[Spoiler alert - do not read this post if you are under the age of 10]

Now that the saga is complete, and as we Star Wars fans who grew up with the OT and rabidly anticipated the PT are/will be raising little future SW fans, one of the most important questions is this: What order will we show them the movies??

Now, I know that GL is a proponent of the I-VI sequence ("chronological order", or CO), and I usually do not disagree with the Jedi Master on very many things. But I strongly disagree on this issue, and I think he does a great disservice to the impact of SW on future generations by promoting this idea, and here is why:

First off, there is the obvious improving trend in production and cinematic quality in the films in the order that they were released ("release order", or RO). OK, the SW revisionist historians like to claim that this can actually make sense, since after the beginning of the Empire, the Rebellion was working with scraps, etc., etc. OK, that may be believable story-wise to some degree. But it is a real stretch at the very least, because the sets and special effects for the Empire were not a whole lot better in 1977 than the Rebellion's. Come on - the PT look like movies that were made in the 1970's and 1980's (nothing work with that, but let's not ignore it), albeit a look that was ahead of its time then.

Then comes the slick PT with all the digital animation. Of course, in the same way that fans have tried to explain away the old look of the OT in comparison to the PT by retrofitting the explanation into the SW story, you could also make a similar argument that in the 'olden days' of the Republic, people looked more animated, and light did not shadow their features quite as convincingly as it did later on because the Empire restructured utilities, making 'realistic skin texture' lighting more affordable for the average Gungan.

But, to get back to the point, I think it is foolish to wash over the clear difference in cinematic quality between the trilogies. I mean, how are you going to try to explain to your little SW fan that lightsaber battles slowed down tremendously b/w III and IV? "Well, son, one of the first official acts of the new Emperor was to decree that atmospheric density on all Death Stars would henceforth be increased by 70%, thereby slowing the super-human abilities of the traitorous Jedi." Why not? I mean, we spend most of their childhood lying to them about everything from sex to Santa Claus, right? [Don't want to ruin anything for innocent children, so I added in the seemingly out of place spoiler alert.]

My point is that a small child watching the saga in CO will not weather the transition from PT to OT and remain nearly as interested as we want them to be. SW will lose fans, because as exciting and new as IV was in 1977 and still remains in our hearts, it was so revolutionary to the film industry that kids growing up today see dozens of movies a year with the same amount of action and same fast pace, so those features are no longer sufficient on their own to automatically enthrall new viewers - it will have to be the story that does it.

Which leads to the comparison of TPM and ANH, since those are the 2 starting stories. I have absolutely nothing against TPM; I liked it and it made sense to me in the overall scheme of things. What book have you ever read where the introduction/first chapter was as exciting as the middle and the end? I thought the public's expectations were ridiculous, whereas poor GL was simply introducing the Old Republic as it was in the beginning, putting out the lights and props and scenery onto the stage where, later, Anakin will turn to the Dark Side. People seem to miss that TPM and AOC were mostly about establishing the context for ROS, and I don't think it makes sense to look at them in any other way.

And to highlight the importance of context, for example, who hasn't seen the famous prize-winning photograph of the crying Vietnamese children on the road after the My Lai massacre? Obviously, a picture of traumatized children is always painful to see. But there are lots of photographs of unhappy children - it is in understanding the context of that particular image (the background, the setting) that that specific image has become ingrained in our cultural history. Similarly, while the 'young innocent on a journey to fight the forces of evil and save the world/galaxy' is a great story in and of itself, it certainly is not original. What made SW become part of our culture was the backdrop, the setting of another galaxy, where the usual archetypal characters were recognizable, but applied in new and exotic ways.

TPM is sort of like the 2nd power of the context - it is setting the background to the background of the OT that we already knew, adding more depth to the saga. E.g., seeing what the Jedi were like before they were wiped out adds a whole new layer of emotional depth to the original movies. Hearing Han and Imperial officers deride the Force as an outdated religion sparks more outrage than before, because we know so much more about the history of it now. Watching the deaths of Obi-wan and Yoda brings even more sadness because we know them better, and it also increases the tension, knowing that Luke is the holder of a lot more knowledge than we really ever understood, and it will all be lost if he is not able to pass it on. And for me personally, there is a whole new dimension to the scene at the end of VI where Luke takes off Anakin's Vader helmet - the audience knowing Padme and his backstory makes him being able to look at his son's face and see hints of Padme in it a far more poignant moment. And his death also becomes much sadder - before the PT, we knew the character as 99% Vader and a whole 2 minutes as Anakin, so Anakin dying was not nearly as meaningful as it becomes after seeing the PT. But all its fine contributions to the saga do not make TPM better to watch than ANH for a first time viewer.

OK, I now understand where "BLOG" really comes from: Belaboring a Long time On tanGents. And you can't spell belaboring without "boring," so, moving on...

So my second point (the first being the cinematic/effects divide that simply can not be bridged) is that while TPM and the rest of the PT add a LOT to the OT, you would be hard pressed to argue that for a child's introduction to the SW universe, TPM is a better choice than ANH. ANH requires far less explanation, first and foremost. Ironically, we understand TPM only because we are familiar with ANH - what is the Force?, who are the Jedi?, etc. But this is a problem for a new viewer starting on TPM instead of ANH - they won't take certain things for granted that we would, or automatically make the same assumptions that someone seeing TPM in the context of the OT would, and it will certainly confuse them, and possibly turn them off to SW. And ANH is simply a lot more exciting than TPM, since it is the middle of the story instead of the beginning.

Finally, although the overall saga has become Anakin's story (or, arguably, R2's story) instead of Luke's, Anakin/Vader is not really in the OT a whole lot until the 2nd half of VI. As opposed to the saga, those OT movies were about Luke, told from his point of view. So, to compare to another father-son story in terms of protagonist p.o.v., choosing CO is like watching, say, Indiana Jones III and suddenly switching to Sean Connery as the main character, with Indy popping up occasionally and then being there again at the end. The father-son thing is reversed, of course, but I think you get the point.

And would anyone be nearly as invested in the Luke and Leia characters if they become simply Anakin's kids in our minds, as opposed to the fully independent, established characters that we grew up with having watched the OT first? I doubt it. Viewing the PT first might also make viewers more ambivalent during the Luke vs. Vader scenes. Yes, Vader is still the bad guy, but they would know that he had not always been the bad guy (far from it), and they would know Anakin far better than they know Luke at that point, and might tend to empathize more with his character.

To summarize:

1. You can try to explain it away, but transitioning from PT to OT look and quality will disappoint new viewers who have not come to love SW as we have (which is why I believe that eventually GL will remake IV-VI if he really believes they should be viewed CO)

2. Starting with ANH gives the proper introductory information to a new viewer, information that was taken for granted in the TPM script because "Who hasn't already seen ANH?" Unfortunately, that assumption doesn't apply to the next generation if you go CO, and TPM becomes more confusing at a fundamental level.

3. Having the OT as merely the continuation, with mostly new characters, of the PT is far less interesting (although correct in terms of the overall timeline of the overarching saga) than getting to know and love the OT characters first, and then seeing how they got there.

So George, while I understand that you have revised the story in the past 3 decades to steer the focus of the saga somewhat away from some aspects of the OT that you don't like so much in hindsight, I believe that the SW phenomenon occurred because we learned the SW story in the sequence that we did, and introducing the saga to young new fans in the future in CO will not have anywhere near the same success. It would be just another (albeit exciting) serial. It would not be STAR WARS as we know and love it.

My son will see Star Wars the way I did: RO. I just don't think that CO would make him nearly as big a fan as I know RO will.

In closing, I will throw this out there: might there be some mediocre serials out there that could be improved by shaking up the order? [And I am in no way calling the SW saga in CO inferior (although the point of this whole blog entry is that it would be...less great than it is in RO). So don't misinterpret my tangent, which derives simply from the idea that ordinary serials could become great cultural phenomena if viewed in different orders.] How about Jaws? If the first one you saw was Jaws III, for example, and you later got to go back and see the original, wouldn't you enjoy III more, and still be blown away by the original, improving your impression of the Jaws series overall?? How about Jurassic Park? The Godfather? Batman? Hmmm...