Via Journalnow.com:

Stephen Colbert was a “Star Wars” fan before the rest of us.
“I like to say I was a fan of ‘Star Wars’ three weeks before any of you people, OK, so don’t try to out-‘Star Wars’ me,” Colbert said with a grin.
How can that be?
It turns out that as a kid, Colbert and several of his friends got to see an advance screening of the film.
“In 1977, my local radio station in Charleston, South Carolina, had a radio contest to this thing called ‘Star Wars’ two weeks before it came out in the rest of the country. For some reason, we were a test market, and I don’t know why. And I won tickets on the radio from WTMA, 1250 on your AM dial. Booby Nash (a radio legend in the Charleston community) was the host.
“We were 13 years old, the perfect age for ‘Star Wars,’” Colbert said. “We went to go see it, we saw it, and we were like ‘How do we explain to our friends that the world’s all different now?’”
They tried to keep their tickets as souvenirs, but had to turn them over to get in; but on the way out, they did get “May the Force Be With You” buttons.
“On the drive home, there was a full moon that night,” he said. “The full moon is out, and we were like ‘It’s the Death Star, it’s following us home.”
Colbert once shared that story on his “Colbert Report” Comedy Central show; after the segment was posted on YouTube, a fan calculated that he must have seen a screening on May 7, 1977, which was the night of a full moon — and was indeed more than two weeks before the May 25 release of the film.
His favorite character, he said, is Han Solo. “He’s the coolest character … what I like about Han Solo is, he’s overtly supposed to be cool, but on a certain level he’s really kind of bad at his job. Because he gets caught smuggling, he doesn’t make any money doing it, and he’s got this crappy ship. So he’s this combination of like both cool and a little bit of a derelict at the same time.”