Having the stereotypical "grew up with Star Wars" childhood, it's been interesting to watch this thing from a born in the 70s perspective. For years our "EU" was some Marvel comics, a holiday special that was awesome (when you were not quite eight yet!), some Star Wars novels with really cool cover but they were full of words (Splinter in the Mind's Eye, Han Solo books, etc.) and weren't great tie ins anyway, plenty of activity books and stuff like that. Oh, there was a cool children's book about Chewie's son. A couple actually. But it all sort of faded way off to the background. I had returned to the US in '91 and just happened to find the paperback of Heir to the Empire. Loved it. Bought the next two in hardcover and ordered the first in hardcover as well. Around the same time I resumed my comic book collecting. Dark Empire? Loved it. Those two series were so well done and led to the successful launch of what is now called the Expanded Universe. Toys started being redone, games started coming out. Great quality games, too. I loved the whole "multimedia" exercise with Shadows of the Empire as well. I remember lugging Jedi Search from Kevin Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy all over Yakima, Washington in my cargo pocket during training (I did the same thing with Dances with Wolves another year and it was surreal to read that story while living on the plains of Yakima). I kept up with all of this for sometime, then merely kept up with collecting it, and then there was just too much. Too many, and too expensive toys, too many books, too much everything. Lost interest, couldn't afford to keep up (my first name might be Steve but my last name isn't Sansweet), quality became too inconsistent.
I'm hopeful for the movies, though. One thing that is sad to me though is for virtually my entire childhood I had all of these wonderful fantasy worlds that lived in my imagination. Whether it was Star Wars, Buck Rogers, GI Joe, etc., I could just get lost in my own mind walking to school or in the backseat of a car. Today a kid just gets lost in a smartphone, doesn't care about drawing some cool robot or spaceship they dreamed up. And I bet I would have been the same way if I had all this crap back then. Fortunately, I had to actually pop quarters out of my coin collection, jump on my bike probably imagining a scene from Tron, and then pump them all into a machine named Tron, in a dimly lit, ice cold arcade with a giant Star Wars mural (Command Center, Renton, Washington).
"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise." - Wookie 03:16