“I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing:” ECU Students Debate the Success of the Original Star Wars Film
May The Fourth Be With You!
When George Lucas’s original Star Wars, retroactively titled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, premiered in limited theaters on May 25, 1977, few could have imagined the cultural impact of this film, and the resulting multimedia franchise would have on our society. As we commemorate Star Wars Day, Joyner Library Special Collections offers a look back at this humorous debate related to a review of the original Star Wars film printed in the campus newspaper, the Fountainhead.
The July 3, 1977 edition of the Fountainhead’s “Cinema Trends” section described the recently released Star Wars film as one in which the plot was “threadbare at best” and that there was “simply no acting being done.” In fact, the author of the review claimed that the only “impressive part of this film is the modeling,” adding that the “replicas of space machinery and certain characterizations are imaginative.” In the end, the author claimed that the film left much to be desired and gave it only a one-star review.
Unsurprisingly, this negative review of the critically acclaimed film drew the attention of students who had enjoyed the space drama. In a forum letter published in the July 27, 1977 edition of the Fountainhead, Linda Friedlander, a graduate student at ECU, wrote that the initial published review of Star Wars was so “unjustifiably negative that a second and more favorable opinion is needed.” According to Friedlander’s letter, the success of the film did not come from “its plot, characterization, or profound meaning” but rather from how it provided viewers a fun and exciting “escape from the harsh realities of everyday living.” She went on to write that a film such as Star Wars should not be “tossed off lightly simply because it lacks intellectual depth” and that it “definitely merits four stars.”
As these two writeups from the Fountainhead show, fans of the Star Wars franchise have always been ready and willing to defend these iconic and beloved films.