Michael Ewing Blog

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS A NEW GENERATION

By Michael Ewing

I grew up in a small, rural town where the number of horses outnumbered the people and we liked it that way, thank you very much. Like most small towns in the middle of nowhere, nothing much happened and we didn’t notice. The biggest industry in town was dairy farming which meant in the spring we planted corn, in the summer we irrigated the corn, and in the fall we harvested the corn into stinking silage pits that we could smell from miles away if the wind was wrong.

We had a small black and white TV that received three stations if the meteorological conditions were right and static if they weren’t. We herded cows and rode horses and drove farm trucks years before we had drivers’ licenses and never questioned it. In October we went goose and pheasant hunting and I got so good at shooting ducks that I stopped because our freezer was full and I couldn’t give them away. Have you shot ducks on ice skates? I have.

When I was fourteen years old, I attended a summer family reunion in our small town park. One of my cousins, Greg, and I got into a fight. We started out throwing water balloons that escalated after I dragged Greg over to the park's water faucet and put his head under it. He then punched me in the nose. I tackled him and had him down on the ground and was letting him have it when my dad dragged me off. He ignored my version of events and told me I was going to do something else while I could cooled off so he could go back and apologize to my uncle.

I thought I was in big trouble for the fight but my dad later said that a family reunion wouldn't be a family reunion without a fight or bloody nose or two. But that was later. Right then I thought we were going to go home so I could do chores (my usual punishment) but instead, he just drove around town until he eventually stopped in front of a movie theater. He parked the car, bought me a ticket and told me he would be back in six hours after the reunion was over to pick me up.

SIX HOURS! I demanded to know how I was going to watch movies for six hours with one ticket and he told me to watch the same movie three times. That was my punishment.

I growled my way into the theater, slumped down in the front where no one could see my bloody face and watched Star Wars three times in a row.

And loved every minute of it.

After my dad picked me up after the reunion, I begged him for more money and bought the book and went home and read Star Wars all night. The next day was church. Since it was a small town, we all went to the same church and everyone came up and admired my black eye and swollen nose. But all I could talk about was Star Wars! The next weekend Greg and all my other friends went. I have no idea how many times we saw it but it wasn't enough.

When I heard Disney had purchased the rights to Star Wars and that a new movie was coming out at Christmas, 2015, I tried to pass on the joy and wonder of those incredible movies to my kids so we could go as a family. But at nine and six, they were not interested in dad's stupid old movies. So I gave up. If they didn’t want to go, they could watch cartoons with a sitter.

But before I could go see the new movie, I had to catch up with the old ones. I hadn’t watched any of the movies in at least twenty years. I had watched all the prequels but they didn’t count. Those movies were angry, brooding and annoying. The force clearly hadn’t been with George Lucas when he wrote them.

I took my 18 month old upstairs so he could play and put on Star Wars IV: A New Hope as entertainment. What did people do to watch kids before TV? I have no idea. I’ve tried to read books with an infant on my knee but all I get is a book with torn pages.

As I was getting ready to watch the movie, my older kids came up. They didn't want to watch Star Wars but I told them I was watching the baby so I got to choose what to watch and if they didn't like it, there was another TV downstairs and they could watch Sponge Bob.

The kids grumbled away and I watched Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Princess Leigh and with each frame, the wonder came flooding back. I was whisked away to 1977.

The next night, I started watching The Empire Strikes Back. I reached the part after the battle of Hoth where the huge space slug Exogorth tried to eat the Millennium Falcon in the asteroid field and something magical happened. I heard a loud gasp and turned around and both of my older kids were watching the movie with wide eyes. They were hooked! They were mesmerized! They liked it so much they even let me shout out the lines before they happened without telling me to be quiet!

"Wow, dad can't remember when to take us to karate but he can remember all the lines to Star Wars!" my oldest said.

We reached the end of the Empire Strikes Back and they begged me to start Return of the Jedi. It was late and a school night and being the good parent that I am, I did just that...until my wife, the Warden, chased us all to bed.

The next morning, I woke up and she was taking a shower so I marched into the bathroom, snapped open the shower door, sternly looked at her up and down and said in my best Storm Trooper voice, "This is the droid I am looking for!"

She called me a geek and a nerd. “I'm not a nerd,” I corrected. “I'm a Nerf Herder."

She rolled her eyes.

When she left for work, she gave me a kiss and said, "I love you."

I looked at her and in my best Han Solo just before getting frozen in carbonite, said, "I know."

I’ve seen the trailers for the new movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and I’m going to go. Yes, even after all this time I am still a Star Wars fan but what makes me feel really good is being able to pass on a bit of history to my family about how I went to a very special movie a long, long time ago with a swollen eye and bloody nose and ended up leaving my small, rural town for a galaxy far, far away.