Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Right Age for Star Wars?

From the sublime to the ridiculous. My Questions:
  • At what age did you introduce your kids to Star Wars?
  • What was your reasoning?
  • And how did the react to it?
Our just-turned-five-year-old can tell you about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. He knows about Light Sabers and can mimic Yoda's butchering of the Queen's English.

But he has never watched.

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7 comments:

lachlanb said...

don't know the answers to any of those questions, though this is a great little article about star wars and kids:

http://www.slate.com/id/2215160/

Mike Bull said...

How bad can Buddism with muppets possibly be?

Probably keep Revenge of the Sith out of reach till he's at least 10.

I found Star Wars to be a great way to illustrate biblical themes like the cost of discipleship, but also to pointing out its flaws (like dualism) makes your kids more discerning in their viewing. My eldest daughter now says she can't watch anything without being Christianly critical, to the point that it frustrates her a bit! Amen.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kat Beecroft said...

Deleted my previous post because I thought it would be creepy to get a comment from just random numbers.

Not a parent yet, but I can definitely comment from my experiences when I was a child.

I think I first saw Star Wars when I was about 10. It is one of my fondest memories of being a kid. Dad was really excited to show us, and he said it was great watching it through new eyes. If I ever have kids, I'll show them at about 8 or 10 I think. Some of the things that happen (particularly in Empire Strikes Back) I wouldn't necessarily want a younger kid to see.

Be careful though. After I saw it I embarked on over a decade of SERIOUS Star Wars fandom that defined my taste in movies and fiction forever after.

Definitely keep the prequel trilogy away from them until they're a little older. Not only because it's much much darker, but also because that way they'll actually be excited to find out answers to some of the questions posed by the original trilogy.

Unknown said...

he should watch it. it has the light saber fights. he would like it and he'd like yoda (and he would mimic voice, yoda's). don't watch the "prequels" - awful

gbroughto said...

Nick is 7 1/2 and has seen Episodes IV-VI and I progressively over the last 12-18 months. We have II and III but he has heard on the infants school grapevine that they are "scary" and has lost interest for a while in watching the rest.

So the imaginative play with light-sabers and figurines, plus Star Wars Lego II (for the Mac) have appeared to be enough, and I think he might be coming out the other side - of the initial infatuation anyway - ably assisted by 5 year old sister who quickly discovered there is a restrictive range of imaginative play possibilities for Princess Lea's character...

I knew we had come out the other side when the light-saber app for my iPhone was considered pretty lame (obviously developed for a more "sophisticated" end user in mind???)

Our experience has been that every other boy 6th and 7th birthday party has had a Star Wars theme, so I'm not sure how well censorship works.

Andrew said...

I was 23 before I got around to watching a full Star Wars movie - is that too old?