“Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.”

Oh Master Yoda, I’m not sure that I can meet your standards today. I’m listening to John Williams’s soaring Star Wars soundtrack and the chills it gives me makes me wonder how I can effectively explain the place that the original Star Wars trilogy has in my life. Being a Star Wars fan, Yoda’s words are echoing in my head, and I know full well that if I fail this task he will tell the disembodied ghost voice of Ben Kenobi that I am unfit to become a Jedi. If this happens my world will fall apart faster than paper underpants and with far more long term damage.

I have no memory of life before Star Wars. I do not mean that I was born after it was released – I mean that I first watched it at such a young age that I cannot remember watching it for the first time. It has always been there. Bizarrely for me, this means that Star Wars is pretty much synonymous with being alive. Perhaps that’s what ignites the fire in my eyes when I talk about it, why I consider it to be a part of me, rather than merely a favourite film, or why I get overly excited that you unwittingly said “I have a bad feeling about this”. Rather worryingly this isn’t too far off the truth when I start to analyse its subconscious effect on my development.

Star Wars is famously set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. There are robots with personality, alien races that look like carpets, and the politics is done on an inter-planetary level (with lasers). The universe of Star Wars is a big place, full of diverse and different people in a way that appears to a young child like their known cultural constructs are non-existent. From a very young age, I obsessively watched a story of a unified rebellion where backgrounds were irrelevant (although its handy if you’ve been a smuggler), who sought to destroy evil. I now realise that Star Wars is very much a part of the 1970s Western culture that created it, but when I was a child it truly opened up my ripe imagination to the possibility that humanity was one entity with one shared struggle.

There are so many higher ethical concepts within Star Wars that I think took root: individual redemption, self-sacrifice, foregoing monetary benefits for a common cause, and facing personal struggles for the sake of others. It could from one angle look like brainwashing — any ethics for children is certainly worthy of scrutiny; even more so in the media because of its subtlety. However, Star Wars was never under any banner — not religion, not politics — except its own. Inventing words like ‘womp rats’ and setting it on a planet called Tatooine may seem like unnecessary geek-speak but it actually creates an isolation of the work from any point of popular reference, liberating the imagination and elevating its contents to themes more consistent with the idea of the shared human condition. 

You may remember that a few years ago there was a Star Wars prequel. I’ll correct you. It’s an optional addition. The first three (chronologically in filming terms) can be viewed without the later three – in fact, I think that’s best. Like many other fans, when I heard that more Star Wars films are on the way (Episode VII is being filmed in Britain this summer), I had mixed feelings. Anyone who’s anyone could tell you that Star Wars means way more to the fans than special effects, except apparently George Lucas who decided to make this the central appeal of the prequels. I hope that J.J. Abrams has also done some soul searching and attempted to recreate what it is about the original Star Wars films that had such an impact on fans like me. Although, I will be honest and confess that a lot of my motivation is based on the desire that, on the day I see Episode VII, I can turn to the naysayers, look them in the eyes and say: “You will find that it is you who are mistaken…about a great many things”. Then I would be a true Jedi.