Enter the 1979 Star Wars Super Stakes and maybe win things that have nothing to do with Star Wars!
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is just over a year away, and has mercifully shed the “Episode Umpteen” part of the title, which helped make the prequel trilogy feel even more rote than it already did. (Can we please go back to referring to the original Star Wars as Star Wars, and not that A New Hope crap?) The above sweepstakes ad harkens back to this simpler time: when the Lucasfilm merchandizing machine wasn’t of Death Star proportions, and Luke Skywalker still dressed like he was spending the day at a spa.
The prizes from this contest — brought to us in 1979/1980 in partnership with MPC, the Star Wars model kit purveyor of the day (and makers of the hideous Gridiron Grabber) — go a little off the beaten path with the big gets. Sure there are some nice model kits of the Millennium Falcon, Darth Vader and everything else under the twin suns, but piles of cash? A full-sized jalopy? A fully functional landspeeder would be too much to ask, but still. And about the latter — what is it with model kit companies and their insatiable desire to award large gasoline-powered conveyances to their mostly young constituency?
Anyway. Whoever knew that R2-D2 was such a gangster, stackin’ papers like that? And surely riding around in that tiny truck has to be the most embarrassing moment in Luke’s life. (Wait, no it isn’t.)