I spent three summers waiting and imagining. The events of Empire were carefully parsed and dissected with my brother and all of my friends. I wrote several episodes of fan fiction in which I actually predicted Luke and Leia’s siblinghood and the return of the Death Star. I practically tore the covers off that Dynamite magazine preview of the last installment in the Star Wars series.

As everyone who can tell a Wookie from a Nemoidian knows, Return of the Jedi was something of a letdown. (How many people have ever told you that Jedi changed their lives? Anyone?) It’s not that Jedi was a bad movie, per se, so much as it just wasn’t a great one. It was a perfectably respectable and entertaining popcorn flick with some classic action sequences and snappy banter.

And yes, there were even some great moments in Episode VI. Think the death scene of Darth Vader, the scooter chase through the forests of Endor, the whole intercutting of action sequences in the movie’s last third. When that Force lightning started shooting out of the Emperor’s fingers, all you could hear in the theater was the sound of several hundred adolescent jaws hitting the floor.

But the troubling aspects of the movie clearly weigh Return of the Jedi down. I wasn’t so much bothered by the Ewoks — they’re overdone but they’re entertaining (which is essentially how I feel about Episode I’s Jar Jar Binks). No, what really bothered me was

• how Lando Calrissian turned overnight from a troubled scoundrel/traitor to a bland and cheerful go-to guy for the Rebels
• how Luke and Leia are clumsily revealed to be siblings (which, let’s face it, George Lucas did not have in mind from the beginning)
• how the mysterious Boba Fett is revealed to be the lamest fighter ever
• how one sudden act of rebellion completely redeems the galaxy’s Eichmann and earns him an immortal place next to Yoda and Obi-Wan
• how… well, okay, I’ll stop here. You get the point.

Remarkably enough, I don’t remember anybody being disappointed with the movie when it was released. In fact, I remember arriving at elementary school on the morning of May 26, 1983, to find the playground in an uproar as a group of kids ran around shouting plot spoilers at the top of their lungs. (“Darth Vader is Luke’s father! Yoda dies! Luke and Leia are brother and sister!”)

(Such trauma was difficult for a young adolescent to endure. A quick playground poll revealed that most of the kids — including myself — had not gone to the mid-week premiere. [Remember the days when movies actually had a theater run of longer than two weeks?] So what could a kid possibly do with such a secret? After a wretched day of inner Sturm und Drang, just dying to tell my brother all that I had learned, my sister conducted what was probably the first therapy session of her life by allowing me to spill the beans to her about Return of the Jedi.)

So it’s only in retrospect, many years later, that Return of the Jedi turned out to be such a profound letdown. Watching the first two films of the series (I’m talking about Episodes IV and V here) today, you can still see George Lucas’ vision at work. You can still overlook the cloying dialogue and the sometimes-painful plot inconsistencies.

But Jedi clearly has the stink of a commercial enterprise about it, with its constant attempts at oneupmanship, its pandering to the audience, its desperation to be adored. You can see the marketing mindset at work with the Ewoks. Looking back on the movie from adulthood, you can see the puppeteer and all the strings, and you think, I can’t believe I fell for this. Even worse, you occasionally think, I can’t believe someone would do this to me.

Now I’ll stop blogging about Star Wars for a while, lest I be accused of kicking this thing to death.

It’s a sunny morning in Orange County, California. Jimmy Carter is president of the United States, Mount St. Helens has just erupted, Richard Pryor will be setting himself on fire any day now. The Iranians have taken a number of Americans hostage in Tehran. Lots of people seem to be singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” though I’m not quite sure why.

My mother takes my brother, my sisters, and me to see The Empire Strikes Back. I’m nine years old.

Star Wars has become my passion, as it is my older brother’s passion, as it is the passion of just about every boy I’ve ever met or heard of. I’m a late convert to the Church of Lucas, having stubbornly insisted for many months that Battlestar Galactica was the superior fictional universe.

Now I’m making up for lost time with a vengeance. I’ve got the first dozen issues of the Marvel Star Wars comic book series, I’ve got a TIE fighter, an X-wing fighter, a landspeeder, a Millennium Falcon, an interior set from the Death Star, every action figure from Greedo to Chewbacca to Hammerhead. My brother and I have worn the plastic light sabers of our Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader figurines down to nubs from fighting with them. (Our life-size plastic light sabers, however, are still in good shape.)

A few weeks ago, I have given in to sweet temptation and bought the Empire Strikes Back comic book published in mass-market paperback form. The cover is white and red. Even though I promise myself I won’t read it all the way through, I take several tantalizing peeks at the opening pages. There’s an ice planet. Luke and Han and Chewie are there.

There’s a TV special showing a behind-the-scenes look at the battle scene on Hoth, the painstaking art of stop-motion animation. I hear something about a new character being performed by Frank Oz.

Then finally, the day arrives. Saturday, May 24th or possibly May 25th — definitely a few days after opening day. The longest days of my life.

Mom hauls four kids in a blue Ford station wagon with wood paneling over to a theater in Costa Mesa (or was it Fountain Valley? Westminster?). We’re hours early. My brother and I haul ass as quickly as we can to the back of the line, nearly crying in despair to see it winding halfway around the theater. But we soon quit our moaning as we see the line snake its way far, far behind us. Suddenly our family is back in the vanguard. We’re prudent planners.

After an hour of torpid standing-around time — the minutes are stretched thin like taut rubber bands — the line moves. We enter the theater.

And somehow we find perfect seats, no small accomplishment for a party of five. Not too close, not too far. Directly in the center of the auditorium, no six-foot jackass sitting in the next row blocking our view. There’s probably candy. There’s always candy at the movies. Mom usually picks it up for a discount at Key Market and smuggles it into the theater in her purse.

The lights go out. My brother and I are wiggling in our seats. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

A symphonic blast of trumpets. The opening crawl.

The first time Mark Hamill appears on the screen, taking off his goggles atop that TaunTaun, the crowd erupts into applause. Cheers, jubilation. Luke Skywalker is back! This is the first time most of us have seen Mark Hamill since his car accident. His face looks different… but it’s still Luke.

The audience is tense as the battle of Hoth rages onscreen. The Imperial Walkers are easily the coolest fucking thing we have ever seen. We’re ducking and diving along with the poor Rebels, who are about to get their asses handed to them by the Empire. But it’s okay — this is an anticipated setback, a planned retreat.

Han Solo & Co. blast their way out of the Rebel base at literally the last possible instant. The menacing figure of Darth Vader emerges just in time to see the exhaust on the Millennium Falcon as the ship wings away. The audience explodes: a literal standing ovation. People are cheering, yelling.

Luke Skywalker finds his way to Dagobah and begins his tutelage under the Jedi Master Yoda, whose words are sage and mysterious and challenging in a way we’ve never quite experienced before. Yoda wants Luke to unlearn? What the hell? To white suburban Orange County kids who have remained largely insulated from the hippy, trippy ’70s, this isn’t Hollywood hokum… this is the fucking Port Huron Statement. This is subversive. Does Mom realize we’re watching this? Would our teachers approve?

Harrison Ford, in the meanwhile, by cavalierly dodging the Empire through fancy maneuver after fancy maneuver, has clearly demonstrated that he is the coolest dude in the history of the universe, ever ever ever. The chase through the asteroid field makes the Imperial Walkers seem like old news, especially now that the candy’s gone and the sugar high has kicked in.

Our heroes find their way to Cloud City.

And then something happens that’s beyond my nine-year-old imagination. The heroes start to lose. The android C-3PO, blown into bits. Han Solo, frozen in carbonite and sent off with the mysterious bounty hunter Boba Fett. Luke Skywalker’s hand neatly sliced off by the blade of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

And then —

I have absolutely no idea what’s coming next. None of the comic books or Saturday morning TV shows I’ve been digesting my whole life have prepared me for this moment. Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. Gasps echo throughout the theater. Time pauses to catch its breath. His father? Never in the darkest corners of my imagination could I have predicted this. It’s a world-shattering revelation. I’m scared, I’m elated, I want to go home, I never want to leave.

The plunge off the bridge, the rescue, the daring escape. The credits.

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. My summer agenda has now been set. I have mysteries to ponder that will occupy much of my attention during the next few years. Was Darth Vader telling the truth? How could someone so noble as Luke be the child of a villain so black as Vader? And why didn’t Ben Kenobi tell him earlier? What point was Yoda trying to make by sending Luke into the cave to confront his phantom nemesis?

One thing is clear: this is not the same world that existed before the lights went down.

It will gradually become clear to me in those next few years what George Lucas was trying to say: The menace and nightmare and calculation that had seemed like some distant, external force in Star Wars is inside of us all. Luke Skywalker is Darth Vader. We are Darth Vader, each and every one of us.

Your grandkids will yawn when you try to tell them what the world was like in those heady days right after 9/11. They will roll their eyes when you talk about how shocking and revolutionary New Wave music was, or how much of an uproar the country was in over the Clinton impeachment. You’ll say “you just had to be there.”

If you’re an American male born somewhere in the late ’60s or early ’70s, you know. You remember. The Empire Strikes Back changed things forever.

And I was there.