No, this is not going to be another nerd lamenting Star Wars' greatness and how the special editions and prequels ruined it. If you want that, watch Brian Pohsein's stand-ups; they're way funnier.

Being a child of the ‘80s growing up in the ‘90s, my fandom with Star Wars was slightly more forgiving to a certain degree, and less so than others. My fandom with Star Wars ebbed and flowed like an ocean tide, more due to my own age and interests than the failings of the franchise. That being said, it certainly didn't do itself any favors over the years.

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What is Star Wars?

You know what it is. Moving on...

My Experience with Star Wars

By the age of 5, I was already into Star Wars. I thought Darth Vader was scary but cool. I even have distinct memories of playing with foam swords at that age with my parents on days when I was homesick, pretending to be Darth Vader. I thought Han Solo was a Jerk and didn't understand why Leia was into him. I definitely didn't understand the complexities of Lando Calrissian. And I was sympathetic to the stupid little ewok things: a true sign that I was young and innocent. I also thought Return of the Jedi was the best movie ever, for a few years, but that was mainly because, when my parents rented it for me from the video store, I'd fast-forward to all the lightsaber battles.

They were fun movies and, for a few years, they would be the films I'd usually ask my parents to rent for me on the days I was sick. As I got older, my appreciation for them changed and I soon realized that I didn't like Return of the Jedi as much as the other two. The original film was a better adventure and Empire was more dynamically interesting with all the different characters doing their own thing. So, by the time the Special Editions were released in theaters, my tastes had changed enough that I didn't really care about all the changes that George Lucas had made to his films. It felt weird seeing a bunch of things that weren't there before, considering how well I knew the films by the time the special editions came out. However, unlike the older Star Wars fans who were losing their minds over the changes, I still had fun seeing them again in a new way. It was my first chance to see the movies in theaters, and the touched-up effects looked good at the time. I still think most of the changes are unnecessary now, but it was still fun for me back then.

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However, shortly after Star Wars had its resurgence in the ‘90s I somewhat lost interest in it. I became more interested in comic book superheroes and cartoon shows, like Spider-Man, Batman, and the X-Men. I didn't have nearly as many toys or action figures of Star Wars as I did of Ninja Turtles or Marvel superheroes. The movies were still fun and I would watch them on occasion when they were available to me, but I didn't really go out of my way to immerse myself in Star Wars like I once did.

The one medium of entertainment that started to pull me back into the franchise was video games. Despite there being plenty of clunkers in the vast library of Star Wars video games, there were also some really fun ones that managed to rekindle my interest in the franchise. The sidescrolling action games of the Super Nintendo that followed the movies were extremely difficult, but they were also exciting and fun to control. The flight-simulators like X-Wing and Tie-Fighter gave me my first opportunity to blow up my favorite Star Wars ships and to fly around in space while listening to all the classic blaster sounds of the big climactic battles in the movies. And the Dark Forces first-person shooter was a well-made Doom clone in the Star Wars universe that would eventually spawn my favorite action-adventure game series of the franchise: Jedi Knight.

There was a surge of quality Star Wars video games during the late ‘90s and early 2000s, which were primarily responsible for rekindling my interest in the franchise. The games gave me a lot of extra information about the people, the creatures, and the lore of the universe that my brain has since decided was important enough to remember to this day. For some reason, I know who the Mandalorians are, I know that the planet that holds the tombs of many Sith lords is Korriban, and I know that wookies come from the planet Kasheek. None of this is useful to me as a functioning adult, and it somewhat infuriates me that I still retain this knowledge but cannot remember important historical facts about the real world. Nonetheless, the games did a good job of making me interested enough to dig into the extra fiction and read some of the associated novels, thus absorbing all this extraneous information. So, after the Phantom Menace came out, when I was about to attend high school, I was well on my way to becoming acquainted with the universe once again.

I said it before when I reviewed the movies, and I'll say it again: I don't think Phantom Menace is that bad. It's certainly not as bad as the two prequel movies that followed. Even when it came out and people were really upset by it, I wasn't that bothered. I knew Jar-Jar sucked as well as everybody else did. I disliked Anakin and all the goofy fun surrounding him, and I thought the conflict of the movie was just a little dumb. It wasn't a good movie and I knew it, yet, I still enjoyed certain characters and action sequences enough not to hate it like the rest of the world.

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Part of what made Phantom Menace a net positive for me at that age was that I was excited to see a portrayal of the universe before the events of the original movie. I was interested in the lore of the universe and how it might affect other things about Star Wars that I enjoyed. So, even though the movies continued to come out and were terrible, more games like Jedi Knight 2, Jedi Academy, Knights of the Old Republic, and several others were doing what George Lucas couldn't: keeping me interested. Some of these games I still go back to and play from time to time just because of how much I enjoyed them back then.

Death of a Fan

The death of my interest in Star Wars was a slow and gradual one. As I said, as much as I considered the prequel movies to be failures, other sources of entertainment were doing more interesting things with Star Wars, so it wasn't enough to make me swear off the franchise as a whole. Games like Jedi Knight and Knights of the Old Republic had built up a lot of goodwill towards the name for me because it showed that creators were willing to tell stories that took place separately from the timelines used in the films. Even games like Empire at War, a strategy game that took place during the original trilogy timeline, added an expansion that told the story of a completely new and intensely interesting character. That being said, when the other forms of entertainment started to run out of ideas of what to do with the franchise, my loyalty and interest towards it waned as well.

After Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy and Knights of the Old Republic 2, there was a bit of a lull for brand new Star Wars action games with any new exciting stories to tell. Star Wars games were getting licensed out, certainly, but none were quite as willing to push the boundaries. The Old Republic was announced, but being a person who generally dislikes the MMO experience, I wasn't really interested in anything about it other than the cutscenes. There was also the Force Unleashed, a game I still have yet to complete. Admittedly, I have a bigger problem with the story of this game and the story surrounding its development more than the actual game having not played much of it.

From what I've read about The Force Unleashed, it's a serviceable action game that has gotten average to middling reviews, it's certainly not so terrible that it deserves much ire from fans or non-fans. However, it has a rote and bland story and does little to improve on gameplay that was already established in the Jedi Knight series. The fact that the developers had such difficulty writing a story for it, that they called on George Lucas himself to advise them, should be an indicator of how bland the story is. The assassin Starkiller, who works for Darth Vader as an apprentice on a mission to kill off the remaining Jedi during the period between Episodes III and IV, goes through a lot of the same sort of cliche story beats and character plot points as every other video game protagonist. Nonetheless, bland, uninventive gameplay and a boring story were not enough to keep the game from getting a sequel. This franchise seemed to pave the way for more bland, uninspired Star Wars games to follow and make a ton of money just off the name.

Since video games were the only medium that I was vaguely interested in by this point, I was already on the road to not caring by the time it was bought by Disney. When Disney did the corporate takeover, however, it also shuddered studios that were working on the few promising games that wore the Star Wars brand, such as 1313. I wouldn't say this was a nail in the coffin, because, while I was disappointed to hear that it wasn't going to be given a shot to exist, the death of 1313 did not bother me nearly as much as the end of PT/Silent Hills. By the time Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens came out, I no longer considered myself a fan. Thus, the new films, for obvious reasons, have not done enough to make me care where Star Wars goes from here and what sort of new games may spawn out of them.

I still know way more about the universe than I'd care to. I would prefer to just forget all the unimportant Star Wars info if I could replace it with useful data, but my level of fandom ran pretty deep during my teenage years. These days, Star Wars is just another franchise that has no chance of pulling me back into the realm of "fan" unless it does something wildly new and brilliant; and making a Dark Souls-like game won’t work either.