Star Wars: Episode I -The Phantom Menace turns 25 this weekend.
This is where I could do another on of my tired riffs on aging about how I’m a terribly old person etc but how boring would that be, right? The thing that’s infinitely more chilling is that it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago to me. It’s an odd thing to see pop culture unfolding and changing in realtime as the generation that ACTUALLY grew up with it is now old enough to have their memories clouded by nostalgia.
Now, this will still be a Figure Friday column after a fashion but we’re taking a trip in the Way -Back machine to when I was a junior in college that was ready for new Star Wars…and all the merchandise that came with it.
Back before any dickhead with a keyboard could begin writing for a pop culture blog with only a sunny disposition and the promise of hitting regular deadlines, we had to get our movie news from sources like magazines, Entertainment Tonight, or the E! Network back when it was was 90% Talk Soup and the Kardashians were not even a dark cloud on the horizon.
My magazine of choice was Cinescape, a publication that skewed towards the sci-fi genre and was slick enough to appear credible. I’d been following the Episode I rumors and irresponsible speculation for literal years prior to the film’s release. There were kernels of truth contained in its pages but they were wrong more than they were right.
At the time the movie was set to release it had been a whopping sixteen years since Return of the Jedi. That’s nearly two decades where the only Star Wars we had was the Marvel comic which ended not long after the movies did, a couple of cartoons, two Ewok TV movies, and finally the novels and Dark Horse comics that popped up in the early ’90s.
The Expanded Universe was chugging along all throughout my junior high and high school years and I voraciously read all the EU stuff I could get my hands on. At the time Star Wars was a largely dormant property. Sure, the movies were universally loved but everyone had more of less moved on and the late ’80s and early ’90s belonged to Star Trek: The Next Generation and its various spinoffs (for the record I have enough space in my heart for both Wars and Trek to exist in harmony).
But Star Wars was coming back. It was almost too good to be true and not at all an exercise in learning to manage ones expectations.
Here’s how deep I was in:
- I recorded the trailer off of broadcast TV onto a VHS tape and I lost count of how many times I rewatched it.
- When tickets for the midnight release went on sale, I closed down the shop I worked at in the mall and drove across the street to the local movie theater. I quickly struck up a conversation with an honest enough looking dude in line and slipped him some cash to get me two tickets for the first showing. I returned two hours later (again closing my shop) to get my tickets and he was still there. Such was the positive power of Star Wars.
- I ordered the first wave of Episode I figure online, sight unseen.
Way back in 1999 online ordering of anything was in a positively embryonic state. It wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous or convenient as it is now and it was most defiantly more art than science. I had found a retailer via a magazine ad that was accepting preorders for the figures, went to the public library (because that’s where the internet lived at the time), printed off my order form, and mailed it off with a cheque…then waited.
The media blitz and building Star Wars mania mad all prior summer blockbusters look cheap in compression. Batmania didn’t have shit on The Phantom Menace. I likely bought my first ever copy of Vanity Fair due to the high quality behind the scenes photos they promised. Action figures were a large part of this for me since I had spent the last decade-plus lamenting the loss of my Original Trilogy figures that would have made me a millionaire several times over (even though I had none of the boxes and they were all well loved toys).
I spent quite a bit of time waiting by the mailbox for my preordered figures to arrive since this was ages before email confirmations or guaranteed ship dates. They did show up eventually…about a week after the figures hit the pegs. But all was not lost and FOMO had yet to be coined even though I was deep the its clutches.
Toys R Us likely did a midnight release for all the figures which I did not attend. It wasn’t like a had a curfew or an aversion to waiting in lines but getting trampled while clutching a Chancellor Valorum figure didn’t much appeal to me. Plus I had to work the next day.
I would usually arrive at the mall early when I had to open the store I worked at. I’d walk downstairs, grab a bagel and a copy of the Detroit Free Press and read the comics and my horoscope before it was time to open.
On my way back to work I noticed that the KB Toys down the corridor from my store was opening early and not only that but they were packed to the rafters with new Star Wars toys and absolutely no one was waiting. I dove into the store like a pig in shit, an apt description, I feel, given the crass consumerism I was about to engage in.
I bought the entirety of the first wave as well as toys of other hitherto unannounced characters. “Ki-Adi-Mundi? Don’t know who he is but he seems like a Jedi that’s going to be going places in this new movie!” I returned to work (on time) with more toys in my arms than I had ever received for any prior birthday or Christmases.
It was a summer or hype, to be sure. The exact number is lost to time but I think I saw The Phantom Menace no less than five times in the theater. The first viewing blew my mind with its spectacle and the audience reaction. Viewings two through five were mostly for the lightsaber duels and trying to convince myself this movie was just as good as the ones I grew up with.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited for a movie as I was for Episode I. It was highly indicative of a time and a place and it’ll never happen again. Over the years I’ve gone though the whole spectrum from love to hate and eventually acceptance that it was certainly a movie that happened.
