Hi guys, Maybe 8-10 years ago I came across some Usenet comments on the net from 1980 with uni students writing their views on the newly released Empire Strikes Back. Anyone remember seeing this and have a link? I'm pretty sure it was Usenet or one of those other ancient networks that only universities had access to at the time. thanks
zombie's got an article on his website, but it's comments about ROTJ, not ESB: http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/flashbackto1983.html I do vaguely remember reading something else a while back similar to what you've mentioned, though, and not on the SHOSW site.
Yeah, the only Usenet comments I recall hearing about are for ROTJ and it was from "The Secret History of Star Wars" actually.
I think you guys are right, it must've been ROTJ. The usenet groups were apparently net.movies.sw, net.movies, and net.sf-lovers. Google apparently used to have an archive of these as part of Google Groups, but I can't find it now. If anyone is interested you can download archived ZIP files of these usenet groups here: https://archive.org/details/usenet-net The messages are stored as MBOX files, so you need an MBOX viewer. I used http://www.mboxviewer.com/ since that was the quickest one I could find that seemed to work. Obviously this would all be easier if the messages could easily be viewed on a website, but I haven't found one yet.
https://groups.google.com/ google changed how you search through them in the last few years. You may have to login now to get the advance search features... Here's an example of a 1985 post about Kirshner and future SW: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/net.movies.sw/POw9ITdoF5A I believe this source of the usenet archives is the Utzoo archive which preserved 1981-1991. https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive (thank you David Wiseman, Henry Spencer, Lance Bailey, Bruce Jones, Bob Webber, Brewster Kahle, and Sue Thielen.)
google has a time line of memorable moments in the usenet archive: http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html Jun 1982 First mention of Star Wars Episode 6 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/net.movies/8Rsra_MR3yY/9TIQH0a19xwJ
These are fun, I've looked up quite a few. Lots of same-day responses to RotJ too. I love prequel speculation from the early 90's, great stuff.
