Sorry to resurrect an old thread with this long post. (Yeah, right!
)
It's incredibly impossible to underestimate the influence of Star Wars on my life. ANH was released only a few months after I was born, so I can't say anything about it right off-hand. However, I do vaguely remember waiting in line with my mother to see ESB, seeing the movie poster hanging outside that theater and wondering what kind of strange creature was that guy riding.
The next memory I have is the Battle of Hoth, and that's pretty much it for my earliest SW memories. Actually, those two memories are
the earliest memories I have of my entire life, which makes it a pretty big deal for me.
I don't really remember my reaction to ESB, but I remember playing with a die-cast metal Millennium Falcon about a year or so afterwards, and it was one of my favorite toys. Then ROTJ came out, and although I don't remember actually sitting in the theater and seeing it, I do remember that I was entranced by it.
Fast forward several years, and I remember picking up a computer gaming magazine just because they had reviewed X-Wing for the PC. I was floored by graphics, and mourned the fact that my computer at the time was a measly 8086, and this monster required at least a 386, or a 486 to run it nicely. So, I had to skip it due to that reason. However, several years later I had stopped by in a Software, Etc. in New York City, and they actually had TIE Fighter running on a PC available for anyone to play, a rarity. I only played one mission, but I was hooked on SW, and bad. I managed to scrape enough money later to buy X-Wing and run it on my-then brand spanking new Pentium I 60MHz system. Oh, the weeks that flew by in my X-Wing! As a interesting side note, I found out all about the inner workings of MS DOS 6.22 due to me trying to ensure that X-Wing ran as smooth as possible on that thing. (Getting Falcon 3.0 to run later provided me with a graduate-level course in memory management
) It directly gave me the experience that I later needed to get my first tech job.
When TIE Fighter dropped in price enough I got that too, and that's really the defining moment for me. At that point I had 100% fallen for SW. The plot line in TIE Fighter was so amazingly awesome that I kept renting the SW movies over and over again.
Then they were re-released on VHS and I scraped up more money to buy the entire box set (No mean feat as I was like 16 at the time), and pretty much wore them out.
Eventually, once I got a bit more comfortable connecting to this new thing called the Internet on my blazing fast 28.8k modem, I eventually found the EH. I joined, and the rest just went downhill.
Needless to say, by the time the Special Edition came out, I was one of the first in line, and I purchased them on VHS too when they were released. Then I met my wife, and found out that she was a fan too, but nowhere near my level of dedication. By this time I was a serious SW novel and game collector, and by then I had met many of the people in the DB/EH that I now call my RL friends.
After I got married the amount of time that I had to dedicate to my SW fanism started to fade, but I still kept as current as I could. However, the birth of my first son (Joshua) threw what free time I had out the window, and I laid low for a while.
However, once he was about 2.5/3 years old, I had determined that my son was old enough to watch TPM and TCW with me on DVD, and possibly even be able to understand some of what was going on. Initially, his reaction was a bit disappointing, but by the time RotS was released he was a pretty hard core fan for a 3-year old. He's so into SW now that it's sometimes scary.
Heck, every time
I expect that my youngest will also follow in the same path, but he's only 2.5 years old, and still can't quite grasp the concept of a movie quite yet, so I figure that if I give him a year or two he'll be good to go. As is now, he loves playing with Josh's lightsabres and gets a kick out of turning them off and on (With the attendant snap-hiss noise).
SW is something that both Josh and I have deep connections to, a common ground that I don't think will ever go away. He's 5.5 years old now, and although he struggles with tactical/strategic choices, he plays a pretty decent game of Star Wars Miniatures: Starship Battles with some help. And don't get me started on Star Wars Lego, he's really good at both games on his Gamecube. Since we live in the Orlando area, we have yearly visits to Disney-MGM Studios during Star Wars Weekends, which is awesome for the whole family.
Thus, SW is something that has far transcended mere fanism in my family. It's virtually a part of daily life for us, and I think that no matter what happens in the future, SW will be a common thread that we can always fall back on. That's a pretty comforting thought.
Furthermore, it has influenced the direction that my life has taken career-wise. Becoming a computer tech was first dictated by necessity to play X-Wing, but that blossomed into a decent paying career in the IT/Telecom industry. So you can say that because of SW, I am where I am.