We watched Star Wars this weekend.

Despite the fact that it ranks as my all time favorite movie, I hadn’t watched it since I was a kid. When they re-released, I made a variety of excuses and never actually made it to the theater. And even though we had all three movies on VHS, I never managed to “find the time to watch them.” However for his birthday Michael got the movies on DVD, and after suffering through Revenge of the Sith I really wanted to watch Star Wars again.

I was prepared to find out that Star Wars didn’t live up to my childhood memories, but figured that it couldn’t possibly be worse than The Phantom Menace.

I glad to discover that I still love the movies, although I was less than pleased with some of the changes George Lucas made for the DVD releases. More Bantha? No thank you. Creepy little cgi creatures hanging around Mos Eisley? Ick. Han Solo no longer taking the preemptive strike against Greedo? Bad! It changes Han’s character! That’s who he was–Mister looking out for himself and to hell with anyone else (except of course Chewie).

The enhanced explosions were nice, but I wish he would have left it at that and not messed with anything else.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.

When Star Wars came out I was 8, and it was the coolest thing in the whole entire world. I saw it repeatedly, probably with some encouragement from my science fiction loving father (alas, his encouragement didn’t take, because I don’t like to read science fiction, although I mostly don’t mind science fiction movies). My hero, however, was R2D2. I thought he was the coolest characters in the movie, followed by Chewbacca. The rest of the characters were fine, and I liked them well enough, but they weren’t as cool as R2D2.

But that wasn’t what struck me watching the movie now. What struck me was that Princess Leia kicks ass. Totally. Something I apparently internalized. At that age I hadn’t seen a lot of movies, and here came a movie that I absolutely adored, and the heroine shoots bad guys and stands up to evil and does everything the guys do.

So I wonder if this is the point where I developed the knowledge that girls can do whatever they want. After all, Princess Leia didn’t need rescued because she was a girl, she needed rescued because Darth Vader was a really bad guy; a boy in that situation would have needed just as much rescuing. Princess Leia had no problem telling guys what to do, and dealing with things herself. Sure she didn’t get in a fighter and attack the Death Star, but either did the other people in command.

I never thought about it in those terms of course–after all, R2D2 was my hero (he broke the rules to go on his mission, he was the one who got shot, who else could be the hero?)–but from that point on, Princess Leia was a model for how girls were supposed to be: strong and self-reliant.

And that’s pretty cool.

I figure that if a movie was going to influence my entire outlook on life, far better that it was Star Wars than some of the other stuff out there, like Snow White or Cinderella.