The Scenes that Made Me: Star Wars
Mon 19 May 2025 by R.L. Dane
Luke looking wistfully out at the dual sunset on Tatooine as The Force Theme plays hauntingly in the background, beckoning him to his grand adventure
Having grown up in the 1980s, one thing random friends would often ask me (actually what family friends would ask my mom) was: "Has he seen Star Wars yet?"
I wasn't around for the original 1977 release, and I didn't know about The Empire Strikes Back when it first ran in 1980, but I got to see Return of the Jedi in theaters when it came out in 1983.
There's a lot of really amazing scenes in the original Trilogy, but rather than unpack them in chronological-to-me order (RotJ first), I'll go through them in story order.
A New Hope
I think ANH was the last of the trilogy I saw, though I'm not sure. It's the one I remember the least, as I saw RotJ in the theaters during its first-run (and it was very memorable to me then), and I saw ESB many, many, many times as a kid.
The one scene that stands out to me the most even to this day is the one pictured at the top of this article. It's "Luke looking wistfully out at the dual sunset on Tatooine as The Force Theme plays hauntingly in the background, beckoning him to his grand adventure." He feels stuck in his boring existence as the nephew of "moisture farmers*," and is longing to do something worthwhile with his life.
* "moisture farmer" always sounded like such a ridiculous occupation, until "crypto miner" became a thing. Then *that* **absolutely** became THE most ridiculous "profession" of all time.
I can't be certain when I first saw ANH, what I thought when I saw it, how it affected me, or what scenes spoke to me the most.
But when I think back on it, in that scene, there is both a calling forth and a calling back. A calling forth to my young self towards all that the future could possibly be, both good and bad, and a calling back towards the hope and optimism that seemed to be all around me when I was a young one.
The Empire Strikes Back
ESB is the Star Wars film I have the most "ocular mileage" on. It was one of few films I had available to me on my beloved Betamax deck, which I had hooked up to my equally beloved Commodore 1702 monitor.
Of course, my copy of ESB was a bootleg, and the copy for whatever reason cut out right near the end, just after the Falcon manages to escape into Hyperspace. Vader sees the Falcon escape, turns around (apparently to force-choke someone for their failure!) and then khschhhttttt! Just STATIC. The recording ends. XD
I really loved ESB for all of the training scenes with Yoda, but also for the long and quite brutal battle Luke had with Vader. I identified with the concept of "father" being a dark one, a long shadow from the previous generation being cast onto my future, footsteps I dared not follow in.
Return of the Jedi
The most memorable scene in RotJ for me is the one where he lifts the mask off Vader's face. As a kid, of course, it was a pretty "Ewww!" moment because of Anakin's disfiguration, but it was still poignant. I recall the now long-defunct Science Fiction parody web-toon website sev.com.au had a comic of that scene that ends with Luke saying, "Ok, can I put your mask back on now?" 😅
That one scene (and the viking-style burial afterward) beautifully resolved the tension between father and son, and gave me hope for some kind of resolution in my own life (which would not come, but hey, that's life).
Bonus: Rogue One
I had no intention to cover the prequels, because I was already in my 20s when they came out, and of course, the sequels are _That_Which_Shall_Not_Be_Spoken_of, but Rogue One more than gets a pass.
There are a lot of striking scenes in Rogue One, but the one that was an absolute gut-punch was the one where you see Princess Leia receiving the Death Star plans. I was not expecting it, and I was coincidentally viewing the film in the theater on the very day that Carrie Fisher had passed away.
YEAH.