Anyway, I agree with you Cassidy, the "Lucas raped my childhood" crowd need to get over it. Though I have never actually heard anybody say that except from anti-"Lucas raped my childhood" people, though I suppose somebody must have said it at one point.
It is kind of foolish to say it is just a movie though, at the risk of sounding really nerdy I must say SW is so much more than just a movie. Perhaps you are too old and it was something you enjoyed in your teen years rather than submersed yourself in during your youth. How many movies do you sign a petition to have released on DVD and regularly visit a message board about? For myself, only one. There is no single movie I have seen as many times as SW. I haven't seen it in years actually. Because it is not just a movie. If it was I would watch it and put it back on the shelf until I wanted to watch it again. It isn't. I haven't seen any of the OT for years, and yet they are still as present in my mind as ever, because they had such an impact on my youth. My buddy and I ran around whacking colored wooden poles together. We had an R2 unit made out of a putty bucket and paper. It was never just a movie to me, it was an actual world that I spend a good deal of my informative years living in. This is not a bad thing, before somebody pipes up and says I have wasted my life on a stupid movie I will remind them that all kids live in some fantasy world, and the SW universe isn't the only one I lived it, but it was one of my favorite ones. If it was just a movie, I could care less about it.
There are many with similar cases to my own. Plenty of us to whom SW is more than just a movie. It is annoying that the films I grew up with no longer exist-- err... I mean... exist only as a special feature on a DVD in pretty lame quality. It is annoying that when I mention SW Jar Jar Binks and Natalie Portman's bad acting pop into people minds.
Cassidy, you have mentioned before how you hate that your child has to grow up in a world where Star Wars fandom is so divided. I am afraid that is unavoidable. After all, there are two different sets a films, it is only natural that you will have fans of Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, and that you will have fans of Star Wars I, II, III, IV, V, and VI. I personally don't care much for the later one, and I am certainly not a fan of them. Goes to reason that I am not going to have a whole lot in common with somebody who grew up on those films. Though they may have as much importance to them as the old ones do to me. We are not part of the same fandom, we love two entire different sets of films. Kind of the difference between a kid who grew up with Star Trek and a kid who grew up with ST:TNG or DS9 or Voyager. They are just not the same thing. The only difference is that in our case we were told we could never see ours again, because it no longer existed.