When You’re Expecting Greatness and Get ‘The Phantom Menace’ Instead
25 years later, is this movie atrocious or merely dreadful?
May 19, 1999, Midnight, Olympia Theater, 106th and Broadway, NYC
Never before and never since have I been in a room full of people so stoked.
The buzz was disco loud. Kids, dressed in Luke Skywalker costumes and up way past their bedtime, ran around the aisles whacking each other with plastic lightsabers. Psyched Upper West Side couples showed up after dinner and drinks. And for dessert, better than sex, those lucky people were about to behold the brand new Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace.
There was a giddy, joyful vibe that something extraordinary was going to happen in this room. And we were all going to see it. Together. Each of us had won a lottery. We were good people about to receive good things.
It had been almost sixteen years since Return of the Jedi and everyone at the Olympia Theater was hungry. No, not just hungry. We needed this.
Anticipation swelled as we sat through what seemed like a hundred preview trailers. When the LucasFilm logo finally came on the screen, followed by the first chord of the brassy Star Wars theme, an entire audience of jaded New Yorkers went totally, Beatles on Ed…
