I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary — but not too scary — villains. (See also Potter, Harry, modern kids and.) I’m sure I must’ve seen a few movies on the big screen before then — I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits — but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater…
Wait. Stop.

I’m not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn’t have been much different than a lot of other people’s. We were all kids, we’d never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case — I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.

We were all there, weren’t we? And those of you who weren’t have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.

But here’s the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn’t actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don’t recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.

This wasn’t unusual for me. I was a sensitive, overly imaginative child, prone to wicked nightmares based on images I saw on television. I remember a particularly horrible one inspired by a 1950s “Big Bug” movie called Tarantula, wherein an experiment gone wrong causes a spider to grow to the size of your average elementary school. I’ve seen Tarantula since then and couldn’t believe it frightened me so badly as a child — the special effects were phony even by the standards of the ’50s — but I know I woke up screaming the night after I first saw it.

The commercials for Close Encounters of the Third Kind got to me, too. In those, the camera rushed down a dark highway toward a hill that had a brilliant light glowing on the other side, and I remember that I absolutely did not want to know what was making that light, because, you know, bright lights on the other side of the hill are bad. And scary. And this was before I’d ever even heard of Las Vegas. My parents dragged me kicking and screaming to that movie, based on word-of-mouth from some friends whose children had enjoyed it. I, of course, subsequently loved it.

Star Wars was the same way. Maybe it was Vader’s fearsome mask, or Chewbacca’s bloodcurdling roar, or the Tusken Raider shaking his gaffi stick while making unearthly hooting sounds, or maybe it was something entirely innocuous to adult eyes, something I no longer remember because it wouldn’t seem even potentially frightening to me now — but something about the TV commercials had me convinced that Star Wars was a scary movie, and I absolutely did not want to see a scary movie. Because those were bad, and if I saw one I’d have bad dreams, and that would be… well, bad.

Fortunately (or so I thought), my parents didn’t have much interest in the story of a boy, a girl, and a galaxy. Not at first, anyway. Not until midway through that summer when my mom’s cousin asked my dad if we’d seen “that wild space movie” yet. I can still recall the circumstances of that fateful conversation. My dad and me and Mom’s cousin, a big, weightlifting, would-be ladies man named Jack, were standing in our garage. The men were drinking beers and I was admiring the chrome handlebars of Jack’s motorcycle. Jack asked my dad if he’d seen the movie, and when dad said no, Jack proceeded to tell him all about this grand spectacle, this amazing thing filled with knights and ray-guns and weird monsters and lots of action. People in this show fought with swords made of light and swung across bottomless pits on ropes. And it was funny, too, Jack said. Dad was intrigued… and it wasn’t too many days after that that the Bennion family was on the freeway, headed into downtown Salt Lake on a balmy late afternoon with the westering sun chasing us through gaps in the Oquirrh mountains.

I was nervous. Mom and Dad hadn’t told me what we going to see, but I had a hunch. I kept asking Mom if it was going to be scary, and she did her best to assure me everything would be fine.

I don’t think I need to say much about how it turned out. Just like my experience with Close Encounters, all my genuine fear was in the anticipation, and it melted into wonder after about a minute of film had run through the projector. From my first glimpse of the massive Star Destroyer coasting onto the screen from above my head, I was hooked. Even the scary stuff in the film, like the smoking skeletons or the garbage-pit monster, amazed me. I wanted that movie never to end.

As soon as I got home that evening, I grabbed a pencil and a notepad and lay down on the living room floor, where I put my limited artistic abilities to the task of sketching out everything I’d just seen, from the growling TIE fighters to the squeaking “mouse” robots that scurried about the polished floors of the Death Star. I wanted to remember it all, you see, and this was in the days before home video, the days when it was very likely that you never would see a movie again once it left the theaters. I couldn’t draw worth a damn, but this was the first thing I could think of that would make the ephemeral experience I’d just had tangible, to give me something I could wrap my fingers around. I knew that what I’d seen was big, maybe the biggest thing I’d ever see, and I had to find some way of preserving those unearthly sights and sounds for future reference.

I needn’t have worried, of course. By the end of summer, the merchandising was kicking in and the sights and sounds of Star Wars were everywhere. I soon had comic books and the novel and the storybook record album, and within another year I’d have action figures and other toys, too. Best of all, I was able to replace my crude first-thought artwork with official trading cards that featured actual photographs from the movie in a small, convenient-to-carry format. Some of them even came with gum, if you could call those chips of pink, crumbly, Formica-like stuff gum.

You could buy bubblegum cards at the 7-Eleven that stood a couple blocks from my house, and once a week or so I was down there blowing my allowance on a banana Slurpee and a pack of Star Wars cards. If I remember correctly, they came seven to a pack, with a sticker — which always ended up either on the front of our old fridge or on the three-ring binder I used at school — and, of course, a stale slab of that so-called gum. (Honestly, I think the cards themselves probably had more flavor than that awful gum-like facsimile; still, I wouldn’t mind having a piece of it now, just for old times sake, or at least for its bubblegummy odor.)

The gum cards had a lot going for them — the sets were large, and there were multiple sets made, so there was a great variety of photos to be found and saved by a burgeoning collector like myself. Also, the backs of the cards were printed with trivia notes, games, and segments of photos that you could assemble like a puzzle. The gum cards were definitely a kid’s idea of cool. But my favorite Star Wars trading cards were the ones that came with loaves of Wonder Bread.

There were only twenty or so of these cards to collect, so you could more easily put together a complete set (even at the age of seven, I was a completist), and I preferred their classy black borders and sharp image quality to the often cheesy-looking gum cards. I liked the bread cards so much, in fact, that I took to carrying my collection around in my wallet. (Yes, I had a wallet at the age of seven — eight, actually, by the time I started collecting cards. My grandmother gave it to me, probably for that eighth birthday, a nice leather one with a large folding plastic thing for pictures. It was like fate bringing together the threads of my life…)

Where a grown man might whip out his wallet to show off photos of the wife and kids, I used to proudly flash my set of Star Wars Wonder Bread cards for my friends. Whenever there was some point of contention caused by our fast-fading memories of the actual movie, out came the cards to prove what the Millennium Falcon really looked like, or whether Chewie really did have blue eyes.

After a while, my mom became my co-conspirator in collecting. I’d complained about getting too many repeats of cards I already had, so she started shaking down the loaves of Wonder Bread in the store, trying to get the card to slide into one of the clear spots on the package so she could see which one it was. She carried a list in her purse of which cards I needed and would try to find loaves containing those cards. When she got home from the store, she’d remove the card from the bag before I mangled the bread trying to get to it, then I’d carefully trim the edges from the cards so they’d fit into the clear plastic windows in my wallet.

Unfortunately, a wallet is not the best environment for paper and cardboard collectibles, and my old Wonder Bread cards soon started looking pretty shabby. I didn’t care, though — I wasn’t as particular about condition when I was in elementary school. It was more important to me to just have the cards, to have a physical reminder of the movie that had so deeply affected me actually on my person at all times, like talismen. In a way, collecting was more fun back then, when I didn’t care so much about keeping things eternally nice.

I still have those bread cards, in case you’re wondering. They’re in rough shape today, scuffed and creased and faded, smeared from moisture and crooked along the edges where I thought I’d done such a good job of cutting them with the scissors. I’ve got a mint-condition set, too, which I keep in protective sleeves so I can look at them without risking my investment. But I’ll bet you can guess which set means the most to me.

My original hand-drawn mementos, sadly, have disappeared into the mists of time.