Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I had a friend over this afternoon, but I've been wanting to do this particular blog post for a few weeks now. As a Star Wars fan I often think about how different it would be to experience the Star Wars franchise for the first time now in 2026, compared to how it was when I was first really getting into it in the mid to late '90s and how the first generation of fans got into it when the Original Trilogy was first coming out between 1977 and 1983. So I decided to explore that in this blog post. So, let's get into it.
Star Wars is a unique franchise in that, it's the only one, outside of Dungeons & Dragons, where the structure is so that you can tell any story within the universe and you never run out of characters to use. I once said that one of my problems with Star Wars is that legacy characters are often pushed aside in favour of new characters. However, it'd be more of a hindrance for the franchise if Han, Luke, Leia, Vader, Chewie, and the Droids always had to be front and center. Star Wars is a vast universe, full of interesting characters, hero, villain, supporting, and background, and fascinating settings. Each with rich backstories and moments that any fan can latch onto and want to follow.
It's always been that way, however, as a fan who got into Star Wars in the mid '90s, my experience of getting into the franchise is very different than how my parents's generation got into it in the late '70s and early '80s. It's also different from how people, regardless of their age, are getting into it for the first time today. When I was a kid, there a handful of novels and reruns of the Droids and Ewoks cartoons, as well as magazines such as Star Wars Insider and Starlog to find out tidbits about the latest Star Wars movie. There was also the Official Star Wars Website that you could look up information on if you had internet access, which was rare in 1995 and 1996.
In terms of content though, there was very little of it. There was only the three movies of the Original Trilogy, and extra material in the form of novels, comics, cartoons, video games, and TV movies. And none of that material necessarily answered the questions you might've had about the aliens in the Cantina scene from A New Hope or the Bounty Hunters in The Empire Strikes Back or Jabba the Hutt and his entourage in Return of the Jedi. Though by the time I first saw the movies in January 1996, the novels had started to answer some of those questions in the short story compilations, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, Tales of the Bounty Hunters, and Tales from Jabba's Palace. But not everything was answered. For example, Boba Fett didn't get a solid backstory until Attack of the Clones came out in 2002. There were conflicting stories in The Han Solo Trilogy by A.C. Crispin, which was published between 1997 and 1998, and other stories, but nothing stuck until the middle chapter of the Prequel Trilogy in the early 2000s.
When it comes to spoilers though, unless you had a friend or family member who talked about the movies endlessly and told you important plotpoints, you didn't know until you watched The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader was Luke's father, or that Leia and Luke were brother and sister until you watched Return of the Jedi, because that information wasn't as well known outside of the fandom as it is today.
Back in the late '70s and early '80s, there was even less. Unless you bought issues of Starlog magazine or were a member of the Official Star Wars Fan Club and read the newsletter, Bantha Tracks, or you happened to pass someone who was talking to their friends about what they'd just seen when they saw the movies, as you were going in to see the movie, you didn't know that Ben Kenobi died in A New Hope (then just known as Star Wars), that Darth Vader is actually Luke's father in The Empire Strikes Back, and that Luke and Leia are siblings in Return of the Jedi.
Fans back then also had to wait three years to find out whether Vader had lied to Luke in Empire or not about being his father until Luke rejoined Yoda on Dagobah after saving Han from Jabba the Hutt at the beginning of the next movie. George Lucas certainly wasn't going to reveal the truth in the few interviews he did when Empire came out in 1980. I suppose you could read the Return of the Jedi novelization by James Kahn to know the truth before you went to see the movie, but that wasn't the case most of the time. It still happened, but it wasn't common.
Watching Star Wars for the first time today is so different. It's a lot harder to go in without any knowledge at all. There's novels, comics, video games, TV shows, and Wookieepedia, where you can look up any piece of information on any Star Wars character, ship, location, weapon, piece of tech, or event within the Star Wars Universe. And online there's always some reference to Star Wars somewhere. It's possible to go in completely blind, but it's much harder to do so these days.
I've seen many reaction channels on YouTube cover the Star Wars movies, and reactions have gone from complete shock at the Vader and Leia reveals to "I knew that was coming". I guess it really depends on how into Fandom you are. Like I had absolutely no clue what happened in the show when I first watched Rebels a couple of years ago in preparation for season 1 of Ahsoka (I'm so excited for season 2). Despite being a huge Star Wars fan and reading Star Wars Insider, I managed to avoid all spoilers for the show, and that show started ten years before I saw it. Even with later seasons of The Clone Wars, I've managed to avoid spoilers, so that if I decide it's time to watch the whole show, I can do so without any foreknowledge of events in the show. Though I did watch the Mortis arc when it first came out, so I do know everything that happened in those episodes.
Also, it's about how you watch the movies too. When I was a kid, we just had the movies on VHS, though they were also available on Laserdisc, but people could very rarely afford the Laserdisc players letalone the Laserdiscs themselves. But until 1982 when A New Hope was first released on home video (VHS, Betamax, Laserdisc, and CED), fans had to wait until the next theatrical re-release of both A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back to see them again, unless they owned the novelizations or the comic book adaptations.
Today, people can watch all of the movies and TV shows on Disney+ whenever they want. All of the movies are available on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Blu-ray, with the Original Trilogy available on Laserdisc, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Blu-ray, and the first two movies in the Prequel Trilogy also available on VHS. So there are a variety of ways for people to watch the movies. And each version is different too. Certain versions are only available on certain formats, so depending on which format you're watching it on, changes the experience too. I find watching the Original Trilogy on VHS makes it easier to separate those three movies from the rest of the saga, because visually they don't match the other movies. Whereas if I watch the 1997 Special Edition versions on VHS or the 2004 DVD versions, I connect them strictly to the Prequel Trilogy. While watching them on Disney+ automatically reconnects them to the rest of the franchise as a whole.
A new podcast called Haven't Seen Star Wars started coming out weekly on May the 4th, and the premise is that two lifelong Star Wars fans guide their two friends who have never seen Star Wars through the movies (so far, I don't know if they'll cover the shows eventually or not). One of them isn't into Fandom stuff, so she had no clue about anything that had to do with Star Wars, while the other had heard "Luke, I am your father!" but didn't know where it was from, although that isn't the actual line, but people have thought it was that, though the line is actually, "No, I am your father!". Regardless, these days it's still possible to go in completely fresh, without any knowledge of the franchise, but with social media, memes, and just the internet in general, it's much more difficult to watch anything Star Wars without some sort of knowledge, even if it's just, "Oh yeah, that's Darth Vader! I know what he looks like!". Out of the entire franchise, I think C-3PO, R2-D2, and Darth Vader are the most iconic characters because they're the ones who tended to appear the most on magazine covers in the late '70s through to the mid 2000s when Revenge of the Sith was coming out. Probably because it was easier to take new pictures of those three characters since two are suits, and one is mechanical or a suit, depending on whether R2 is moving or standing still. You could have anybody in the suits and take the pictures, without needing to ask aging actors to come back for new photos of characters they played ten to twenty years earlier.
Listening to the podcast is what inspired this blog post because it did get me thinking about how people today experience Star Wars for the first time differently compared to how I first experienced it back in the '90s or how my parents and other people of their generation experienced it for the first time in the late '70s and early '80s. Especially because you can put on Disney+ and binge all of the movies in a couple of days, whereas I had to wait a whole 24 hours to watch each movie on VHS, and the first generation of Star Wars fans had to wait three years between each movie when the Original Trilogy was coming out from 1977 to 1983.
I had to do the same with the Prequel Trilogy as it was coming out from 1999 to 2005, though I could rewatch each movie on home video while I waited for the next movie to come out. I also had tons of novels to read while I waited too. So I was never out of Star Wars content to enjoy between movie releases. The Sequel Trilogy was a bit weirder, because even though there was two years between each movie in the trilogy, you still had Rogue One coming out between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, and then both Solo and the first half of the first season of The Mandalorian coming out between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. So there was even more coming out during the Sequel Trilogy than there was when the Prequel Trilogy was coming out almost two decades earlier.
That's all I wanted to talk about in this blog post today. I listened to the soundtrack for The Phantom Menace on CD while I wrote this post and it's still a great soundtrack 27 years later.
I'll be back soon with more Star Wars blog posts as well as more nostalgic goodness over on My Nostalgia Blog. Until then have a great night and may the Force be with you.
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