STAR WARS Day 2019

I'm pretty sure I was ten when I saw STAR WARS (1977) for the first time and that is probably the right age to have it enter your life. I was a young lad living in rural Tennessee and getting to a movie theater was difficult to the point of frustration. I think the film had been out for months if not a year by the time I finally was taken to see it, but by then I was already familiar with the story. In 1977 I had bought a paperback copy of the novelization and devoured this tale of science fantasy adventure in much the same way I devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter novels or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. The experience of seeing the film was life changing but not the way so many people seem to have had their sense of self altered by Star Wars. I loved it but I had so many other similar tales in my awareness that it was just another fun one. That this one got splashed across the big screen in the real world made it special but the screen in my head had so much more variety that competition was sharp for my love.

For a brief few years after the second film I thought that the series might become one of the greatest adventure stories of all time. The high quality of the script of Empire opened up the world giving the characters nuance and detail beyond the broad hero/villain outlines of the first movie. But then the third film came along with it's rehash of the first movie and made-for-toy-shelf characters and my enthusiasm was tempered again. Since then I've occasionally read some Star Wars fiction or comics that recapture the original feeling of wonder from when I was ten or twelve years old but it's still those first two movies that continue to do the trick.

Even after the horrible prequels and the weakly realized Disney follow up trilogy films I still enjoy those movies. I end up being able to enjoy new Star Wars films and tales only in that they find a way to rekindle the feeling of wide-eyed discovery I felt reading that novelization or seeing the first film. It's become something, for me, that causes nostalgia more than anything else. I guess that may have been the inevitable fate of a story originally conceived out of nostalgia for a man's childhood love of science fiction adventure stories. But it's a shame that there have been so few of the films since 1977 that have been able to make Star Wars more than what it's detractors said it was from the beginning - big budgeted children's scribbling. It's better than that but now it has become much more difficult to argue for the tale's higher qualities because you must start each defense with caveats about the obviously bad things attached to it.