The Star Wars Effect

In 1982 I was 4 years old and my Dad took me to the cinema for the first time...

[fade out to me as an 8 year old queing at a cinema in Paignton]
I didn’t know why, but I was excited. I was stood in a line with my Dad who said we were going to watch a film. I wasn’t sure what that was, but I thought it was something to do with the TV. I was sill excited about the zoo we’d been to the day before. I was carrying a plastic lion with me everywhere. At that point I was going to grow up and be a vet so I could look after the big, scary animals (I wasn’t interested in the cute ones or the reptiles, just the ones that could eat you) so I could prove how brave I was. As the queue started to move Dad told me AGAIN that I had to behave and be quiet if we were going to see this film. This film was ‘"Return of the Jedi"; and as we queued my Dad started to tell me the back-story to the film (my Dad’s a huge film geek too), he told me about the Jedi and about Luke and Ben. Han Solo and Princess Leia. Storm Troopers and x-wings. By the time we were let in I was already excited, when I saw the size of the TV, my mind just couldn’t deal with it. But then the film started and that big TV, the cinema screen, became my first window into another world. Everything looked so REAL (not like the CG we get now) and through those images and sound, but most of all through that story, it made me believe that incredible things were possible. That I could move things with the power of the force. That other worlds existed. That good would always beat evil...
[fade back to the present]

Star Wars is directly responsible for the birth of my now overly active, often warped and weird imagination. Of course, other things influences me in this way, like when I began to read books for the first time and I read ‘Danny the Champion of the World’ or the first time I really listened to the Beatles, but Star Wars started it all. And on Thursay morning, 23 years later I watched the last new Star Wars film I'll ever see. So it was with a mixture of joy and sadness that I sat in the cinema at 12:35 in the morning. But as the words "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away..." appeared on the screen, and the music started, I was just a young kid again watching the thing that I loved.

The film itself was really good. MUCH better than the other two prequels. I got to see the fall of Annakin as he became Darth Vader. I saw Luke and Leia's birth. I watched Chewbacca help save Yoda from the Jedi Massacre. Sure there were problems with it. But it was a Star Wars film, so part of me was always going to love it (I even secretly love episode's 1 and 2, even though I know they're relatively crap).

But the best thing about this film happened today while I was sat in my favourite coffee shop on Rose Street. It was fairly busy and as I sat there with my coffee, reading my paper, a man and his son sat next to me. The son (who's name was Jack) was bouncing up and down with excitement holding a C3PO toy. He told me that he'd just been to see Star Wars with his Dad. He told me the story of that film and that it was the first time he'd been to the cinema. That his Dad was going to let him watch the old films now. He talked to me non-stop for 30 minutes about Star Wars while his Dad was using the internet. It was like watching myself 20 years ago and when he left I had a huge smile on my face, happy that Star Wars still has the power to excite and let kids take their first step into a larger world.