Watching Skies: Star Wars, Spielberg and Us

As Ready Player One and Stranger Things prove the retro might of VHS era cinema, Watching Skies: Star Wars, Spielberg and Us is a universal and affectionate tale about the pop cultural remembrances stuck in all our R2 unit's memory systems. Like many a British kid in an '80s world of VCRs, Reagan and Atari, Mark O'Connell wanted to be one of the mop-haired kids on the Star Wars toy commercials. Jaws , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , E.T. The Extra Terrestrial , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Superman , and of course Star Wars weren't just changing cinema--they were making lasting highways into our childhoods, toy boxes, and video stores like never before. In this energetic and insightful memoir-through-cinema, O'Connell flies a gilded X-Wing through a universe of bedroom remakes of Return of the Jedi , close encounters with Christopher Reeve, sticker album swaps, a honeymoon on Amity Island, and the trauma of losing an entire Star Wars figure collection. A unique study on how a rich galaxy of movies continue shaping big and vital cinema to this day, Watching Skies is for all Star Wars kids--whatever their era. It is about how George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, a shark, two motherships, some gremlins, Ghostbusters, and a man of steel jumped a whole generation to hyperspace* (*action figures not included).