Comments

1

I loved those movies. Star Wars movies were fun then.
I know how long I’ve lived, Charles, and I still waste too many moments.

2

I watched Star Wars when I lived in BC. At the movie theatre.

It was fun.

3

Generation X - well, there was a future that flashed before our eyes for a moment when we were maybe 10, right? By our heyday, the 90s, we had already suffered such loss, lack of hope, and disillusionment, that a name was invented for us to encapsulate our reaction to powerlessness and dispossession by the cannibalistic hordes that came before is. Have we ever stopped losing since? I don't think so, but Whatever.

4

While the face is ageless, the speech is super robotic so maybe this is a poorly de-cryo'd Hammill clone? Or is that just voice acting how they currently think a Jedi should speak? More Ahsoka Tano!

5

It's a mistake to interpret "Star Wars" and its various spin-offs as being particularly future-focused, because in reality it's exactly the opposite.

Those of us born at the tail-end of the Baby Boom Generation were much more aware of the sense of future possibility that lay just ahead of us. Basically, anyone growing up right before - and certainly after - the launch of Sputnik I by the USSR in October of 1957 were thrust head-first into a forward-looking paradigm. We were weaned on NASA and "the space race", "Star Trek", "2001: A Space Odyssey", the Apollo moon landings - watching contemporary astronauts on live television or science fiction space explorers on both the large and small screens were our day-to-day reality. We were the generation that turned away from playing old-fashioned "cowboys and indians" with cap gun six-shooters to playing with Major Matt Masons and electronically-buzzing ray guns, vicariously exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, boldly going where no man (or woman - or child) had gone before - because, for that brief shining moment in time it really seemed to us that we MIGHT.

As it turned out of course, the future we were promised, with its personal jet packs, sleek atomic powered vehicles, shiny form-fitting leisure ware, and endless possibility was in reality mostly just a pleasant dream, a distraction from seemingly endless war, racial and ethnic strife, ecological disaster, and lowered expectations. So, to those of us who lived through that time, both the hope and the inevitable disappointment, "Star Wars" didn't feel new or futuristic - and it was never intended to be: It's right there in that famous opening crawl: "A LONG TIME AGO..." It was deliberately about the PAST, a nostalgic rehash of the cheaply made Saturday matinee serials of our own parents' childhoods; all the clean Kubrickean "2001" sheen rusted into stained and grease-smeared dishabille; with retrograde wild west motifs and characters, and space battles that deliberately emulated the look, feel, and even sound of WW-II era aerial dogfights.

Maybe that's why your auntie fell asleep: perhaps she was simply bored, because she'd seen it all before.

6

Oh @ cbu @3.. is that you?.. capitalism is to blame not the people. We tried HaRd to shift things, and we did.
From the revolution in our we birthed our babies, to confronting the horror practices in psychiatry. It was a time of immense intellectual fertility & social change.
Then people like Reagan were voted in, AIDS happened, and we got middle aged & now old.

7

Decades to buck the story, and there’s still time.
Buddhism hitting the west during the 60s, because His Holiness the Dalai Lama and many other Tibetans, had fled Tibet when the Chinese invaded, had a big influence on how people opened to change.
The future is now, all one ever has.


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