Droid C-3PO joins his creator, George Lucas, on the set.

Las Vegas really was a faraway galaxy a long time ago, when "Star Wars" blasted onto movie screens -- and into movie history -- in May 1977.

An out-of-nowhere smash, "Star Wars" and its sequels changed moviemaking -- and moviegoing -- practices in ways that reverberate to this day.

Not that anyone expected such colossal cinematic impact from moviemaking maverick George Lucas, whose biggest claim to fame in those days was another out-of-the-blue hit, 1973's nostalgic "American Graffiti."

Indeed, no one expected much from "Star Wars" -- including the studio releasing it, 20th Century Fox, which considered "The Other Side of Midnight" its big box-office prospect for the summer of '77.

Four theaters showed first-run movies in Las Vegas then: the single-screen Parkway and two-screen Cine Boulevard on Maryland Parkway, the single-screen Fox Charleston on East Charleston Boulevard and, on West Charleston, the 11-screen Redrock, an early multiplex that began as a single-screen theater.

In those days, exhibitors would bid on the summer releases they wanted to play, sight unseen, in March or April, recalls Pat Neal, former manager of the Redrock and the Cinedome, another long-gone Las Vegas multiplex.

"At that time, Lucas had done 'American Graffiti,' but nobody was interested in space," recalls Neal, now the head Imax technician at Luxor's giant-screen theater.

Instead, the Redrock went after what they considered a likely hit, "Exorcist 2: The Heretic," a sequel to the 1973 horror smash.

Before "Exorcist 2" arrived in early June, however, Redrock officials watched as "Star Wars" took off -- and kept right on going -- at the Parkway.

"When it opened, it was big -- and every day it would get bigger," Neal recalled.

As Yvonne Thompson, the Parkway's assistant manager, told the Review-Journal in 1980 when the "Star Wars" sequel "The Empire Strikes Back" opened there, " 'Star Wars' was the greatest we ever had here."

Even with 808 seats, however, the single-screen Parkway "couldn't get enough shows," Neal notes.

The knowledge that the Redrock went after the wrong movie "haunts me to this day," Neal admits. But "we got lucky, in retrospect."

That's because "Star Wars" was so big it ran for eight or nine months, he recalls, and by the holidays, "the Parkway had to let the film go to make way for 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' "

So "Star Wars" ultimately found its way to the Redrock after all -- "and we were selling it out all through Christmas."

Neal first saw the original "Star Wars" at Hollywood's most legendary movie palace, the Chinese -- and watched its 1980 sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back," at another, almost-as-legendary Hollywood theater, the Egyptian (which now houses the American Cinematheque).

"At the Egyptian, they were running it 24 hours a day," Neal recalls. "We had to get up at 4 in the morning to stand in line."

As the Review-Journal reported, hundreds of Las Vegans lined up at the Cinedome in 1983 to see "Return of the Jedi," the final "Star Wars" movie -- until Lucas launched a prequel trilogy in 1999 with "The Phantom Menace." (The prequel trilogy concludes with today's release of "Revenge of the Sith," the third episode in the six-movie "Star Wars" galaxy.)

With modern-day multiplexes and advance computerized ticketing, no one needs to wait in line for the "Star Wars" prequels the way they did for the originals.

But that's not the only thing that's changed, in Neal's view.

"It's a different type of film that doesn't exist anymore," he says of the original "Star Wars" trilogy. "It just brings out the kid in everyone. It's almost a cowboy movie, in a way. But there's something deep in all of us that we relate to."