This Week In Geeking Out: STAR WARS Squeee Alert

Somewhere in my mind there is a seven year old boy sitting in a large rocking chair in a movie theater called a Bijou in downtown Clearwater Florida. Update 12/21/2019: Damn me for a fool, my brother Phil reminded me the place was called Carib Theater, closed down ages ago, WHY did I think it was called Bijou...?

It's late summer, just before school. Having taken care of a big event in our family's lives - moving into a new home - the parents relent and take their three youthful boys to see this movie everyone's been gabbing about called Star Wars. The lads are familiar with some elements of science fiction - we've seen this thing called Star Trek on the teevee once or twice - but all we knew about the movie was from an ad campaign that showed spaceships blowing up and robots running around.

And the previews for other movies wrap up, and the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up with its fanfare, and then this comes up on the screen...

Okay... (now you know where I get the habit of writing ellipses at the end of sentences)

AND THEN BAM

AND THEN WHAM

And then this whole movie plays out an epic heroic journey of two droids struggling to deliver vital battle plans to a struggling resistance battling an evil galactic empire, drawing in a young farmboy, an aging mystic warrior with dark secrets, two space pirates piloting the coolest spaceship ever ("What a piece of junk!"), an action princess caught in the clutches of the evil empire, and about a billion human beings across the planet getting hooked on the whole damn thing.

It's archetypal, it's nostalgic, it's futuristic, it's action, it's space opera, it's primal emotional satisfaction. When Luke finishes that trench run and the Death Star blows up (oh shush I'm not spoiling a damn thing), the need among everyone in the audience to stand and cheer in victory is universal.

I never really grew up from that moment. My mom is probably thinking of suing George Lucas at some point for stunting my adult development.

So here I am, this week, it's a big week. It's one of those "I wanna stay alive to see this happen" moments. The next movie in the Star Wars space opera saga is coming to movie theaters.

The Force Awakens is the continuation of the proposed third trilogy of George Lucas' once-planned nine-movie saga covering the entire Star Wars history. There's a lot more that can be said about that, and you may have noticed on this blog a few entries about the movie coming out, but all that I can discuss later, after I see the movie this Friday.

The early, SPOILER-protected reviews are saying good things, enjoyable things. It's not like we should be expecting the next great Oscar-winning film - that's Fury Road, dammit - but for all intents it's going to be like what it was when I was seven and sitting in that big rocking chair geeking out to the Millennium Falcon jumping into hyperspace.

These are good days.