I have family members who were ages 14-27 at the time and distinctly remember things that were only added or tweaked in later releases.
I know some one who swears to high holy god it premiered in December. And argued the new release dates were a return to tradition.
And here’s the thing. It did. Where he lived.
That movie seems to have had a uniquely weird. Staged release. There were multiple regular re-releases. A couple different versions. Extended theater stays. And the system of repatory and drive in theaters at the time seems to have kept at least one of The Star Wars running, somewhere until pretty late in the 80s
So what I’ve found is that when people who were alive for it. And old enough to be cognizant. And definitely saw the main release. And when they try to remember details of the first time they saw it? Often enough those details reveal something that had to be from a later release.
It was out there enough and long enough. And everyone saw it so often that a lot of it tends to blend together.
It’s far more confused the closer you get to my age. For us Star Wars was sort of just always persistently there. Like I said I saw Jedi before I was old enough to walk with any sort of pinache. And the VHS release was pervasive by the time I was old enough to operate one. I can’t recall anything about the first time I saw any of them. I just remember seeing them all in sequence constantly as a child.
