First movie experience to get you hooked on film

Just a bit of fun and memories of the first film you remember that gave you a WOW factor about movies.

 

Nothing says the holidays like porn with the cousins.

I've never understood watching porn with other dudes. Same aversion I have to strip clubs. I don't wanna be hanging with my boys getting chubbies. That's weird to me.

But in answer to the original question, it was Stars Wars for me. I was 4 years old when it came out and it's the first movie I remember seeing in the theater. I'm not a Star Wars super fan and I didn't like The Last Jedi or any of the middle 3 movies, but Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back were awesome films that hold up.

 

I've mentioned it before, but the first movie I saw in the theaters was Star Wars. It is still the only movie I've seen in the theater more than once. (Twice during the initial release and then when it was re-released with the first round of Lucas's tinkering in the '90s.)

I was very young and very confused at first. During the first battle, I had no idea which guys to root for. The Stormtroopers looked bad, but they were wearing white. Then Darth Vader stalked into the aftermath and even five-year-old me knew that was the bad guy.

Edit: I was already typing that as Boogie posted.

 

2001: A Space Odyssey. Saw it when I was almost 10. Still have no idea what it means.

 

It means Stanley Kubrick did a fucking metric shit ton of hashish.

 

I figure it was those Disney movies that mixed in animation with film - Mary Poppins and the like.

 

Not the first theater movie for me, but Star Wars did it for me, too.

It's the first movie where I truly saw (and can remember) the impact that a movie was having -- the lines around the building and out through the parking lot and down to the sidewalk of the busy boulevard below were a big clue. And it lived up to the hype. It was such a good, fun movie movie that, yeah, you could see yourself going to see it again, and enjoying it just as much. And a lot of people did that.

Ditto for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Those first three/middle three movies gave real and true meaning to the word "blockbuster" to that generation of movie-goers, and they were a different type of movie than blockbusters from previous eras like, say, Gone With the Wind or some of the great westerns and war movies.

There was/is much more cross-over appeal to the Star Wars movies in terms of fans...

 

The first real movie experience I recall was going to see The Empire Strikes Back with my brothers and our babysitter/family friend. We all loved it so much we just stayed in our seats afterward and watched the next showing too.

 

I remember hearing stories of my great uncle doing that as a kid. He would go to the earliest matinee, then stay so late my great-grandparents had to send his older sister, my grandmother, to get him. I didn't realize people could still do that in the '70s.

 

Funny how a Star Wars film was the first one for so many us. For me, it was Return of the Jedi. I was 4 and I remember being captivated by the lightsaber battle in the dark of the Emperor’s throne room. That scene, quite specifically, made me love going to the movies.

 

Star Wars was something way outside the box for movie studios at the time. The trend had been for disaster movies, Jaws, - when studios went "big budget" it meant elaborate sets and costumes, not action sequences. SW had that great opening shot of the Rebel cruiser (which was cool) and then the empire battleship which never seemed to end.