1977

Well the responses are starting to pour in about the decision to see the 6 Star Wars in chronological order, and the mailbag has some interesting stuff. Don’t forget you can also post your comments right here on the blog. One person emailed me and suggested having Access Hollywood or Entertainment Weekly do a story about the adventures of the person who had never seen the movies and was writing a blog about seeing them… There have even been some doubts about my claim that I have never seen any of the six films! One person even asked…. What were you doing in 1977?

Well let me tell you, from my perspective it was a perfectly normal year. At the time, I was going into 7th grade and dreading a longer school day which meant I couldn’t get home in time for my daily game show fix. I always made it a point to get home in time to see Match Game ‘77. In my mind, I thought everyone was doing this. But then again, maybe I was wrong. At the time, I was hearing that Match Game would be introducing “The Star Wheel” a gimmick that would give a player the chance to double his money, but the twist was you couldn’t take the easy way by picking Richard Dawson who had a Nostradamus-like (or maybe Kreskinesque?) knack for always getting the right answer.

Now the star wheel was coming and my 12 year old brain was starting to worry! Would Goodson Todman Productions come out fiscally ahead by doubling the prize winnings? How would the odds work of getting a double vs. just picking Richard? Too bad Marilyn vos Savant didn’t have her Parade column back then. And how would this affect the budget for the show? With my elementary school math education I started to draw charts and graphs to try to figure out the odds. And my parents weren’t really too cooperative. Whenever I went to them for some help on this one.. it was the same ol’ “Shouldn’t you be practicing for your bar mitzvah?”

Speaking of 1977 last wknd, my lovely wife was in her friend‘s wedding party. Would you believe that both the bride and groom were born in….. 1977? Boy it makes me feel old that my wife has friends who are that young! Then I started to wonder….did these young whippersnappers ever see Star Wars? During the rehearsal dinner, I was chatting it up with some of the bridesmaids, who were also born in 1977, and based on my informal poll, ALL of them had seen the original movie, and thought I was some kind of pointdexter for never having seen any of them. (I actually had figured the odds differently which might explain why I was never a financial analyst for Goodson-Todman)

I’m so old, I was born the night Hogan’s Heroes premiered on CBS. I think it was on in the delivery room as I arrived here. My earliest memories go very far back. As I recall there was a man in white saying “It’s a boy” while on the background TV I heard a German accented voice bellowing “Hooooooooogan” The show starred the late Bob Crane as Hogan and had a character named Newkirk played by…. Richard Dawson. If you saw the movie Auto Focus, you found out a lot of inside scoop about the goings on behind the scenes and the crazy shenanigans that got Bob Crane in deep trouble and eventually led to his murder. It also didn’t seem like Richard and Bob were the best of friends.

Now years later, its interesting to note that both Bob’s son and Richard’s son have had a bizarre feud of their own. When Auto Focus came out they were blasting each other on their respective websites. Richard‘s son Mark has a bulletin board on yahoo groups where he claims to be a friend of the late John Carpenter. What makes that even stranger is that Mark Dawson served as a consultant for Auto Focus… yet the movie strongly implies that Carpenter killed Crane by smacking him with a tripod,. (Carpenter was acquitted at his trial and later died.)

Personally, I’m not too happy about the idea that the younger Dawson rips into Scotty Crane. Granted Crane has a very odd website that pays tribute to his father in some very unusual ways. But doesn’t Mark Dawson have anything better to do with his time than rip into Bob Crane‘s poor son? I mean Bob Crane was brutally murdered, while Mark’s dad went on to have a lucrative career as a game show panelist and host, and he achieved movie immortality by playing the cruel game show host Damon Killian in The Running Man in one of the most amazing acting performances I have ever seen…By the way, in their review of that movie, Newsweek said Damon Killian was the best movie villain since………….Darth Vader!

Ok… time to pop in the dvd….. Did you know beta tape technology was first introduced in 1977?