On Sequels and Prequels

Buckle your seatbelts, kids...because things are baout to get geeky.

To riff a bit on the topic I brought up last week, I would like to talk about something near and dear to all of us...

What's the proper order to introduce the Star Wars movies to your youngster?

Yeah, go ahead and deny that you haven't considered that dillema. Do you stick to your staunch childhood roots, and show them the movies in the order you experienced them (or just ignore that the prequels existed)? Do you show them in order from Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi? Special Editions or (if you still have them) the original cuts? VHS Full Screen, or DVD Wide Screen?

Okay, maybe that last one was just me.

Anyway, this was something that, as geeks, both my wife and fretted over. She was more old-school, in that the proper order would be 4-6, and then 1-3. I thought, in that "using our daughter as a social experiment" kind of way, that'd it'd be cool to let her watch the series in a 1-6 kind of order, to see what her experience with Star Wars would be, compared to how Stacey and I experienced it as kids (and later young adults).

We didn't know that there would be an option three.

When we introduced Star Wars to Brady a couple of years ago, I kinda won out by showing Brady Phantom Menace first. I say "kinda," because she maybe got through half of the series before she grew bored with it, and really stopped paying attention.

I know, shocking, right?

So, it looked like Stacey was going to win out, until Brady threw a monkey wrench in our plans: she started watching the Clone Wars series on Cartoon Network.

Huh. Hadn't thought of that.

Brady dug the series enough where she knew who the main characters were (Obi-Wan, Anakin, Yoda, etc), and she liked the lightsaber battles. Again, it wasn't something that she watched religiously, but she liked it when it was on.

So, we decided to move forward with the movies, except now we'd just skip the remaining prequel movies, and move on to the Original Trilogy. In a way, Stacey and I both won out, because she got to move forward on her idea of watching the original movies primarily, while at the same time I got my social experiment.

Brady eventually watched Star Wars, and right off the bat liked it much more than Phantom. However, things got real in teresting when we watched The Empire Strikes Back.

When the big reveal with Vader and Luke happened, it was still a shock, but in a different way than we all probably felt when we experienced it. Instead of freaking out that Vader was Luke's father, her reaction was, "That's Anakin??" She was shocked that Anakin became a bad guy, and was wondering what happened? Incidentally, this was followed by her screaming "don't do it, Luke!!", worried that he would become a bad guy, too.

As for Jedi? I think it was her favorite of the bunch. Three guesses as to why (hint: "Yub Nub!").

So, the final verdict on Star Wars? She liked it. It's not something she's been clammoring to watch over and over and over again, but she liked it. But, it didn't/doesn't hold that same level of interest and excitement that we all had growing up. Yeah, you could blame the prequels, or the cartoon, but I got the feeling that she would have felt the same way if she watched only the original ones. It just wasn't her thing.

But, to tie it in with my topic from the other week, she created her own experience in watching Star Wars. She didn't watch them in a way that neither Stacey or I thought she should have. And yet she still had similar experiences and surprises that we had, just from a different perspective.

All in all, it's a childhood experience she can call her own. And personally, that's what's important.