STARRRRRRRRR WARRRRRRRRRRRRS

In a different world and a different timeline, the gang is together in Stirling, Virginia tonight, for the renewal of the old tradition last exercised a decade ago, there at midnight for the release of a new Star Wars movie. Of course, we’re living in three different metropolitan areas with five children between us, so a midnight movie on a Thursday night was never going to be on the cards in any event, but it’s nice to dream.

Someone smarter than me blogged earlier that right now is the greatest moment to be a Star Wars fan, because it could still be anything at all and it’s about to happen.  That glorious anticipation – we know there’s a girl and a boy, and we think she’s a desert scavenger and he’s a fallen Stormtrooper.  There’s something awfully Vader-like, and possibly Vader-worshipping, with a lightsaber that has a crossguard.  There’s an even tinier astromech droid than R2-D2 ever was, rolling around on a spherical body with personality that just bursts through even the briefest flash of trailer.

And there’s Leia, and there’s Han and Chewie, and there’s Artoo and Threepio. All the pieces are on the board. All the players are on their marks. We’re about to pull the curtain we’ve spent three decades never expecting to see going up.

This is the movie we’ve wanted since 1983. This is what led a dorm full of Southern frat-boys to rush out and buy Heir to the Empire in hardback the moment they realized it existed. After thirty-two long and winding years, we have something the prequels simply weren’t capable of giving us.

This is the story of what happened next.

Star Wars was my life. When my first baby tooth came out at school, and I lost it, I got my first or second action figure as compensation. The packaging of those toys is iconic to the point that I wanted to run out and buy a crap-ton of action figures when they reused it for the prequels a couple years back. I got the Death Star Space Station set for Christmas in 1978, I think, and my three living grandparents all smiled and nodded with the same bewilderment I now reserve for Pokemon and Skylander Trap Team. I wanted to be Darth Vader, or else be the one that took him down. I wanted a real life snowspeeder more than anything, to the point that I received a Lego one for my forty-third birthday. I spent years running around the back yard with a sawed-off blue mop handle, thrashing endless stormtroopers and God knows what else.  And this was a world without even VCR versions of the movies. If I’d had what exists today – Blu-Ray and streaming and multiple cartoon series and Star Tours and the ability to build my own lightsaber at Disneyland – if I’d had a third of that at age 8, I would have collapsed and died in a weeping puddle of pure emotional overload.

When I walked out of the theater at age 11, it never occurred to me that there wouldn’t be a new Star Wars movie on the screen for sixteen years.  I figured 1986. And it didn’t happen, and 1990 didn’t happen, and they had stopped making toys a year or two after, and it didn’t take long to decide well, they’re done. And I think a lot of people have soured on the prequels, and rightly so in some cases, but they’ve also forgotten that we were willing to forgive and overlook a lot simply because it was new Star Wars. And at the same time, I think a lot of people still haven’t forgiven the prequels for telling us this is how we got to that point, not what came next.

Because we’re older. We know that “and they lived happily ever after” is the biggest lie you ever hear growing up. Maybe the end of Return of the Jedi was good enough for the original vision, although depending on what you believe there were either nine or twelve or six movies originally planned. I know that at age 8, I had my own timeline for what was coming after Empire, and it involved me cropping up starting in the fourth one, a Battlestar Galactica crossover in the fifth one, at least one episode incongruously titled “Run Vader Run” and the whole thing landing on Earth by the eighth one. (If Patton Oswalt’s famous improv monologue actually comes to pass, or the Guardians of the Galaxy show up in Episode IX, I am going to feel legitimately hard done by.)

And from the sound of things, our heroes’ lives didn’t turn out like they expected either. They didn’t all get to show up at the holo-opera on Coruscant for opening night ten years later either. But at some point in the next few days or weeks, in our own separate times and places, we get to touch that again and remember what it was like to all be together, and what it was like to be a wide-eyed kid waiting for that fanfare to hit. And I’m going to see an actor – who said twenty years ago that he couldn’t see playing a role as uninteresting as Han Solo again – go up there and speak for all of us.

Chewie…we’re home.