70s were like, I love this Star Wars thing. Let's bring it into our world. So there was like the disco remix by Mecco and all the variety show specials. The worst,

Donny Murray. Princess Leia, our goose is curved. The less we lift off of the star. Luke, I know you're right. We just gotta take flight. this was before they'd got a handle on the licensing and on what media was going to be allowed to do what with the star wars image and they saw a lot of these versions and a lot of these references, and they just thought, whoa, this is way too tacky. So Lucas began this unusually tight crackdown to take control of the images and sounds of Star Wars, which were spreading through the culture like nothing else before.

He did not want the culture to change or appropriate his work. The culture would have to bend towards his sensibilities. I mean, of course Star Wars was going to be popular, even trendsetting. But why did it dig so deeply into people's consciousness? Well, the first thing you often hear is that Star Wars gave birth to the Hollywood blockbuster franchise. But Jaws had already done that in 1975. So it was the special effects, right? I mean, there's been tons of documentaries about all the unorthodox ways they created those iconic sounds and images.

But that kind of stuff dates quickly. I mean, if it were just the special effects, Star Wars would be remembered as being, quote, ahead of its time. Another thing you'll often hear is that Star Wars put an end to the era of smart, dystopian sci-fi. And after that, all we got were dumb rip-offs, battles between good and evil, nothing more. But I saw a lot of those Star Wars rip-offs. They were terrible, and they're totally forgotten by history.

The good sci-fi got even more dystopian, with better special effects and better fashions. Alien, Blade Runner, Terminator, The Matrix. It seems like nobody else but Lucas and Spielberg were able to combine that sense of optimism and fantasy. But Kurt had a really interesting theory. And I thought this at the time, even, this idea of the force was so appealing at this moment when, in this post-60s way, what was just then starting to be called New Age and belief

in, you know, channeling the spirit and the energies and the mystical ancient blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. This was the religion that embodied that perfectly. Well, Kurt's obviously pretty jaded about New Age sensibilities, but he's from Omaha. People in Nebraska weren't into that kind of stuff. Or so we thought. And my mother, who was a rationalist and an atheist and not religious, in the early mid-70s, there was this big bestselling book about talking to your plants. And she bought that book and I think she talked to her plants. I mean, my mother did not believe in crystal therapy or anything like that. But as people started to believe in all that stuff, why not believe in the force?

I mean, you know, it was a perfect new ecumenical religion because it is perfectly translatable to every religious culture, and therefore many of its billions of dollars of tickets sold were not in Christian nations. And Lucas actually says that he got the idea of the Force from an independent, a small, short, independent movie in the 60s. Again, Chris Taylor. 2187 was the title. And it was just sort of bits of dialogue and pictures stitched together.

In communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force or something behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us. And they call it God or they you know depending on on their particular disposition to the question the earlier versions the movies interesting he sort of goes back and forth on how much he's going to say about the force perhaps with a little help from the producer gary kurtz who'd done his degree in comparative religion uh He, you know, Gary says he helped George boil it down to just the basic, you know, just tell us in a very short space of time what the Force is. So that's why the description of the Force that Obi-Wan gives to Luke in the first film

is just 28 words long. The Force is what gives the Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. And I think it's become both something that people take seriously, but also something that people use as a joke. Annalee Newitz. For example, in Australia and the UK, there was a movement in 2000 to get people to declare themselves as Jedi religion on the census. And it was so successful that in England, at least,

2% of Manchester declared themselves Jedi. So you had a significant minority of Jedi. In fact, there were more people identifying throughout the UK as Jedi than there were people identifying as Jewish. Alyssa Rosenberg writes about pop culture for the Washington Post, and she thinks that kind of spirituality was the essential ingredient missing from George Lucas's own Star Wars prequels. Lucas changed the rules of the game and introduced this idea that the Force wasn't something mystical you could tap into. People who were strong with the force were actually born with a very high level of midichlorians in their blood. It makes this concept that felt malleable and applicable to a lot of people in a lot of circumstances too concrete. It saps some of

the power away from it. That idea really kind of gives us a sense of purpose, which is what I think people were yearning for in 1977. Star Wars was an antidote to apathy. It's not just a matter of the battle between light and dark, but between getting people who are in that sort of apathetic middle to join up with one side or another and to feel a genuine commitment and connection. And I think that this is something that transcends decades or cultural moments, is that it made me feel like I could be someone special, that any of us could be something special. Alyssa felt that way the first time she saw the movie as a kid in the mid-90s.

I just fell into this world, and it was like having a fever. I think my parents thought I was completely round the bend. I wore grooves in those VHS tapes. I just watched them constantly. Star Wars just feels alive to people, and it feels alive even given the advances in special effects, even given the clums special effects, even given the clumsiness of the remastering, even given sort of the damage to the universe that was done by

the prequels. Those movies just live. That's it for this week, but I'm not done. Not by a long shot. And I'm talking bullseyeing a Womp route with my T-16 in Beggar's Canyon. This is the start of a five-part series on imaginary worlds that will look at all the different ways Star Wars has buried itself into our minds and changed our collective imagination. Special thanks to Kurt Anderson, Chris Taylor, Alyssa Rosenberg, Annalie Newitz. You'll be hearing from them in later episodes. Also, thanks to Rob, the engineer who was taping Annalie in San Francisco, who chimed in to let us know that he is a full-fledged Jedi on the UK census. Well, no, I mean, the reason I guess that it happened was that, you know, people said,

if enough people do this, then it will become an official religion in the UK. And I'm not a particularly religious person and I thought it'd be kind of amusing. So that's kind of why I did it. You don't practice regularly? Not so much anymore. I'm getting too old. But you did when you were younger. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was pretty good at lifting things out of ponds. May the force be with you, brother.

Seriously, I actually want to hear all your ideas of the awful ways that Disney could just continue to exploit Star Wars forever and ever. So leave those comments on the Imaginary World's Facebook page. Also tweet at E. Malinsky. And if you're psyched about this series, tweet it, share it, tumble it, create a hologram and stick it into an R2 unit. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org C3PO, you're next! I certainly don't

know, but this is our big ending! Oh, alright. Oh, wow. Lucky I once saw the Fred Astaire film. Okay, that was really wonderful. Okay, Luke, you're next. Panoply.