In the early eighties I was quite young, so while I myself was big into SW at that time, I really didn't see it a whole lot from anywhere else. I remember watching as SW action figures vanished from store shelves and it was all forgotten. Even in elementary school for some reason it seemed really hard to find other kids who liked SW. To me, the eighties were when Star Was began to fade away. The nineties on the other hand, were really exciting. Suddenly SW was everywhere again, tons of new books to read, tons of new comic series to choose from. Yeah, the 1995 line of action figures sucked pretty bad in all their ape like glory, but after time rolled on, they started releasing some really cool figures. Even after 1997 things still seemed great to me, back in the days where my original versions sat on the shelf next to my SEs, where I could choose with one to watch in equal quality. To me the nineties were the height of SW.

Until... TPM came out. And I am not just saying this to spite The Phantom Menace, but this film serious brought everything to a crashing halt. Suddenly any likeness of Luke, Han, Leia, or Darth Vader were purged from toy store and comic shop shelves. Suddenly every thing SW was replace with SW: Episode I. We went from Lightsaber shaped suckers at store check lanes to Jar Jar tongue suckers at store check lanes. Every thing Star Wars made a sudden shift from what had always been Star Wars to me, to the prequels. And it has pretty much stayed this way ever since

As a teenager/young adult at the end of the nineties I didn't see the gradual fading away of Star Wars like I did as a kid in the eighties, instead I saw it disappear almost overnight, and be substituted with something completely alien.