The first Star Wars thing I ever saw was a Lego walker (I think it was an AT-ST) with a clone trooper that someone in my kindergarten class was playing with. I thought it looked cool and I wanted to know what it was from. Went home and asked my parents what Star Wars was. The first Star Wars movie I saw was The Empire Strikes Back when I was five or six. This was when Revenge of the Sith was about to come out, so there was a lot of hype and merchandise for Star Wars. The cereal boxes had spoons that lit up like lightsabers, stuff like that. So I ended up becoming pretty obsessed with Star Wars, had a lot of the toys and stuff. I wanted to be a Jedi and I got in trouble at school a few times for fighting with rulers and sticks pretending that they were lightsabers.
There were a few bumps in the road over the years. I learned about the special edition nonsense and grew pretty pessimistic about the prequels and the sequel trilogy, although I’m a lot softer to the prequels now than I used to be. It’s been a long journey, would take too long to explain. There were a few times when I was a teenager where I thought I had “grown out of it.” But I’ve always appreciated the original trilogy, they’re still three of my favorite movies.