I was born eight months after the release of Return of the Jedi in theatres. For all intents and purposes, the Star Wars saga was over. But its legacy was just beginning. It might have been 1991 when I got hold of a worn-out VHS on which my sister had recorded The Empire Strikes Back live from a commercial broadcaster. There was no fancy sticker on it, no logo, no information whatsoever. It was just a black box with a brownish magnetic tape visible through the transparent plastic and a badly handwritten title on the spine. Nothing that could prepare me for what was I about to experience.
I put the VHS in the videorecorder, and I was hooked right from the start. The crawl, the music, Hoth, the tauntauns, the weird and scary hologram of the emperor, Lando with his semi-robotic sidekick, the carbon-freezing chamber scene, the wise green elvish master disguised as a fool, the anguish of Luke’s trial, and the heroes’ final defeat. I did not even have the words to process all that I was watching. It was dark, it was serious, it was swashbuckling, it was fun, it was epic beyond my wildest dreams. I memorized everything – including the commercial spots and all the jingles which I still recall to this day.
At that time, and at that particular age, a VHS was nothing short than a technological marvel – you could watch and rewatch a film any time you wanted to. But that was the exception and still quite a novelty. Normally you would have watched something live on TV once – and that was it. If you had no VHS at hand to record what you were watching – or if you didn’t have the money to buy an officially licensed version of the product, if and where available – it was gone who knows for how long. Also, the quality of an overused VHS was terrible. The sound was muffled, the video was grainy.
Catching something live on TV was definitely better in terms of overall quality and experience. I remember as if it was yesterday the emotional impact a marathon of all the original trilogy Star Wars movies back-to-back, possibly on New Year’s Eve and surely for the most part alone, had on me. It was at my grandmother’s apartment by the seaside, probably not long after my first experience with Empire, and she had no VCR (gasp!). My attention was on steroids. I sat in religious silence, completely absorbed into the whole story, captured by the technological prowess of Industrial Light & Magic. It was nothing short of a religious ritual, a mesmerizing séance. It was strange. I never felt anything like that watching a movie. I bonded with those characters – they became a part of my emotional dictionary. It was one of the best holidays I ever had.
For all intent and purposes, after the final celebrations at the very end of Return of the Jedi, the Star Wars saga was over. When I seriously got into non-Star Wars related comic books in the mid-1990s, I occasionally came across the Star Wars series published by Dark Horse and the novels by Timothy Zahn, but I never actually bothered to pick them up. There was not going to be any more movies, so I thought that any cross-media lore expansion would always suffer from a comparison with the movies and feel derivative at best. Moreover, the core of Star Wars was the father-son relationship, and with the Vader arc completed, I felt no need to revisit those places. Luke had already won and redeemed his father.
This does not mean that I stopped watching Star Wars. Far from it: re-watching the saga became a sort of holiday ritual. I admired the 1997 release of the Special Editions, I enjoyed most of the prequels, I loved both the Clone Wars TV series, and I adored Knights of the Old Republic when I played it many years after its original release. But nothing ever came close to those two experiences I had as a child with that worn-out VHS and that TV marathon.
Notes
This is an outtake from a paper about canon and the influence of Comparative Religion scholars in the genesis of Star Wars I submitted to an academic journal some time ago.
If you’re interested, keep an eye on this blog and I’ll let you know when the paper’s coming out!
UPDATE July 2021: the article has been published! Click on the title to access it (paywall): “The Trials and Tribulations of Luke Skywalker: How The Walt Disney Co. and Lucasfilm Have Failed to Confront Joseph Campbell’s Troublesome Legacy.” Implicit Religion 23(3): 251–276. https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.43229.