This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Like everyone in my age bracket, I have a story about where and when I first saw "Star Wars."

(And, like everyone in my age bracket, I still call it "Star Wars." If you correct me and say it's "Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope," I will conk you on the head with my cardboard-tube lightsaber.)

I grew up in a geek-friendly house — my older brothers named our cat Frodo, if that tells you anything — and I grew up on a steady diet of "Star Trek" reruns. So when I was 12, and read about this new movie, "Star Wars," in Time magazine, I knew I had to see it.

A few weeks after the movie's New York and Los Angeles opening, "Star Wars" arrived to my city, Spokane, Wash. It played at one theater, the UA Cinemas, on the other side of town from my house, about 10 miles away.

One Saturday morning, I rode a bus downtown, transferred to another bus, and arrived at the theater at least an hour before it opened. There was no line, so I sat in the June sun for the box office to open.

When the theater opened, I bought my ticket, popcorn and soda, and went into the auditorium. I don't recall what coming-attractions trailers played, because the first images of the movie — that yellow crawl of words, followed by the Imperial star destroyer that swallowed up the screen — obliterated all other thoughts.

There was so much to take in: The menace of Darth Vader, the bravado of Han Solo, the feistiness of Princess Leia, the heroic innocence of young Luke Skywalker, and the comic relief of C-3PO and R2-D2 — as well as the speedy spaceships, the frenetic dogfights and the massive spectacle of it all. I absorbed it like a sponge.

The other thing I remember is that I had ample opportunity to use the bathroom. At a reel change midway through the movie, the theater put up the intermission sign and stopped everything for 10 minutes. This, it turned out, was in the middle of the trash compactor scene.

I went back to the UA Cinema several more times that summer — though usually in groups where someone could drive. "Star Wars" played at the UA for 26 weeks, which was a record that was broken by the next movie booked there, Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," which played for 27 weeks.

One other significant thing about seeing "Star Wars" that summer: It led to the first movie review I ever wrote, for my eighth-grade journalism class that started that fall. (And you thought Jar-Jar Binks was the worst thing Lucas ever inspired.)

In recounting the details of my first "Star Wars" viewing, I can't help but feel a twinge of "back in my day" nostalgia about how much the moviegoing experience has changed in four decades. Many of those changes were brought about by the rise of the blockbuster action movie, for which "Star Wars" was the prototype.

Nobody today waits for blockbusters to come to their town, because now studios open a film at 4,000 theaters simultaneously. Theater complexes don't have just one or two screens, but a dozen or more — and a midsize city, like Spokane or Salt Lake City, will have multiplexes downtown and in the suburbs. With digital projectors, there are no reel changes, and a theater wouldn't schedule an intermission that might interfere with seating the auditorium next door. And a hit movie today might get a month or two in the first-run theaters, and would be released on DVD within six months of its theatrical release.

One thing that hasn't changed: The ability of big movies — like "Star Wars" back in 1977, or J.J. Abrams' new chapter, "The Force Awakens" on Friday — to make audiences cheer, cry, and giggle with anticipation.

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.