TODAY'S NEWS: "Star Wars" was released on my fifteenth birthday, but because the small town I lived in was the equivalent of Tatooine, it took months for the movie to reach a theater near me (Note to Young People: This was years before any of us could download pirated copies of movies on the Internet. I know it's hard to imagine such a primitive time, but it's true). I'd been reading in the news about this upcoming film that combined rusty spaceships and leading-edge special effects, and I could hardly wait. And then it finally came to the one theater in town, and my friends and I sat way down near the screen, and the opening credits scrolled upward, and the Empire's Star Destroyer slowly cruised by, and there kept being more and more and more...

I am less enchanted with the second triad of the series, but I will always have fond memories of the original "Star Wars."