Back when Jimmy Carter was President, a gallon of gas cost 64 cents, a average house would sell for $25,000, and the average joe made less than $10,0000 a year, I went with my best friend John Pitman, my brother Mike, and our mutual friends Chris and John Cuevas, to see Star Wars. I had no idea, while riding in the backseat in Mr. Cuevas' car, what I was in for and what it would do to my life and the world.
28 years later I have my ticket in my wallet for the last (yeah right) of the Star Wars films. I only saw the original film in the theater 6 times. I think I saw Empire Strikes back 4 times and Return of the Jedi 4 times. Phantom Menace I saw once in the theater and that was the same for Attack of the Clowns, I mean clones.
As a guy who had his whole adolecense taken over by Star Wars I chuckle as I walk thrugh Toys'R US seeing all the little kids oggling the Star Wars toys. I see their parents and they look as if they too might not have been born when the original came out.
I get all picky about what I like and don't like about the films. The truth is that no Star Wars film will do to me what that first film did. It was the first, and I was twelve. No matter the wating in lines, the masks, the remember-whens, the speaking of Star Wars lines, I can't be twelve again. And no generation will ever see Star Wars the way mine did. The current film, for good or bad, comes into a world chock full of technology, special effects, shock and awe, and videogame cgi wizardry.
In no small way Star Wars helped design this technological terror we have constructed. Movies are products of culture. But when they are imaginative they can be the creators of culture. Now we have to decide whether we should follow Obi-wan or Darth.
May the Force be with us!
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