Q&As About 'Star Wars': Do you keep count of how many times you watch the Star Wars movies so you can say you've seen them “X” times?

-

On Quora, member Thomas Fay asks: 
Do you keep count of how many times you watch the Star Wars movies so you can say you've seen them “X” times?
Not since I bought my first (used) VHS video cassette of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope back in 1984.
Before then, when VCRs were still expensive toys that only people with lots of disposable cash could afford, most Star Wars fans of the 1977 Generation only saw the Original Trilogy in theaters - as many times as they could.
Star Wars - as the first film was originally titled before its Summer of 1981 re-release - premiered on May 25, 1977, although it didn’t hit theaters in some cities (such as Miami) till early June. 20th Century Fox was not expecting it to be a big summer hit, so it acquiesced to Lucasfilm’s request that it release the movie close to Memorial Day weekend. (Fox believed that its Summer of 1977 would be its adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight,and since its board of directors feared that “that science movie” would not be a success, it warned theater owners that they could not screen The Other Side of Midnight that August unless they agreed to screen Star Wars upon its release.)
As we all know, Star Wars succeeded way beyond the studio’s expectations, so Fox kept the movie in theaters for over a year, and fans went to see it again, again, again, and again, not just to see the movie, but to set “personal best” records and earn bragging rights in their circle of friends and acquaintances.
I was a Johnny-come-lately to Star Wars mania; I wasn’t interested in seeing the movie when it opened in Miami in the late spring of 1977 and even turned down a couple of invites to go see it with my friends that summer. I’ve never been much of a sci-fi/fantasy fan to begin with, so Star Wars and Star Trek were two franchises that I happily ignored in favor of such films like A Bridge Too Far and The Spy Who Loved Me.
Eventually, though, curiosity got the best of me, and in October of 1977, I finally went to a small, out-of-the-way movie theater in the Village Green neighborhood in Dade County, Florida and watched what became my favorite film of all time.
In those days, it was easy for me to keep track of multiple viewings, partly because I couldn’t go to as many screenings as I would have liked, and partly because I used to keep a record on one of those pocket calendars with leather bindings. Thus, each time that Star Wars (aka A New Hope) was re-released, it was significant enough for me to record on paper how many times I saw it in theaters.
Episode IV Re-release Trailer - Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope
The tally from 1977 to 1982 looks like this:
  • 2 times in 1977 (October and December)
  • 2 times in 1978 (March and April)
  • 1 time in 1979 (March)
  • 1 time in 1981
  • 2 times in 1982
The total is not impressive; I saw Star Wars in theaters 8 times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 1 more time in 1997 in its Special Edition 20th Anniversary re-release, and most recently last December, when I watched it at the Ruth Eckerd Hall in St. Petersburg, Florida when it was shown as part of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars In Concert Series.
As for the other Star Wars films, I watched The Empire Strikes Back a total of seven times in theaters between 1980 and 1997; Return of the Jedi I saw four times in 1983, once in 1985, and once more in 1997.
As for the Prequels:
I knew that I was going to eventually own them on DVD, which was just beginning to catch on as the dominant home video format, so I was happy to see each of the Prequel Trilogy films twice in theaters.
The sole exception to this was when Lucasfilm released a limited engagement of Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones in the IMAX format. So I saw that film three times in theaters.
The new Star Wars films? I’ve only watched one (The Force Awakens) more than once in theaters. Not because I hate the new films, but strictly due to financial limitations and other grown-up considerations.
I have never tried to keep track of home media viewings. It would probably require an Excel spreadsheet and a watch log, and although I’m a Star Wars fan, I’m not that obsessed!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of  11/22/63 
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’s first C.O.,
Read more

Bolero: The One Movie I Have Seen That I Wish Could Be Erased From My Memory

-
Image
If you could have 1 movie that you’ve seen in the past erased from your memory, what movie would that be and why? That’s easy.  Bolero. © 1984 Cannon Film Group Now, I have seen more than my fair share of movies that, for one reason or another, I don’t enjoy at all or once liked but have changed my mind about as I have grown older.  Me Before You  is an example of the former;  Avatar  and  Midway  are exemplars of the latter. But writer-director John Derek’s softcore porn movie disguised as an “adventure in ecstasy” is still the dumbest, most boring film I ever paid a movie ticket to go see in an actual multiplex. It’s so bad, in fact, that my friends (yes, I went with a coed group of buds from college) and I decided, collectively, that as spectacular as Bo Derek looks naked, she was way too old to play a nubile if naive girl in her 20s. The story was just a barely-there plot woven together around a series of nude scenes (including the obligatory girl-girl scene) that
Read more