Family Legacy: How the Star Wars Prequels Saved My Relationship With My Father

Ask anyone on the internet how they feel about the infamous Star Wars prequels, and you’re likely to hear the same response: they were disappointing. Either they were disappointing, flat-out bad, or the worst movies ever, those are three common opinions about the Star Wars prequels, which George Lucas started rolling out in 1999. In reality, opinions on the prequels are divided pretty evenly, and as time goes on more and more people that liked them are coming out of the woodwork, and some are even looking back on them with a renewed and less harsh perspective. Personally, I think the internet is largely responsible for it, for creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by propagating the opinion that they’re bad as a “meme” of sorts, but that’s just a theory. Say something is true enough, and eventually people will begin to accept it. Criticism is in vogue now, don’t you know? Although I’ll concede that my theory doesn’t exempt them from fair criticism.

Similar to those who grew up with the original trilogy, the Star Wars prequels were a big part of my childhood. Like other ’90s kids at the time, I was raised on offline video games, classic Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, and all the other tropes that you can find being memed around the internet. I was the perfect age for the prequels: old enough to follow the plot, and young enough to appreciate things like Jar Jar Binks and the wave of fresh new toys. I’d taken a liking to cinema at an early age, watching anything I could get my hands on and then some. Movies were inspiring to me. The drama, the visuals, the soundtrack, the art on the covers of the home video boxes — I found something to love in most movies that I watched, whether they were universally known as “good movies” or otherwise. I’m sure it’s not that special, plenty of people love movies, but I’m just making a point here to illustrate what kind of kid I was. I’d just as soon sit down to watch a film intended for grownups as I would sit down to watch cartoons after school.

I was set in my ways by the time I hit the good old puberty ages. Video games, movies, and playing outside took up most if not all of my free time, divided into percentages of forty, forty, and twenty respectively. However, to say that my life took a hard left turn at that point would be an understatement. An adult would have seen it coming, but I did not anticipate that my then casual relationship with my father was about to become exponentially more complicated.

Now, I’ve written before about my imperfect relationship with my father, and how his opinions on entertainment shaped some aspects of my childhood; my father was puritanical during my childhood, a major lifestyle change that came about after he “found God” and had a spiritual awakening. Don’t attribute any resentment to my tone here, I say that as objectively as possible. The thing is, I didn’t actually live with either of my parents for about half of my childhood years. I lived with my grandmother and her husband, for reasons that I don’t have time to explain in this story (I’ll tell it another time). I knew my mother, but she was elsewhere, she wasn’t really in my life and she would not be until I grew a little older. Per the Family Court ruling, I was to live with my grandparents, and indefinitely. That changed when I graduated from elementary school and was preparing for middle school, when my then single father stepped up, taking things into his own hands, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He asked me to live with him instead, making promises that life with him would be better, as my grandparents were getting older and wouldn’t be able to keep up with me. Instead of just seeing him every once in a while on the weekends, I’d be able to see him all the time! My father would finally become a part of my life. This is something that I desperately wanted, and I didn’t hesitate to tell him I would certainly move in with him. My grandmother was reluctant to let me go, but she let me go anyway. Not unlike Anakin Skywalker, who left his mother to be a Jedi, I left the watchful and worrisome eye of my grandmother and moved in with my father over the summer, between semesters.

You’re probably speculating that things did not go smoothly, based on context clues here, and you would be correct. For one, I was dealing with “new kid” syndrome, trying to find my place in another group of kids at another school. At my old school, I was one of the popular kids — top of my class, participating in programs for gifted learners, friends with quite literally everyone in my grade. At my new school, all these things went away. Suddenly, I was completely a nobody. They didn’t have a gifted learning program either. While everyone in my old school district was likely wondering where I was at, a fact that didn’t occur to me until I grew up, the kids at this new school hardly even noticed me.

The worst part of it was the fact that, surprisingly, my father and I had little to nothing in common. Whereas in the past he would pick me up from my grandmother’s house maybe once a month on the weekend, as if we were just friends, I was now a 24/7 part of his life. It’s true what they say: you never truly know someone until you live with them. For one, he thought my video game habit was nerdy, in a bad way, and utterly unproductive. My father resented the fact that I wasn’t more athletically inclined, I could tell he did even if he never said it outright. He didn’t much care for my choices of entertainment either, including the books I wanted to read, and the things I preferred to watch on television. For two, my father was much more strict than my grandmother, and he did not hesitate to enforce rules that I’d previously not been beholden to. Adding to the problem, I was already Christian because my grandmother had instilled that in me, but my father’s new religious beliefs were extreme to a degree I was not expecting. Never before had anyone told me what I could or could not watch, or could and could not play, and I was thoroughly confused. Church became a scary and somewhat uncomfortable event on Sundays, my father’s radical Pentecostal church was nothing like the casual non-denominational church that I’d grown accustomed to before. Suffice to say, I felt as though that my father saw me as no more than a chubby nerd who spent way too much time in front of the TV, and I was beginning to regret moving away from my grandmother, who never once made me feel bad for being who I was.

We did have one thing in common though, and that one thing was Star Wars. As any good parent would do, my father had introduced me to Star Wars years beforehand, and I rewatched his VHS copies of the Special Edition release of the original trilogy over and over again.

“Wait, Star Wars?” you’re asking. “I thought he was strict.”

For all his newfound religious beliefs had changed, one thing remained, and that was his love for Star Wars. He was a kid at one point too, in the ’70s, and not only was he a fan, but he was a Star Wars fanatic! He had at one point all the toys a kid could own, a sizable collection of Star Wars merch that would make a modern day collector drool with dollar signs popping out of their eyes like Looney Tunes. His love for Star Wars never changed. Luckily for me his love for movies in general never changed either, despite his reservations against some material that he felt offended his religious sensibilities, and over time watching movies became something we enjoyed doing together. We made a habit of going to our local Blockbuster, a popular video rental store at the time, and making “movie nights” for just the two of us. I was a movie buff already, so I was able to sit down and watch whatever. As luck would have it, he had a knack for science-fiction and fantasy, and so did I. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

I’ll never forget the year that ‘The Phantom Menace’ came out, in 1999. Suddenly, my father and I had something in common! For the first time we were both excited for something for the same reasons. I remember us shuttling around town to various places to collect all the collectible cups, and Pogs, and everything else. By the time I actually moved in with him, which was before ‘Episode II’ was released, we were drowning in Star Wars stuff in our apartment. He even bought me a large horizontal poster that stretched across my bedroom wall, which came in multiple pieces you had to collect from different places. It produced in me a feeling of satisfaction I had not felt before. We were together on something, mutually. A bridge had been built. Just like my dad when he was a kid, I now had a room full of Star Wars toys. Years of brand new Star Wars was promised to us, and we were prepared to soak it in.

Before, my father all but mocked my video gaming habit, but now we were playing together. I owned all the popular consoles of the time, so we bought all the Star Wars games we could and played them together. ‘Jedi Power Battles’ on the PS1 in particular comes to mind. ‘Jedi Power Battles’ was a game that allowed players to choose characters from the prequels and play through the events of ‘The Phantom Menace’, destroying droids and other enemies and sometimes doing some light puzzle solving. It was a “couch co-op” game, meaning two people could play on the same screen. My dad wasn’t nearly as good at video games as I was, to hilarious effect, but we still played together. I even whooped his butt at “Masters of Tera-Kasi” (a now forgotten Star Wars fighting game) to the point where he didn’t even want to play with me anymore! Yes, we played quite literally every Star Wars game possible together, even the single-player games. As the years passed by and Star Wars released more and more video games, I don’t think I ever missed a single release. I’ll also never forget when my father futilely tried to connect us to play a LAN match of “Republic Commando” on Xbox by buying dozens of feet of Ethernet cable. Somewhat disappointingly, however, he also grabbed “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” when it hit shelves, the Bioware role-playing game that would become legendary. He didn’t like this game at all, but me being the nerd, well, I loved it. RPGs are my favorite genre of video game! (note: Knights of the Old Republic II is in my top favorite games of all time)

One fond memory of the prequels I have is from when we saw ‘Episode II: Attack of the Clones’ in theaters. I remember the night clearly. My older cousin was with us at the time, and we were having a snack at home before the movie. My father baked a large batch of cookies, something he started doing regularly since it took lots of food to feed the two of us (hey, don’t judge, you know you like to eat too). We were all eating our cookies and milk, when my father got tongue-tied and said “Cugar Shookies” instead of “Sugar Cookies”. At that point we all started switching up the first letters of words, and soon it turned to Star Wars words. Qui-Gon turned into “Guy-Quon”, Boba Fett turned into “Foba Bett”, and I nearly blew milk out my nose laughing. Maybe I was too busy laughing, but when the time came to see the movie, I didn’t realize where we were going until we were getting ready to go. I asked my dad where we were going when we were on our way out the door, and he coyly said, “To a galaxy far, far away.”

Like a bozo, I’d fallen asleep during the last stretch of the movie the first time we saw it. I was a kid, and it was at night, go figure. I do remember waking up during the big fight scene at the end, and how the theater erupted when Yoda started spinning like a top with his lightsaber out. Because I missed some of it, we then decided to go see it a second time on a different date, so I could see all of it. Everything was going swimmingly until the romance scene between Anakin and Padmé came up. While they looked longingly into each other’s eyes, the screen took on a warm orange and romantic glow. We thought it was all a part of the movie, until….the film reel split in two! Everyone’s mouth in the theater hung open as we stared disbelievingly at the blank screen. We had to wait in the lobby and grab a snack until they replaced the film reel, so we could finish the movie. It was all funny to us, nobody got upset, and it made the night a memorable one.

Because real life is differently than Hollywood makes it seem, the issues between my father and I didn’t magically end with Star Wars. We still butted heads during my teenage years, as young men and their fathers tend to do. Unfortunately, my father and I couldn’t possibly have been more different people. Times would change, people would come in and out of our lives. We’d move to different residences, our family would split apart and come back together. Times would be good, and then times would be bad. Sometimes really bad. Life was….life. But Star Wars was always there in the background, giving us a common thread.

My Star Wars related memories are sprinkled throughout my teenage years like pictures in a photo album. I remember many times when we’d pop one of the movies in the VCR, and later the DVD player, sometimes to have it playing in the background while we cleaned house, or other times to just enjoy them again. I remember playing all the various new Star Wars board games, spending long hours in the afternoons enjoying the time with my dad. Two of my favorite Star Wars board games to come from that era were “Star Wars Episode I: Clash of the Lightsabers”, and “Star Wars: Jedi Unleashed”. ‘Clash of the Lightsabers’ was a card game where players would recreate the battle between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Darth Maul by playing cards against each other in a card battle like other similar card games, and I beat my father handily at that too. It’s a shame the pieces to it have been lost over the years, it came with lots of interesting cards and neat miniature pewter figurines of Qui-Gon and Darth Maul. ‘Jedi Unleashed’, which I thankfully still have, was an interesting game because it put players in the control of everybody who was present at the Battle of Geonosis from Episode II, allowing them to control heroes and villains on a large board and roll dice to attack fellow players until the time when Yoda arrives. There were countless more games, but those two are cemented in my memory. Then one special Christmas, my father bought me a special toy: a life size standing Sith Droid that shot Nerf discs at you, which you’d block with a toy lightsaber. Yes, Star Wars came at us from every angle, and my father was glad to share it with me.

I still have those VHS copies of the original trilogy Special Edition releases too, they’re sitting in a box collection in decorative fashion over my computer, a relic from a simpler time. I look at that box, with Darth Vader on the cover, admiring the now scratched up lackluster golden colors, and I think back to those years when I hardly even knew my father. Similar to Luke Skywalker, I discovered that there was something redeeming in my father, someone whom I thought I was nothing at all like. Even though I hated living with him at times, I am grateful that we were able to connect on something, even if that something is the Star Wars prequels. I honestly think the Star Wars prequels aren’t that bad, all things considered. Sure, they use a lot of CGI, but what doesn’t anymore? And all that exposition? Star Wars is built on exposition, we wouldn’t have Star Wars now without the prequels further establishing more of the universe that we all know and love. I even think Hayden Christensen was good in his role, he displayed perfectly an Anakin Skywalker who was immature and had a temper problem, in my humble opinion. I sincerely think they are decent movies, and I firmly stand on that. But I am not afraid to admit that some of my love for them is because of what they did for me. I am not blind to the fact that the merch and hype surrounding ‘The Phantom Menace’, for example, is a big part of the reason why it’s actually my favorite Star Wars movie, besides the fact that Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan fighting Darth Maul is cinematic history. To me, the Star Wars prequels are a part of my childhood that brought me a lot of happiness, and I’m sure my predilection for movies in general played a big part in that. For many fans, all they see is what they perceive as bad acting, an unnecessary plot, or any number of other popular complaints, but all I see is the rousing story that George Lucas wanted all of us to see and enjoy.

Without the Star Wars prequels, and Star Wars as a whole, I’m not sure my father and I would have ever connected on anything at all. It helped repair the rift between us. So, allow me to say something that many internet trolls, as well as Star Wars fans, have neglected to say:

Thank you, George Lucas.

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