Every six months or so, I put on the Star Wars DVD and see if J-Bone is any more interested than he was six months earlier.
My memories of going to visit his elder cousins are studded with Star Wars books, Sky Plus’d movies (usually the Phantom Menace – shudder) and cartoons, and Lego Star Wars games on various consoles. My own memories of the saga are cloudier, a milky background of Star Wars figures round at primary school friends’ houses and TV adverts for the same to the first time I actually saw the film in October 1980 at the age of very almost eight – an event trumpeted by Look-In with no small excitement. 
But the longest J has stuck at the movie so far is …. well, so far this afternoon, he’s got as far as Mos Eisley without running away to do something else. There’s been plenty of squirming and wriggling about, but he’s at least kept some eye on the action. The only film he’s watched even remotely all the way through is Cars 2, so he’s no cineaste, but I don’t suppose the 1977 production values do much for a two-year-old almost forty years later, no matter how epoch-defining they seemed at the time. We’ll have to see what he makes of Epiode VII in a few years.
It’s a curious impulse – the desire to get J interested in the things I love. It’s an impatience, perhaps, with the idea that he’ll form his own obsessions (he already has with Thomas the Tank), but it’s also the same impulse that propels the making of mixtapes for people you think might be of similar mind to oneself. It’s a desire to bond a little more, pull the magnetism a little tighter. Maybe I’m unconsciously worried that installing a love of Star Wars will give us something to talk about in the decades to come…
I’ll let you know how we get on.
Scruffy Dad Chronicles 