How About Some STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER to ‘Force’ a Smile?

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
“May the Force Be With You” on this tiny blue planet cheers (almost) everyone up a little, right? Okay, it is a movie franchise with messaging and marvelous deployment of LucasFilm magic, but it is also a 42-year-old series that many of us grew up with and enjoy. The newest iteration is STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, and it opens wide on Dec. 20 from Disney.

In case you forgot how this whole shebang got started in 1977, with STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE, which was only titled STAR WARS back then, here’s a reminder. It was released by Twentieth Century Fox back then, and had a voice-over that sounds very unaware of the culture-changing phenom it would become.

Can you remember the order of characters, as they appeared on screen?*

Here are some images and the newest trailer to pick up your day in the swirl of bad real news lately.

Get your own images from https://www.starwars.com/databank – on the download. (All your images are belong to us, lol?)

How The Force Got Started, A Proto Version?

George Lucas is a great writer, which is evident even from THX1138 back in the day. It all started in the future, when Lucas co-wrote this oddity with Walter Murch, among others. A look-back at the 1971 trailer is eerie, because THX 1138 is the name of a citizen in a totalitarian society, a police state. Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola, produced this movie, that stars Donald Pleasence and Robert Duvall. It is chillingly, and thrillingly, prescient, perhaps? Never mind. Just enjoy the weirdness, the stilted dialogue, the beginning.

*(Hint: it all starts with some robots, a guy in all black, and Carrie Fisher, who is hiding on the ship, then shot in the back… who departed this planet in real life on Dec. 27, 2016. Fisher will have an Ad Astra Anniversary a week before this new release on Dec. 20, so… May the franchise be with her.)

# # #