"Dad, when did Luke find out that Leia was his sister?"
These questions and more have been echoing around my house as Owen develops a true love of Star Wars.
It's funny. I was Owen's age when Star Wars burst onto the scene in the late 1970s. It captured my imagination at the time: a universe far, far away with X-wing fighters, The Force, and Darth Vader, the most terrifying character I had seen in the movies.
Star Wars was the first movie I ever saw in the theater. I begged my mom to take me, almost from day one, but Adventists at the time frowned on visiting movie theaters. During it's second run in the Spring of 1978, she finally consented and took me, along with my best friend, Eric, to the theater in downtown Athens, Ohio. Afterward we went to Dairy Queen, and I had a Peanut Buster Parfait--it's amazing the things you remember thirty years later.
Owen took an indirect route to Star Wars obsession. He is currently fixated on Legos. At his birthday, recently, he received four or five different boxes of Legos. One Lego series is based on Star Wars. More importantly, they have a series of video games called "Lego Star Wars."Owen is working his way through the movies. It's confusing now, because of course George Lucas released a three-part prequel to Star Wars between 1997 and 2004. Owen says that he likes Episode 1, but by that he means The Phantom Menace, not Episode 4, which was the original Star Wars. He likes to refer to the three movies of my childhood as "the original trilogy."
It is fun, though, seeing the movies through his eyes once again. Star Wars is for kids: the Jedi knights and droids and spaceships are tailor-made for a seven-year-old's imagination. As I grew older, I began to focus on the soap opera quality of the storyline. Watching the movie with Owen again, I realize, "there are worlds out there...all we must do is imagine them; there are monsters and heroes and robots and spaceships...all we must do is create them--and play, most of all."
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