Discussion Generation gaps among the fans

Midnight showings are fun (usually.) People dress up -- its a SW party with 200 of your closest friends and family.

 

I was born in '95. My father decided I should probably see Star Wars after I missed the "I am your father" reference in Toy Story 2. lol My first real experience with Star Wars, however, was listening the The Saga Begins over and over on Weird Al's Running With Scissors album.

It was never that tense for me. After all, the trilogy sort of had a foregone conclusion...

 

Yes, they are fun, and a bit noisy for my tastes. Which is why I probably never attend a midnight opening again. I Ike to watch the flix, in peace. And with SW, it's the only franchise where I will go see it multiple times at the theater just so I can catch things I missed. Lets face it, SW movies are so rich in eye candy, there's always something new to see with each viewing.

 

I didn't vote because the option "I like the OT and the PT equally as they are all part of one saga" wasn't there.

I do believe there are weird generation gaps. I'm in my late 30's and I saw all the originals in the theater, however I only really remember ESB and ROTJ. My older brother took me to see all of them. He was 15 years older than me so he was already in his 20s. Anyhow, it was love at first sight for me and I never turned back. We were lucky because we had an early version of the "RCA Electronic Video Disc" player and we had all three movies on that media. I of course watched the Ewoks and Droids cartoons in the early 80s. Then that was when the "dark times" began: no Star Wars until 1997.

As a teenager I gravitated to other teens that liked Star Wars. We'd watch them over and over on VHS. In 1997 I was 21 and I camped out for all the special editions and I was ALWAYS first in line at my local theater. Most of my buddies watched them at the same time and enjoyed them, because they were cleaned up, and just the magic of seeing them in the theater and appreciating them. If I had to say something bothered my friends it was "Greedo shooting first". That's when we started "disagreeing".

Fast forward to 1999, we all camped out and we all saw TPM. We left the theater super excited. However over the following days I KEPT seeing it in theaters, but my friends weren't interested. During that time they started voicing their displeasure with the film. Along those same lines my nieces were born in 90 and 92. So I took them to see the prequels. It was the same story for AOTC and ROTS. My friends my age hated the prequels and I loved them. Also my little nieces loved them as well.

In 2009 my nephew had a son (my grand nephew) and now he is a big fan of the TCW.

Long story short, being a guy nearing 40, I'm not the typical "OT fan": I actually like all 6 films equally as I believe they compliment each other and tell a whole story. I WANT to believe that Disney will continue that tradition and I will be a OT, PT and ST fan, but as of now I'm not sure.

 

Where is the selection for those of us who love ALL of Star Wars regardless?

 

People, the poll is only asking in which era did you become a fan.

 

I don't get emotionally attached to the movies. It's not healthy. As for cliffhangers, they annoy me and I hope the ST won't have too many of them.

 

I was seven when my mom took me to see SW when it first came out in theaters here in Canada. I made her take me back three more times. I also saw ESB and RotJ in theaters when they first came out.

I saw PM in the theater as well...that time, I took my mom to see it. I thought it was great, with the exception of Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd's mediochre acting ability. Duel of the fates blew my mind.

I read voraciously, so I am an EU fan as well. I enjoyed every single book. I recently read the FotJ series, and loved every minute of it. So I guess you can say I'm a fan of ALL things Star Wars.

Except Jar Jar.

 

as a kid, i wasn't exactly worried about the three year wait between movies.

 

I know how you felt. My Dad took my sister and I to see The Phantom Menace twice when it was released in theaters, 3 years later it was the same with Attack of the Clones. but when Revenge of the Sith came out, it was basically just me and my dad watching it because I knew he was even curious about how they were going to go with creating Darth Vader and what not. we saw it twice as well.

 

I feel like the poll choices aren't right either.

I was born in 1974, saw the OT in the theaters, multiple times in the early 80's. In that era I also loved the Ewok's films, read some of the Marvel comics(not enough ) and even read the Han Solo books probably way before I could understand them. I love the original trilogy.

I also love the Expanded Universe. To me the Thrawn Trilogy, circa 1991, is the sequel to Star Wars and my favorite ever character from the universe is Gilad Pellaeon. Not Luke, not Obi-Wan, not Darth Vader - an aging Imperial Officer loyal to what he believed in.

I also love the Prequel Trilogy and all the tie in work that came with it. Palptine wiping out the Jedi was amazing and the nuance given to the Jedi through both the films and EU makes them much more interesting to me than I ever imagined they would be.

Sure there are things I don't like, parts of the OT, EU and PT that I don't enjoy - but overall I enjoy far more than I don't.

 

Receiving action figures for ANH and TESB in the early 80s is one of my earliest memories. I don't actually remember having seen those movies at that time though. ROTJ was the only Star Wars movie I was old enough to remember having been taken to see in the theater (my dad and I waited in a long line outside to catch a matinee), and the only one I remember having truly experienced some of the hype for. At the time I declared the speeder bike chase my favorite part.

From there I built up a large toy collection, saw the Ewok movies, acquired a full collection of Ewok stuffed animals, watched the trilogy countless times on home video, reenacted the movies in the family room, and so on, so I consider myself a definite OT-era fan even though I was probably about 6 or 7 years too young to really appreciate the phenomenon for what it was.

 

TPM and AOTC were family outings from what I remember. My mom, dad, and sister. When ROTS came out I was 13. My dad and I saw since sister was too young still and mom didn't want to see "dead baby jedi". It was a great experience. Dad and I made fun of the horrible dialogue MST3K style while watching it in theaters.

Hey nobody else could hear us it was all good.

 

I was born in 1987, so well after the movies were in theaters. I was one of those VHS kids that had the untouched VHS box-set that I inherited from my way older half-brother who had moved out of the house.

My earliest memory was probably early elementary school-ish when I went over to my parents' friends house (they had a lot of kids) and some of the boys were watching Return of the Jedi with the speeder bike chase.

I seemed to have watched Indiana Jones more than Star Wars, oddly (ditto with the VHSes). I seemed to watch Temple the most (probably because the end of Raiders--particularly Toht--scared me to pieces--and likely the same was true of the rapid-aging in Crusade). I remember borrowing the SEs off a friend of mine in maybe late elementary or really early middle school and they were a novelty for a while, but I defaulted to the O-OTs that I owned.

I used to have one of those Queen Amidala cup toppers from Pizza Hut and when I was taking an art class (I was an 11 year old taking summer art and typing classes at the high school), the teacher came in with all the TPM cup toppers as our art subjects (drawing 3-dimensionally) and I drew Padmé. There really didn't seem to be a backlash that reached the wide public for TPM (though I certainly don't care for the Prequels now), but I definitely was noticing it in 2002 (rented it--I remember my parents commenting that it was lousy) and people just didn't seem to care about Star Wars at all in 2005. I didn't see the last film until a few years later on DVD--and only because I hadn't seen it and thought I might as well.

I was at a school (all girls) in Ensenada for a while (2001-2002) where I stumbled upon some EU novels and, being 15, Harrison Ford on the covers was certainly quite lovely. The books were a bit meh, but they were sort of silly, nerdy guilty pleasure books in between reads of classics or really, really long epics of literature like Les Misérables, Frankenstein, The Lord of the Rings (I didn't have much else to do for 10 months), etc...

After coming home, I really started watching and becoming a fan of the O-OT and really morphed into a purist. I started watching a lot of Harrison Ford movies and Star Wars was an extension of that. I pretty much came to loathe the Star Wars fandom circa 2002-2003, though, and found the EU worshiping (not a fan of certain post-RotJ EU developments, as Han and Leia are my favorite characters--honestly, they seemed like they got a bit sparsely used and felt a bit low-importance for where the fandom had turned--I'm not the biggest fan of OCs when it comes to tie-in fiction) and the Prequel b*tching to be a bit revolting with a lot of arrogant, patronizing, belittling, bullying fanboys that got off on picking on teenage fangirls that didn't think novels about x-wing pilots, Boba 4-line-character Fett and random background aliens were where all the focus should be (I'm definitely an original trio fan). I felt like the fans had totally lost sight of who the main characters were. It seemed so clear to me who the main characters were in the films. And I didn't particularly like the line about how the saga is really all just a story about Anakin (best thing to come of the ST announcement was to kill that idea--the OT was centered on Luke!).

And now, of course, a combination of the ST news brought me out of my decade-long loathing of what I remembered of the early 2000s fandom and, as I've since become a raging Doctor Who fanatic, Tennant's voicing in The Clone Wars. I wouldn't have gone within a billion parsecs of a Prequel-related cartoon if it hadn't been for someone like him. It's not something that quite hits my drama buttons, but it's not awful (the dialog, for one thing, has improved). Good news is, ever since the announcement, or perhaps since the Prequels/EU discussion has mellowed for a few years, I find the SW fans to be a far more agreeable and positive bunch that actually care again about what the OT really was about and what was actually special about it (the chemistry between Mark, Harrison and Carrie, the various dramatic plots in this classic trilogy and what feels dramatically right for the continuation of these characters). And just maybe the Internet has matured a bit (I've also gotten 10 years older and not as easy of a sensitive target, too).

 

Being 32 I'm from the generation of "My older brother loved Star Wars so I inherited his toys during the '80s". I can remember RotJ coming out, and we had a bootleg of it (Back then I didn't know what a bootleg was I just thought that's how movies were obtained). We had a VHS of Star Wars from an early TV broadcast and I remember the Holiday Special airing on TV (this airing around '84 in Australia is documented on Wikipedia).

I met my still current best friend because in Kindergarten he was wearing a RotJ shirt. While I was still recieving Kenner figures for my birthday until around '85 this was a hard time to be a fan as there was no new movies and Transformers etc started to take over.

Around '87 I bought my last Kenner figure which was Imperial Dignitary or something with a silver coin, it was the only character they had left and it was going out cheap on clearance as SW marketability was at an all-time low.

Around '93 Super Star Wars was released and that was where the ball started rolling on it for me again.

Liked the prequels and it was cool to be a part of some cinematic SW for once.

Now I'm a lifer


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I don´t fall in any of those categories. I´m an EU era fan. I was born in 1.981, so I could have seen the movies, at least in video if not in the theaters, but I never got around to seeing them although my parents sometimes did see them at home. I did see the Droids and Ewoks cartoons and had toys about them, but didn´t like them too much.
Then, in 1.992 or so, I saw a book titled "Heir to the Empire", which was said to be the continuation of those films I had never seen. I was curious, since at the time books expanding the stories of films were not as common as they are now, and decided to buy it. I inmediately fell in love with all the characters, not only the movie ones. After reading the full trilogy I finally saw the movies, which for me were like the PT, since I already knew all the important facts, but I enjoyed them nevertheless, watching them multiple times (and realizing Admiral Ackbar wasn´t human as I had come to believe).
From then on it was a constant flush of Star Wars novels, comics, videogames, TCG, and finally the Special Editions where I saw the movies on theaters for the first time (even if RotJ, my favourite, was projected on a smaller room because of "The Saint").
After that the novels started dwindling in exchange for the comics. You see, I live in Spain and the publisher here decided to stop publishing the novels. We got half of the teen jedi saga (the one with Jacen, Jaina, Tenel Ka and Lowbacca) and four or five NJO novels, which unlike most people on these boards I loved, before they too stopped. We only recently got the Millennium Falcon novel which shocked me due to the events that had taken place during the novels I had missed.
In between those novels came the PT, of course, which I loved as well (except for a certain gungan and some out of place "humor" in the geonosian arena), I even cried at the ending of RotS, due to the Star Wars saga being closed for what I thought was forever. Then I learned about Episode VII and took it with both happiness and wariness.
You see, as an EU era fan I love all of Star Wars, not only the movies. For me, Jacen Solo, Mara Jade or the yuuzhan vong are as much Star Wars as Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, so I fear all of those novels (yes, bad as some of them may be) will have been for naught and retconned into oblivion.
Either way, I expectantly come here everyday in search for news and opinions. This is a great time to be a Star Wars fan.

 

Those categories are a bit strange. I don't know anybody who is an EU fan that has never seen the movies.

 

I put that category in as a choice because I do know someone who has only ever read the books and comics. His choice for this is because he prefers to visualise the characters and the universe in his mind rather than see them in a movie. He doesn't own a television and all he does is read.

I guess I could never please everyone with the options I gave to vote on, but to be honest, I never expected a thread that I started to get so many responses!
It has been amazing reading all the replies and even if the poll choices are not to everyone's liking, the thread has done more good than bad with everyone passing on their memories and what Star Wars means to them.

 

THIS is true pretty much too for me as well, except I had seen the OT way before the Prequels even existed being born in '87. They never really captured my attention as the works mentioned above, thus SW went "unnoticed" by me for quite some time. It was my father who liked the original movies enough, who bought and literally forced me(I wanted to see Chamber of Secrets) to see TPM on DVD a few months before AOTC came out also on DVD; I was too angry at him too pay much attention and it bored to death. Then Episode II came out on DVD(can't remember if I saw it big screen) and even though I liked it much better, I was not on wagon just yet but interested enough to look up spoilers for the upcoming movie. By the time Revenge I was taking a film study class in my Senior year of high school and I was able to watch the movies much more understanding appreciation... I went I to see ROTS with the excitement of casual movie goer, but I came out the theater so blown away that I came home and watched I and II again with a more critical eye...A couple of days later saw ROTS in theaters and it was amazing seeing all click in place! I definitely believe that while the OT is a cinematic breakthrough, the Prequels are beautiful homage to the golden age cinema...for that and more, I proudly consider myself of the Prequel Generation.

PiettsHat glad I'm not the only one expecting something new for the DT.

 

Why can't I do all of the above?

 

I don't know which category I fit in. I'm as old as TESB but the OT was never had a wide theatrical release in my home country. Star Wars were just classic scifi/action movies we enjoyed watching on VHS, along with Indiana Jones, Terminator, Back to the Future, etc. I didn't own any toys and didn't realize it was so culturally significant until I moved to the US. Boy, was the summer of '99 crazy! I might happen again with Episode VII, but I doubt it.

I can't say I was impressed with TPM but it prompted me to reevaluate the originals and all the speculation about the next movies pulled me back into the universe. I know for sure I wouldn't be a die-hard fan if it wasn't for the prequels which is why I'm more forgiving of some of their flaws than someone who grew up with the originals and had very high expectations for the newer trilogy. I think I'm more annoyed with ROTJ than with any of the prequels because it's easier to forgive a faulty start of the saga than a mediocre ending (it actually works better if viewing after the prequels). I also notice that people in my country of origin are more accepting of the Star Wars movies as one saga and there's a lot less animosity towards the prequels.

I think my favorite is still ANH (best example of the mythical hero journey on screen) followed by ROTS (I just love the epic tragedy).

 

November 29, 2012 - 3:33 PM (UTC/GMT)
I find it revealing that, of the people who chose to take this poll, there are more fans of the SE than of the PT.

 

I'm pretty sure there're more older fans here than kids that grew up with the PT.
I myself didn't vote because none of the answers suit me.