A Boy, A Girl, and a Humanoid

You should probably just click here and watch the orignal Star Wars trailer before reading this story.

I'm pretty sure we saw this preview (as we called trailers in those days) on the front of the movie Silver Streak. SS came out in December of '76 but could have lingered in theaters for months because that happened back then (and of course Star Wars would ride out its stay for more than a year). The trailer's a total mess but it was immediately apparent from the footage that there was something special going on here.

Shortly afterwards my sister DCD, me, and four other neighborhood kids were hanging out in Reggie Mason's yard up the street. In a one-time-only democratic move, we decided let each kid pick a game to play for a while, going in order of descending age. The games might be things like Hide and Seek or something based on a TV show. I probably picked Space: 1999, as that was pretty popular with us.

Anyway, DCD was last because she was five and a half and her friend Tracy claimed to be five and three quarters. When we got to her, she said she wanted to play Star Wars. In that irritatingly smug way other kids sometimes have, Tracy's older brother Ray pointed out that nobody knew how to play Star Wars because only my sister and I had seen the preview. So my sister's sitting on the steps crying and I'm trying to get everybody to wing it based on what I recalled from the voiceover: that it was about a boy, a girl and a humanoid who have adventures and travel to a thousand worlds.

Well, it didn't work. We didn't play Star Wars that day. Of course the word "humanoid," which is what I thought Chewbacca was being called, is actually the word "universe" in the trailer. And I believe Tracy was actually the youngest in the group, although I doubt that would've mattered.

A little while later my whole family and Ray went to see Star Wars in the only theater that was showing it, some out-of-the-way brick building I couldn't find again in a million years. On the way out we saw people lined up around the block to see the next showing. I don't know if we had ever seen lines like that for a movie, but it made perfect sense. We would be running around in our yards playing Star Wars for many, many days to come.