Took the Boy to See Phantom Menace

My eight year old son, Joshua, is currently on a big Star Wars kick. For Christmas he asked for and received several action figures, all six movies on DVD, the LEGO game for his DS, and a few outfits. Ever since Penny was born in November Josh has been a great big brother and I’ve seen no evidence of him becoming jealous of her, at least not right now. For this and for good behavior at school we decided to reward him by having a boys night out and seeing Star Wars Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace in 3D.

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Josh behaved very well throughout the film. When we arrived he and I played the Terminator shooter video game with rifles, he got to pick out one concession item (giant popcorn), and we settled in watch the flick. I did have to make him take off his shoes as they light up whenever he takes a step and he was subconsciously kicking the back of the seat.

How did the film age? Considering I haven’t seen it since shortly after it originally came out while I was in college (this was before midnight releases in my area, we took turns standing in line from the day before to get 12 tickets for the 8:00pm showing in THX) it aged better than I thought. It still has a lot of warts (Jar-Jar, Jake Lloyd) but now that I’ve had several years to reflect on all six movies I realize that Lucas had to fit a lot in this one film to satiate fans of the original trilogy and I think he did a good job on that especially with the final half hour that played out in four different battle zones (Queen trying to capture the Viceroy, Gungans vs. Droids, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon vs. Darth Maul, and Naboo starfighters vs. the Droid control ship).

I still would love to see more new Star Wars stories on the big or small screen; hopefully they’ll get around to the TV show but make it Old Republic instead of Clone Wars.