Force Feeding

I was five when I first saw Star Wars (or Episode IV: A New Hope, as it has gratingly become known), my brother even younger. And like millions of kids the world over, we were instantly in love with it.

When Tampering George decided back in 1997 that he'd have a fiddle with the original Star Wars trilogy, polishing up some sequences, positively ruining others, some of the magic was lost. More so, considering that he placed an embargo on the original versions of the movie being released again on video or DVD. These new 'Special Editions' were definitive - live with it.

I promised myself that when my kids got to an age where they could watch the film for themselves, they would see the original versions, as preserved on my dusty old VHS copies. So I was ecstatic when I heard about this:

A DVD release for the original, theatrical, pre-buggering about version of the film (although Mr Lucas has refused to back down about which is the Official Version, snidely packaging the original as a special feature on the billionth re-release of the tarted-up edition. Honestly, how many people are even going to take the Special Edition disc out of the box?)

All that aside, it's the film as it was first seen, on DVD, and released to coincide almost exactly with my daughter's fifth birthday... As a tall, black-masked icon once said, 'The circle is complete'.

So this afternoon, when I was looking after the kids and therefore unable to work anyway (that's such a good excuse), in went the disc, up snuggled the daughter and away we went.

Despite initial excitement about the droids ('I wish I could go and visit them') and the mere fact that there was a princess involved, her interest started to wane rather quickly. By the time Luke Skywalker had acquired C3PO and R2D2, she was off drawing pictures of mummy and flowers.

Now that's not a reflection on my daughter at all - she demands to watch Doctor Who, loves the Daleks and does a frighteningly convincing Cyberman impersonation. She has my genes, no doubt about it - sci-fi is not a turn off for this girl.

Instead it just proves that robots wandering around in a sand pit for half an hour probably wasn't the best way to kick off the film.

Not that it bothered me, back in 1977. Then again, I was five ... And it had spaceships ...

*Sigh* She never even got to see who really shot first.