I had a minor Christmas miracle last month: while poking around my Dropbox for some forgotten reason, I stumbled upon the Bittorrent for the “despecialized” editions of the OG Star Wars trilogy!  About ten-odd years back you see, a Czech Star Wars fan got his grimy mitts on some old theatrical prints of the original trilogy from the late-70s and ’80s, and created a digital version of the same for file sharing.  For a grizzled older Millennial like myself, it was a draught of fresh water: At last, Han shoots first! No more weird CGI inserts that ironically looked worse than the original models and more immediately dated!  No more pointless extra scene with Jabba the Hutt that was rightfully cut in the first place!  No more Hadyn Christensen force ghost and insipid “Noooooo!” awkwardly shoe-horned into Return of the Jedi! The whole shebang!  All of this was completely illegal of course; but since Fox and now Disney refuse to make themselves even more money by re-releasing the theatrical versions, I felt no qualms of conscience in using Bittorrent for the first and last time in my life to download it.

Which was back in 2015; so when my laptop of the time abruptly gave up the ghost, I thought I’d lost the Bittorrent files forever (in any case, I made no effort to track down the de-specialized editions again, because I was kinda getting over Star Wars anyways by then).

But, the pull of childhood nostalgia is strong, and so when I stumbled upon the back-up in Dropbox, I promptly re-installed Bittorrent and rewatched all 3 with my toddlers during the last week of the year.  They are still a touch too young to really get into Star Wars, but they seemed to be engaged anytime space lazers were going “pew-pew!”

Probably the single most frequent of feedback I give students is, “Half of all good writing is simply stating the obvious, because what’s obvious to you isn’t always obvious to everyone else.” I mention this because after re-watching the OG Star Wars for the first time since “Gagnum Style” was still popular, I remembered something else that should’ve been obvious to me all along: Star Wars is for children. 

I don’t mean that disparagingly; we are to be as little children, according to no less than the Savior Himself, are we not?  Indeed, the pleasure of the OG trilogy comes not just from the aforementioned pull of childhood nostalgia, but because you very much have to put yourself into a childlike sense of wonderment to enjoy them. 

Consider: the 1977 Star Wars works throws you into the action the same way small children are thrown into this world. On “trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home,” passing through a “veil of forgetfullness,” as we call it, and land on this Earth in media res–in the middle of the action–and spend our childhood endlessly orienting ourselves, at all of these strange creatures and power struggles that surround us. Goethe once said something to the effect that all children look at the world like foreigners, “strangers and pilgrims” upon this earth.

And how does the first Star Wars open? With a wild opening scroll, a small rebel ship beset by an imperial Star Destroyer, and a sudden cascade of new characters–Robots! Princesses! Dark Lords!–whom you’ve never met before and have no idea where they come from nor where they are going. What a fitting metaphor for mortality! There are no call-backs and no fan-service, because there is nothing to call back to nor any prior fans to service.

How did Leiah get the plans to the Death Star? How did Han and Chewie meet? How does the hyperdrive work? What’s it matter? The OG trilogy wisely neglects to fill in the gaps in the narrative, because that’s not how small children think. Small children begin by assuming the world is a given quantity, and proceed accordingly; interrogating how and why the world came to be are adult concerns. Fan-service is for adults; fan-service is where we got “metachlorians,” as though why certain people are strong with the force ever mattered in the first place; fan-service is part of what bogged down the prequels and the sequels. 

I bring this all up because I can already anticipate a potential objection: well then, I must cease from hating on the prequels and the Disney sequels, since these are clearly intended for small children as well.  To that, I say only: oh, but they are not!  How do I know this?  Because, again, of fan-service, and fan-service is intended for adults.

Little children couldn’t care less about fan-service; they don’t wanna do their homework to properly enjoy their entertainment, no, they just wanna run around and scream and have fun!  Call-backs are wasted on them, because everything is still too new for them to have anything to call back to generally.

We, again, must also become as little children, or we cannot be saved in the Kingdom of God. And it is worth contemplating more just what that exactlt entails.