This movie came out after Star Wars. It was a sequel to the 1973 American Graffiti with the same actors and characters but it's really four movies. Each story is set on New Year's eve for the years 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967. One story was set at a drag strip, the other in Viet Nam, another in San Francisco, and the
fourth at an unnamed college taken over by anti-war protestors. The original American Graffiti was about actual things that teenagers in the late 1950's and early 1960's actually did. The four stories in this movie are just fiction that George Lucas made up based on what he would have liked to have happened. The drag strip story was similar to the pod racer story in Star Wars Episode I but with a boy meets girl theme. It was the only one of the stories that didn't have an Anti-Viet Nam War theme. Each of the stories had a different style. I went to see this movie in Stillwater at the new Cowboy Mall north of the OSU campus. I was glad to see that "Toad" really didn't die but I didn't like that they made him a deserter. Ron Howard and Cindy Williams played reprised there characters but they seemed more like their Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley characters. The San Francisco hippie story is hard to follow. The Viet Nam story was just a bad MASH rip off. The whole thing is sort of entertaining but didn't match the first movie.
May 12, 2007
