BackYoda is my daughter’s nightmare
There is no right way to introduce your child to the 'Star Wars' saga. Let her discover the magic in her own way
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The Force is getting stronger in my family and it definitely started around three years ago when the Star Movies TV channel (or was it Star World?) ran a marathon session of all six episodes of Star Wars on a weekend.
I am not your average geeky Star Wars mom. I don’t have an opinion on whether Jar Jar Binks was the worst possible character ever introduced, I had never watched an episode of the animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and I was never particularly interested in any character, droid or attack vehicle’s back history.
So it did not matter to me that my daughter did not get initiated into the Star Wars saga in the much touted “Machete Order" (start viewing with Episodes 4, 5, 2, 3, 6, and skip 1 entirely). In fact, my then eight-year-old daughter got introduced to young Anakin and C-3PO before she even heard of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia or Han Solo. By the time we reached Episode IV, A New Hope, the droids C-3PO and R2-D2 had already stolen her heart, and there was no turning back.
Unlike me, who has grown up on a healthy dose of Sunday morning viewings of Star Trek and Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan on Doordarshan, my daughter’s first introduction to the world of aliens, starships and “lands where no man has gone before" happened with Avatar, in a 3D theatre. I always thought that after Na’vi, Pandora, blue long-limbed aliens with tails and flying dragon-like predators, the Star Wars series would be passé for someone from her generation.
As she snuggled up to me that weekend and started to watch Luke Skywalker get rescued by the hermit Ben Kenobi on the planet Tatooine as the latter scuttled away the Sand People, I could see that she was hooked.
But I only fully realized how captivated she was when we were in the US last year. On our first day in Los Angeles we visited the Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum. As we walked past the 8ft, 11 inches-tall model of the world’s tallest man, R. Wadlow, Michael Jackson’s portrait made entirely from candy, the Berlin Wall and many other oddities, my daughter spotted a model of C-3PO, a battered version of R2-D2 and, of course, a large Darth Vader model made from scrap parts. She held on to C-3PO’s hand and wanted a picture clicked from every angle; and no, she did not show the same inclination towards the Transformers models.
At Disneyland we took the ride Star Tours—The Adventures Continue and even waited a couple of hours to sign up for the lightsaber class. In Vegas and New York, we met Darth Vaders and Chewbaccas and missed taking the Newyorkjedi.com’s summer lightsaber class in Washington Square Park. In Washington DC, we pretended the flight simulator rides at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum were actually our way of experiencing the bumps that Leia, Chewy and Luke felt in the Millennium Falcon.
Over the years, we have watched the Episodes many times (we have all six) in varied orders, and now that she is thankfully over her Anakin and C-3PO obsession, we have had discussions about many of the characters and Episodes, and figured why we like some of them.
Leia, for us, is troublesome. We like her and we don’t. She shuts up smart-mouth Han Solo, almost rescues herself in Episode IV, rescues Han in Episode VI, but “is no Katniss Everdeen" because she is never solely in charge like Katniss (from the The Hunger Games trilogy) nor does she fly Seze like Neytiri does in Avatar. Leia does not even fly an X-wing Starfighter, stays behind when the boys go to destroy Death Star and “wears some really weird stuff". Katniss and Neytiri are the stuff real heroines are made of.
Yoda is my favourite teacher—and my daughter’s nightmare—because “he is strict, exacting, looks weird and gives encouragement in very small measures".
Padmé is lacklustre—the only thing that interested us about Luke and Leia’s mum is the way she painted her lips...sometimes.
The Sith Lords, Jedis and their complicated genealogies and motivations, I suspect, will become more interesting than the colours of the lightsabers they use as my daughter grows older. For now we have studied the lightsaber colour charts and what they stand for and still regret not buying our own neon-green "Luke-like" lightsaber when we had the chance in Disneyland.
Anakin/Darth Vader is confusing for the young one. She was introducted to him as a young boy, a teen, a husband and then someone who turned bad. So she is perhaps more accommodating about the character’s weaknesses. I, on the other hand, find myself judgemental about this “evil" Jedi-turned-Sith Lord. Besides, Anakin’s story is fascinating for the child mostly, I suspect, because he is the creator of the irritating C-3PO.
For her, Han Solo is a smart- mouth, for me it’s the youthful Harrison Ford I still dream about.
As we wait for Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens, we have renewed our biannual Star Wars viewing sessions and with it our discussions about the characters who will return and who Rey, Kylo Ren and Finn will be.
May the Force stay strong in this family.
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