It feels like a very specific way to identify my age — one of those tell me you’re in your 50s without telling me you’re in your 50s memes that randomly appear in your social media feeds if you don’t prune them enough — to admit that I can remember when Star Wars wasn’t just uncool, but something that was basically forgotten about my pop culture as a whole.
That feels like a near-impossibility for the last… what… 27 years? Something like that? Ever since the prequel trilogy started, it feels as if there’s been a sincere attempt on behalf of multiple companies to make sure that we not only remember that Star Wars exists, but that we think of it as a living, breathing piece of mythology as opposed to, you know, a franchise that is allowed to fall out of favor every now and then. It’s been pretty continuously on movie screens or television screens or whatever you stream to in all of that time, never mind all the books and comics and video games and toys and whatnot that comes along with all of that.
It’s weird to think about that, in a way. I mean, in a sense, it’s really not, because that’s the seeming ambition of every franchise along the way and has been since… well, pretty much Star Wars first came out in 1977. But when I stop to think about the sheer barrage of Star Wars in the past three decades, it strikes me that it pretty much matches the volume of merch and everything that surrounded that original trilogy when the movies were, you know, actually phenomenons. Now, they’re just there, seemingly omnipresent and everything that accompanies them just exists because that’s what we expect now, I guess.
It really does sound almost impossible, in that context, to recall a time when Star Wars was this weird shared secret nerds shared: references that not everyone would get, but when they did, it was a sign that they got it, they were like you in some magical, dumb way. I’m talking… the late ’80s, very early ’90s, I guess? When the generation who were 5 or so when the movies were coming out had grown up somewhat and would see old merch in charity shops and get excited by how much it reminded us of more innocent, more imaginative times. I miss that more simple nostalgia, I admit.
Anyway, happy Mandalorian and Grogu release, I guess.