According to the digital clock-sign at the train station this morning, it was 4.21 AM, January 1, 1999. Oh, goodie, now I can relive all the madness that led up to the premiere of The Phantom Menace…
(Seriously, that would be fun, don’t you think? The final few moments of unadulterated excitement before Star Wars fandom broke down into testy pro and con factions…)
I’m pretty relentlessly “pro” as far as the Prequels go, but I remember when I was in line for TPM tickets, two weeks before it opened, before you could get tickets online…and there was already an awful lot of cynicism in the air about the whole thing, just to judge by things said by others in that line. People saying things like “I’m going to HATE this Jar Jar thing” and “I’ll be surprised if this movie doesn’t suck”. I think the backlash started well before the film even opened.
You’re probably right about people being cynical from the get-go. I think that was a reaction against the overwhelming marketing campaign as much as anything in the movie itself.
However, I myself found the line experience pretty positive. I went to an opening-day matinee with the true-blue fans, so there were lots of costumes and spontaneous cheering and such. It wasn’t until a couple days afterwards that I sensed any growing negativity.
I’m don’t dislike the prequels, but I’m not wild about them either. I believe my first-viewing reaction to TPM was “not as good as I hoped, not as bad as I feared,” and that ambivalence/indifference pretty well sums up the whole prequel trilogy for me (although the last half of ROTS was extremely emotional for me, and really was exactly what I was hoping for…)
What really makes me sad and makes me wish the prequels had never been made isn’t the films themselves, but the cultural consequences of them. The backlash, the inter-fan factionilization (I’ve found myself in some very heated discussions about the movies and G. Lucas, enough that I don’t participate in the fan scene much anymore just so I can avoid these fights), and the lessened reputation of the overall Star Wars brand is what hurts my feelings.
Ah, but that first day in ’99, the sense of community and the rush I felt when an entire theater full of thirtysomethings broke into spontaneous applause at the 20th Century Fox logo… that was cool…