American Graffiti Easter Egg - THX 1138 Reference

What most people don't realise about lucas is that the funding for all his films came from the fact that he invented a cinema sound system called THX. The first release of this was THX 1138 which he subsequently named his first film after. The THX sound system is still used today in most feature films and is prominently mentioned in all Lucas's films incl the SW trilogy

Actually... The THX sound system was partly named after Lucas' movie. THX-1138 was his student film, later re-edited and expanded to become his first feature film. Here's a little THX background... --------- In 1982, George Lucas gave his full support to his Technical Director, Tomlinson Holman, to create a new movie theatre sound system standard: the THX Sound System. (Incidentally, the name THX comes from two sources: Lucas' first feature lenght film was a science fiction movie named THX 1138 it also stands for Tomlinson Holman's eXperiment.) The THX Sound System complemented and enhanced the playback of Dolby Stereo, which was by that time a well-established standard for film sound recording. THX picked up where Dolby Stereo left off, encompassing standards and technologies for power amplifiers, speakers, proprietary reproduction of movie soundtracks.

Actually, this fact was mentioned in the DVD edition of this film, so everyone who's seen it on DVD knows this now, but if you found this out before the DVD came out then good find. =D

The term THX was used before George Lucas knew Tom Holman, so the myth of it being named for TomHolmanseXperiment is incorrect. Dolby Stereo consists of a process for encoding four channels of audio onto the films optical soundtrack, and the electronics to decode this track in the cinema. THX is a group of minimum specifications for theater acoustics, amplifiers and speakers. I could show my 8mm home movies in a THX equipped theatre and it would be "In THX". THX did not 'fund' any Lucas movies...THX was a minimally profitable sideline for him, and he sold off THX years ago.