 I recently put out a video about my terrible movie experience at Captain America Civil War years ago. It was a reenactment of sorts. Highly suggest you check it out if you haven't. To offset the negative movie experiences though, I have to talk about the positives which there are far more of. It's the reason I'm a huge movie fan. It's the reason I continue to go to the theaters. When I think of some truly special moments going to the movies, the first one that springs to mind isn't even my favorite. It's not even probably my top five. But it was just so iconic for me. It just hit at such a crucial time in my life. I think high school for a lot of people is kind of the time you look back on as a, you know, the coming of age tale. You're fork in the road where your life splits and you're not entirely sure of where you're going or where you're even at in the moment. You're just living life to its fullest. Or you're depressed as all hell and that's a whole other thing. Either way I can sympathize and in either case the one thing that's constant is the movies. From hardcore movie fans you'll hear some cliched phrases like movies are my Super Bowl or movies are my religion. And both of those apply to me. The reason I still get excited week to week. I mean there are other things of course but having that experience not only with my parents growing up but now to have that with my children is truly something special. My sophomore year in high school my parents decided to do the brilliant thing and move us to Newalm which is a town a couple hours from where I previously was at in Monticello. These are these are real places in Minnesota. Moving is very tough on a child to begin with especially when you're in school and trying to make new friends or leave old friends behind and start over. It's really hard when you're a sophomore in high school to to get new friendships and to say goodbye to old ones or try to maintain them to the best of your ability. Thankfully since I was on the football team I was able to accumulate some new friendships before the school year started and I was also kind of a nerd so I was able to pull in some other people from other communities that liked video games and movies and all the things that aren't even nerdy anymore which is nice. The month is May the year 1999. Some people may already know what I'm referring to now as far as the film goes but you also have seen the title of this video. I mean so it's already been given away. I don't know why I'm doing some sort of a big reveal here. Star Wars Episode 1 is coming out on the 19th. I was super excited. I was hyped beyond hyped for this film. The first new Star Wars movie in decades. We've had re-releases sure with some extra bullshit special features thrown in like dumb singing Muppet CG characters but nothing was going to be like a brand new polished George Lucas film right? My friends back home were super excited about it. The guys at my new school however were not as jazzed except for one out of my inner circle. He really liked it so we made a plan. We were going to bounce from the school as soon as that bell rang jump in his shitty car haul ass to the local theater that had like four screens and wait in line from 3.30 to midnight because back back in the day you couldn't pre-buy your tickets. You couldn't get your seats ahead of time. You had to put in the work to get to a movie on opening night. 3.30 to 4.30, 5.30, 6.30, 7.30, 8.30, 9.30, 10.30, 11.30, 8 and a half hours we waited in line. Thankfully it's May so it's spring. The flowers are blooming. The birds are chirping. The out-of-shape heavy-sets men are mowing their lawns with their shirts off. Everything is right in the world. We're talking about the film all day. The whole school's talking about it even though they're not going to wait in line for eight and a half hours like freaking sheep. No, we're not sheep. We're hardcore fans. They're going to go see the movies still. They just don't want to make a lot of effort for it. We did find out a couple other people were going though. They were kind of the underlings of society in our in our class. We weren't going to join them. We'll see them there. We'll wave. We'll acknowledge but we're not going to wait in line next to them. So the day arrives. The clock is in slow motion. Only eight hours of school to go. Lunch is sheer hell. All we do is sit there with our thoughts. What is this movie going to be like? How amazing is it going to be? Are we even going to get in? I've been told there's already people waiting outside that don't have school. Old assholes with nothing better to do. That would be me today. I heard people camped out overnight. Tim heard people have been camped out for a week according to the news. Thankfully, we're a new home. It's a small quaint little village. There isn't a lot of people that are hardcore enough to go wait outside for a full day to see Star Wars. There's some. There's definitely some. When I drove by this morning before going to school, I saw a few dicks out there. And once a few get there, the rest of them flock. Finally, the bell rings. Tim and I look at each other and we bolt. We run down the hallway. There's girls like, Hey, Adam, you look really cute. I elbow her in the face. I don't have time for her. I keep sprinting. A teacher comes down the hall towards me. Hey, Adam, you need to stay after school to talk. I punch him in the gut. Drop the elbow on the back of his head and I keep going. We burst through the front doors and the skateboarders are on both sides of us trying to do a kickflip, but they're not really trying. They put in like 50% effort, but there's a possibility they could get hurt. So they never go all in. One of them loses his board while I'm running. I have to jump over the board. I land on top of another one and now I'm skateboarding down the stairs. There's a railing. I do an ollie onto the other side and now I'm coasting down that side. The problem is I'm skateboarding the wrong way. Tim's over there in his car. So I do a Casper slide around some of the students into a manual, pop up into an ollie and then dive into the front seat of his car. It is possible I'm remembering some of this story incorrectly as well. We all asked to the theater. Tim's trying to get his CD player to work, but the faceplate is kind of busted. So he just goes for the radio. Yet span one week since you looked at me, I saw the sign for there used to be a great tower alone on the sea. Somebody once told me the world was gonna wish you would step out from that ledge, my friend. Three third eye blind songs later and we make it to the theater. The line is not only out the front door, but it's down a long sidewalk around a railing and then it skirts back down the other way. We figure there's about 70 people in front of us. Now the capacity for the theater is well over 300, so we're good. I don't know if that number is accurate, but it's well over what we needed to get in. I know that much. We get our spot in line and thankfully there's a ledge where we can just kind of plop down on, talk, hang out. We brought some lunch. We have our backpacks full of some snacks and some other things to do. We also saw one of our teachers and a few of the lessers in front of us in line. We talked to them for a little bit. We shared some ideas about what we thought was gonna happen. They had some theories and ideas. They were on some of the forums in the dial up internet community. We had people dressed up as Jedi's. We had a couple Darth Vader's. There was cheap lightsabers here and there. Everybody was pumped for this thing. There was a lot of handheld gaming going on too. So many Game Boys. You couldn't even believe it. A lot of Pokemon hunting going on. We had buddies from school drop by here and there, bringing us food, just chatting it up, keeping us company for a while. I believe my folks stopped by once or twice to say hi to me. My brother came by just to kind of make fun of me and go home with mom and dad. It was just a great experience. The whole weight for the film, the anticipation, the conversation, the laughs, was so much better than the movie itself. Now if you thought, okay, Adam, this is just gonna be some cheap ploy for you to bitch about Star Wars Episode 1 and how bad it is, nigh. That's not what we're doing here. I really had an awesome time thinking back about this movie. Now the movie itself, it wasn't good, okay? I saw it in theaters day one. I left the movie going, what? I didn't leave the movie outright hating it though, but I certainly didn't like it. It was just kind of this, just this void, this weird place to be in with Star Wars, right? I just, I couldn't understand why it went so different. Theaters had to update their tech for this movie. I mean, they wouldn't be able to show it otherwise. So it was a groundbreaking, earth-shattering event. And it definitely changed movies for years to come thanks to the technology Lucas was using. The motion capture on Jar Jar Binks alone was completely new. It was brand new territory and he nailed it in terms of, you know, how he utilized the animations and whatnot, the character itself. We don't need to get into that, but. When that title crawl appeared and started to scroll, the entire audience went nuts. It was the same with Force Awakens, the opening night of that, which was also a great experience. And I bet the same thing happened at Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. People just went nuts for it because Star Wars is that special to a lot of individuals. It's that special to just history now, for better and for worse. But I don't look back on episode one with hate because I have that valuable experience in my life that was just so special for me. And even though the movie is something I don't ever want to watch again and I've actually tried and just couldn't even do it, I still have the memory. And that's all that matters. Well, there is my story on Star Wars episode one. If you were old enough to see it in theaters or maybe just had a special memory about it with your family or friends, let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear it. Like the video if you had a good time. Subscribe if you haven't and hopefully I'll catch you next time.