As big and sprawling - and for the decades of time involved - that it's all managed to hang together at all is quite a feat. This thing became bigger than anyone could've possibly ever expected/dreamed heading into spring 1977.
I sometimes like to imagine/think about various "what if" scenarios (had certain public figures never been assassinated, had Pearl Harbor never been attacked, had some junior high classmate beaten Adolf Hitler on the playground to such a degree that he was a brain-damaged pussy for the remainder of his life and just painted in a rented basement somewhere until dying of tuberculosis at 27 (I put a long tail on that kite, didn't I?
), had the Mercury program had a half-dozen major failures/deaths on the launchpad and the whole U.S. space program was abandoned, had the Beatles never gotten out of the clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg, had MTV and the whole idea of "music videos" never taken off, etc.). All these things that shaped/defined the world (or significant parts of it, anyway), that we just kinda take for granted and that we just can't imagine not having happened/existing.
And one of those things I sometimes go to is "what if
Star Wars had totally bombed in 1977, and was just seen as some sort of pop culture punchline all these decades?", as is the case with so many movies. Imagine all that wouldn't be, all that sprung from that...including the careers of dozens, if not hundreds, of people, the theme park presence, the toys/merchandising, the catchphrases and shared shorthand we all know, the other eight movies and all other media, etc.
For the type of movie it was, and with all the snags they encountered while making it, this could've
easily been a gigantic flop and been out of theaters within weeks...and the only people even talking about it, four decades later, would be hipster standup comics and diehard cosplayers in their "obscure" Darth Vader and Jawa costumes at various conventions (where
Logan's Run and
Space: 1999 might've been the huge, SW-level franchises that everyone latched onto instead).
Everything just happened to go right.
I remember the night I first saw it with my parents and sister. I loved it, but they were all kinda laughing about it in the car on the way home. "Why are they doing that?", I still remember thinking. "Am I wrong/weird for liking it so much?" I managed to see it in the theater three more times throughout the summer. It's all my buddies and I talked about, all summer and on into the school year. We had no toys to play with, of course, during that period (the infamous "oops...we weren't prepared for this on the licensing/merchandising front", which they seem to have made up for since).
But man, there was indeed that amazing period between spring/summer 1977 and Christmas 1978 (by which time the toys were out in full force - no pun) that was just so fun. As the toys began to roll out in 1978, my buddy and I would coordinate with our parents and grandparents on the two gift-giving holidays (Christmas and our birthdays, both of which took place for both of us between December 25 and January 26, so every year until 1981 or so was a month-long orgy of SW goodness), ensuring that we both got different, non-overlapping toys, so that, when we went to each other's houses on the weekends or to spend the night, we had the widest array of toydom possible...I had the Cantina, Death Star, Droid Factory, Landspeeder, he had the TIE Fighter, X-wing and other things I didn't have, plus the Death Star (which we would combined into an even larger Death Star playset (two elevators, two cannons up top, two trash compactors down below, etc.), and I think we both wound up with the Kenner Millennium Falcon, but that was the only real overlap. And we both had various figures, and we actually sought out multiple Stormtroopers, Death Star commanders, Jawas, etc. so there would be 3-4 of those types of figures so things were more movie like (there's never just one stormtrooper in a scene, right?). This was all by design/planning. And when we brought it all together, holy smokes...it was beautiful. A toy catalog come to life.