50 for ’76: Early Star Wars Promotions (Part I)

Danny writes:

 While next year, 2027, is the 50th anniversary of Star Wars in theaters, 2026 is the 50th anniversary of when the promotion of Star Wars really kicked off. This is part one of a multipart series about Star Wars promotions before the initial release. 

American Graffiti was released in the Summer of 1973 and was an immediate smash hit. People were obviously very interested in what George Lucas would work on next. George was interviewed in several film magazines in 1973 and 1974 where he was asked about his next movie and each time he would reply with a variation of “Star Wars is a science fiction movie that’s a cross between 2001, Flash Gordon and James Bond.” Notably, these articles don’t show any concept art or talk about any of the characters. I don’t think the general public knew about these interviews as they were in relatively obscure magazines aimed at people involved in the moviemaking industry. In fact as I track down these issues, very often the title of George's new movie isn’t even mentioned! 

Filmmakers Newsletter, March 1974

That would all change in 1975 when Lucas would be interviewed by more mainstream magazines. First, he was in an article of Esquire about the new era of Hollywood including other greats such as Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, De Niro, and finally the writing team of husband and wife Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. In case you don’t know about the Huycks, in addition to writing American Graffiti, they were instrumental in script polishing Star Wars including cleaning up the cantina scenes and peppering the whole movie with quippy dialog. At the end of George’s segment: 

"Lucas' current project is The Star Wars, 'the first multimillion-dollar Flash Gordon kind of movie with The Magnificent Seven thrown in. But I’m also sneaking in a bit of Triumph of the Will, just so a point is made.'"

But the best thing about this article is the photo of George and his dog. There is no caption or mention of the dog’s name; but we know this is Indiana. The Alaskan Malamute who sat in the front seat of the car like a huge furry co-pilot and was the inspiration for not just Chewbacca, but also the namesake of Indiana Jones. 

A man and his dog. Photographed by Anthony Edgeworth. Esquire Feb. 1975

It wasn’t until a December 22, 1975 article in Newsweek titled "Science Fiction: The Great Escape" that the general public would have its first image of Star Wars. In that six page article covering the rise of science fiction movies, Star Wars gets only half a paragraph:  

"Less intellectual perhaps will be 'The Star Wars,' a $9 million movie about a juvenile gang rumble against Fascist oppressors of the galaxy. Its director, George Lucas, who made 'American Graffiti' and the futuristic 'THX-1138' doesn't care if it's called science fiction or not. 'A shoot-em-up with ray guns' is his description. 'A romantic fantasy about as serious as a spaghetti western. A sword and sorcery film.'"

The rest of the paragraph talks about Steven Spielberg's upcoming movie Close Encounters of The Third Kind and how that will soon be considered "The Jaws of Science Fiction movies." The bulk of the article discusses TV shows and novels over the past ten years, such as Star Trek, Space:1999, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dune.  

Behind the title of the article is our first public visualization of Star Wars: a black and white Ralph McQuarrie painting of a TIE Fighter pursuing Y-Wings flying towards a planet. This painting is the second version of the artwork. The first version had an early rendition of the strut covered Death Star instead of a planet. The image in the magazine gives us a glimpse of what Star Wars would be but with the low resolution of the magazine, it is hard to make out the details. This would be fixed in later publications. 

In January 1976, 20th Century-Fox held an event called "26 for 76" where they touted the 26 films they planned to release in theaters in 1976. The event was to convince theater owners to book them to help finance the films in production. Star Wars originally had a December 1976 release date so it was the 26th movie on the list.

There are a surprising number of collectibles from this event including posters, magazine ads, pencils, notebooks and of course the brochure touting all 26 movies. 

The poster was printed in two sizes and are extremely rare: a one sheet which was 27x41 inches and a larger 40x60 poster. Both were printed in silver ink with a black background similar to how the Star Wars advance posters would later be printed. 

Pete Vilmur has previously written about the "26 for 76" Poster in the Archive Database.

It should be noted that the posters don’t mention Star Wars at all and only feature the "26 for 76" logo.  The ads in Variety and Box Office magazines do a better job and include the titles of all 26 movies (including Star Wars) but are also just text, no visuals.  

Lucky attendees received a binder emblazoned with the 20th Century logo all around, an exclusive "26 for 76" pencil and notepad for taking notes and the brochure listing all 26 movies. The Star Wars page reused the same McQuarrie art as the Newsweek article but it has been altered. The Y-wings and the stars in space were painted over with black and white highlights. This technique is called enhanced contrast and it was used to make things more visible on lower resolution black and white print formats like newspapers. Note that the Star Wars title used in this publication is in a font not used elsewhere and predates the Dan Perri and Suzy Rice logos that were used in 1977.

There is another interesting piece of art that I don’t think made it to production. This is a full color version of the same McQuarrie TIE Fighter painting pasted onto a board with a hand painted overlay saying Star Wars in the same font as the version used in the "26 for 76" booklet. This came from the collection of Bill Wallen who was involved with making early promotion and advertising campaigns for the film. I believe this mockup was an alternative concept for the "26 for 76" booklet that was not used because the brochure ended up being a black and white lower resolution book.  

Star Wars-specific campaign brochures sent to theaters in 1977 used later versions of the logo and used actual stills from the movie. The fact that this mockup is purely concept artwork and that the Star Wars title font matches the one used in the "26 for 76" brochure both imply it was created before filming started around the same time as "26 for 76." 

Finally, later promotions at the end of 1976 and in 1977 that use this McQuarrie TIE Fighter artwork use the third and final version that replaces the Y-Wings with the Millennium Falcon and change the planet back to the Death Star. However, unlike the first version that had struts covering the poles, this is the smooth Death Star we see in the movie.

Factors 1977 internal documents of the final version of TIE Fighter art with the Falcon and Death Star.  Also shown is the original negative. This is the version that is used in promotions after "26 for 76."

The next six months are mostly silent in terms of promotion as Star Wars enters production. Principal photography doesn’t wrap until late June/early July. Part II of this series will cover the summer conventions...stay tuned!

P.S. If you like this topic, check out Pete Vilmur's classic Archive Special Feature on pre-release items.

Star Wars Food Ads

Gus writes:

 Vintage food collectors will often comment on the extreme scarcity of food packaging that they're able to find years later. While many saved highly-publicized Star Wars food premiums that were advertised with purchase of food items, few thought to save the actual packaging. As a result, there are still to this day many rare, one-of-a-kind and unknown-to-still-exist Star Wars food items. As collectors, one way we are able to learn what was made is through these ads in magazines, newspapers and comics from the period. 

KP Outer Spacers was a corned-based snack food which the British call "crisps" and Americans correctly call "chips." These snacks were shaped like spaceships, so it was well suited as a Star Wars promotion. This started in early 1978 shortly after the release of Star Wars in the United Kingdom and offered a mail away Star Wars "Fighter Kite," made by the British toy company, Palitoy. The offer required kids to send in 3 wrappers and 95p to receive a kite, reducing the number of intact bags saved to this day. The promotion appeared on three different flavors of KP Outer Spacers: beef burger, chutney and pickled onion.

The KP Outer Spacers promotion was advertised in various Star Wars comics such as the March 4, 1989 issue of 2000 AD (a British science fiction comic) and in the Marvel Star Wars Weekly comic from February 29, 1978. Marvel's Star Wars comic, which was a monthly series in the United States, was published in a weekly series in Britain.

KP Outer Spacers bags are next to impossible to find, but here's an example of a bag of chutney flavoured [sic] chips with the Star Wars Fighter Kite offer details. This is also a rare example of a food promotion where even the premium is super difficult to come by!

Nabisco launched the first cereal promotion in Britain on boxes of Shreddies cereal. In this case, the premium is the packaging, as each box contained a small sheet of Letraset stickers of Star Wars characters that could be affixed onto the back of 4 different Star Wars scenes on the box backs.

The Shreddies offer was promoted in various UK comics such as the June 17, 1978 issue of Tiger and the May 24, 1978 issue of Star Wars Weekly. 

The Shreddies offer appeared on 10 ounce and 15 ounce boxes of Shreddies cereal, so with 4 different scenes on the box backs, there are 8 different Shreddies Star Wars boxes to collect!

Coca Cola ran a massive campaign in Japan for the release of the first Star Wars film. Jonathan McElwain wrote an extensive blog article on the Star Wars Coca Cola promotion in Japan that I'd highly recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about this fascinating Coca Cola promotion. One of the places where this was advertised was in the July 2, 1978 issue of Weekly Shōnen, a weekly manga comic that is popular in Japan.

Each Coca Cola product brand (Coca Cola, Fanta Orange, Fanta Grape, Fanta Apple, Sprite, Fanta Club Soda and Fanta Golden Grape) had 50 different bottle caps. Bottles were also sold in six packs with two different six pack trays: one with C-3PO, Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi, and another with the Escape pod.

Some American Star Wars collectors might be surprised to learn that there was a Nestlé's Quik Star Wars food tie-in. Well, not exactly. Nestlé, which offered Star Wars jewelry mail away premiums on wrappers of their candy bars, also did a newspaper campaign for Kenner toys, which included the Star Wars large size action figures and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter vehicles. Unlike other Quik food promotions, as far as I know, this promotion never reached the actual Quik cans, but here is an image of a similar Quik can for a toy promotion from 13 years earlier for a British boy band using a can label design that has remained largely unchanged over those years.

Kraft brought Letraset stickers back for The Empire Strikes Back in a Dairylea cheese promotion in the United Kingdom. There were four different Dairylea cheese spread boxes, each containing a different black and white Star Wars scene on the back of the container. Kids could find a small sheet of Letraset stickers inside the box that could be used to add characters and objects to the scene. This was advertised in the Marvel adaptation for The Empire Strikes Back in the Star Wars Weekly issue for May 29, 1980. Kids could also mail away for an Empire Strikes Back "bumper transfer pack" that contained additional Letraset stickers. This Marvel issue also included a small Letraset sheet for this Kraft Dairylea series.

Kraft would later go on to do another Dairylea cheese promotion for the Droids and Ewoks cartoons in the mid 1980s with different characters appearing on cheese wedges.

For Return of the Jedi, Amora offered Star Wars glasses in jars of Dijon mustard in France. This promotion was advertised in the Franco-Belgian comic, Spirou. 

There were four different Star Wars glasses to collect: Chewbacca and Ewok, "Dark Vador" and Troopers, "Luc" and Dark Vader, and Luc and Yoda. 

The Hi-C promotion for Return of the Jedi included a mail away offer for Return of the Jedi t-shirts and caps. This was advertised in newspapers and directly on drink labels. Kids could send 3 quality seal labels from any Hi-C drink plus $3.99 or $3.25 for the t-shirt or hat, respectively.

Labels and intact Hi-C cans are surprisingly difficult to track down. Even though the small rectangular quality seal was the only portion of the label that needed to mailed in, even partial labels were not often saved. This Return of the Jedi promotion appeared on 11 different flavors of Hi-C drinks. Looking at the three labels above, only the orange and grape drinks state "All Natural Flavors," which tells you everything you need to know about Fruit Punch.

Possibly the most obscure food promotion from the vintage years was conducted by Doriana in Argentina. Over many years, Doriana has created collectible margarine containers for popular comic characters, superheroes, Disney characters, sports figures and more. The concept is illustrated in this ad where kids are encouraged to cut out the character on the container lid along with a small plastic strip underneath it to make a stand. Needless to say, this tended to cause many of the container lids to be destroyed.

Here are two examples of fully intact Doriana margarine lids for "Wicket the Ewok" and "Imperial Scout." The Imperial Scout (or Biker Scout) also includes the original Doriana margarine container.  

One of the last Return of the Jedi food promotions occurred in Finland from 1984-1985 for Star Wars themed licorice and fruit candy, as indicated by the dates of these comic book covers. The back covers of these comics had full color ads where kids could mail away for 1 of 5 different flavors of these Star Wars candy boxes.

Here's an example of one of the Halva licorice boxes. All the candy boxes featured Darth Vader on the front with 9 different images of Star Wars characters and spaceship card art on the back.

One of the most elusive food promos occurred in Sweden in 1984 for Hemglass ice cream. Hemglass "Star Mint" and "Big Star" popsicles could be bought from local ice cream vendors driving around the neighborhood in Hemglass trucks as depicted in the lower right hand corner of this ad in an issue of The Phantom comic. To date, I have never found nor have seen any packaging related to this food promotion, so it's fair to call it a Phantom Menace.

A little known cereal tie-in in 1985 appeared on covers of the Marvel's Return of the Jedi weekly comic in the UK. As was standard in the day, toy premiums would occasionally get attached to the covers of these comics, literally taped onto the front. Two of the promotions were for Kellogg's Corn Flakes, one in March 1985 for dinosaur 3D cards, and another in August 1985 for plastic plane models. Obviously, these premiums had nothing to do with Star Wars, but their placement on the Return of the Jedi made them canon! 

Demonstration Not for Sale

Danny writes:

 Early into the COVID-19 pandemic when we were all in lockdown, I was able to acquire this Star Wars vinyl soundtrack that is stamped “Demonstration Not for Sale.” 

In addition to the DEMO stamp on the outside, the inner contents are complete and include the sleeved records, inserts, and the folded poster with artwork by John Berkey featuring the infamous 4 Millennium Falcons. But the best thing about this item was that the inside of the album was hand signed by John Williams with a nice vintage signature!

Normally, demos or promotional copies of music albums would be sent to broadcasters to help promote not yet released music. I had never heard of a demo for a movie soundtrack that didn’t have tracks intended to be played on the radio. I was able to trace the provenance of this particular record through the previous owners back to Gary Kurtz, producer for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. This record was bought from Gary along with a bunch of cast and crew memorabilia, but with my limited knowledge of cast and crew collectibles, I hadn’t heard of soundtracks being given out to the cast and crew before. Furthermore, nothing turned up in any online or forum searches. Over the years, a few of these records have popped up at various auction houses and the auction descriptions have never said where they came from or if they were known cast and crew items. Each one was also signed by John Williams. While each signature is very similar, the placement and lettering are all slightly different -- a good indication that they were personally hand signed one at a time.

Why did this item exist? There are several of them out there so it wasn’t a lucky fan getting John Williams to sign something at a concert.

A few years later, I stumbled upon a post of a person who went to the Highland Hall Waldorf School during the Original Trilogy era. This was the private school that both Gary Kurtz and Harrison Ford sent their kids to in the '70s and '80s (you may also know that the Kurtz children played Jawas in Star Wars and later were background extras for Echo Base and Cloud City to make the sets appear deeper using forced perspective). In that post, the person mentioned that they saw Star Wars as part of a school function before it was in theaters. More digging turned up similar posts from other students who mentioned going to a benefit screening and a dinner with some of the cast and crew, including Gary Kurtz, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.  

I was able to chat with another former student who went to this benefit screening. She showed me some of the items that she and her sister were given from that screening including buttons, patches, the demo album and a Star Wars Exhibitor Brochure. Her sister’s brochure box was even signed and inscribed by Mark Hamill! I asked her to check her demo album to see if it was signed by John Williams and it was! I don’t think she ever opened it before and didn't know it was autographed.

As a collector of Star Wars theatrical memorabilia, I have a few screening tickets to the original movies, including some for Highland Hall. There were two screenings as a Benefit Fundraiser for Highland Hall on May 21, 1977 -- four days before the official release of the movie on May 25th. The earlier screening at 1pm was intended to be more kid friendly while the later 8pm screening was more for adults “followed by Dining and Dancing and Meeting the Stars from the film with Johnny Williams conducting excerpts from his Film Score.”

Example of invitation inside original envelope with small McQuarrie sticker on outside (recipient address redacted)

Comparison of 1pm and 8pm invitations. The 1pm invitation uses a large McQuarrie sticker cut down to fit onto card.

Comparison of 1pm and 8pm invitation text

These screening invitations occasionally pop up for sale, but they are usually incomplete, especially missing their RSVP cards as those would have been filled out and returned to the school. However, in 2024 I was able to finally complete my invitation set by getting the RSVP cards. The 1pm and 8pm invitation RSVP cards have slightly different wording and prices because of the dinner and bus transportation arrangements, but both contain “for this special commitment [you] will...receive an autographed album...”

Unused RSVP still in return envelope

Close up of RSVP text mentioning the autographed album

So this signed John Williams soundtrack was given out as the first official SWAG to kids at a benefit fundraiser for the Highland Hall Waldorf School before the movie was even in theaters. The album was probably stamped DEMO to denote that it was to be given away and to prevent re-sale later. Gary Kurtz must have had a few left over after the screenings and sold them to collectors later.  

How cool it must have been to see Star Wars before anyone else in the country and to know that your fellow classmates and their parents helped make the movie!