I Tried to Watch Star Wars and This is What Happened

On Saturday night, Ben and I got Babygirl ready for bed and Ben made us all amazing vegetarian Reubens: rye bread, homemade Russian dressing, sauerkraut, swiss cheese, and tempeh bacon in lieu of corned beef, grilled to panini-like perfection in a cast iron skillet. The child, drugged with fat and carbs, went straight to sleep. Then we, the adults, tried to figure out what movie to watch.

“I kind of want to see Star Wars,” said Ben. The real one, he meant, the one that came out in 1977 with Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.

Cool! I said. I’d happily see that again; it’s been years, and everyone’s talking about the JJ Abrams reboot. Turns out, though, you can’t watch any of the Star Wars movies online — at least not until 2016, when Disney’s new deal with Netflix kicks in. (Disney, as you may recall, acquired LucasFilm & the Star Wars franchise.) You can’t rent them, either. As recently as last year, one of us could have walked to either of the two indie video stores near us, but rental stores have disappeared so completely they may as well have been Raptured, leaving us mournful and forsaken. And considering piracy.

The Oatmeal dealt with this conundrum in a strip called I Tried to Watch Game of Thrones and This is What Happened. Unlike the protagonist of that story, we stayed on the straight-and-narrow, though, opting instead to watch my DVD of Into the Woods in preparation for that reboot, which arrives in theaters later this fall. But what will happen when we are next seized by the desire to experience the Force? Will we be strong enough to resist the Dark Side?

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