Leading up to the Storm ...

Starting in the late Summer and early Fall of 1977 I began to see television commercials for "Star Wars" and I was hooked.  "Star Wars" was like nothing that I'd ever seen before ... it wasn't a movie, no, it was liquid magic painted on your eyes with a high tech brush.

The quick images, eye candy, the music and the sounds were often caught incomplete with me hearing the commercial start in the other room, dropping everything and running to catch what I could of the commercial while I could before it ended. 

Sometimes I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and I got to see the entire commercial from start to finish.

Thirty seconds ... that's all it took to blow my seven year old mind right out of my skull.

Remember, back then there was no Internet, no Youtube, no DVR, no rewind.  TV stations were limited, the Big Three networks and a few other channels, no where near the hundreds of channels that we have today.  These early advertisement commercials played at random times during the day and night and if you missed them, well, you missed them.  If you missed them and your friends didn't, well, you'd know about it the next day at school.  Yeah, back then sometimes childhood was just bucket loads of steaming hot disappointment.  

Kids today are so spoiled ... media and information sharing has come so far in the last four decades that kids today have no idea of how hard it was way back then to find a new picture of this movie, to see a trailer again or to find out any information at all.  "Star Wars" opened in a limited number of theaters and slowly added to that as 1977 rolled on.  Big cities got "Star Wars" but smaller cities and towns had to wait so even though "Star Wars" opened in May of 1977 it wasn't until October or November of 1977 that "Star Wars" reached Hattiesburg, Mississippi, opening in the Cloverleaf Mall Twin Cinema (now long out of business).

Here are two television commercials that aired advertising "Star Wars", the first was an early promo.

"Star Wars" early promo commercial

The second commercial was run more often ...

"Star Wars" trailer

And a brace of TV spots that I remember the most ...

"Star Wars" TV spot 

Memories.