Kids, infamously, get obsessed with certain shows, movies, songs. I still read the same books, watch the same movies – especially since the pandemic began. It’s gotten easier but for a while there I couldn’t abide any story in any media that I didn’t know how it ended. I needed that assurance of what the end is, even when the end might be dark. But all my life I’ve had the things I return to again and again, beginning with Star Wars. I mean episodes 1 & 2, chronologically or, if you’re fussy, 4 & 5. A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, though back then they were just Star Wars and Empire. I don’t even count Return of the Jedi because after the escape from Jobba I find it kinda boring and I never liked Ewoks.
Whatever thing you obsessed over and could somehow watch again and again, ours was Star Wars. We would build a two "room" fort of pillows on either side of the couch, stick our heads out the middle, and listen to John Williams. For a long time I thought he was the beginning of all movies – I had 2 VHS tapes growing up: Star Wars and Indiana Jones, so it was a reasonable belief. Both of them were mysteriously pirated by a relative long before renting was a thing and played on our first VHS player that you put the cassette in and pushed down. I grew up wanting to be Wedge, that one X-Wing fighter who lived. Who, like Luke, had grown up on Tatooine, the planet farthest from the bright center of the universe – the other guy who made it off that planet, just as I would make it out of Ardmore one day. Star Wars was our first understanding of good guys and bad guys and loveable scoundrels who shoot first. Of the Force, which was a (then simple) belief system we could get behind. Of what makes a hero and how size and what you look like and being a girl don't matter when you have heart. (Oh how I loved Leia but couldn’t aspire to Carrie Fisher.) I don't care about sophisticated analyses of Star Wars. Call it childish if you want; I was a child. And when it comes to that original story in its original form, I always will be.
I remember as a girl that we were all in love with Luke – because he was the young hero and we were 4 yo when it came out. Then by Empire we got that Luke was ok but that was Harrison Ford. (I did know one woman who said her favorite when she was a kid was Grand Moff Tarkin because he could tell Vadar what to do. I’ve never had an attraction to power, but I think maybe it looks like Peter Cushing when you’re 4.)
And here’s a betrayal (according to purists and the narrow-minded) of all that came before in this little essay: my first crush wasn’t Han Solo. It was Spock.
Cue horrified cries of people who think you have to pick between Star Wars and Star Trek. Roddenberry never went back and “updated” the first Star Trek movie.