Back in 1999, a high school buddy of mine and I caught that case of Skywalking Pneumonia that seemed to be going around that May, and we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for an opening matinee. A couple of hours later, we walked out and said, “Um… it had lightsabers. Lightsabers are cool. Right? I mean, I thought they were… cool… and there were – Exactly what the fuck just happened to us? Why do we suddenly miss Ewoks? And if I hear the word ‘Meesa,’ I swear before God I will plow this car into a fucking abutment!”
Since then, there’s been a lot of hyperbolic talk about George Lucas raping childhoods, while Lucas defended himself by saying The Phantom Menace was meant to be a kids’ movie, but the bottom line is that a lot of people see the movie as a filthy aberration. And I am one of them… to the point that I never paid to see another Star Wars movie in the theater again (I was, um, provided a copy of the 2002 leak of Attack of The Clones, and I saw Revenge of the Sith at a free advance screening sponsored by the radio station I worked for).
Well, it is now thirteen years later. And despite Lucas’s tone-deaf verbal defenses of the movie in the face of fan revolt, there is finally, all in one day, two pieces of concrete evidence that we fans were right.