I was the 15th person in line for the very first showing of The Phantom Menace here in Dallas at the UA Galaxy 10. Was I anticipating the return on these movies? Oh Yea! While waiting in line there was no shortage of people dressed up in Star Wars garb and of all the characters there were more people dressed up as Darth Maul as anyone else. I remember at the end of the movie when Darth Maul died I looked down the aisle at a guy who had obviously spent a great deal of time putting on the Darth Maul makeup — it was really good. He ruined it all when he buried hands in his face at the shock that Darth Maul was cut down and done in the 1st movie. Lots of people were getting on the bandwagon that this was gonna be some badass ninja version of Vader or something; nope, he sucked and died.

I recall as everyone was bouncing around in there seat and cheering when the Jedi pulled out there light sabers for the 1st time and cut down all the droids. I gotta say at that moment I had sort of an “Uh oh, this is already getting silly and it’s only been 5 minutes.” I definitely felt like the editors had been drinking too much meth-laced Starbucks in the way the screen wiped back and forth from one scene to another in about 10 second chunks. It gets so bad towards the end that I was screaming in the my head, “STOP!” Then, when Obi-wan got caught in the force field doors and had to sit there and watch Obi-wan die I remember screaming out loud (and getting some evil looks from the crowd), “Why didn’t he just use his force speed run like at the beginning?” As a big time fan of the franchise I really wanted to like TPM and tried to over look a lot of discrepancies but I just have to sigh and resign myself to the notion that George just completely F-ed up the prequels.