The hottest toy in America at Christmas 1977 was a cardboard envelope with nothing in it. Kenner, the toy company that had licensed Star Wars, had been caught so flat-footed by the film's success that it had no action figures to sell, so it shipped an "Early Bird Certificate Package": a decorated envelope containing a certificate redeemable, months later, for the first four figures — Luke, Leia, Chewbacca and Artoo — plus stickers and a display stand. Parents queued to buy a promise. Nothing better captures how completely everyone had misjudged George Lucas's space picture.
Almost nobody had believed in it. Universal and United Artists had passed on the project; at Twentieth Century-Fox, it survived largely because of one executive, Alan Ladd Jr., who championed Lucas after American Graffiti and defended the strange, expensive fairy tale to a sceptical board. The shoot in Tunisia and at Elstree in England was miserable: droids broke down in the desert, rain fell on the sand dunes, the British crew was bemused, and Harrison Ford delivered the era's most quoted piece of set criticism, telling Lucas words to the effect that "you can type this stuff, George, but you sure can't say it." An early cut screened for Lucas's filmmaker friends landed badly with most of them — though Steven Spielberg, famously, predicted it would be enormous. Fox's own expectations were low enough that exhibitors had to be strong-armed: cinemas that wanted the studio's hotly anticipated melodrama The Other Side of Midnight were pushed to book the space film too. It is one of Hollywood's great jokes that the leverage ran in that direction.
The deal of the century
Lucas, meanwhile, had made what looks in hindsight like the shrewdest trade in entertainment history. After American Graffiti became a hit, he was entitled to a substantially larger directing fee for his next film. Instead of taking the extra money up front, he negotiated to keep something Fox considered nearly worthless: rights over sequels, and the merchandising. Film merchandise in 1977 meant a few posters and novelisations; no one imagined a toy line outliving the film. Those retained rights became the foundation of Lucasfilm's independence, funding the sequels Lucas controlled and eventually underpinning a merchandising empire whose lifetime revenues are measured in the tens of billions — comfortably more than the films' own box office. Alec Guinness, who privately grumbled about the dialogue while playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, took a percentage of the profits rather than relying on his fee, and the "fairy-tale rubbish", as he called it in a letter, made him wealthy for life.
Star Wars opened on 25 May 1977 in only around three dozen North American cinemas — fewer than forty screens, because so few had wanted it. The queues began that week and did not stop. Fox's share price surged over the summer as the film expanded cinema by cinema; it overtook Jaws to become the highest-grossing film of all time, a crown it wore until E.T. in 1982. At the 1978 Academy Awards it won six competitive Oscars — in craft categories including editing, visual effects, and John Williams's score — plus a special achievement award for its sound effects, though Best Picture went to Annie Hall.
The empire after
The aftershocks rearranged the industry. Studios that had regarded science fiction as B-movie territory began chasing effects-driven "event" films; Industrial Light & Magic, the effects house Lucas founded because no adequate one existed, became a business in its own right; and merchandising clauses were never carelessly given away again. Kenner's delayed figures duly arrived in 1978 and sold in the hundreds of millions over the following years, establishing the 3.75-inch action figure as an industry standard. Even the film's name changed under the weight of its success: the opening crawl's subtitle "Episode IV — A New Hope" was only added for the 1981 re-release, retro-fitting a saga onto what had been, in 1977, a one-shot gamble titled simply Star Wars.
The nobody-believed-it story has, inevitably, grown a little legend around it — Lucas did believe, at least in the toys and the sequels, or he would not have traded cash for them. But the empty Early Bird box remains the perfect artefact of that Christmas: proof that the only people who truly saw Star Wars coming were the children already saving shelf space for it.
Quiz nuggets
- Unable to make toys in time, Kenner sold an "Early Bird Certificate Package" for Christmas 1977 — an empty package redeemable for figures of Luke, Leia, Chewbacca and R2-D2 in 1978.
- George Lucas gave up a larger directing fee to retain sequel and merchandising rights, which Fox considered nearly worthless.
- Star Wars opened on 25 May 1977 on only around three dozen North American screens.
- Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, negotiated a share of the profits despite privately dismissing the script in letters.
- The subtitle "Episode IV — A New Hope" was only added to the opening crawl for the film's 1981 re-release.