Today is Phantom Menace day. 20 years ago today is when the first of the prequel trilogy of Star Wars was released and a whole new wave of Star Wars fervor swept the world. It was the first new Star Wars movie since 1983. The excitement was beyond huge.
It was also the movie that saved me.
Let me set the stage for you. In May of 1999, I was 12 years old, an undiagnosed autistic kid dealing with a whole lot of sensory overload as well as mental overload because I was in a foreign country trying to figure which way was up. I had help with it, but there was also a lot I couldn’t get help with yet because I simply did not know how to ask for it or even verbalize what was going on in my head. It was the late 90’s and literally no person would have looked at me and known that I was on the ASD spectrum. I was female and what they called high-functioning and no one who didn’t see me in the middle of a full-on sensory meltdown would have even guessed that’s what was up with me.
I was also a former army brat who was extremely resentful that after having started to put down roots and double checked that we weren’t planning on moving and that I could quite possibly not actually have to be the new kid for once, that I could go to middle school with all of the rest of my friends and yearmates…and then before I could even blink, we were in the process of moving again. And not just across the US but to a completely foreign country on the other side of the equator.
Because of all of that, I retreated inward a lot. Stuck to my books and my games and what internet access I was allowed to have. Talked when I was spoken to mostly or when I knew it would be expected of me. Didn’t bother otherwise.
The one thing I did know was that I loved science fiction. I’d been raised on Star Trek and Babylon 5 but hadn’t been introduced to Star Wars until I’d asked my dad a question after hearing some boys on the bus talk about it. He realized that no, he hadn’t shown us that, and that day went out to buy the trilogy on VHS. We spent the weekend watching them and it was the gateway to this fabulous new world full of adventures and terrifying villains and where the smartest hero was the girl and it was pretty brilliant all around. My tiny 9 year old self was blown away. It wasn’t long before I was asking to rewatch them or if they knew anything more after the end of Return of the Jedi?
At 10, I found and proceeded to beg and plead and bargain for my mother to buy me this book I found that was all Star Wars in the book section of Kroger. It was Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Crystal Star and my mind was blown open again by the fact that here were my heroes 10 years on, still alive and thriving, and OMG they had kids!!
Fast forward back to 1999, the only real thing that to use my parents’ term, “brought me out of my shell” was the fact that there was a new Star Wars movie coming out and I HAD to see it. Any thoughts I’d had on running away and calling my grandmother to please come get me (I had an international calling card in my possession) because I didn’t want to be here or doing something else drastic completely faded away because there was a new Star Wars movie coming out and I had to see it. Which meant I had to stay where the money and the transportation were. I also had to be GOOD so that they’d take me to it. The desire to see the movie overrode every other thing in my brain.
Even better was the fact that at my local theater there, it wasn’t dubbed. It was subtitled instead and that meant that I could go to see it and not miss anything because my language skills still weren’t super great.
And it was exactly what I needed and more. It gave me the Jedi and Anakin as a small thing and podracing and complicated political measures and a Queen and her handmaidens who were close to my age and being the most incredible capable awesome GIRLS ever. It gave me new depths to the universe I was already in love with and new characters to fall in love with or hate desperately from the bottom of my heart (Darth Maul killing Qui-Gon had me seething in my seat). I saw it four times in theaters and only one of those times was with my parents. I totally wrangled movie funds out of them for doing all manner of chores and homework and whatever. There were a bunch of kids in the neighborhood we were living in at the time and I’m pretty sure we all convinced their parents at one time or another to drop us off at the theater to go see the movie again and again.
Best of all, it was part one and that meant there were more coming and that meant I had to do whatever I needed to so that I could be there to watch them.
Later on, I went through that phase where everyone hated on it and disparaged it and made jokes about it and I ceded to the peer pressure then but deep down I never forgot that before I had antidepressants, before I even knew about sensory overload and major depression disorder and generalized anxiety disorder…I had Star Wars. And that was enough at the time.
Without The Phantom Menace coming out in theaters today 20 years ago, I don’t honestly know if I would still be here or not. Because of it and Star Wars, I have met some of the absolute best people in the world, I have friendships that I wouldn’t have had without it, and life is super awesome being the Star Wars nerd that I am.
NB: This post could not have been written without the awesome that is Bryan Young (find him here: https://www.swankmotron.com/ or on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/swankmotron