Another May 4th has come and gone, and geeks everywhere display their true geekdom by referring to it as “Star Wars Day”. Seems that “May the fourth” is a lisping version of part of the famous (and overused to the point of tedium) quotation, “May the Force be with you.” The attempted joke was funny once… for a few seconds… but by now it’s just annoying. It’s as funny as the phrase “chicken butt”. Let it die in peace already.

Of course, Star Wars fans are all atwitter about the next movie in the series, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, set to come out this December. With the previous movie (Revenge of the Sith) some ten years old, a lot of young new fans want to catch up on the series by watching all the previous movies.

I’m seeing a lot of stuff online about the correct order to watch them in. I strongly recommend watching them in the order in which they were made and released – Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith.

Actually, you can probably ignore the three “prequels”. They have offensive characterizations, overuse of green screens and computer graphics, tedious scenes filled with talking, the reduction of The Force into some sort of scientific gobbledeygook…

Worse, you already know how the story is going to end. You know Anankin will join the Dark Side and become Darth Vader. You know which characters must survive. There’s no real tension in any of them.

And it could have been so much better….

By the way…. The name of the movie is Star Wars. Not “Star Wars: A New Hope”, Not “Star Wars: Episode IV”, just Star Wars. Thanks to the Internet, you can go back to 1977 and see the opening crawl from the movie’s original theatrical release:

Notice anything missing? That’s right! There’s no “Episode IV: A New Hope” nonsense! Nowhere in the movie, in any of the reviews, or in any of the advertising and promotional materials was it mentioned that this was going to be part of a series, and therefore needed a number / subtitle. It wasn’t until Lucas was working on The Empire Strikes Back that he thought of making the movies a series. The “Episode IV: A New Hope” bit first appeared in the opening crawl of the movie in its 1981 theatrical re-release. Which, actually, was a year AFTER “Empire” came out.

So there.