The Power of the Force: Growing Up as a ‘Star Wars’ Kid Without a New ‘Star Wars’ Movie

Star Wars has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can’t recall any precise moment of introduction to it, because it was just always there. My parents had recorded all three (at the time) films off of USA. My first experience with the movies was with the original versions, technically, but also with regular commercial breaks. And I didn’t mind it one bit. From the time I was old enough to talk, I’d be watching those on repeat. Later on, when I hit school, I became friends with people who actually owned them on VHS and we’d watch them when I went over to their house, because that’s what kids did. Kids loved Star Wars. But the last film in the trilogy, not counting the Ewoks spin offs, had been released six years before we were even born. And we were ten when The Phantom Menace came out. I had been watching Star Wars since I was old enough to speak. That’s a long time to grow up without a new Star Wars movie and yet, we managed. In fact, we barely ever thought about it.

When I was a kid, I didn’t even question it. The trilogy was the trilogy and to me it was its own, complete thing. I never even thought about whether or not it would be followed up. Sure, I knew there was a whole bunch of backstory. I gleamed it from the exposition in the movies themselves as well as a Handbook to the Star Wars Universe that I carried around with me wherever I went. That, I remember, detailed a final fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin that gave him the wounds that led to the transformation into the iconic Darth Vader outfit and I was floored reading that for the first time as a kid. I spent days thinking about how cool it would be to see, but that didn’t mean I actually thought it would ever happen.

As strange and contradictory as it sounds, part of why I didn’t spend my youth dreaming of a new Star Wars movie was because there was plenty else to sate me. Sure, the franchise felt over on the screen, but Star Wars in general was everywhere. I had a ton of books from an early age, mostly collected through local book sales, but nearly enough that they could have taken up their own shelf. That, if anything, was why I and I think so many other kids growing up at the time loved Boba Fett. Because in the movies, Boba Fett is a character who looks really cool but doesn’t actually do much of anything at all. He’s basically a joke that plays out over the course of two movies, but I’ll always go to bat insisting he’s a great joke. A bounty hunter with a notorious reputation, who gets built up as the ultimate badass in Empire Strikes Back before being accidentally killed by a blind Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. It’s, as I’ve said before, as if the gag where Indy just shoots the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark was stretched over two entire movies.

But the three movies that existed, while they were most important, were just a fraction of my love for Star Wars because they were it and there was so much else out there. I didn’t love Boba Fett because of the films, I loved him because of comics like his self-titled Dark Horse comic series and books like The Mandalorian Armor.

All of the Star Wars books were amazing to me, because it made the mythology truly feel like an entire universe full of endless possibilities. I could read entire book trilogies just about X-Wing pilots. I could read short story collections about bounty hunters, or tales of the Mos Eisley Cantina, I could read Han Solo’s early adventures or find out what happened to Luke and Leia after Return of the Jedi. And I absolutely have to credit these books with my love of tie-ins and novelizations in general. These made me want to have that feeling for everything that I loved and that remains true even today. I want to fall into and be completely immersed in the things I love, whether it’s Star Wars or Friday the 13th, the more tie-ins that allow me to explore corners of that world — or worlds, in this case — the better.

My first Star Wars books were actually born out of my greatest love: horror. I remember when it was such a big deal a few years ago that there was going to be a Star Wars horror novel, but when I was growing up, those were already a thing. The ’90s were ruled by horror books and series being marketed to children, a fact I’m still very grateful for, and the reigning king of all of them was R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. It dominated the young adult book market, then it dominated television, computer games, Happy Meal toys, board games, you name it. Everything wanted to piggyback off of that success. Every brand wanted their own Goosebumps and yes, that included Star Wars.

Because of that, we got a kids series of horror books set in the Star Wars universe called Galaxy of Fear. I absolutely ate those books up. I completely devoured them. What I loved most is that you’d see figures that you knew were technically scary from the movies, but only because other characters in those features were scared of them. You never really dwelled on them, never got to see why everyone was so afraid of them, it was all just left to the imagination. And even if the Galaxy of Fear books were written for kids, they still did their best. You see why people are terrified of the Rancor and some of the other creatures in that world. But it goes doubly true for Darth Vader.

Like a great deal of expanded material at the time, Vader is used sparingly in Galaxy of Fear, but its to tremendous effect. In fact, the limited screen time — so to speak — only helps to make him a more menacing, creepy presence. Vader’s characterized in those books somewhere between Doctor Doom and Torquemada. After all, Vader’s the most feared man in the entire galaxy, maybe more than the Emperor himself, but we had never really seen why. He’ll choke someone without warning, but overall the guy is basically a monolith. He’s an asthmatic sphinx and it’s impossible to ever know what he’s thinking, what he’s going to do, or what he might have just done. That mystery is, I think, crucial to the success of the character. But these kids books, of all things, played that reputation and that fear factor up to shine a light on just how horrific Vader could be when he was working his day-to-day job within the Empire and not chasing Luke and his friends around the universe.

Vader’s appearances are brief, but it’s clear that this is a Vader overseeing the torture and imprisonment of children, this is a Vader who might not exactly be as over-the-top as Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, but would have absolutely hired that guy to get information that he needed. While I had always loved Vader as a kid, these books marked the first time that I really got how scary he could be.

Books were just the tip of the iceberg, however. Star Wars was present across every gaming system I ever had. Those games worked on exactly the same principal as the novels and comics I loved so much. They told stories outside the movies that helped to make the universe feel that much wider. My first was Star Wars on Game Gear, basically just a loose adaptation of the first movie and one that frustrated the hell out of me because it felt impossibly difficult. When I eventually got my hands on PlayStation, it rocked my young world. My first two games were Dark Forces and my absolute favorite Star Wars game of my childhood: Masters of Teras Kasi. When it came to gaming, I was never quite an expert. I was a kid raised on the likes of Mortal Kombat. Fighting games were what I knew, so a Star Wars fighter was absolute heaven to me. It looked dated almost immediately, but I didn’t care. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, even if my friends did spend a good deal of time making fun of a Tusken Raider named “Hoar.”

Still, the biggest, most fundamental part of my childhood love of Star Wars had to be the toys. I had a lot of them. Maybe too much. I didn’t just want to recreate my favorite movie scenes, I wanted to tell my own stories beyond the movies and I wanted them to look and feel as accurate as possible. I was learning how to write, making up adventures with my action figures. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time, but it was. I was storytelling. That also meant that I didn’t just want Luke in his regular outfit, I wanted him in the X-Wing pilot outfit for when he needed to, you know, fly around in his X-Wing. I didn’t want one Stormtrooper because it’s Star Wars and Stormtroopers were supposed to be all over the damn place.

Even the novels and comics I loved so much, like Shadows of the Empire, got their own action figure series. That felt nuts to me as a kid and it still does. It’s surreal to think about walking into Walmart and finding toys based on a tie-in book. My adventures got to include Bounty Hunter Chewbacca and characters or events that had never appeared in the movies and as a kid, I thought that was the coolest.

Part of the reason for my large Star Wars collection as a kid just stemmed from my mom being an expert yard sale-or. Thanks to her, I got major vehicles like the AT-ST and Boba Fett’s Slave I for dirt cheap. My friends didn’t know how cheaply I’d gotten most of the cool things I had, so they were absolutely wowed by the things that I had.

Of course, the ’90s weren’t quite without any new Star Wars movies as, building up to The Phantom Menace, the decade gave us the notorious Special Editions. These days, there’s a lot in those that make me cringe, a lot of incredibly unnecessary additions that don’t add anything to the scene and special effects re-dos that actually look worse. But as a kid they were unbelievable. All they meant was that I got to go see the movies I loved so much on the big screen, with some new stuff that I had never seen before. That was basically beyond a dream come true. I could barely comprehend it. When they were finally released on VHS as a collector’s set, it also meant I no longer had to watch the movies taped off of TV. I thought newer had to be better, so I might have embarrassingly even teased my friends who held onto their non-Special Edition VHS sets as still having “the old ones.”

As I’m sure everyone who was alive at the time would remember, the hype surrounding Episode I was monumental. I don’t remember the first time I saw the trailer, but I do remember first seeing the toys pop up in stores. The biggest thing, for me, though, was when my dad bought me a hardcover of the novelization. He didn’t like novelizations or tie-ins at all and even actively discouraged them. But even to him, that one seemed to feel like a big deal. The cover was what stood out to me the most. It was just Darth Maul’s face and it was my first time laying eyes on the character. I wanted to know everything about that guy and what his deal was, so I absolutely devoured the book.

Honestly, being ten years old, The Phantom Menace did not disappoint. I was a kid and the lightsaber fights were great and it was more Star Wars, which I had never thought I was going to get. Even now, I like the ambition of it and the entire Duel of the Fates sequence with the three-way lightsaber fight never fails to impress. When it hit VHS, I would watch it all the time with my dad. He seemed to really enjoy it, which was surprising for an adult who wasn’t even that into the franchise, but I eventually just realized that he was simply happy that I liked it so much. We’d watch it so often that my dad was the only human person to ever utter the phrase, “You can never watch Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace too many times.” He would say it every time we were about to watch it, at least until I started getting older and the appeal wore off.

Just as I had done throughout my childhood before that, I collected as many of the Phantom Menace toys as I could, which really tried to sell kids on “new technology,” with a voice chip that you could put the figures on to make them talk. It was actually way more complicated and way less fun than the many kinds of talking toys that existed before that. I even owned the Phantom Menace video game and played it all the time because it was the first new Star Wars movie I had ever gotten to experience and I wanted to devour everything remotely related to it.

Even though I did get that movie after years of being a fan of that mythology, my best childhood memories of Star Wars aren’t related to The Phantom Menace. When I think of how much I loved Star Wars as a kid, I think about watching Return of the Jedi when I was sick. I think even more about bringing my toys out into the snow to simulate a battle on the ice planet Hoth. And I think, most of all, about X-Wing adventures on the swing set and Jedi battles with my friends, all of us armed with cheap, plastic lightsabers that didn’t even light up or make noise anymore. Those are, to me, the memories that make May the 4th and the celebration of all things Star Wars so special. It’s not just a great mythology, a great story with many ups and downs as all long-lasting franchises have, it’s a reminder of a time when Star Wars felt like the biggest thing in the world. It reminds us of what it was like to be a kid who dreamed of being a Jedi, how it felt to go higher and higher on a swing and imagine you were lifting off into space. And even though we grow up and we don’t have plastic lightsaber fights or even watch the movies as often as we once did, those memories remain and carry on and they will stay with us. Always.