(This is how George Anderson, the late drama critic of the Post-Gazette, experienced the opening of the first "Star Wars" in 1977.)

'Star Wars' a joyous space trip

By George Anderson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

"Star Wars" may be the greatest comic book movie ever made.

An exhilarating throwback to Flash Gordon and an age when science-fiction was pure heroic fantasy rather than the ponderous pessimism it has become in the nuclear age, the new 20th Century-Fox film is a joy.

Writer-director George Lucas, who mined his love of old junk rock-and-roll records into a marvelous film called "American Graffiti" has done it again. He has turned an obvious affection for old pulp fiction into a hugely entertaining film.

The movie opening today at the Showcase Cinema is distinguished by great imagination, astonishing technical wizardry and an almost child-like sense of real fun.

A preview audience erupted into spontaneous applause six times during the showing the other night, and if there's any justice left, "Star Wars" should be an absolute smash.

The plot is a distillation of every simplistic good-guys-vs.-bad-guys cliche, yet Lucas invests it with such energy that it proves fresh all over again.

He casts charming actors in mostly stereotypical roles, but even masterful performers like Alec Guinness are upstaged by two of the most heartwarming characters to appear in a movie since "Rocky" -- a gold-colored mechanical man named See Threepio, who is rather effete, talks like Roddy McDowall and hates space travel, and a squatty little robot named Artoo-Detoo, who has a computer brain, speaks in burps and beeps and tends to whine if he's scolded.

The film opens right in the midst of a chase, as if we've walked in on chapter two of a Saturday afternoon serial,  and it offers a wonderland of curious beings, bizarre sets and strange props that make Oz look as mundane as a PTA meeting.

Lucas and an army of special effects men have created their own world, "long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away."

To do so, they have concocted the best special effects I've ever seen in a movie, bar none. By comparison, even Kubrick's "2001, a Space Odyssey,'' looks like a warmup.

Lucas, of course, is not pursuing mystic profundities like Kubrick. His simple plot, depicting a civil war between rebel forces and imperial armies in outer space, is serviceable and simple.

It is the cinematic magic and the sense of joyous fun that makes "Star Wars" a very special film. Lucas makes his actors play with proper seriousness, while keeping a civil sense of humor about it all.

For example, a sequence when Guinness and young hero Mark Hamill visit a space equivalent of the waterfront saloon where the riffraff of the galaxy hang out is a hilarious interlude of little green men, bubbleheaded musicians, and, inevitably, a barroom brawl.

For contemporary flavor, there's a heroine (Carrie Fisher) who is not a damsel in distress, but a spunky, resourceful, independent woman.

So many scenes in "Star Wars" are memorable: an aerial dogfight between spaceships that is staged at a breathless pace in contrast to Kubrick's balletic slow-motion in "2001"; a desert sequence with sand people riding huge beasts that look like a cross between elephants and dinosaurs; a duel between combatants carrying laser beams instead of swords; a sudden electric moment when a spaceship jumps into the speed of light and the screen bursts into a million little white stars.

John Williams outdoes his Oscar-winning "Jaws" score with triumphantly symphonic music that avoids electronic cliches, while Gilbert Taylor and John Barry deserve medals for their photography and production design.

I realize I haven't said a great deal about what "Star Wars" is really about. There are two main reasons: 1. It doesn't matter all that much; 2. The film works best with the advantage of pure surprise.

See it. Take every kid you know and find out how much kid still lives in you.