It’s Christmas morning. (Or the morn of a holiday of your choice.) There’s so many gifts, but you really only care about that one you beeeeged Santa to bring you. The best dang toy ever, the one you’ve been waiting for for-ev-er! Five-ever even. But of course your mom makes you open all the boxes of sweaters and tube socks first to make your grandparents happy. But now is the time. There’s only a thin layer of corny green and red paper between you and the last toy you’ll ever need. You unwrap it and…. Well, it needs like 20 batteries of all different kinds. And of course dad doesn’t have them and he’s not going to go get them because it’s Christmas after all and you never get to see your Aunt Sarah. Besides that you’re pretty sure it’s smaller than it looked on the commercials. The paint started to chip off as you pry it out of the dumb plastic things that pin it to the cardboard. And to top it off your snot-nosed sister wants you to share it with her. Ugh.
If you can relate to that level of disappointment then you can understand a fraction of what Star Wars fans felt with the advent of The Phantom Menace.
For many, their childhood eyes fell in love with Star Wars (before it was A New Hope [/old hipster]). And then after 22 years of build up they got a toy that just looked so much better in the commercials. Now my generation is afraid that the same thing will happen to us these 16 years after Jar Jar. And for those old enough to feel the disappointment from before, they wonder will their hearts be broken again? To mix my metaphors, can they learn to love and trust again after such a breech of the relationship?
With the height of emotion following the released of the final Episode VII trailer, are we just setting ourselves up for heartache? Are these trailers nothing but lies like The Phantom Menace trailers?
But were we lied to in the days leading up to May 19th, 1999? Were there warning signs even in the Phantom trailers that we all just missed? Are their red flags in Awakens that we just aren’t seeing? Let’s revisit the trailers for The Phantom Menace (TPM) and The Force Awakens (TFA) and see just how they stack up.
