I first saw a fullscreen version of ANH as a kid, I guess I was like 8 or 9 which was at the end of the 80s. My uncle was a movie “nut” for the time and he had a big TV with a ProLogic receiver and four speaker setup to rock the living room… I stil remember that I was absolutely taken away by the “space knight” narrative and re-enacted with my friends with growing sophistication 😉
I remember not even knowing at the time that it was actually a trilogy, as I was absolutely psyched when my dad told me that he had “pts.2 and 3” on video a few months later. For whatever reason my family didn´t really care that much about TV and so we had a somewhat small TV from another room in the house as fill-in during the summer when the main set broke. But that didn´t matter when I could watch ESB and ROTJ on back to back days during the summer school break. Funny how as a kid you couldn´t care less about the quality of the movie delivery, as it was all about the magic that happened on screen, even on a 20in TV.
Then I lobbied for the THX VHS trilogy set, when I moved into my own flat out came the SE re-releases at the movie theaters. I actually DO remember quite fondly, with exception of the actrocious song replacements and a couple really cheesy CGI. However, for someone not from the States and having experienced the movies on video first, seeing the trilogy on the big screen with big sound was still a great experience all in all. Then came the 2004 DVD and the 2011 BluRay.
Oh, and as for the prequels… Well, I went to midnight premiere and was absolutely thrilled to actually see a new SW movie at the theater in my life. I really, really wanted it to be good. At the opening crawl, the whole theater burst into applause, and I actually thought that it did have potential while obviously being vastly different from the original trilogy. I was even willing to accept my first impression that it was obviously very much tailored towards kids. But then I watched it again after a week and actually went to see it a third time and then it sank in that this movie was nowhere near being able to re-capture the true enchantment that I experienced as a kid. Whether that meant having become an adult and thus not as easily impressed, or simply the movies not actually being able to provide that spark, I was not immediately sure. But after a couple of days, it was absolutely clear the GL had lost his touch. But that´s for another topic…