It blows my mind that Monday was Star Wars Day ("May the Fourth be with you!"), because I discovered this after the boys and I spent much of the weekend watching "A New Hope" two and a half times. They wanted to see it a full third time--after Robert's mudbath that some observers might call a baseball game--but I restricted the viewing to cool stuff, like droids battling and battles droiding, so we could conjure LEGO battles of droids battling and battles droiding.
The first viewing was Friday night, when the three of us settled in on drizzly, grim night. The boys sat rapt, squirt guns blasters wedged in their pajama waistbands, while Luke used the force to fell a ginormous, planet-sized space station with his two little popguns. One of the most ridiculous plot points in all of explored space, if you ask me, but still a crucial protein strand in our collective celluloid DNA.
By the second viewing, our third overall, we'd gotten pretty familiar with all the specific dialogue. So an impromptu sort of MST3K episode broke out. Witness these little gems:
- Robert, after Luke gazes off into the two setting suns of Tattooine: "Does that mean you can get two sunburns?"
- TwoBert, after our heroes plunge into the Imperial Trash Smasher: "Princess Leia should not be walking in the garbage because she is wearing a dress."
- Robert, after Obi-Wan slashes the arm off the belligerent snoutface in the Mos Eisley cantina: "OK, note to self. Don't mess with the old guy."
By viewing number three, we were playing along with our LEGO ships and drawing huge explosions and rolling around avoiding certain blasterdeath. The downstairs neighbors might have called the National Guard.
To celebrate May Fourth, I bought both remastered trilogies for $30 each on Amazon. The Force is strong with these children. Perhaps by the time he is 18, TwoBert will follow through on his promise to change his name to Darth Vader.
