Does anyone remember what they were doing when they first saw the trailer for The Phantom Menace? It was November 1998, and some people were probably sitting in a theater, waiting to see some now-classic film like The Waterboy or Meet Joe Black. Others, who were lucky enough to consider themselves one of the richest kings in Europe and could afford an enormous room-sized computer and whatever passed for an Internet connection those days, managed to download the trailer and watch it on a postage stamp-sized monitor that couldn’t even hope to properly reflect the majesty of the world’s first glimpse of Jar Jar Binks.
Why are we talking about this? Well, the first official teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens has just been released, and technology has advanced so much in the last 16 years that there’s a significant chance that some people are reading this on their phone while in the bathroom. We think those people should watch the teaser, and then take a few minutes to come up with a better story about what they were doing when they first saw it. Some day, their grandchildren will ask about the first time they saw whatever the new Jar Jar Binks is, and they’ll want to have a good answer. This is an important historical moment, after all.