Carol was telling me about her trip to the video rental store. They have a big fancy entertainment center with surround-sound speakers where they show videos, and when Carol went they were showing the fourth Star Wars movie. I admitted that I had never seen that one, and then I had to admit that the only Star Wars movie that I had ever seen in its entirety was the first movie. “But I saw the first Star Wars on opening day,” I said.<\/p>\n
“Really,” said Carol, expressing mild interest.<\/p>\n
“Haven’t I ever told you that story?” I said. “I went with my friend Mike. We were in the high school science fiction club together. The auditorium was filled with people from the New England Science Fiction Association. When — what’s his name, Harrison Ford’s character —”<\/p>\n
“Han Solo,” said Carol.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, when he’s talking about how fast his spaceship will go,” I said, “he says something like, ‘Yeah, it’s so fast it’ll go 32 parsecs.’ And all around us you could hear people murmuring, ‘Parsecs? Parsecs per what<\/em>?’ And then people started booing.”<\/p>\n Carol laughed at the image of a movie theatre full of science fiction geeks booing.<\/p>\n “And when we came out of the movie, they offered us buttons that said, ‘May the Force be with you.’ And I didn’t take one. Mike and I were sure that the only people who would like the movie would be science fiction geeks.”<\/p>\n “That button would probably be valuable<\/em> now,” Carol said.<\/p>\n “Yeah,” I said. “I figured it would be like George Lucas’s first movie, ‘THX-1138’ or whatever it was called. Good movie, but no one watched it.”<\/p>\n Carol said that when she learned about George Lucas’s connection with Joseph Campbell, she realized how powerful those Star Wars movies could be. I had no such intimation; I didn’t get that Star Wars was myth, religion even, wrapped up in pop culture. And because of that, today I do not own a valuable button reading “May the Force be with you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Carol was telling me about her trip to the video rental store. They have a big fancy entertainment center with surround-sound speakers where they show videos, and when Carol went they were showing the fourth Star Wars movie. I admitted that I had never seen that one, and then I had to admit that the … Continue reading “Star Wars and me”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[268],"class_list":["post-1104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-science-fiction-and-fantasy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1104"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2041,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions\/2041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}