Star Wars Has Come! of Yukito's room

Star Wars.That's the movie George Lucas created.
Even young generations who don't know the frenzy at the time of release or people who are not interested in this kind of movies would agree that Star Wars had brought SFX a great progress, heavily changed the Hollywood studios' business style, and affected various genres beyond movies, including TV anime GUNDAM.

It was spring of my fifth grade of the elementary school that I got to know for the first time about Star Wars, which was introduced in the opening color feature of Shonen Magazine.
Probably because its release in Japan had not yet been confirmed officially, the Japanese title used in the feature was directly translated as "Seikan Daisensou" (which I am not sure, though). The small and indistinct still photographs made my young heart beat so fast.
" This is what I've wanted to watch!" The shout of intuition struck my mind like lightning.

It might require background briefing.

Even before Star Wars, SF films have existed, of course. The genre also had many masterpieces, such as War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, Planet of the Apes and Westworld. The Japanese movies such as the Godzilla series might be included in this genre.
However, when it comes to the spacecraft in movies, "the silver rockets blasting fire" were common in those days, at least in Japan. And their viewpoints had never escaped from the localism of the earth at that time. I could say the films like War of the Worlds, Planet of the Apes and Westworld are just a variety of panic movies or survival ones, though even children can enjoy them. (One exception is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made about 20 years ago from Star Wars. It contained real spacecrafts unlike rockets and the viewpoint free from the earth localism, but at that time, I didn't know it existed. Besides, it's hard to be said that story appeals to juvenile minds.)

The situation was more serious in Japanese movie industry. The films that contained subjects such as spacecrafts, robots and aliens were made light of as things for children. So they had made easily kid stuff with such low quality that even kids got angry with.

In this way, the concept of Star Wars was completely beyond the common sense of the existing movies of those days.

The media such as TV news in Japan soon reported the smashing success in the U.S.A., its release in Japan was also confirmed, and Star Wars fever among both adults and children had spread all over Japan.

On beaches in the summer of that year, my younger brother and I were absorbed in collecting the scenes from Star Wars printed on the backside of the caps for Coca-Cola's bottles.
I also collected mini polypropylene dolls for giveaways of sweets. I bought a pocketbook with the photograph of a stormtrooper riding over a dinosaur, too. I also wanted plastic models of Millennium Falcon and a Darth Vader's helmet, but they were too expensive to buy. I collected any information about Star Wars.

In the summer of 1978, at last the movie was released in Japan.

However, there wasn't a movie theater in my neighborhood. I didn't know how to take a train, either.
I made my father promise to take me to a movie theater during the summer vacation, but the promise was never fulfilled. Even now, I still bear him a grudge over that matter.

After all, I had not been able to watch Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope until I was a high school student, when the film dubbed in Japanese screened as revival.

If I expressed my deep emotion when I had experienced Star Wars that time, it would go like this;
"In the U.S.A., there exist the adults who never make a fool of the subject which could be regard as kid stuff but film it in good earnest!"

This deep emotion soon shifted to a simple dream, which was that I would like to make a movie, too.