Mike MacDonald is a Star Wars Blogger. His work the “Looking Away to The Horizon” blog can be found at www.miketarkin.com he tweets from @MikeTarkin . His blog is well written and presents a unique perspective that I highly recommend checking out!
————————————————————————————————————————
I was nine years old when Star Wars was first hit theatres in May 1977. The exact date of when I actually saw it is cloudy but it’s safe to say it was early summer of 1977.
Before the movie was released, I can recall having the paperback novel adaption that I’m pretty sure I didn’t read before seeing the film—I don’t think I was concerned about spoilers, more likely I was much more interested in the half dozen or so pages of colour photos that were included in the book. In fact, these promotional stills were the blueprint for LEGO toys my younger brother, Doug and I would build and play with right up until we began buying Kenner action figures in March 1978.
The first time I saw Star Wars is a special memory as it involves my Aunt Shirley. We lived across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, Canada where cross border shopping is an art form. As kids though, “going over the river” as our parents call it was quite a big deal and to have a relative that we had to drive nearly an hour to get to was just plain exciting. It helped that Aunt Shirley was just the nicest person to us. We were spoiled by her every time we visited, normally for a weekend, where her and Uncle Louie would keep us well fed with chips and pop (we’d giggle at their Michigan accents-“Paypsi Payp and Cheeps”), homemade French fries and baked beans with sugar on them (something our mom wouldn’t let us do). The other great thing Aunt Shirley would do was take us to her local K-Mart to spend the small amount of money our parents gave us to spend while visiting. The best thing we ever bought from those trips were Spider-Man webshooters. They wrapped around your wrist with Velcro and fired rubber tipped darts–illegal today, I’m sure, but so much fun!
On one of these visits to our favorite Aunt she asked if my brother and I would like to go to the gas station with her. As Doug remembers it, he didn’t want to go but I convinced him that, as 9 and 5 year olds, we didn’t have much choice. So we got in her car and then began to realize, she’s driving past the gas station. And the next one. And the next one. What was she doing? Finally I mentioned to her that, “um Aunt Shirley? You keep passing the gas stations.” And that was when the thunder hit:
“I’m taking you boys to see Star Wars.”
We couldn’t believe it. I’m sure we had been bugging our mom to take us back in Canada and to be honest I don’t know why we hadn’t seen it by summer vacation but there we were in a movie theatre in Utica, Michigan, sitting down to watch Star Wars. Doug and I were completely enthralled from the opening crawl to the final iris out. It didn’t even bother us that some teenaged girls behind us swore a lot and had their bare feet on the back of the theatre seats-it was the 70’s after all. Although we couldn’t understand why Aunt Shirley kept falling asleep throughout the movie-to the point where she shushed us to stop it.
Star Wars consumed our young lives from that point on, although I left Star Wars behind as a young teen only to rediscover it as an adult in the early 90’s. Now, I’m a collector of toys who has a Star Wars blog and an awesome family that shares my passion.
And it’s all because of Aunt Shirley.
Remember you can add your story to this collection by sending an e-mail to starwarsgenesis@yahoo.com. The goal is 500 stories shared by Episode 7!! If you know a Group or Charity that you feel needs to written about please let me know!
May the Force be With You
-Cody Lee-
Star Wars Genesis 