‘Star Wars’ Was Born in the Bronx
A superfan travels to Galaxy’s Edge theme park seeking the thrill he got when he saw ‘Star Wars’ for the first time in the BX
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May 25, 1977. I was six years old. I saw it at a duplex theater in the Bronx. My imagination has been in hyperdrive ever since.
That day, I got the first taste of what would become the quintessential modern mythology of my generation. George Lucas created a world of wonder that none of us had ever seen before. On the screen, there were starships soaring through the darkness of outer space with the balletic elegance of World-War-II-era dogfight films. There were cataclysmic explosions that were orders of magnitude more impressive than on the reruns of Star Trek I’d seen. There were samurai sword battles updated for sci-fi (behold: the lightsaber!). There were alien sand dunes and fussy lifelike robots. Star Wars mattered, immediately, to anyone with a pair of eyes in their head or a fiery imagination in their spirit.
I knew I wasn’t White like Luke Skywalker. But I also knew I didn’t need to be. Even though heroes of color were…
