Last Friday some friends and I watched all six Star Wars films one after the other. We named this feat 'Star Wars day', although the event actually ran over two days (we finished Return of the Jedi during the early hours of Saturday). With Star Wars being a set of six films, watching all of them in succession seemed like a logical thing to do, and after originally stating our intentions months ago we finally all had the free time and food supplies to go ahead with the day.

Rigorous plans were made, as we knew we'd be on a tight schedule. We did originally plan to watch both seasons of the Clone Wars cartoon in between Episodes II and III, but we decided that 15 hours might not be physically possible. We bought a hefty amount of pizza and hoped to make a 9:30pm start. It turned out we sat down at my friend's house to watch Episode I at 9:59pm. And as the first ship flew overhead the surround speakers we were using broke. After figuring out that the audio wire simply needed to be plugged back in we sat back again, this time with reduced volume and bass. After a few more breaks due to speakers cutting out we managed to achieved an optimum level of sound with the speakers we had.

After Revenge of the Sith we thought it might be a good time to do some exercise to prevent our legs from seizing up (although there had been a small amount of lightsaber duelling in between each film). Stepping outside actually came as quite a shock, our eyes not being ready for the sunshine, but we found our way to my house to watch the remainder of the sextology.

The day progressed, and by the time we came to watching Return of the Jedi night had fallen and after finishing off the remaining pizza we sat down for the final straight of our epic adventure. We finished somewhere around 1:15am on Saturday. After briefly discussing what we had watched and posing with our lightsabers for a photograph we hit the sack.

Watching all of the films in a day, although taking 13 over hours, did strangely make the trilogy seem shorter than before. This could have been because my brain didn't have the time to fully process what had happened in each film, and so they all blended into one. But in fact, the films didn't flow into one another quite as I had expected. I was able to make links and connections with locations and characters across films because their backstory was fresh in my mind, but the join between films wasn't seamless as I had imagined it would be. Maybe this was because we took a break in-between the prequels and the old trilogy. Also, we had Episodes I, II and III on DVD, while Episodes IV, V and VI were the VHS Special Edition versions, which could have meant the difference in picture quality and sound somehow separated the two trilogies.

There definitely was a noticeable difference in the style of the two trilogies. To me, the prequel trilogy always comes across as very "clean", with more politics than action and adventure. It does set the story up very well for the old trilogy though, which I suppose was one of Lucas' main intentions.

Another observation I made was that Empire didn't seem quite as evil as in previous viewings. I think this could have been to do with the fact that when I saw Darth Vader I was reminded of his previous self, Anakin Skywalker, who I had witnessed earlier on in the day, and how he was more lost and unsure than evil. Darth Vader's redemption and the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi was quite a climax to the day though.

It had been quite a while since I'd seen some of the films, mainly the old trilogy, but I'm glad I finally achieved my goal of viewing all six movies in a row. It's definitely something I'd recommend for all Star Wars fans. I did read about someone who disrupted their sleeping pattern from doing so, but I experienced no adverse side effects - if anything the day was useful as a rest period. Because the day consists of nothing much else but Star Wars the mind is free to concentrate on the story and view the saga holistically. And although it takes up a whole day I believe this is the true way to view Star Wars.

Here's the picture we took in all its geeky glory.