Thank You, George Lucas

I remember loving Star Wars deeply as a child. I can't remember many things I was as enthusiastic about as Star Wars. I drew pictures about it endlessly, recreating scenes from memory days, weeks, or even longer after watching the film. My brothers and I played Star Wars all the time, making up our own stories using the characters from the films. Perhaps the biggest piece of praise I can give the films from my childhood is that Star Wars helped form me. Even today, when faced with something I don't know if I can overcome, I sometimes take comfort in the wisdom of Yoda's words: "Do, or do not. There is no try." or "You must unlearn what you have learned." or "So certain are you. Always with you what cannot be done."* or "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." I remember Han coming back for Luke even after he burned his bridges, or the way Obi-Wan sacrificed himself for the others.

One of the most formative times of my life was running around the house playing with Star Wars action figures. My brothers and I made huge plots that deviated wildly from the films, stories in which Obi-Wan survives and the heroes go on all sorts of magnificent adventures, stories which prominently featured Boba Fett and Darth Vader as the main villains. There was a time I watched Star Wars every week. My mother read us the Thrawn Trilogy as bedtime stories.

But that was "Before the dark times. Before the Empire."

Though it wasn't Empire that changed things for me, of course, it was The Phantom Menace. I remember standing in line for hours the day it came out. I didn't see the first showing, but even then the crowd was as excited and eager as I have ever seen an audience. Something changed in the fifteen-year-old me through that film, something which I don't have to get into in detail. I think I lost sight of something that I should have remembered.

That something is all those hours running around with an action figure clutched in each hand, shaking one or the other and making 'pew pew' noises, or making them whack each other with plastic lightsabers, going 'ksh ksh ksh.' It's all the pictures I drew of stormtroopers and laser sword fights and spaceships. Star Wars gave me a huge part of my childhood and some of my happiest memories.

And I owe all of this to George Lucas.

George Lucas has taken a lot of fire, especially from some of Star Wars's biggest fans, for what he has done, first in the special editions of the original trilogy (Han shot first!), and then in the new trilogy. But artists won't always create things I'm happy with. Even my favorite novelists wrote novels I don't like. I have let my own disappointment in the new Star Wars disguise what was most important: my happy childhood memories. And who knows? Maybe in twenty years, some other kid will be writing about how much he loved playing Anakin and Jar Jar.

George Lucas has consistently rejected fans' demands to "restore" Star Wars to the way they want it, and fans have been vocal about how they feel about it. But the truth is, George Lucas didn't ruin my childhood. He made it better.

Sometimes I think about why the live-action Star Wars TV show never materialized, and I wondered today whether that's because of how ungrateful we, as fans, have been. So let me go on record here saying, "Thank you, George Lucas. Thank you for giving me something I truly love."


* I've never been sure about the quote "Always with you what cannot be done." That middle word is hard to make out in the film. I have always heard "what." According to the Star Wars scripts I've looked at online, the word is "it." Hm. It may be time to unlearn what I have learned.