Here’s a cool way to celebrate May the 4th, the global party that’s taking place today for that long time ago in that galaxy far, far away. Of course, I am talking about Star Wars, cultural sensation of the cinema and the sci-fi adventure/action genre. A progenitor of so much culture which shaped Hollywood distribution, marketing, merchandising, and direction of story narrative. A film with an an overall embryonic sense of making a certain kind of movie which defined the term “blockbuster,” something which seems to be churned out like an assembly line today, as film after film gets produced with actors donned in non-humanistic costumes and thrust in front of a green screen with all the CGI polish, spit, and grit it can muster in successfully manifesting the final product. It all starts with Star Wars, but unlike a lot of the films it spawned and inspired, Star Wars remains the class act in the deck of cards, the joker of the chess set, the ultimate, all time popcorn classic.

And to help celebrate today, affectionately known by the legend “May the 4th” (as in “May the 4th Be With You”), are some early, rare interviews with two of the films major stars, Academy Award-winning (for the wonderful The Bridge on the River Kwai) Alec Guinness and still at-the-time looking to make his mark in Hollywood, Harrison Ford. Watch the video interviews from 1977 here below.

The two actors are filmed in separate interviews, Guinness on the staple for decades British talk show Parkinson’s (heads up, there’s some blurriness during the video, but it doesn’t affect the overall maximum impact one iota) and Ford in an interview replete with a clapboard opening and of good quality, both men waxing and reflecting about the film, which in essence was still in the theaters at the time both interviews were conducted in 1977.

It’s interesting to view these clips, because they are in a sort of zeitgeist when that first Star Wars movie just bolted out of the starting gate; it was the first generation having and experiencing the first wave of the phenomenon, something which became almost daily rituals years later when the film entered the pantheon of becoming the absolute time-honored classic that it is. This was during a time when the adoration was still paint-splattered fresh, when the direction of how the pop cultural fabric was to take the film and the whole civilization that exists in so many forms of entertainment medium separate from the film still making its own roads. These interviews are a great window into the phenomenon that is Star Wars, that has such force that will be with us, always.

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