Jesus. Fifteen years... that just blows my mind.
I was... eight or nine at the time. I had really only just discovered Star Wars a couple years earlier, actually. I remember being really excited about it; I remember the Pepsi products with the characters, I remember the magazines, I remember the toys, I remember the joint KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut (remember when Pizza Hut was a place you went to sit down and eat at?) promotions with the cups with the character toppers (I still have both toppers, but only one cup), I remember checking out info for the movie on the burgeoning internet, I remember the shampoo bottles, even. The hype was huge, and I was just running off the hype for the SEs that had just come out.
I'm not sure how long after release I saw the film, but I remember it was really neat to me. I remember for some reason being in a theater and seeing the part where they attack the droids in the hanger, and the one droid's legs keep walking after it's cut in half. I'm pretty sure I really enjoyed it.
It wasn't until much later that I started to learn that not only that other people didn't like it. I was shocked; how could anyone not like something Star Wars? I chalked it up to them being dumb. But I also thought the Special Editions were great at the time, so what did I know. I was a prequel apologist for a long time, and I really bought into the Special Edition hype, in fact, it was the first copies of the film I got and the only one I had until Tobar introduced me to OT.com and I had my eyes opened to how bad the PT and the SEs were.
What always gets me is the arguments I hear from current prequel apologists: "Well you liked it when you were a kid, you're just following the crowd of old crusty cynics who don't like anything now", which, to me, is a ridiculous argument. My view of the prequels has changed as I've aged, yes, and I won't deny that I've learned more about the flaws of the PT, but I've also learned a lot about all the flaws of the OT as well; however, I can't go back and enjoy the PT the way I did when I was nine like I can go back and enjoy the OT the same way I did when I was five or six. Binary Sunset still gives me chills every time I hear it to this day, I can't say the same about anything in the PT.
Anyway, that got a bit wordy, but I felt it needed to be said.