‘A free date with the princess and a bucket of popcorn’: When Carrie Fisher gently pranked a ‘Star Wars’ moviegoer

In the hours after the death of Carrie Fisher on Tuesday, the “Today” show released a 1977 video of Gene Shalit interviewing the fresh-faced cast of the original “Star Wars” just after it debuted in theaters. (See below.) Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Fisher, who was then just 20, told Shalit that they were still at the point in their careers where they could show up unnoticed at movie theaters and watch “Star Wars” with paying audiences.

“It’s easy,” Fisher said.

But she did describe one encounter when she didn’t get away unrecognized, a precursor of the fandom that would grow exponentially with each new installment of the saga.

“This one guy had seen it 12 times,” she told Shalit.

“What was his reaction?” Shalit asked.

“The princess!” Fisher said, mimicking the moviegoer raising his hands in shock.

“Did he ask you out?” Shalit asked.

Fisher, showing her wit in the face of Shalit’s rather lame question, then described a gentle pranking of the moviegoer.

“I ... told him I was the prize,” she told Shalit. “That the 20th Century Fox office had heard he’d seen it 12 times and he got a free date with the princess and a bucket of popcorn. He believed it.”