For Star Wars fans, today’s great news is seismic. The prospect of new movies invites a rush of questions as the mind races to grasp its implications. The one that sticks in my mind, though, isn’t about the movies. It’s: “Where were you when you heard?” While the temptation is to speculate wildly on what lies beyond the horizon and be mindful of the future, I also don’t want to lose track of the present, as Qui-Gon advises in Episode I.

To my fellow old school Star Wars fans, I ask you to reach into your collection and dust off Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine #10, the Winter 1990 issue of the official fan club magazine. I’ll wait while you admire the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade cover. Now flip it open, and there, on page 1, is the breathless headline that blares, “The FORCE To Return In The 90’s!!”

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The long conjectured third Star Wars trilogy has kept fans guessing for decades, and may even have a few numerologists working on their mysteries. George Lucas’ shifting feelings about future Star Wars trilogies have consistently clouded the picture. Given the difficulties associated with the birth of Star Wars in 1977, it’s no wonder that Lucas’s ideas kaleidoscoped. When trying to get such a big undertaking up and running and out the door, visions of the future are understandably hazy. But, as of October 30, 2012, Episodes VII, VIII and IX have been announced as real and soon to be tangible — but they’ve existed as gossamer spirits for nearly 40 years.

On December 29, 1975, in conversation with Alan Dean Foster per the novelization of Star Wars, Lucas mentioned the prequel trilogy along with what would become Episodes V and VI: “I want to have Luke kiss the Princess in the second book. In the third book, I want the story just about the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire. Then someday I want to do the back story of Kenobi as a young man – a story of the Jedi and how the Emperor eventually takes over and turns the whole thing from a Republic into an Empire, and tricks all the Jedi and kills them. The whole battle where Luke’s father gets killed. That would be impossible to do, but it’s great to dream about.”

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