I had no context to recognize this at the time, but I came of age in a golden era of fantasy cinema.  Some of my earliest theatrical experiences included Superman II (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), and Back to the Future (1985).  Movies like those were made, by and large, by a generation of filmmakers—notably but not exclusively Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—that had been raised on the sci-fi and fantasy offerings of 1950s B-movies and comics, and later became the first students to major in cinema studies and filmmaking; when that formal training was fused with their pulp passions, the contemporary blockbuster was born:  first with Jaws (1975), then Star Wars (1977), and then Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Superman:  The Movie (1978) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Goonies (1985).  That cornucopia of imaginative fantasy—hardly an all-encompassing list, by the way—was my first exposure to the movies.  Is it any wonder I was hooked for life?

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