Episode I
1999
The trailer dropped before Waterboy.
That’s the absurd detail I remember most: a theater in Mequon, the only one in Wisconsin showing the first teaser for Star Wars: Episode I, and we were sitting through the opening credits of an Adam Sandler movie to see it. I’d driven down with my friends Dawn and Heather, who were heading to Milwaukee for Mötley Crüe. I was heading to a movie theater for ninety seconds of footage.
When it played, some of us stood up and clapped. Others walked out — they’d gotten what they came for. The people who were actually there for Waterboy probably wondered what was happening. I stayed for Waterboy. It was fine.
Later, when tickets went on sale for the actual film, I was one of the silly people waiting in line. All day. By myself. In the drizzle. But you’re never really by yourself in a Star Wars line. You make friends. We nerded it up for hours, talking about Dune, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, everything adjacent to the thing we were actually waiting for. There were old friends from different eras of my life scattered through that line, and we found each other the way fans always do — by the subtle signals of a T-shirt, a reference, a willingness to have a forty-minute conversation about hyperspace physics.
Tab Man was there. Green Bay’s own costumed folk hero — a guy who’d built a full suit of armor entirely from crushed Tab soda cans. He wasn’t Star Wars. He was something better. He was local mythology, showing up wherever a crowd gathered, clanking around in his aluminum regalia like a knight from a reality that didn’t take itself too seriously. I loved that he was there.
On opening night, Joel and I went together. The news was there. They interviewed us, before and after. Before, we were optimists — twenty-five years of waiting compressed into the walk from the parking lot to the seat. After, I had to perform enthusiasm. I was the foil to Joel’s pragmatism, because the cameras were rolling and it felt wrong to trash the thing I’d been waiting years for while standing in the lobby.
But we both knew. Even though the film was fine — it was fine, it had moments, it looked incredible — it wasn’t for us. It was for a new generation, and the Star Wars we’d grown up with, the one with practical effects and used-future grit and genuine danger, was being replaced by something shinier and emptier. We had to deal with that.
Around the same time, I had another realization. The toy aisles were glutted. Hasbro was releasing new versions and new poses of the same figures — a slightly different Luke, a marginally improved Stormtrooper — and I understood suddenly that I was being played. The frenzy wasn’t organic anymore. It was engineered. I was the consumer they were designing for, and they were good at their job.
I didn’t want to be used like that.
It wasn’t the end of collecting — that took a few more years to fully unwind. But it was the beginning of the end of Star Wars fandom for me. The moment the magic started to feel like marketing. The moment the boy at Bosse’s Newsstand, holding the Millennium Falcon blueprints, started to grow up.