1977 ...and Elvis
I remember seeing a poster in the theater for the upcoming star wars, it was winter, so probably January or February 1977. We were standing in line for whatever unforgettable movie, and I was drawn by that poster.
I mentioned to someone "this movie (star wars) is going to be different. It's going to change everything." I don't know what compelled me to say that, I knew nothing of it until I saw that poster. Such is the force of advertising.
The best sci fi in the whole star wars franchise is a quick, throw away scene in the first movie, in the huge crawler of the sand people, when the scene pans across the collection of robots they have absconded with.
If you have the movie, look at that scene, and pause it to see the variety of the hardware. The suggestion is that people will build robots that resemble themselves.
There's a c3po type of robot that looks like a bee, and talks in a buzzing fashion. There's clunky r2-style units, and other unique forms. The one that hit me like a ton of bricks is a humanoid robot that has red chevrons on it's chest. It appears deactivated, but the look on it's "face" is clearly insanity. It's scary, and well done as a prop.
There's even a demonstration of a self preservation program in the robots, when the main door opens so the sand people can sell robots, several appear to panic and run from the door.
All in all, those few seconds, there are actually 2 brief scenes of these robots, blew me away like no other sci fi before. There was so much to think about; the cultures that would develop such robots, the fact that diverse cultures would separately develop robots of a universally common basic design, that there's a culture of insane people out there that fashioned a familiar face on their robots, a face that would make me drop everything and run like he11 the other way...
One question, Jay: would any of this effected the death of Elvis in August 1977?
