That long, huh?

I was 5 years old when I discovered Star Wars.

Before that I liked Starsky & Hutch and SWAT but really as with most little boys it was the cars and guns in those shows that I liked. But one evening in May of 1977 changed all of that forever.

I remember sitting under my parents huge dinner table playing with some toy or another while they were watching the channel 7 evening news (with Bill Butell and Roger Grimsby) and Joel Siegel came on and was talking about something called Star Wars and talking about a galaxy far, far away or some such crap.
It was when the clip played that my attention was completly caught. It was the part where the Millenium Falcon had just escaped from the Death Star and was being attacked by a small group of Tie Fighters. Han and Luke were manning the gun turrets and were trying to shoot the Ties down.

It was the most incredible thing that I'd ever seen in my life. (I was five and hadn''t seen my first pair of female breasts yet so don't hold this against me...)

I only mention all of this now because I noticed that lately cable has been running the Star Wars movies (all of them) back to back and with some frequency. I wondered why until one day I was checking a calendar for what day the release date for Spider-Man 3 fell on when it suddenly hit me.

May 2007.

May 1977.

30 years.

The 30th anniversary of Star Wars.

Damn I feel old.

My own 5 year old was introduced to Star Wars when he was 3. He used to sit on my lap while I played LucasArts Jedi Outcast, then it's sequel, Jedi Academy and finally Bioware's Kinghts of the Old Republic, all on my PC. He likes Star Wars, but he LOVES Lightsabers. The boy has 3 of them, the extendable plastic kind. For his first Halloween costume he was a Jedi Knight. I think its the flashing lights and the sound of them when the clash together. Everytime there's a lightsaber fight he runs to go get his lightsaber and starts mimicking the movements on the TV as well as making the associated noises.

My love for Star Wars has waxed and waned over the last 30 years. I'm also one of the few Star Wars fans who understand that the prequel films weren't aimed at me or people my age (well maybe Revenge of the Sith, it's the only one of the three that felt like a real SW movie) they were aimed at, well my son. He absolutely loved The Phantom Menace. He laughed at all of the stuff that I thought was silly and stupid and overall he enjoyed it as a kid would enjoy it. Kinda like I enjoyed Star Wars way back when. Because face it, in the end Star Wars isn't high art and the only really good, solid Star Wars film is, IMHO, The Empire Strikes Back.

Still, as I watched Empire the other day, the first time in a long time, I noticed something, parts that were my favorite when I was 9 -10 aren't my favorite parts now. I mean when I was a kid I loved all of the training stuff with Luke and Yoda, the mushy romantic crap with Leia and Han on the Falcon was cool but I could have done without it. My all time favorite part when I was a kid, the climactic duel between Luke and Vader on Bespin, is no longer the thing I love the most. I still like it, but for my money the best part of the Empire has to be when Han is about to be put into the carbonite and Chewbacca is like "NO, thatsnotgonnahappent" and starts hurling Stormtroopers to and fro. Finally, Han calms him down and tells him that he has to look after Leia. There's a moment where Leia and Han look at each other just before they kiss that says everything thats needed to be said about how they feel about each other, at that point the actual kiss is just a formality. But the awesome part comes right when they're getting ready to put 'ol Han on ice:

Leia : I love you.

Han: I know.

Best response to "I Love You" in any movie. EVER.

I'd venture that not a lot of guys could pull that off in real life and seem that cool, but you believe that Han would say something like that and totally pull it off. We understand that this is who Han is tho' ,that he was written with this smug self assuredness and it's an understanding of character that was lacking in the prequels (Obi-wan and Palpatine aside, for their lack of screen time, these were the two characters I felt we got to know the best).

Anyway I've rambled on too long about Star Wars, Happy 30th to a part of my childhood that I don't think will ever, ever go away...