The whole “May the Fourth” thing has been around long enough now that I feel a lot of the cleverness behind it has worn away, but since it seems unusually ever-present this year for some reason (new movie coming?) and I needed a topic for today....
One of the biggest knocks against the Star Wars movies has always been how they were basically made for nine-year-old boys. Well, for the record, back when that first movie came out in 1977 -- I actually WAS a nine-year-old boy. I went into my first viewing knowing next to nothing about what I was going to see, then got knocked back by the enormous musical fanfare and the expository scroll, which went straight to the rebel blockade runner being pursued by the Imperial Star Destroyer that just went on forever and then kept going on forever and then finally, no, wait, it’s still going on forever, and then ten minutes later you see the engines. Then there were lasers and robots and Jawas and those enormous skeletal remains that C-3PO walked by in the desert (and what had that thing been when it was alive, anyway?!?) and any other number of things I had never seen before. I will credit Star Wars in no small part to introducing my little kid brain to the breadth of possibility regarding what was allowed in storytelling.
My Star Wars fan cred runs deep. My elementary school friends and I would pretend we were in the Millennium Falcon fighting off TIE fighters while playing the soundtrack album on the little record player in the corner of my parents' basement. One year I gave my older sister, the one who couldn’t give a rip about Star Wars, a necklace with a die-cast R2-D2 on it for her birthday. She put on a good show about pretending to like it, but I don’t think I ever saw her wear it. My top action figure was Han Solo. I was never one of these people to buy the things and keep them in plastic as a collector; I took the term “action figure” very seriously. My Han Solo stayed in the adventure rotation long after his head broke off in some forgotten way. In what may have been one of my first instances in creating fiction, I continued playing with a Headless Han Solo having given him a backstory that the Empire had done something to him that made his head invisible, and whatever adventures the action figures went through, reclaiming a visible head was always part of his quest. The prequel trilogy really didn’t cut it for me, but even something as awful as Jar Jar Binks or the offensively rubbery CGI creatures from those movies wasn’t enough to turn me off. Once I had a computer and a game console, some of my favorite video games came out of the Star Wars universe. Maybe they weren’t always the best, but they were a brief entry back into that world, which was always a welcome distraction.
I can remember the rumors from childhood about how not only was George Lucas going to make Star Wars into a trilogy, but that there might be as many as nine or twelve movies when all was said and done. When I went to see The Avengers this past weekend, I saw a trailer for “The Force Awakens,” the upcoming Star Wars movie to be released this Christmas. I have mixed feelings about it. I have little doubt it will be a fun movie to watch and I totally owe it to my nine-year-old self to go see it. But there’s no way it will ever mean as much to me as that first one did.
That’s probably okay, though. I know a lot of nine-year-old kids, and to be honest, they can get a little jaded about movies when they’re being bombarded by some new superhero or Pixar blockbuster every few months. Maybe this will be the one to come along and knock their generation back in their theater seats.
For their sake, I hope so.
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