You might imagine a lion with the sharpest, best imagination in the world, reading the best description ever written, but it still won't be up to scratch compared to actually seeing a lion hunting on TV.
You had me up until the point you said TV. (Emphasis mine.) What about real life? I think seeing a lion in a zoo provides part of the experience you wouldn't get from watching it on TV. Like a few orders of magnitude better resolution, smells, etc. Ideally, go on an African safari and see a lion on the Sarengeti yourself.
Honestly, though, different types of media (books, television, movies, pictures, illustrations, games, eyes, ears, noses, etc.) all provide different experiences. Really, you can't wave your arm and classify whole realms of experience. Some things can be experienced adequately through books. Some can be experienced adequately through television. Some through movies (larger screen, higher resolution, better sound), and yes, some things can only be adequately experienced by actually Being There(TM).
Really, though, it depends on your purpose. If I were doing research for a 3rd grade class paper, reading a small picture book on lions might be adequate. If I were writing a thesis on lion mating practices on the African plains, I may have to watch movies, read books, see them in zoos (woefully inadequate, but safe) or deity forbid, go to Africa and do the research.
Ideally, direct experience is best, but individual needs and circumstances vary greatly. Blanket statements need not apply.
Every restaurant, place of business, public park, street, and highway should have individual capsulized bullet-proof compartments for each potential person that could enter those venues, to prevent any illegal discussions or activities that may happen.
Also, those compartments should prevent RF and any other medium that can transmit potentially illegal analog or digital data.
Every compartment should have a speaker grill with a microphone that can transmit the occupants' wishes to the dictator watching all 6 billion of us so he can personally approve or disapprove every transaction that person wishes to make with every other person on the planet.
I'd have to agree with the high resolution of HDTV being contrary to porn.
My 65" HDTV shows me wayyyy too much detail at times, and it's a turn off. Stretch marks, surgery scars, acne, razor burns... it's not stuff you want to see in high definition. And for some reason the directors still love their closeups.
If you're watching DVD's on a 27" or smaller television, it's not the same as a 65" HDTV. Seriously.
Re:Keeping it simple: answer to all astroturf post
on
LokiTorrent vs. MPAA
·
· Score: 1
Considering the audience that Futurama attracts, ie, geeks for a good part, I'd say a pretty good percentage got the joke.
Personally, I think Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is just a limit of technology, not something that should be made into a Law. Just because we can't see quanta without affecting them now doesn't mean we never will.
Of course, I'm an armchair physicist -- I've read a few Hawking books and I have a subscription to Discover, but otherwise my last physics course was over 10 years ago. That kind of math is beyond my meager skills, but I can hypotenuse the hell out of a triangle!
Really, I can think of many causes that would be more worthy of donation.
Basically any cause that actually does research into curing the maladies that put kids in the hospitals (and adults) could potentially do much more good than Child's Play.
It's a fun cause, and something gamers can relate to... I just think it's a shame that all this attention is being given to something so transitory as a few toys that will break or be outdated in a few short months.
I have purchased one of these plush Cthulhu's (well, actually I received it as a birthday gift from my gf) and I can heartily recommend it. Craftsmanship is excellent. He's soft and warm and cuddly, perfect for those cold evenings reading Lovecraft by the fire.
Kyrandia wasn't really flexible enough to be called a MUD, but it was a good game. We had a contest on Amusers for the first person to solve the game... and I won. If you remember Amusers, and you remember Kyrandia, you'd probably recognize my old handle.
The funny part was they actually made standalone PC games years later based on the Kyrandia lore. Funny.
InFiNiTy CoMpLeX was awesome too. Cab the Commie, A Commie, B, Commie, etc., all singing Twist and Shout. Firing all your rockets down a hall and killing 20 NPCs and not to mention a couple people. Galactic Empire. Those were the days!
Amusers, Solaris, Crow's Nest?, Hole in the Wall, Castle Royale (kind of far out), ummm.. lots of others. But yeah, to reply to your comment, ANSI animations were cool. I used to do some ANSI graphics screens for people..
I wrote an essay and contributed it to this project years ago. It's nice to see that the project is finished, and my essay might even be included on the DVD.
A common misconception among people who don't follow the videogame release market is that "gone gold" means they've sold X copies of the videogame. Not true; "gone gold" merely means that the publishing house has declared that the game is ready to be mass duplicated and released to market.
By implying something about a game that has "gone gold" means something about people, implies that the release is equal to popularity, which in this case, is a confusing comparison to the record industry (ie, gone gold, gone platinum, etc.)
I waited months for the SA8000HD DVR to be released in my area (Fayetteville; not far from the Raleigh/Durham area in North Carolina.)
Previously, I had an SA8000 DVR (SD) and the non-DVR high def box. HD cable was useless for me at this point, because I rarely sit down and just surf for programming; I almost always have a goal in mind when I sit down in my home theater area. (65" Mitsu HDTV, Onkyo 7.1 receiver, etc.) Most of the time, that goal is watching DVDs, which my HT setup does very well.
Now that I have the HD DVR, I was able to turn the two other boxes back in, and lower my monthly charges a few dollars. I've set up a few programs to record in HD on a regular basis, but without functionality similar to the TiVo "suggestions", I often have very little HD programming to look at. However, I do have the expanded tier of HD programming, so I have at least 3 HD movie channels, which is nice, when I take the time to go through the next week's movies and schedule them to record.
As for the quality of the recordings. HD recordings look amazing, but sometimes the audio stutters, especially when it's recording at the same time I'm watching a show.
Non-HD channels can still look like shit.
For you people bitching about the gray bars; the bar color can be changed in your box's setup. However, gray is recommended by HT professionals so that your CRTs get burned for the same amount even when watching 4:3 content. That is, if you want to watch a lot of sideboxed programming, projection TV's will benefit from gray bars versus black bars.
If I decide to stay on a 4:3 channel I just switch the view format via my TV anyway. Often my brain automatically compensates and I have no issue watching the show with that ratio.
I still drool over the television 8 months after I purchased it. Definitely worth the price for me ($2800) considering the enjoyment I get out of it. It depends on how much expendable cash you have; I make decent money.
Well, when I drive, I'm concentrating on driving. The radio is always secondary. So if something happens while I'm driving that requires more attention (ie, some jackass cuts me off, I start ranting about the people who don't use their fucking turn signals, loud screeches, looking for a street sign, etc.) then the radio fades out of perception until my "available CPU" is back down to normal.
I've got a TiVo sitting unused and gathering dust since my conversion to HDTV. I just can't bear to watch SD programming on my 65" HDTV.
Now with that said, the SA8000HD isn't too bad on its own, but as the poster said, after using a TiVo, it's not quite stabbing yourself in the face; more like a little blunt trauma every time you try to search for a show, or wonder what your TiVo would have recorded based on your previous recordings.
I'd buy a $500 TiVo with support for HDTV. $600 if it included wireless network access so it would hook up to my LAN. $700 if it included a DVD burner. $800 if it had a digital cable tuner compatible with my provider.
I hate wading through programming, and I don't want to run wires all over. I'll pay to avoid that hassle.
My time is worth a lot to me, and considering I only watch maybe 30-60 minutes of television a day (Jeopardy, or an installment of some serial like Alias on DVD), wading through a programming list for an HOUR every week because the interface sucks is very irritating to me.
But, in two years, these things will exist. I won't pay that much then. I'll just be missing out on some potentially good television programming until then.
Well, I was viewing the LD rips on my computer monitor, and the quality was noticeably blurry. I've watched some DVD clips and HD DivX rips on my computer, and they weren't anywhere near that kind of quality. They must not have been the optimal versions I've heard discussed in this thread.
I am currently downloading the ones mentioned by someone else elsewhere in the thread, so we'll see how that goes. In 2d6h41m.
All of those things you quote about Star Wars is true, however the big difference I think between Hop-along Cassidy and Star Wars was marketing.
Was there ever before as huge a marketing campaign and number of product tie-ins as seen with Star Wars? Fast food merchandise (posters, toys, etc.), watches, lunchboxes, bedsheets, toothbrushes, t-shirts, night shirts, curtains, notebooks, pencils, pens, squirt guns, toy lightsabers, action figures of various sizes and accompanying toys, bean bag chairs, blow up chairs, rulers, coloring books, sleeping bags, clocks, cookie jars, Legos(TM), and probably dozens if not hundreds of item lines in addition that I just couldn't even imagine.
Sure, not all of them came at the same time, but that marketing machine had to have been the biggest and most successful in history.
Yes, the original worth of the movie made a big difference. What you said was spot-on; ground-breaking special effects. Wonderful acting performances. Unforgettable music. How many people can't hum or hear the Star Wars music (at least the introduction and Vader's theme) in their heads? Was it the movie itself that did that? I believe it was the movie AND the endless commercials on television for the PRODUCTS, not the movies.
PLUS the follow-up movies reinforced these things, whereas any single movie might fade in memory. Repetition is the key to making any short term memory a long term memory, and the marketing aspects of Star Wars combined with its intrinsic worth and its sequels combined to give Star Wars lasting power. I wouldn't hesitate to say Star Wars has become a demi-mythology among many 30- and 40-somethings.
However, this demi mythological status is a direct result of MARKETING. Without it, I don't think it would be what it is today; which is to say, something that has become ingrained in our culture.
I'm not saying Star Wars sucks; I'm saying that the people that promoted Star Wars were very lucky, and the insinuation of Star Wars nomenclature into popular culture is due in a VERY sizeable part to marketing, not just merit.
Well, I already pre-ordered the DVD's for the trilogy, but I wouldn't mind owning another version, as a collector.
I wouldn't really consider it piracy or theft in any moral sense (legally that's a different matter) since I already own two different VHS copies and have pre-purchased the DVDs and have seen every movie several times at the theater. I think I've paid enough into the franchise (not counting the thousands of dollars in toys, collector memorabilia, and videogames) to have a right to an older, basically defunct, version with just a bit more resolution. Is that so wrong of me?
If anyone cares to send a valid torrent link my way, I have a gmail address; supergeek is the username. Perhaps I'll shoot a gmail invite your way as a reward.
Since I couldn't remember clearly the timeline behind the release of the action figures, and John Harrison challenged my memory, I did some Googling to find out...
One press release from Kenner regarding the prequel toys states, "When Star Wars hit the theaters in 1977, Kenner was there with the first (and only) Star Wars action figures and accessories."
But, in contradiction to this, the Star Wars Archive Database has a blurb about the "Star Wars Early Bird Certificate Package" (http://www.toysrgus.com/index.php?action=disp_ite m&item_id=39696) which states:
"The Early Bird Certificate Package was the first Kenner Star Wars action figure item. It was also one of the great marketing coups in the history of toy retailing. You see, although Kenner had signed on to produce Star Wars toys prior to the film's release in May 1977, they were blindsided (as was everyone else) by its massive popularity. They must have initially planned on making fairly easy-to-produce, low-investment Star Wars items, such as puzzles, coloring books and paint sets. But a hit this big (and there really never had been one bigger) all but demanded an action figure line. However, it takes close to a year to develop a line of plastic toys: they have to be designed, sculpted and tested. Most importantly of all, steel molds need to be created, and that takes time, not to mention money. So, in mid-1977, as Star Wars sold out theaters across the country, Kenner found themselves in a bind. On the one hand, they were sitting pretty as a license-holder for the biggest hit in movie history. On the other hand, they they had no proper toys to release. Even if they worked around the clock developing them, they wouldn't be ready for the all-important Christmas season. How does a scrappy mid-western toy company solve the problem? It pulls a fast one, of course. It tells its retailers that they're going to sell what is essentially an empty box. Moreover, it convinces them that parents will go for the idea; that they will, in the absence of Star Wars action figures, settle for the mere promise of Star Wars action figures and place the Early Bird Certificate Package under their Christmas trees.
Did it work? Of course. In fact, it's a testament to the sheer force of Star Wars' popularity that this empty box was such a success. For Christmas of 1977, thousands of children received a cardboard envelope in which was packed a pointless display stand (pointless since there were no figures to display on it), a gimmicky Star Wars "Club Card," a few anemic stickers, and something that sounded more like a coupon for a small town breakfast joint than the ticket to Toy Nirvana-- the Early Bird Certificate itself.
The idea behind the Certificate was that kids could fill it out with their names and addresses, mail it in and wait. Months later, their set of the first four Star Wars action figures would arrive along with the plastic pegs that allowed them to be affixed to the once pointless cardboard display stand. The figures included in this set were Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2-D2 and Chewbacca. Although they were all sold individually later on, the special four-figure set was available only as a mail-away."
While I remember seeing the movie at the theater after waiting in a line that wrapped around the theater building, my being 6 years old at the release of Star Wars (May of 1977, and I was born June of 1971) could be a factor in my glossing over the continuity between the release of the movie and the release of the figures.
How to reconcile Kenner's press release? I don't know, not my problem. But I do remember that you could get Star Wars anything, as I mentioned. Perhaps just not right away.
I do remember going to Burger Chef and having little punch out Star Wars character cards with my meal.
Also, according to this page (http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1977/0STRW.html ), Star Wars was still grossing a million dollars a weekend 7 months after release, and made a boatload of more money every time it was re-released.
It may have taken a while for the promotional giant to rear its head, but once it did, the marketing machine hasn't stopped since.
Slashdot Mirror
You might imagine a lion with the sharpest, best imagination in the world, reading the best description ever written, but it still won't be up to scratch compared to actually seeing a lion hunting on TV.
You had me up until the point you said TV. (Emphasis mine.) What about real life? I think seeing a lion in a zoo provides part of the experience you wouldn't get from watching it on TV. Like a few orders of magnitude better resolution, smells, etc. Ideally, go on an African safari and see a lion on the Sarengeti yourself.
Honestly, though, different types of media (books, television, movies, pictures, illustrations, games, eyes, ears, noses, etc.) all provide different experiences. Really, you can't wave your arm and classify whole realms of experience. Some things can be experienced adequately through books. Some can be experienced adequately through television. Some through movies (larger screen, higher resolution, better sound), and yes, some things can only be adequately experienced by actually Being There(TM).
Really, though, it depends on your purpose. If I were doing research for a 3rd grade class paper, reading a small picture book on lions might be adequate. If I were writing a thesis on lion mating practices on the African plains, I may have to watch movies, read books, see them in zoos (woefully inadequate, but safe) or deity forbid, go to Africa and do the research.
Ideally, direct experience is best, but individual needs and circumstances vary greatly. Blanket statements need not apply.
Every restaurant, place of business, public park, street, and highway should have individual capsulized bullet-proof compartments for each potential person that could enter those venues, to prevent any illegal discussions or activities that may happen.
Also, those compartments should prevent RF and any other medium that can transmit potentially illegal analog or digital data.
Every compartment should have a speaker grill with a microphone that can transmit the occupants' wishes to the dictator watching all 6 billion of us so he can personally approve or disapprove every transaction that person wishes to make with every other person on the planet.
Only THEN shall this world be piracy free!!
I'd have to agree with the high resolution of HDTV being contrary to porn.
My 65" HDTV shows me wayyyy too much detail at times, and it's a turn off. Stretch marks, surgery scars, acne, razor burns... it's not stuff you want to see in high definition. And for some reason the directors still love their closeups.
If you're watching DVD's on a 27" or smaller television, it's not the same as a 65" HDTV. Seriously.
Bravo! Well said.
Considering the audience that Futurama attracts, ie, geeks for a good part, I'd say a pretty good percentage got the joke.
Personally, I think Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is just a limit of technology, not something that should be made into a Law. Just because we can't see quanta without affecting them now doesn't mean we never will.
Of course, I'm an armchair physicist -- I've read a few Hawking books and I have a subscription to Discover, but otherwise my last physics course was over 10 years ago. That kind of math is beyond my meager skills, but I can hypotenuse the hell out of a triangle!
Really, I can think of many causes that would be more worthy of donation.
Basically any cause that actually does research into curing the maladies that put kids in the hospitals (and adults) could potentially do much more good than Child's Play.
It's a fun cause, and something gamers can relate to... I just think it's a shame that all this attention is being given to something so transitory as a few toys that will break or be outdated in a few short months.
I have purchased one of these plush Cthulhu's (well, actually I received it as a birthday gift from my gf) and I can heartily recommend it. Craftsmanship is excellent. He's soft and warm and cuddly, perfect for those cold evenings reading Lovecraft by the fire.
And all three of your other drives become fodder for a reformat when any one of them becomes corrupted or fails.
That's a lot of data to back up. I'm leaning towards a standalone raid5 file server myself.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought this as soon as I read the news post. I immediately clicked through and scanned for responses like this.
YOu beat me to it :P That response was just *begged*...
Not true, at least with my version. I beat the game back on my Commodore 64.
Yeah, and nobody says ATM Machine or PIN Number that you know, eh?
I'm not sure how someone who uses the phrase "for all intensive purposes" could be moderated insightful. It's "for all intents and purposes."
Kyrandia wasn't really flexible enough to be called a MUD, but it was a good game. We had a contest on Amusers for the first person to solve the game... and I won. If you remember Amusers, and you remember Kyrandia, you'd probably recognize my old handle.
The funny part was they actually made standalone PC games years later based on the Kyrandia lore. Funny.
InFiNiTy CoMpLeX was awesome too. Cab the Commie, A Commie, B, Commie, etc., all singing Twist and Shout. Firing all your rockets down a hall and killing 20 NPCs and not to mention a couple people. Galactic Empire. Those were the days!
Detroit area? Dude!
Amusers, Solaris, Crow's Nest?, Hole in the Wall, Castle Royale (kind of far out), ummm.. lots of others. But yeah, to reply to your comment, ANSI animations were cool. I used to do some ANSI graphics screens for people..
I wrote an essay and contributed it to this project years ago. It's nice to see that the project is finished, and my essay might even be included on the DVD.
I knew the guy that wrote C-Net, sort of. More accurately, I knew a girl who slept with him because he drove a Porsche. She was crazy about Porsches!
A common misconception among people who don't follow the videogame release market is that "gone gold" means they've sold X copies of the videogame. Not true; "gone gold" merely means that the publishing house has declared that the game is ready to be mass duplicated and released to market.
By implying something about a game that has "gone gold" means something about people, implies that the release is equal to popularity, which in this case, is a confusing comparison to the record industry (ie, gone gold, gone platinum, etc.)
I waited months for the SA8000HD DVR to be released in my area (Fayetteville; not far from the Raleigh/Durham area in North Carolina.)
Previously, I had an SA8000 DVR (SD) and the non-DVR high def box. HD cable was useless for me at this point, because I rarely sit down and just surf for programming; I almost always have a goal in mind when I sit down in my home theater area. (65" Mitsu HDTV, Onkyo 7.1 receiver, etc.) Most of the time, that goal is watching DVDs, which my HT setup does very well.
Now that I have the HD DVR, I was able to turn the two other boxes back in, and lower my monthly charges a few dollars. I've set up a few programs to record in HD on a regular basis, but without functionality similar to the TiVo "suggestions", I often have very little HD programming to look at. However, I do have the expanded tier of HD programming, so I have at least 3 HD movie channels, which is nice, when I take the time to go through the next week's movies and schedule them to record.
As for the quality of the recordings. HD recordings look amazing, but sometimes the audio stutters, especially when it's recording at the same time I'm watching a show.
Non-HD channels can still look like shit.
For you people bitching about the gray bars; the bar color can be changed in your box's setup. However, gray is recommended by HT professionals so that your CRTs get burned for the same amount even when watching 4:3 content. That is, if you want to watch a lot of sideboxed programming, projection TV's will benefit from gray bars versus black bars.
If I decide to stay on a 4:3 channel I just switch the view format via my TV anyway. Often my brain automatically compensates and I have no issue watching the show with that ratio.
I still drool over the television 8 months after I purchased it. Definitely worth the price for me ($2800) considering the enjoyment I get out of it. It depends on how much expendable cash you have; I make decent money.
Well, when I drive, I'm concentrating on driving. The radio is always secondary. So if something happens while I'm driving that requires more attention (ie, some jackass cuts me off, I start ranting about the people who don't use their fucking turn signals, loud screeches, looking for a street sign, etc.) then the radio fades out of perception until my "available CPU" is back down to normal.
I've got a TiVo sitting unused and gathering dust since my conversion to HDTV. I just can't bear to watch SD programming on my 65" HDTV.
Now with that said, the SA8000HD isn't too bad on its own, but as the poster said, after using a TiVo, it's not quite stabbing yourself in the face; more like a little blunt trauma every time you try to search for a show, or wonder what your TiVo would have recorded based on your previous recordings.
I'd buy a $500 TiVo with support for HDTV.
$600 if it included wireless network access so it would hook up to my LAN.
$700 if it included a DVD burner.
$800 if it had a digital cable tuner compatible with my provider.
I hate wading through programming, and I don't want to run wires all over. I'll pay to avoid that hassle.
My time is worth a lot to me, and considering I only watch maybe 30-60 minutes of television a day (Jeopardy, or an installment of some serial like Alias on DVD), wading through a programming list for an HOUR every week because the interface sucks is very irritating to me.
But, in two years, these things will exist. I won't pay that much then. I'll just be missing out on some potentially good television programming until then.
Well, I was viewing the LD rips on my computer monitor, and the quality was noticeably blurry. I've watched some DVD clips and HD DivX rips on my computer, and they weren't anywhere near that kind of quality. They must not have been the optimal versions I've heard discussed in this thread.
I am currently downloading the ones mentioned by someone else elsewhere in the thread, so we'll see how that goes. In 2d6h41m.
All of those things you quote about Star Wars is true, however the big difference I think between Hop-along Cassidy and Star Wars was marketing.
Was there ever before as huge a marketing campaign and number of product tie-ins as seen with Star Wars? Fast food merchandise (posters, toys, etc.), watches, lunchboxes, bedsheets, toothbrushes, t-shirts, night shirts, curtains, notebooks, pencils, pens, squirt guns, toy lightsabers, action figures of various sizes and accompanying toys, bean bag chairs, blow up chairs, rulers, coloring books, sleeping bags, clocks, cookie jars, Legos(TM), and probably dozens if not hundreds of item lines in addition that I just couldn't even imagine.
Sure, not all of them came at the same time, but that marketing machine had to have been the biggest and most successful in history.
Yes, the original worth of the movie made a big difference. What you said was spot-on; ground-breaking special effects. Wonderful acting performances. Unforgettable music. How many people can't hum or hear the Star Wars music (at least the introduction and Vader's theme) in their heads? Was it the movie itself that did that? I believe it was the movie AND the endless commercials on television for the PRODUCTS, not the movies.
PLUS the follow-up movies reinforced these things, whereas any single movie might fade in memory. Repetition is the key to making any short term memory a long term memory, and the marketing aspects of Star Wars combined with its intrinsic worth and its sequels combined to give Star Wars lasting power. I wouldn't hesitate to say Star Wars has become a demi-mythology among many 30- and 40-somethings.
However, this demi mythological status is a direct result of MARKETING. Without it, I don't think it would be what it is today; which is to say, something that has become ingrained in our culture.
I'm not saying Star Wars sucks; I'm saying that the people that promoted Star Wars were very lucky, and the insinuation of Star Wars nomenclature into popular culture is due in a VERY sizeable part to marketing, not just merit.
Well, I already pre-ordered the DVD's for the trilogy, but I wouldn't mind owning another version, as a collector.
I wouldn't really consider it piracy or theft in any moral sense (legally that's a different matter) since I already own two different VHS copies and have pre-purchased the DVDs and have seen every movie several times at the theater. I think I've paid enough into the franchise (not counting the thousands of dollars in toys, collector memorabilia, and videogames) to have a right to an older, basically defunct, version with just a bit more resolution. Is that so wrong of me?
If anyone cares to send a valid torrent link my way, I have a gmail address; supergeek is the username. Perhaps I'll shoot a gmail invite your way as a reward.
Since I couldn't remember clearly the timeline behind the release of the action figures, and John Harrison challenged my memory, I did some Googling to find out...
e m&item_id=39696) which states:
l ), Star Wars was still grossing a million dollars a weekend 7 months after release, and made a boatload of more money every time it was re-released.
One press release from Kenner regarding the prequel toys states, "When Star Wars hit the theaters in 1977, Kenner was there with the
first (and only) Star Wars action figures and accessories."
But, in contradiction to this, the Star Wars Archive Database has a blurb about the "Star Wars Early Bird Certificate Package" (http://www.toysrgus.com/index.php?action=disp_it
"The Early Bird Certificate Package was the first Kenner Star Wars action figure item. It was also one of the great marketing coups in the history of toy retailing. You see, although Kenner had signed on to produce Star Wars toys prior to the film's release in May 1977, they were blindsided (as was everyone else) by its massive popularity. They must have initially planned on making fairly easy-to-produce, low-investment Star Wars items, such as puzzles, coloring books and paint sets. But a hit this big (and there really never had been one bigger) all but demanded an action figure line. However, it takes close to a year to develop a line of plastic toys: they have to be designed, sculpted and tested. Most importantly of all, steel molds need to be created, and that takes time, not to mention money. So, in mid-1977, as Star Wars sold out theaters across the country, Kenner found themselves in a bind. On the one hand, they were sitting pretty as a license-holder for the biggest hit in movie history. On the other hand, they they had no proper toys to release. Even if they worked around the clock developing them, they wouldn't be ready for the all-important Christmas season.
How does a scrappy mid-western toy company solve the problem? It pulls a fast one, of course. It tells its retailers that they're going to sell what is essentially an empty box. Moreover, it convinces them that parents will go for the idea; that they will, in the absence of Star Wars action figures, settle for the mere promise of Star Wars action figures and place the Early Bird Certificate Package under their Christmas trees.
Did it work? Of course. In fact, it's a testament to the sheer force of Star Wars' popularity that this empty box was such a success. For Christmas of 1977, thousands of children received a cardboard envelope in which was packed a pointless display stand (pointless since there were no figures to display on it), a gimmicky Star Wars "Club Card," a few anemic stickers, and something that sounded more like a coupon for a small town breakfast joint than the ticket to Toy Nirvana-- the Early Bird Certificate itself.
The idea behind the Certificate was that kids could fill it out with their names and addresses, mail it in and wait. Months later, their set of the first four Star Wars action figures would arrive along with the plastic pegs that allowed them to be affixed to the once pointless cardboard display stand. The figures included in this set were Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2-D2 and Chewbacca. Although they were all sold individually later on, the special four-figure set was available only as a mail-away."
While I remember seeing the movie at the theater after waiting in a line that wrapped around the theater building, my being 6 years old at the release of Star Wars (May of 1977, and I was born June of 1971) could be a factor in my glossing over the continuity between the release of the movie and the release of the figures.
How to reconcile Kenner's press release? I don't know, not my problem. But I do remember that you could get Star Wars anything, as I mentioned. Perhaps just not right away.
I do remember going to Burger Chef and having little punch out Star Wars character cards with my meal.
Also, according to this page (http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1977/0STRW.htm
It may have taken a while for the promotional giant to rear its head, but once it did, the marketing machine hasn't stopped since.