Geekiest. Kippah. Ever.

Whatever it’s called, it’s cute.

Actually, I guess I do. If you were eleven years old in 1977, I suppose you were hit pretty hard by the whole star wars thing.

I remember, in 1977, you could still smoke cigarettes in movie theatres. As smart-assed college student film buffs we’d go, once a week and enjoy the animation festivals, the quirky dramas and sci fi features, and mainstream films where the Hollywood bosses had obviously surrendered all creative control to the directors, because the endings were always sad, or at least not “triumphant”

I remember we’d just seen “Silent Running” with Bruce Dern, and we were blowing smoke rings in the theatre, and then we saw previews for a new sci fi film, something called “star wars” but it seemed different, more old fashioned, a throwback to the old Flash Gordon serial things, with the corny music and heroic, non-ironic figures.

The part where the little robot falls over on its side got a chuckle from the (mostly stoned) audience. “This looks interesting, we’ll have to check it out,” we said. So we did, and it was a total parody of all the corny sci fi serials from the ’40s and ’50s, but we enjoyed it. Little did we know an entire generation of eleven year olds would worship it and idolize it into the 21st century. I mean, it wasn’t THAT great.

After that, movies changed. The studios decided that every film had to be a blockbuster, and have toys attached to it, and rousing music. No more Dog Day Afternoons or The Conversation. No more Silent Runnings even. It was all Lucas and Spielberg and big flashy budgets. Reagan came in and used the “evil empire” quote.

Years later, in the 90s, I took my kids to see the “digitally remastered” star wars sagas (I fell asleep during the empire strikes back) and I heard some college students saying how the dialogue was corny, but “what do you expect, it was 1977″ and I wanted to tell them “we knew the dialogue was corny back then, we weren’t simple, there were some rather complex films back then, but they were crowded out by the star wars saga,” but I was too tired by then.