Today has unofficially become Star Wars day because of the whole pun of May the Fourth be with you.  It's a bad joke, but I'm willing to get on board with it because I like bad jokes and I was raised on Star Wars.  

I'll admit it's a little hard to be as passionate about Star Wars as I once was, but when I was a kid it was the absolute coolest.  I can't even remember ever having not seen A New Hope or Empire Strikes Back and I can remember looking forward to and being excited for the release of Return of the Jedi.  I have a vague memory of being really, really young and seeing Yoda on the big screen so I wouldn't be surprised if Empire was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater.  I don't know how I saw A New Hope, but I knew it inside out from an incredibly young age.

And Star Wars action figures were my favorite toys.  I had a pretty impressive collection of them.  I remember there used to be this store called Mervyn's that my Mom would shop at decently often and they had a cool toy section so I was always excited to go there with her and go browse the Star Wars section for figures I didn't have yet.  Usually I could talk her into letting me get one or two while we were there.  That's definitely a fond memory I have from being a kid.

I also remember desperately hoping there would be more movies after Return of the Jedi and there were rumors for a long time that George Lucas was going to make a prequel trilogy but he apparently wanted to wait for technology to catch up to his vision.  It ended up taking 16 years before The Phantom Menace came out, which doesn't sound like such a crazy long time to me now, but it felt like forever when I was a kid.  Not to mention I had no idea how long the wait was going to be.  I was about six years old when Return of the Jedi came out.  I had pretty much given up on it ever happening when suddenly in my senior year of college it was announced the first prequel movie was really being released.  The difference between six and almost twenty-two really is pretty significant.  Much more so than say, being twenty-two and thirty-eight, so I can see why it really felt like it took forever.

The town my college was in was pretty small and didn't have the awesomest movie theater situation so I remember finding a group of people with a car and driving to a nearby bigger city to see The Phantom Menace.  I'd had some warning from people who'd seen it opening weekend that I might want to lower my expectations a little bit, but it was difficult to do.  I remember seeing "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" come up on the screen followed by the Star Wars logo and then the text crawl and the iconic music and I couldn't help but get a little chill in my spine.

I do remember finding Jar Jar and little kid Anakin to be pretty annoying, but I thought Darth Maul was cool, and my excitement about a new Star Wars movie was strong enough to convince me as I walked out of the theater that I liked it more than I actually did.  It was only on reflecting on it and discussing it with friends that I started realizing how much of a disappointment it really was.  I gutted it out with the rest of the prequel series and although I think there were some areas of improvement in the subsequent films, overall the whole thing was kind of a letdown.  

I was cautiously optimistic when Disney announced they were making a sequel trilogy.  I was there for The Force Awakens on opening night.  It's far from a perfect movie, but I felt at the time like it fixed some of the problems I had with the prequels so I remained hopeful for the rest of the trilogy.  Overall it ended up being a bit of a letdown, too, though.  I don't hate the sequels as much as some people do and I think they have their good moments, but they're undoubtedly flawed.  There was a lot of potential there that I don't think was fully realized.  I still think they're an improvement on the prequels, but don't hold a candle to the original trilogy.    

I've seen most of the Mandalorian and thought it was okay, but still slightly lacking.  Haven't checked out the Book of Boba Fett yet, but I do plan to at some point.

I don't know if it's even possible at this point to make a truly great Star Wars movie.  The fanbase is too large and hypercritical and I don't think you can do anything that will please everyone.  I feel a good writer with a well developed vision ought to be able to make something enjoyable, but I don't think anything could live up to what I imagined as a kid.  I'm not sure in retrospect that the original trilogy even does.

And that I think is the real takeaway and lasting legacy of Star Wars for me.  It stimulated my imagination as a kid to such a degree that I think that's why I'm still interested in imaginative works now.  There's no doubt I owe a debt to Star Wars for my own work.  I wouldn't say I've ever consciously ripped it off, but it's such a part of my creative DNA that it can't help but have an impact.  All the robots and spaceships and aliens and creatures just made it seem like anything was possible and I'll never be able to totally hate on Star Wars just for that.  My childhood and by extension my life wouldn't have been the same without it.

So in closing I'd just like to say, Live Long and Prosper.