May 2007 will mark thirty years since the original theatrical release of Star Wars. John Booth, who at age six converted his thumbs and index fingers from cowboy shooters to Han Solo-inspired blasters, is raking together his memories of the saga in a series of essays for Field's Edge.The series begins here.

   For all the things that make Star Wars a truly big-screen experience, for first-generation fans, there was something special about seeing its spectacle on the television in the living room. There were no videotapes or DVDs or incessant cable channel showings. For years, we settled on catching bits and pieces of the movie in commercials or “Making of…” shows. 
   You saw Star Wars in a movie theater or you didn’t see it at all. 
   The first Star Wars-related program I remember seeing on television was a science fiction special that was airing, I think, on PBS. The narrator was talking about visual effects in movies, and said something about how 2001: A Space Odyssey had set a new standard that put things like the old Flash Gordon-type shows to shame. “Then,” I remember him saying, “in 1977, George Lucas’ Star Wars…” and something about a wholly new special effects experience, only after that all I remember is suddenly the Death Star dogfight was on the television screen right in front of my face. 
   I was sitting on a footstool in my living room and feeling that roller-coaster swooping in my belly during the point-of-view shots of fighters diving into the trench and I swear I could hear the lasers sizzling past my ears and my heart was racing. (I tried to recapture that feeling once by running around the house like an X-Wing, with my hands positioned like horse blinders on either side of my eyes, then “diving” towards a photo of the Death Star trench in my Star Wars storybook. Not quite the same effect.) 
   I absolutely loved when stuff like that was on TV, especially the Star Wars-specific shows like “SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back,” and “From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga” I’ve seen the latter a lot over the years – I wore out two VHS copies of it - but I haven’t seen “SPFX” since it aired back in 1980 or ’81. 
   Star Wars even playing a passing role on another show was worth getting geeked up about, as in the case of Mark Hamill guest starring on “The Muppet Show,” or seeing a Star Wars parody showcase showdown on “The Price is Right.” 
   The Star Wars Holiday Special aired on my eighth birthday. (Not that I remember that specifically - it’s just something I’ve learned in the years since.) I have only a fleeting recollection of the show taking place on the Wookiee home planet and there being an oddly uncool cantina scene. I haven’t seen it again, although I have seen the cartoon clip that introduced Boba Fett and the bizarre Jefferson Starship music video that was part of the show. 
   I can specifically remember the first time I saw Star Wars, the actual movie itself, on television, because I’m pretty sure it was the first time anyone saw Star Wars on broadcast television. I was on vacation in Vermont with my friend Trevor and his mom and stepdad, and we were staying in a condo at Killington. The TV was either sitting on a high shelf or mounted on one of those wall brackets above the hide-a-bed couch in the living room. 
   And Star Wars being on TV was a big freaking deal. The commercial breaks were bracketed by short clips of interviews with the movie’s cast and crew. As excited as I was about it in the weeks leading up to it, being on a ski trip, I’d forgotten all about it and only wound up seeing the last half. 
   Star Wars on television figured into another ski trip years later when I was in high school. Aaron and I were at Seven Springs in Pennsylvania on a youth ski trip and the movie was on during our first night there. (Dinner had been so bad that we and our two roommates had a pizza delivered to our motel room and thought we were clever. The pizza guy showed up with a pickup truck stacked to the rafters and an order for just about every room in the place.) So we watched Star Wars and ate pizza, and Aaron and I got into an argument during the closing credits because I thought they’d rewritten the closing music slightly in order to cut away to a commercial. Aaron insisted they’d broken off at just the right beat within the existing score. 
   He was right. 
   When Return of the Jedi came out, I set our family’s boom box in front of the television so I could tape record of one of the movie trailers. (I did the same thing to make my first mix tapes, recording videos off MTV. To this day, if I hear Rush’s “Distant Early Warning,” right after Geddy Lee’s cry of Absalom! Absalom!, my mind inserts the sound of me saying “hi” to my mom as she came into the room.) 
   Two things happened sometime in my teenage years that forever changed the way I watched Star Wars: First, my family got cable. Then we got a VCR. I still own the first two VHS tapes that I ever laid claim to, with movies recorded from HBO and Showtime. They’re a treasure trove. The first includes Raiders of the Lost Ark, Strange Brew, and From Russia with Love (although that last one’s a crappy ABC-edited chop-job), and the second has The Blues Brothers, The Breakfast Club, and The Cannonball Run. On a college trip to Colorado, my friends and I once watched this one all the way through. 
   My first “watch-whenever-I-want” Star Wars collection was a single VHS tape with the movies recorded in the wrong order: Star Wars, then Jedi, then Empire. This got me by until I was in college and shelled out fifty dollars – holy crap, FIFTY DOLLARS - for the set’s original boxed videocassette release. 
   I rarely sit down solely to watch the Star Wars movies anymore, though I go through the saga a couple times a year, popping the DVDs in while I’m doing stuff around the house or when I just want to chill and maybe doze a bit. The funny thing is, if I’m flipping through channels and I see one of the movies is airing, something stirs in me and I get a tiny leftover adrenaline rush from the years when catching Star Wars on television was a treasured rarity. I usually wind up watching at least a few minutes. 
   When Lucas was prepping to put the first trilogy back on the big screen under the Special Edition banners (ten years ago already!), the first trailer opened with a shot of a television and a single-speaker voice over saying, “For an entire generation, people have experienced Star Wars the only way it’s been possible: on the TV screen.” 
   It hasn’t always been a bad thing. 

      Here are the links to the rest of Remembering Star Wars:

Part I: Summer, 1977
Part II: The Droids We Were Looking For
Part III: Perfect Hibernation
Part IV: Into A Larger World
Part V: Collect All 21!
Part VI: A Certain Point of View
Part VII: A Pack-A-Day Habit

Part IX: Along A Different Path

Part X: There is Another

Part XI: Bounty Hunting