Music Babble

Your post the other day made me think about this, since I remember that since it was such a major release, it took like a year to get to the dollar theater. I went to see it again with a friend because, even though we didn't really like it, we figured we'd want to see it at least once more and that paying $1 on the big screen beat paying to rent a pan'n'scan VHS or watching it on TV with a bunch of commercial breaks.

At this distance, my opinions are no longer reliable, and my opinions at the time were pretty party-line for most people my age who grew up with Star Wars, but to play devil's advocate 1) As spectacle, it was more technically impressive than the SW movies that came after it if you're judging them all by the standards of their time (in the sense that something identical to The Phantom Menance that came out later would be less impressive by default). The CGI vistas fest huge. Even if you hated the aesthetics, it was something new at the time in a way that's probably hard to appreciate now. 2) Despite a bunch of unnecessary crap that was only there tie it to the earlier movies but that really just ended up alienating long-time fans, it is probably one of the two Star Wars movies that best stands on its own, after the original. I didn't see Solo, so I don't know about that one.