The Last Star Wars

This hasn’t aged well—a Time magazine cover story from May 5, 2005, on Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, "the last Star Wars."  I came across this while doing some spring cleaning, among magazines I’d saved for posterity. Little did we know!!

While May the 4th is now traditionally celebrated as Star Wars Day, the original film (now known as Episode IV: A New Hope) was released May 25, 45 years ago today.

The film was released when I was 15 years old. Though I was regularly reading comics at the time, I was otherwise completely unaware of comics or sf fandom, so like a lot of people, this film came out of nowhere for me. In fact, I didn’t see it until late in its run, when my parents took my brother and sister to see it (1 and 10 years younger than me respectively). I remember seeing it as a matinee at a huge movie house in Manhattan, but since it was late in the run (probably late summer), the theater was nearly empty.

My brother, who has a much better memory for these things than me, provided a few additional funny details to this story: Our parents wanted to take us to a movie that day and left it up to us: my brother wanted to see Rabbit Test and our little sister wanted the Other Side of the Mountain Part 2—but apparently, I won out since I was the oldest. (My brother says he’s grateful that his choice was denied lol.)

He also reminded me that this was at a time when you could just walk in during the middle of a film and leave where you came in. In this case, we walked in right when Threepio and Artoo get captured by the Jawas—which makes sense since that scene remains a vivid memory from that showing. It must have been the first thing I saw from this film.

A few weeks later, my brother and I went to see it again with some friends, taking the local train to get there, who were similarly blown away. And the rest, as they say, is history.