Emmett and I have this problem when we discuss Star Wars, every time I talk about "the first Star Wars blah blah blah" and he rejoinders, "You mean the fourth one?"

Oh God, B. and I have so many misunderstandings (~arguments) about this. It's the FIRST film and it is called STAR WARS; deal with it, kid!

But then I do quote B. a lot in my film history lectures with reference to the amount of money Lucas is still making (and, to be fair, the durability of his storytelling), and also the new ways of watching movies on DVD. For a purist like me, who always likes to watch films in one sitting and even has trouble taking a pee break at home, his approach is really something. Whenever it gets too scary or too boring, he zooms. He's through Star Wars in about 45 minutes. The other day I come up to find him whizzing through a scene in "Jedi". I asked him what was going on. "Oh it's really boring. Yoda just dies".

I am absolutely certain that when I saw Star Wars, the Episode IV stuff WAS in the crawl, because all around me the audience was going "huh?". But this was in Scotland in early 1978, so certainly not an original release print.

Edit: this leads me to a related rant, which is about Lucas rewriting history (which he can do because he kept the negative rights). How scary is it that the original versions of all three original films all but disappeared. Han shot first!

Were we supposed to know that?

I thought so. But maybe the only people who know are those who saw it when it opened?

I saw it when it opened. But then I was 6 or 7, so it probably didn't register with me at all.

Seriously, though? Is that another common-knowledge thing that I've made it to almost 40 without knowing? It's like I live half in a cave.

I don't remember Episode IV stuff from the original run in the theater. But pretty early on, it became common knowledge that there were going to be 9 movies, and Star Wars was going to be the fourth.

I remember that Time did a big cover article on Star Wars and Lucas either when they announced that Empire was going to be made or when Empire was released (can't remember which), and that's when I first heard about the whole "Episode IV" thing, as well as Lucas's original 9-film planned saga. It was only after that that Lucas changed the title card for Star Wars.

I remember getting to arguments about the IV thing and hey, I was only 8 when I saw the movie, but I was pretty sure it wasn't there.

I refuse to call the first movie A New Hope. It is Star Wars. Anything else is subtitle in my world.

Also - which movie was it where they had released posters with a slightly different title which had to be pulled when they decided to change the name. It is in my brain somewhere but my brain is refusing to share with me.

Also - which movie was it where they had released posters with a slightly different title which had to be pulled when they decided to change the name. It is in my brain somewhere but my brain is refusing to share with me.

Are you thinking of The Revenge of the Jedi / The Return of the Jedi?

Lucas says the "revenge" was to fool the pirates or something, but I don't think that's true.

That is it tommy. A friend of mine had gotten one of the "wrong" posters. I'm sure it is quite the collector's item now. I wonder if he kept it.

I was nine or ten when it came out, and I don't even remember how many times I saw it during the first run, and to the best of my recollection Fred Pete and Kathy are totally right -- it wasn't in the original crawl, but the Big Huge Arc plan became common knowledge pretty soon after the first (the REAL ACTUAL first, dammit) movie.

The mom of a friend of mine in high school worked for ILM way back when, and he was very proud to run around school showing off all his cool extra-advance Revenge of the Jedi swag. When the title change was announced, I asked him if he was bummed that the t-shirt he was wearing that very day was now wrong, and he said, "Dude, I was waiting for the bus this morning and some guy offered me fifty bucks for this shirt."