I was 8 when Star Wars came out, and outside of my memories of the Apollo 17 moon landing, it’s the only memories of my early childhood I can put a firm date on. I never saw a trailer for it, I just remember that literally everybody was talking about the movie. The music teacher at my school dropped whatever it was that she was teaching us, and began playing the soundtrack to the film while recounting what happened in it.
I think that out of my group of friends, I was the last one to see it, but, man, was I hooked! No one had told me what the film was about before I went to see it, it was just, “You’ve got to go see it! It’s incredible!” And yeah, it was. After that, all I wanted to read was science fiction. I tore through the badly written crap, and then discovered the masters like Heinlein and Asimov. When I found an electronics textbook belonging to one of my older brothers, I read it, hoping to learn how to build my own lightsabre.
I’d blow my allowance on all the Star Wars toys I could, and ferverntly wished that I had money to buy more and that they’d make more toys. I read and reread the novelization of the film I don’t know how many times, the same with splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Just couldn’t get enough of it.
When The Empire Strikes Back came out, I raised a fuss until my stepmother took me to the theater to see it. I bought the comic book (and gawd, was the artwork awful) version of the movie, read the novelization, and hungered for more.
Jedi came out, and I read the novelization before I saw the film, but was bummed that Luke and Leia turned out to be brother and sister. Still, I couldn’t wait for Lucas to release the prequel trilogy.
When The Phantom Menace came out, I was working 3rd shift, and me and a buddy lit out of work early, since there was a theater that was showing the film starting at midnight and running it continuously for 48 hours. I actually liked Jar Jar (but it’s fun to mock the fishmouthed bastid), that’s how much of a geek I was.
AotC was a bit of a letdown, but I held out hope for the last film to be better. I was sorely disappointed. All the while, I kept cursing Lucas for not releasing the untouched original films on DVD. I’d seen the Shortbus Editions and found them lacking.
So when I heard that Lucas was going to be releasing the original versions as “bonus” material on the DVDs of the OT, I planned to pick them up, and render the Shortbus Editions unplayable, so I wouldn’t accidentally load them in the DVD player and have to suffer through Greedo shooting first (amongst other abominations). Today, I’m in Wallyworld, to pick up a few things before I go to work, and I notice that they’ve got the DVDs on sale. I’m flush with cash since I put in a lot of overtime at work last week, and I can easily afford to buy all 3 at once. I pick one of them up, look at it and think, “Meh. I’d rather have an 80-gig iPod.”:eek:
This is not like me. Normally, even if I didn’t have the extra cash, I’d be figuring out ways to buy them. (“I’ll go without food for a couple of days, but it’ll be worth it!”) I’d try to talk myself out of buying such a thing, but there’d be no luck. Today, I was trying to talk myself into buying the things, and I just couldn’t do it. All I could think about were all the other things that suddenly meant more to me than having copies of those moves. If any of my friends from school knew this, they’d wonder what the hell happened to me. Obviously, my inner geek has died. And for some reason, I can’t even force myself to mourn the loss.
