I remember, quite clearly, the first time I saw The Phantom Menace.
It was 1999, opening weekend. I had agonized over not getting to see the very first showings, over not being one of the true fans, the ones who’d dressed up and camped out for their place at the very front of the line. But at last, there I was, and I was ready to have my life changed.
I was 15, and I'd grown up with Star Wars. I was hooked from the moment I saw my first Star Wars film — it would've been about 1991, watching The Empire Strikes Back in my friend’s basement, sinking into worn shag carpet and feeling overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the Battle of Hoth — and my obsession had only grown over time.
First, obviously, there were the movies themselves. Rented on VHS and watched over and over again, until my parents finally broke down and bought me copies of my own. Then came the games — hours spent with Rebel Assault, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and still more hours of hunting down missing floppy disks and user manuals.
Then came a visit to Disney World and a ride on Star Tours, and my mother's fateful decision to buy me The Lando Calrissian Adventures and Tales from Jabba's Palace, which opened the door to a world of tie-in books, comics, and reference material about every single damn character in the series, no matter how small.
And as my interest grew, it felt like Star Wars was returning to the world. Going from outdated nerd marginalia to fringe success to mainstream popularity all over again. And I went along for the ride, seeing my own media preferences vindicated before my very eyes.
But of course, all those things were, well, peripheral. Shadows of the Empire — with its simultaneously released novel, comics, and video game — was great. Revelatory, even. But it was secondary to the movies. Mere footnotes and errata, basically.
And so my fandom culminated in 1999, when I walked into that theater, sat down to watch the first truly new Star Wars film since 1983, saw the opening crawl and heard the swelling music, and felt fully alive.
But when I left the theater a little over two hours later, something was wrong.
It had been Star Wars, to be sure. It looked and sounded like Star Wars, with the thrumming vibrato of engines and the whine of lightsabers and the flash of blasters. But it wasn't the Star Wars I'd grown up with.
The story was different, for one. And the tone was different. Come to think of it, everything was different, just enough to feel wrong. Gone was the industrial chic aesthetic I’d loved so much, replaced with shining chrome and art deco cities. The characters weren't pirates, rogues, and drifters. They were diplomats, officials, and — uh — children?
I'd loved some things from the jump, sure. The Duel of the Fates sequence was brilliant. Darth Maul was a favorite, too, with his double-sided saber that felt directly inspired by Sith Lord Exar Kun, a well-established figure in the Expanded Universe books.
But then they'd killed him! He wouldn't even be coming back? Good god!
It was all wrong. And my opinions didn't improve with the subsequent two prequel films, which if anything doubled down on what was different and changed about Star Wars, and further alienated me from what had been the dominant media spectacle of my entire childhood.
George Lucas became a hated villain, the ultimate embodiment of creative excess and hubris. He'd had everything! A perfect, living universe of lore, built up over two decades! And he threw it all away!
I was heartbroken. It hadn't been what I wanted. Not in the least.
Jump forward to 2015. I'm walking out of The Force Awakens, and I'm filled with, well, jubilation. Because J.J. Abrams, that god damned genius, had brought it back from the brink. Everything was right again! The film had been exactly what I’d been expecting from The Phantom Menace, a restoration and continuation of that old-time Star Wars look, feel, sound… everything!
It LOOKED like Star Wars. It FELT like Star Wars. I felt like I was fourteen again, reading and re-reading the Tales from… books, devouring a veritable (and at times literal) encyclopedia of data on ships and people and planets.
Good lord, it felt great.
But over the next few months… well, something odd happened. My interest in Star Wars, briefly restored to prepubescent levels, tapered off again.
Oh, I considered picking up the new books, learning more of the backstory of Rey, Finn, Poe, and the like. I even borrowed one from the library. But I returned it unread two weeks later.
And bit by bit, I forgot about Star Wars all over again. Which was odd, because they’d given me exactly what I wanted. But it somehow wasn’t enough.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Because while The Force Awakens made me feel like a kid again, for a couple hours at least… well, I wasn't. Star Wars was no longer something I was discovering, new, for the first time. At best, it was something I was returning to.
The original Star Wars films and their accompanying Expanded Universe books had kindled a lifelong interest in genre fiction. They led me down a path that I’d followed all the way to Bester, Gibson, Zelazny, Sterling, and Lovecraft. They had a massive, outsize impact on my childhood.
But now that I'd already crossed that horizon, what use did I have for more of the same? I couldn't exactly rediscover sci-fi for the first time. Nor could I relive that experience of feeling the facts and figures of a fictional universe overtake me and my brain. I wasn’t a kid, with a mind like a blank slate waiting to be filled with dreams of starships and space wizards and super-weapons — I was a grown-ass man.
And what's more, the very thing that had briefly made The Force Awakens feel so close to my childhood — the reuse of those themes and aesthetics that had inflamed my imagination decades before — was also the thing that prevented it from really making an impression. Because, of course, the impression had already been made.
In 2015, Star Wars was not a new thing. Not to me, and not to anyone who wasn’t at most a child. At best, it was a recapitulation — and that’s exactly what it was designed to be.
It was not dredging up and remixing forgotten ideas from radio dramas and World War 2 films and odd sci-fi books to create something totally new and weird, like the original had done in 1977. Instead, it was intentionally aping something that was already fully formed and well-defined in popular culture. It was building a brand, continuing a valuable franchise, and it was trying to precisely meet the expectations of its audience.
It wasn't opening a new door — at best, it was just making a new key for an old one.
And this, whatever you think of the actual quality of these latter-day Disney sequels, is a fundamental problem. We cannot bring back 1977 — or whatever date you first saw and fell in love with a Star Wars film. We cannot be children again. We can't rediscover things that we already know.
We can revisit them, sure. Especially as parents, it can be a joy to experience things through your child's eyes, to see them light up and feel something similar to what you once did all those years ago.
But even that will only be similar. Their world is not ours, and their childhood is something new and inexplicable.
And over the past year, I've found myself going back to the prequels — those once-hated artifacts of teenage trauma and hubris. And no, I don't appreciate them in quite the same way I appreciated the original films when I first came across them.
But how could I? And more importantly, why would I want to? I have those original Star Wars films, and I can watch them whenever I want. And I have the things I learned, the art and the experiences I discovered. If I want to keep growing, I should seek out something new.
And for whatever faults you may think the prequels have, they were new. They were different. They had totally new and weird ideas, albeit ones that didn't fit into the narrowly defined Star Wars milieu I'd spent my childhood immersed in.
But regardless of how you think of their qualities as films, it’s impossible to deny that the prequels added something new to the discussion. It just turns out it wasn’t a discussion I actually wanted to change and evolve. I wanted the same thing, to relive the past, the keep it from slipping away. And as anyone who’s actually watched the prequels knows, that’s impossible.
And so this, then, is the tragedy of the prequels. All along, they were what I should have wanted, but didn't. And it's the tragedy of the sequels, too, because they were exactly what I wanted, but shouldn't have.
It's that old Monkey's Paw: the tragedy of getting exactly what you wanted.
And for once, that is a story the Jedi will tell you.