I saw Star Wars for the first time with my entire elementary school on a field trip. I still remember walking the five or so blocks to the single-screen movie theater in our tiny town, sitting in a row with all of my fourth grade buddies, getting blasted back into my seat by the opening fanfare and being completely overwhelmed in the best of all possible ways when that Imperial Star Destroyer flew over my head and kept on getting longer and longer and longer. I was immediately hooked.
Both of my sisters were in the theater that day as well. My younger sister Erin was as susceptible to overindulging in enthusiasm as I was at that age, and for the two of us, Star Wars became as much of a focal interest as anything else during whatever years remained of our childhood. As far as I could tell, our older sister Jenny probably liked the movie just fine that day, but instead of sharing in the same nerdery overdrive that had taken over Erin and me, she ended up quietly enduring ours. Erin and I collected the trading cards, starting with the hard-to-find blue set and continuing through red, green, yellow, and beyond. Star Wars was the only comic book I ever subscribed to. I had a yellow Star Wars t-shirt with the two droids on it that I wore until the picture had all but completely faded away. Erin had earned a blaster just like Han Solo's as a reward for (allegedly) breaking a bad habit. I once gave Jenny a gift of an R2D2 necklace, which she wore one time to pose for a picture on her birthday, and probably never touched again. Erin hung an Empire Strikes Back movie poster on the wall in the bedroom she and Jenny shared. I'm sure Jenny loved that.
Of course we collected the action figures: Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, Ben, Vader, C3PO, R2D2, Yoda, Stormtroopers, Tuskan Raiders, Greedo, Walrus Man, Power Droid, even a Jawa. I'm sure I'm forgetting some, and I'm just as sure if Erin were still around she'd be able to point out which ones I'd overlooked. In our house, action figures weren't precious things that stayed in plastic collector's bubbles, but they lived up to their name. My Han Solo action figure was without a head for most of its tenure in our collection; in what I now recognize as an important developmental moment of my writer brain, I invented a backstory that explained how his head wasn't actually missing but was just invisible, and how he was on a quest to change things back. Erin had a landspeeder for our figures to ride around in, and she also had a Death Star play set (which was NOT the Star Wars equivalent of a Barbie Dream House). Outside of the expected possessive older brother/younger sister arguments, we always shared everything equally since the hundreds of adventures we came up with would be better served with the entire collected cast of characters.
We had the soundtrack album, and this was back in the days when vinyl was the standard. It was a double album, and side 4 was easily the best. When friends would come over, we'd play it loud and tip back the chairs in the basement against the walls so we could pretend we were manning the guns in the Millennium Falcon while escaping from the Death Star. I still remember the moment we were watching TV and saw an ad saying Star Wars (I still cannot, to this day, refer to it as "A New Hope") was going to be shown on broadcast television. Understand, these were the days before even a VCR in every home, and in our house the announcement of that upcoming broadcast was bigger than Christmas morning.
For the longest time after "Return of the Jedi" had come and gone and the story seemed to be done, Star Wars became just part of the cultural background. There were always rumors that teased episodes 1, 2, and 3 coming someday, and maybe even episodes 7, 8, and 9 when the actors from the original trilogy would be old enough to tell the story, but eventually the anticipation of this ever happening died down. The movies were always worth a re-watch if they ever showed up on TV, and that was good enough.
I was thrilled when the original trilogy movies were re-released, even if the digital "enhancements" weren't necessarily improvements. When "The Phantom Menace" came out in 1999 to launch the prequel trilogy, Erin and I waited in line at least an hour one Friday evening to see it. It was great at the time because it was more Star Wars, and a throwback to the seed of so many of our childhood adventures, but, as time has proven, the new trilogy didn't measure up to the original. When I got my first computer, one of the first games I bought for it, and in fact ordered the same time I ordered the computer itself, was Dark Forces, a Doom-clone set in the Star Wars universe. Not long after that I bought the X-Wing Collector's Edition, which ate up more of my free time than I will ever publicly admit. Erin didn't have a computer that could run these games, and she was noticeably jealous about it when I showed her how they worked.
In a just a couple of days I'll see "The Force Awakens," the first in the new trilogy that my nine-year-old self hoped for so many decades ago. The first reviews are in, and so far they're overwhelmingly positive. The trailers have been dominating YouTube for at least the past month and they look amazing. J.J. Abrams has a great track record as a director, and since he's about my age and grew up in the same haze of Star Wars love I did, that makes me think this movie could be close to perfect, and something like all of the adventures my little sister and I had come up with while playing on the sandy hill in our yard.
But she isn't here anymore, and she's not going to get to see it. Because of that, no matter how great the movie turns out to be, no matter how dreamlike the experience of seeing it the first time after decades of hope and anticipation will feel, something about it will always be slightly less for me than it should. I fully expect I'll love the movie. It would have been nice if she'd had the chance to love it, too.
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