“Kids would love this, I reckon.
I think I was probably in the worst generation for Star Wars fandom.
I was too young to see any of the originals in the theater by just a handful of years. And when Phantom Menace came out, I was PUMPED. I went the afternoon of the last day of school. And…it kinda sucked. I tried to convince myself it was good, I saw it a second time just because I kind of couldn’t believe it wasn’t good.
Here’s my Star Wars journey:
Star Wars (I’m not calling this A New Hope, that’s dumb): Great. Just fun action.
Empire Strikes Back: Love Hoth, Yoda is fun, the Han Solo/Leia shit is kind of boring up to the end. One of very few movies to end on this down a note, which I appreciate.
Return of the Jedi: Look, I have a soft spot because I saw it at the perfect age. I know people hate space bears, but the whole opening with Jabba is great, the ending is solid, the speederbikes were so cool. It’s never going to be a 10 out of 10 if you saw it first as an adult or if you saw it for the first time in 2000, but it’s a gem in my book. Also, it gave us the best Star Wars name ever in Salacious Crumb.
Dark Forces (PC): This is like Doom set in Star Wars. So it was a blast(er). It was pretty simple, go here, shoot this asshole, go there, shoot another asshole. You really just run around blasting Stormtroopers, which is what most Star Wars games probably should be.
X-Wing V. Tie Fighter (computer game): Pretty fun for a flight simulator. I played it on a computer that was WAY too slow, so it was choppy as hell, but somehow I managed to shoot down lots of spacecraft. Flight simulators are always dicey. Because they’re either accurate or they’re fun, never both. This one was fun.
Shadows of the Empire (Nintendo 64): This was a game I really liked, but I don’t know why because it was frustrating as hell. It was an early 3D game, so that meant weird shit happened all the time. You’d get hung up on an invisible thing, fall through a wall, all sorts of weird shit. And there was a good chance you’d play most of a sequence without the ability to really see what you were doing. It was mostly about figuring ways to use the game’s brokenness against it, but it was still pretty fun.
Shadows of the Empire (novel): I don’t know what I expected, but I read a book in 1997, so full credit to the writer, who is named Steve Perry and is probably not the guy from Journey. I’m not going to check on that because Steve Perry is probably a common name, and I feel like it would be a bigger deal if the Journey frontman wrote a decent Star Wars extended universe novel.
Kenner Figures: I bought a bunch of these, hoping they’d be worth money, but I also hated leaving them in the packaging, so I took them out. A little request/advice for Kenner: Can you make the limited, valuable figures ones that aren’t cool? I could never find a goddamn Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, it was always a bunch of IG-88’s and that pig man who worked at Jabba’s palace. How about you make the chase figures some crap no one cares about, like Jabba’s friend with the big snake head or whatever.
Episode 1: So disappointing that I saw it twice because I thought there must have been something wrong with me to be disappointed by STAR WARS. I was a rabid fan at this point. I’d read in some magazine a couple years before that there were supposed to be 9 episodes and I was like, “Wow, can you imagine what a utopia this would be if there were NINE Star Wars movies?!”
Episode 2: My strongest memory of seeing this one is that I turned to my friend and said, “This is not going well” a few minutes in. He laughed. He was seated between me and a third friend, and the middleman said, “Steven [guy on the left] said the exact same phrase in my ear like two minutes ago.”
Episode 3: Didn’t even go see it in the theater. Saw it eventually. Was confused why people liked it, and I could only assume it was because they had to feel like there was some purpose to going to all these movies. Also, why does the Darth Vader sequence look like it was filmed like a soap opera with lens blur and shit? Is that real or am I imagining that?
Lego Star Wars: This was super fun. I completely burned myself out on Lego games because I played the absolute shit out of it and even did the annoying time trials and stuff, but it was totally worth it. This is probably the best way to experience the prequels, and I recommend it.
[comic I can’t remember the name of]: there was this short story that implied the Millenium Falcon crashed, Han died, Chewie was inconsolable, and in the end the planet was Earth and Chewie was behind the legends of Bigfoot. Sort of a reverse Planet of the Apes crossed with Bigfoot. As an aside, in Force Awakens, I felt worst for Chewie because he lost his best and only friend. That was fucked up, and I’m 99% sure he doesn’t tear Kylo Ren’s arms off at any point, but I wouldn’t have minded that.
Force Awakens: I went with my mom, who watches almost exclusively detective shows from the Netherlands, and her review was, “I just kept waiting for something exciting to happen.” I sort of expected by now that the whole Han Solo getting killed by his son thing would make more sense, but I guess it doesn’t.
Last Jedi: I kind of hated the low-speed chase in space. Mostly because that’s not how space works. See, it doesn’t necessarily require more fuel to move a large ship through space than it does a small ship. Because there’s no resistance in space, so, in theory, a single tiny thruster would move a giant space ship just fine. It’s not like air where a smaller craft is quicker and more maneuverable and requires less resources to move around, it’s not like a boat where a smaller craft is easier to turn around and shit. This is why the Borg on Star Trek travel in a cube: in space there’s not drag, no resistance (it’s futile!), so flying around in a cube is a completely reasonable thing to do. So the idea that it would be silly to send a big ship after smaller ships doesn’t work. Also, space is 3-dimensional, so if you had a convoy of ships trying to slowly outrun a large ship, the simple answer is to split the group: One group goes straight, one straight “up,” one straight “down,” and one group each 90-degrees to the sides. The large ship would then have to select a single group to pursue, provided they were going to continue on this dumbass path of a slow speed chase, so 4/5ths of your people would get away. I know, the common argument with this sort of thing is, “Why do you care about science of space travel in Star Wars?” And the answer is because A) It’s kind of the premise for the entire movie, B) Laura Dern keeps asserting that her leadership shouldn’t be questioned, and I think we’re supposed to be on her side, but she totally fucks it up by not making any good choices, and C) it’s not like it’s an incredible journey of a film with this one flaw. I think the chase in space had the most potential, because who cares about any of the other parts? The fetch quest to get the snake man? Eh? Rey repeating Luke’s path on a less compelling environment with a less interesting teacher? They kill Snoke, who’s just some guy? I mean, it’s fine, it’s whatever, I just didn’t really care, and maybe I wasn’t supposed to?
Rogue One: Besides answering the question of why the hell someone would build a space ship with this shaft that could allow it to easily be destroyed, I didn’t need to see it. I did like the ending with Darth Vader, I think because it felt like a movie, you know? Like someone came in and was thinking about how to make it cinematic and compelling where most of the rest of the movie doesn’t have a whole lot I remember, TBH. It was like someone said, “What if this last 5 minutes, we made it like…I don’t know, entertaining?”
Solo: It took me like 5 times to get through it. Just boring. I think they could’ve made a great heist movie, which is sort of where they went, especially with a charming but bumbling Han Solo. I really wish the original movie they were putting together was the version that got released. Also, I was told Lando was pansexual or something, but there was like no sexuality in the movie other than the droid constantly harassing Lando, so what even?
Rise of Skywalker: [only here so you don’t think I forgot, but I haven’t seen it]
Jedi Academy: Well, it’s fun, perfect for kids, and it might even please adults who are tired of their kids reading exclusively comics because it kind of mixes comics and text.
And that’s it!
If I had to predict what the next Star Wars thing for me would be…maybe the Mandalorian? I’m told that’s good. But it’ll probably be some comic book thing that is fine.”