What makes the OT so widely appreciated?

[Elfdart]

I think it was successful because, while it was a simple story, it had powerful themes in it that were easy to pick up and sympathize with.

I thought the 70s were full of movies like this?

Quite the opposite.

There were other issues to consider as well. Fantasy/Sci-fi was boring and stagnant in the movies at the time. In the US people were pretty down from the last decade + or so, no one had seen the type of merchandising that came along with Star Wars so kids went absolutely ballistic.

Movies in general were stagnant and boring back then: I remember it well. Aside from the occasional Disney re-release of their classic animated films, movies aimed at kids in the 1970s almost invariably sucked. The three other Saturday matinee-type movies that were even halfway watchable in 1977? The Rescuers, a mediocre Disney Cartoon; Candleshoe, a so-so live action Disney film with Jodi Foster and David Niven; and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, a half-hearted stop-motion Harryhausen flick notable for casting John Wayne's son and Tyrone Power's daughter (neither of whom would have starred in any films were it not for their parents), one of the all-time greatest camp performances by Margaret Whiting at the witch Zenobia ("Minoton, ROW!"), and a very brief glimpse of Jane Seymour's bare ass -in a G-rated movie no less!

There were no shoot-'em-up westerns, no swashbuckling adventure movies that played it straight, no superhero movies, no Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers...

Essentially there was little or nothing of interest for 7-12 year old boys in the 1970s like there was in the 30s and 40s. Star Wars was very retro. Not only was it the kind of movie that would have starred Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power had it been made 30-40 years earlier, but everything from the use of wipes and irises to change scenes, to the score that was part Wagner, part Korngold and part Steiner were right out of the Golden Era of Hollywood. Kids were awed because we had never seen anything like it before, and the grownups loved it because of nostalgia for Captain Blood, Flash Gordon, Zorro and Robin Hood.

The last thirty years or so have been very different. The theaters are saturated with Saturday matinee movies. Whatever you might think of most of these movies, they are a cut above what was being served up to kids in the 70s.

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