Suddenly Star Wars came out while we were on hiatus, and we looked like the old Buck Rogers series, where they had cigarette smoke blowing out the back of the rocket ship.
Star Wars' was derivative of 'Buck Rogers' and 'Flash Gordon,' wasn't it?
I saw 'The Empire Strikes Back' the week that it came out. My father was a huge 'Star Wars' fan. And so when it came out, my dad took me.
I saw The Empire Strikes Back the week that it came out. My father was a huge Star Wars fan. And so when it came out, my dad took me.
I came out of school one day, and there was this pulp magazine. It was a rainy day, and it was floating toward the sewer in the gutter. So I pick up this pulp magazine, and it's Wonder Stories, and it's got a rocket-ship on the cover, and I'd never seen a rocket-ship.
Maybe, I got a sense when [Star Wars] came out, and there were always these lines around the block. We didn't understand the popularity of Cheers until maybe five years into the series.
Growing up in the 80's, I think a lot of us saw things that were "new," an experience we don't get too much of these days. We saw things that were never done before. When Star Wars first came out, no movie before that had ever looked that way.
I used to wash my hands every ten minutes. I couldn't step out of the house unless I had gloves on. I wouldn't smoke a cigarette unless I opened the pack myself, and I would never use another cigarette out of that pack if someone else had touched it.
I thought it was funny. I always thought Star Wars and Indiana Jones were basically comedies. The humour came out of their relationships; it came out of the fact that we were basically types.
My relationship with 'Star Wars' is that I'm old enough that I saw it when it first came out - 'A New Hope,' that is - and it was like when Dorothy steps out of black and white into Technicolor. I was transported from a gray, miserable 1970s London into a different galaxy, and I didn't know what it was, but I wanted to be a part of it.
We were going to call it "Star Trek: The Avengers", and for a while we were like, "People are going to love that title". No, we had a whole bunch of titles, we never had any official title until we came out with this, we had different conversations about other things.
I had been acting since I was seven years old, but I had a combination of things happen at about the same time. 'Austin Powers' came out on DVD, I got a series regular gig on 'Buffy' and 'Can't Hardly Wait' came out.
Lucasfilm called me out of the blue, and I almost hung up because I thought it was a practical joke. This was right before 'Revenge Of The Sith' came out. Here you are, a big 'Star Wars' fan, talking about 'Star Wars' all the time, and you have your master replica lightsaber, and then you get a call from Lucasfilm for a job?
I remember, as a kid, riding in the back of my dad's old Saab 95 in Denmark. We were on the highway, and suddenly this silver Maserati Bora came upon us, then passed. At the time, to me, this car looked like a spaceship.
I did grow up watching Buck Rogers and Buck Rogers didn't stop at Mars. In my lifetime, I will be incredibly disappointed if we have not at least reached Mars.
I don't consider it jumping ship. The 'Star Trek' philosophy is to embrace the diversity of the universe, and 'Star Wars' is part of that diversity. I also think 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' are related beyond both having the word 'Star.'
Living on the street as a kid changed the way I looked at everything. It was a different time and while it had its dangers, it was nothing like it would be today. It was the Summer of Love and there was a real sense of community among us. We were hippies who looked out for each other instead of trying to rip each other off. We only had to watch out for the police who liked to roust us just on general principles, and the kids who came in from the suburbs to do a little hippie-bashing.