I am actually going to do my best to keep my child's exposure to Star Wars to a bare minimum until I feel they are old enough to watch the Saga. With their arrival set for early October, that's at least a 5-7 year wait, not even accounting for the possibility of siblings.
However, once that day comes, and if I still have some internet presence, I will be chronicling the experience for you all.
I have already decided that I will be doing flashback order for their first viewing. That's VI-V-I-II-III-VI. All rewatches will be in Episode order. As far as additional material goes, if they like the Saga well enough to want more, I will make available what I can to them. This includes Clone Wars, Rebels, VII-IX, and the various EUs. While I will make my child(ren) aware that these materials have some fundamental differences, they will not be discouraged from liking whatever they wish
As a matter of fact, while I will give my personal opinion when asked, I will ALWAYS encourage my child(ren) to like what they like regardless of my feelings about the work in question. As the appreciation of the subjectivity of art is one of my core values, it is something I want t instill at a young age.
There are other values I want to instill at a young age, but that's a topic for another time.
Yeah, I think flashback order is probably the best way to go about it (obviously my preference is strictly chronological, but flashback order keeps the strengths of both trilogies largely intact and solves the Christiansen conundrum when you use the SEs).
ReplyDeleteI don't think you have to worry about making your opinions known at all--I remember as a kid both my parents *hated* AOTC and didn't shy from telling me, but that didn't stop it from being my favorite of the bunch for a good couple years. Kids will like what they like, which is a pretty marvelous thing in of itself.
I think I was...4 when I first watched Star Wars? From what my parents told me it happened to be on TV at some point and I just sorta went wild over it. That led to the rest of the trilogy, and then the prequels once they were released (I have distinct memories of first seeing TPM). Outside of that most of what I watched/consumed were things of my own volition--I would go to a library and check out the Galaxy of Fear books, or those old reference books on ships and droids and the like, or making-of documentaries and textbooks. A lot of it was my own kinda searching through the universe rather than what my parents pushed me towards (though, of course at the time we didn't have the CG Clone Wars or Rebels, and my family never got Cartoon Network to watch the original Clone Wars).
To this day I have avoided the Moore-era Bond films because my father has a complete disdain for them. It wasn't his intent, but it's what happened. I'd like to avoid that.
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