My relationship to Star Wars

To give you a sense of how much and how long I have been a Star Wars fan, let me relate a couple of elements of my childhood. My dad was 26 years old when Star Wars came out, and I was 3, and we both really dug the movie. I have a very vague recollection of watching the movie for the first time at a drive-in theater in 1977 or 1978, and then, for a long time, that was it. I had seen it once, it made a huge impression on me, but it was just a memory. Back then, kiddies, before cable tv, before the internet, before even the VCR, you just couldn't easily rewatch movies. It's kind of amazing that any children of my cohort, given how short our attention spans would have been at the time, held onto any strong feelings about Star Wars, once it was out of theaters. But there were a couple of things that helped.

One, my dad was a record collector. Since Star Wars made just as big an impression on him as it did on me, he went out and bought the double-LP soundtrack pictured above. My memoriy of the initial big screen experience might be fuzzy at best, but I have many, many memories of lying on the carpet of my parents' living room, with the Star Wars soundtrack on the record player and the album cover opened up to the stills from the movie as shown in the photo above. I revisited the movie many times in my mind, assisted by what really is one of the most iconic movie scores in modern history.

Ironically my favorite part of Star Wars (A New Hope, but we didn't call it that back then of course) was the cantina scene and all the weird aliens. The song from that scene is on the soundtrack album, naturally, but you can see there aren't any pictures from that particular wretched hive of scum and villainy. But that's OK, because of the second thing that really helped hook me for life.

THE TOYS. As we all know, George Lucas really rewrote the rulebook on movie licensing and product development, and for all the books and bedsheets and lunchboxes and everything else I acquired, it was the action figures and vehicles and playsets that really did it for me. You'd best believe that the Hammerhead figure was one of my prize possessions as a pre-schooler.

So yeah, between the movie itself and the music and the merch, I was all-in on Star Wars from day one. That was all well and good during the six years it took the first trilogy to wrap up, and by then we did have cable and a VCR and I watched the movies over and over again. I wished they would make more, and when they started publishing Star Wars novels and I tried to give them a chance, but they didn't quite do it for me. I never stopped being a Star Wars fan, it just became an old childhood favorite rather than an active pursuit. Then of course the prequels came out, and I acknowledge their flaws now and knew at the time they were imperfect, but I watched them all and enjoyed them in the moment despite however much I might nitpick them later. When the lights go down in the theater, I'm just a kid who's a diehard Star Was fan. That held true for Episodes VII through IX, as well. I'll get into each movie in more detail as the project covers them, but I just wanted to lead off with the admission that there hasn't been a conscious moment in my life where I haven't positively identified as a Star Wars fan.

I love movies, all kinds of movies, but when people ask me what my all-time favorite movie is, I don't say it's a classic piece of cinema from the golden age of Hollywood, or an indie darling from more recent years, or anything else that would make me sound cool or give me proper cinephile street cred. My favorite movie of all time is Star Wars, full stop.

One of the biggest draws for me with this project is finally making time to watch the animated series that I haven't consumed before. That's the other big thing I wanted to clarify. It's not that I got burnt out on Star Wars, or lost interest in it, or have anything whatsoever against animation, Star Wars on tv, or that period of creative output from Lucasfilm and/or that era of Star Wars as a setting. The Clone Wars and Rebels just happened to come out when I was a working adult, a homeowner, a husband and a father of three kids. It's tough to find the liesure time to put my eyeballs on 133 episodes of anything at my age. Unless of course I make it a regular weekly thing as part of a year-long (give or take) Big Pop Culture Project, like this one.

The point is, I am coming at this whole endeavor both clear-eyed and capable of critical reflection, yet also with an enormous amount of love for the subject matter. Star Wars occupied vast swathes of space in my head and my heart. Always has, probably always will.