OLED! LED! Plasma(RIP)! On display technologies

OLED! LED!  Plasma(RIP)!  There are, today, quite a few technologies for video displays. What does it mean? What's best? Today we'll talk about video displays. This is an AV post, but if you're a "regular" user and curious about some of the buzzwords stick around.

Last week I stopped by at the Sapphire Marketing Roadshow as it  traveled to my city of New York. Sapphire, as my AV friends know, is the rep firm for Crestron, Digital Projection, Vaddio, RPVisual, and Silicon Core. The latter was the brand I was most interested in seeing face-to-face. They might not be a household name outside the AV industry, but they have the most eye-catching product at this show: direct-view LED displays.

Plasma and LCD
Display technology has gotten confusing since the days when televisions were big and the only choice was a CRT screen. I'll assume you know that a video image is made up of tiny dots called pixels, and that a high-definition image measures 1920 pixels across by 1080 down. A "4K - UHD" display doubles each dimension, to 3840x2160 (the purists in the industry don't consider this "true" 4K as the horizontal pixel count is less than  4000 pixels. Aspect ratios are another topic). Today's question is what those pixels are, and how we light them up.

Comparison of plasma display
to a fluorescent lightbulb
(from my personal notes taken during
Jonathan Brawn's Advanced Display
Technologies lecture)

You can, without being too far wrong, think of a plasma display as an array of very tiny fluorescent lights (this is a metaphor. You'll remember that I like metaphors). Each element contains a phosphour which, when hit by an electron will admit a certain wavelength  of light. Red, green, and blue phosphours will be combined to create the full range of color; when they're lit they're on, and when they're off they're off - more on this tautology later. Plasma is considered an emissive display technology because each elements emits light.

An LCD tv works differently. An LCD screen is a sort of glass sandwhich; the "bread" is a polarizing filter on the inside (facing the light source) and the liquid crystal on the outside (facing the viewer). In between are colored filters which give us our red, green, and blue pixels. An electrical charge applied to the liquid-crystal element would twist the crystal to align its polarization with the inner layer, letting light through. LCD displays are transmissive in that each element allows light to be transmitted from a white source.

Which is better? This is a question I've heard a great many times before the slow death of plasma. For viewing experience, emissive technologies are better. Remember when I said that an element that was "off" is off? That means that "black" on a plasma display is truly black - no light. "Black" on an LCD will always have some leakage; it's a darkish-grey masquerading as black.

So why did plasma die? Plasma displays are very heavy. They use a great  deal of energy. And they are susceptible to "burn in". Phosphours degrade as they emit light. This not only means that the entire image dims over time, but that displaying a static image may degrade one group of elements more than the rest, leaving a persistent "ghost image" on the display.

Edge-lit vs backlit (source as above)

Did I hear someone ask, "What about my LED TV"? LED TVs (not OLED or direct-view LED walls which we'll talk about later) are a special case of LCD display. Remember that "light source" I was talking about earlier? In older models that was a compact fluorescent bulb. IN newer ones, it's white LEDs, placed either at the perimeter of the viewing area (edge-lit) or behind it (back-lit). Back-lighting creates a brighter, more evenly lit image, while edge-lighting allows flat panels to be made almost absurdly thin.

OLED
Organic light-emitting diodes (or OLED) is an emissive technology, involving organic molecules which behave as LEDs. As with a plasma display, each color is directly emitted. Also as is the case with plasma, these elements will degrade with use. Your ten year old television? That would be functioning at less than half the brightness as when it was new if it used OLED. It's a great technology (in my opinion) for cell-phones. By the time your phone display has noticeably degraded you're very likely to have replaced it with a newer model for other reasons (processor speed, screen size, amount of memory, etc). You're even more likely to have dropped it and shattered the screen in the first place.

Direct-view LED

This brings us back to the Silicon Core display at the Sapphire roadshow; Silicon Core is one of several manufacturers of large-format emissive displays which use individual LEDs for each pixel. The challenge with those has always been "pixel pitch" or the distance between elements. Older LED displays, with a pixel-pitch over 2mm, are only well-suited for applications in which the viewer is very far away; closer, one sees "dots". We now can pack them in much closer; Silicon Core's "Lavender" display has a pixel pitch of 1.2mm. It's one of the prettiest displays I've seen, with two clear drawbacks:

Photos don't do this justice

First, there's cost. Not only are they expensive to purchase, they are expensive and difficult to mount. A large LED display of this type is made of many smaller (about a foot and a half square) blocks, each of which needs to be placed within a very tight tolerance to give a seamless-looking image. Because maintenance and connectivity is at the rear, this often involves a complicated "scissors" type mount with moving parts allowing for some kind of front-access. 

Secondly, there's a manufacturer-specific issue with Silicon Core: their current "top of the line" model is called Lavender. Previous models, with larger pixel pitches, include Magnolia, Peony, Orchid, Sunflower, and Tulip. I'm afraid that before too long they'll run out of recognizable and pleasant flower-names, and we'll be stuck with "Stinkweed" or "Corpse Plant". 

The Story of the Battle with the Faeries, Told Twice

Here's a very quick sketch; another take on last week's "Fairy House" story. I'm not sure how I feel about this one; it's a little bit too "on the nose", but I like the idea of looking at myth from different perspectives.

I wonder what stories the fey folk tell about the humans.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



There's a story we tell around the campfire. You heard it from your father who heard it from his father. It's the men's story. It's your story.

The first hero was born ... many generations ago now. Nobody knows how long, but they know that it was a different time. The very woods were different then. Closer. There were fewer paths, denser brambles. More space for them to hide. They'd come right to your land, sometimes steal a sheep, sometimes dig up your crops.  They'd steal children, leaving behind strange changelings who would grow into strange manners. Sometimes you'd see a flash of irridescent wings fluttering off to the wood, but that was it. Nobody got a close look. Until the hero.

Sometimes the stories start with fire, sometimes with trickery. You've always liked those better; always loved imagining the hero dressed in uncured sheepskin, half-buried in a vegetable patch, posed on a stake like a scarecrow. Ever alert for the flutter of irridescent wings.

The ones with fire are good too. You can sit around a smoky campfire with too-damp wood and imagine the brambles burning, imagine the little winged creatures staggerfluttering out of them. THe smoke stings your eyes.

The stories always end with iron. The iron of the axe, the iron of blood.

Those were the oldest stories. Later ones the heroes were bolder, trecking deeper into the woods, in hidden places beyond the sight of men. They tell stories of the times we still would see irridescent wings, still worry about a stolen sheep or a child swapped for a changeling.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a story we tell around the campfire.  Your heard it from your mother who heard it from hers. It's a women's story. It's one we don't speak of to the men.

It started, you must understand, with a great shame. Men are fragile, men hate to see a child who doesn't act like them, doesn't swagger like them, can't swing an axe like them. They hate to see a weak child, hate to know they sired it. So, it was - at one time - easier to tell a story. That the weak boy wasn't of their seed or our bodies, but a changeling, a made-thing switched by the fey folk so they might steal a bit of our power.

A woman who births a weak boychild is beaten. A woman whose child is stolen is pitied. That's a lesson we learned early.

The boys' stories tell what happens next. It isn't meant for our ears, but we know. It always ends in flame and blood.

So... leave a saucer of cream by the back door. Say it's for the stray cats, and the boys will dismiss you as a weak and sentimental.

When you're cleaning, build a little nest in  the empty spot under the steps. Put fresh water, put something soft for them to sleep on.

And, late at night, when your child sleeps - keep the crib close by.

Just in case.

Meatsuits and the Limits of Metaphor - On Gender Identity UI, and How to Think

Today's post is seems to be about disparate topics, but at its heart regards something quite important to me as a writer and, perhaps surprisingly, as an AV designer. Today we're talking about metaphor.

Last week I came across this drawing by British artist Alice Hershel, drawing under the name Glytxh (the drawings are quire charming and cleverly done. If you want to see more, you can follow her on Google Plus or even venture to her GoFundMe for a chance to own your very own ink-and-paper hardcopy of the collection, delightfully titled "Whim").

From Whim, by Glytxh

Many people (myself included) reshared he image as a clever statement of support for those whose expressed gender doesn't match that of their birth. Then someone gave this reply:

...I was never trapped in the wrong body. It's my body, so it's a woman's body - it just had some medical issues. Being raised as a boy is part of who I am, and I can't truly be part of myself if I fight to discard that. So put the meatsuit back on, sharpie that O--> to a O+ (or a smileyface) and fight to be yourself, whoever and whatever that awesome person is".

What followed was a discussion about how "trapped in the wrong body" is a metaphor - and one which can be uncomfortable for those who either don't want to or do not have the means to change their bodies. On the positive, for those who have body issues this thinking creates a division between the essential "self" within and the physical shell. As CS Lewis once said, "You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."

"But Leonard," I hear you saying, "You're an atheist. You don't believe in souls. Why are you quoting a Christian apologist?" My answer is simple: I don't believe in souls as a literal thing, but I DO believe in metaphor and even, to an extent, in myth. I also believe that something can be "true" (that I what defines my "self" is more than my physical body" without being literally true.

So is a soul trapped in the wrong body a good metaphor for gender transition? (For a high-profile example, think of Jenner - an individual whose crowning accomplishments were of the body. How does saying that someone like Jenner is "trapped in the wrong body" inform how we - and they - see the work they put into having success with that body?)   Or a caterpillar metamorphizing into a butterfly? Or, as the above commenter noted, a person using the raw materials of themselves to create something new? It likely depends on the situation and on  the person. What I'm most glad of is that we're reaching for metaphors other than a model of "disease". To no longer look at a trans man as a broken woman or a trans woman as a broken man is a step forward. The next step is to listen to our trans friends and better learn the different ways in which we can think about this matter.

Metaphor and UI

Are my AV friends still here? I've not forgotten you! I DO have a point about AV system design, which is this: even in an increasingly connected world technology - especially the kind of bespoke technology for specific environments we in the AV industry have come to know and love - is not something with which the human race has the centuries of experience to be able to conceptualize instinctively. We can describe form, we can describe function. We can also, as we create new technologies and interfaces, rely on metaphor.

One route - perhaps the simplest - is to use a technology with which most people are familiar in order to describe something new. I'm reminded especially of a discussion with SMW's Associate Principal Robert Badenoch. Badenoch is quite an accomplished AV designer with a great measure of knowledge and experience about audio systems, especially the acoustic requirements for performance spaces. What I find even more valuable - the skill which is very hard to teach - is that he knows how to think and how to help other people think constructively. One thinks with metaphor.

The discussion about which I am thinking took place perhaps a year and a half ago while we were working on the control specification for a fairly complicated system including three cameras, five video displays (two of which are annotative), two dedicated PCs, a wireless video input appliance, a recording appliance, and more laptop inputs than you can shake a (USB) stick at. To create something user-friendly for such an environment is a challenge.

In one early bit of discussion he said that the control system could be like either the CATV remote you have in your home or like ones Amazon.com shopping cart. In the former case, each interaction with the control creates an action on the settop box; it will change the channel, change the volume, or move the STP to "Menu" mode. The interface - your handheld remote - remains static. The Amazon shopping card is different; the interface will change to display various bits of product information as you select items, and those items will queue in your virtual shopping cart (another metaphor!). The actual action - moving funds from your bank to Amazon - doesn't happen until you've made all of the selections and hit the "checkout" button. It's also the way a technician-oriented "routing" control would work (Source, source, source, destination, take).

The brilliance of such an approach is that we can take something which is, by nature, unfamiliar and describe it in terms with which our audience has an instinctive understanding. The drawback and danger is the same as with Glyxth's "Meatsuit" - if one carries  the metaphor too far, it can inform your thinking in ways you may not want. If I look at the UI in a conference room as a handheld remote, for example, it's easy to get locked into a "single buttonpress/single action" form of thinking. There may be some times when one wants a keypress to do more than one thing, or be context-specific. Or when one wants to react to something other than a keypress. At best, metaphor gives us the ability to both direct our thoughts and communicate with both end-users and fellow professionals. At worst, we're the well-meaning ally inadvertently telling our trans friends to hate their bodies and - by extension - parts of themselves.

No way to treat specialized AV cabling.
Will this be your HDMI cable tomorrow?

This question - of how to think and communicate - is the one constant in an ever-changing AV industry. I'll close with another metaphor: Last week I needed a tie-down for the trunk of my car and didn't have any bungee-cords at the ready. What I did have was a scrap of cable which must have been lying there for years; after I finished tying  it up I realized that the cable was low-skew UTP with equal  wire-lengths to preserve sync between colors when extending analog RGBHV video. I realized that it's a cable I would never again use for anything as the equal twist rates make it useless for actually carrying data. It's a specialized bit of AV cable from yesteryear, now only useful as a rope. This is what happens to yesterday's technical knowledge, while the bigger lessons of how to think endure.

Flash Fiction - Not a Changling

I'll try again at starting a "Friday Flash" tradition, mainly because it's alliterative. 

This is another little trifle with which to end your week. Flashes on this blog are usually quick sketches, written during the morning commute.

 Enjoy!

"Not a Changling"

The accommodations are not to my liking, but if one travels this far from Faerie one takes what one can get. No doubt the intentions are good, whether passed down from parent to child in whispers around the fireplace or read in the Big Book of Summer Activities it didn't really matter; what mattered is this. The young boy has built a fairy house, and I will, for a time, dwell in it.

The outside isn't much to look at; a thing of long-dead and sterile cardboard. The child did have the courtesy to write "Welcome Fairies" in blue ballpoint pen across the top. Yes, I know what a ballpoint pen is. And inside is surprisingly cosy. Dandelion heads pulled from the lawn, flower petals plucked from the forsythia bush in the backyard, and a soft bed of fallen tuplip petals. Yes, the child has done well.

The early spring chill has faded enough that the child sleeps with one window open. Yes, the mesh screen remains in place, but has such a thing ever stopped me? Midnight I slip in, followed by an indifferent spider, alight on the child's pillow, and whisper.

I whisper of the things beneath the forsythia's roots, of the hidden dark world outside the house's foundation.

I whisper of the spider, the secrets hidden in the geometry of her web.

I whisper of the swallow and robin living in the birch tree, of the hidden burdens they carry.

I whisper the things the child should have heard from its parents and its parents' parents.

I go back to the little house, now infused with the musty smell of cardboard damp with the fresh morning dew. This is a hard place to live and, truth be told, the child did me few favors with location. Not the damp corner beneath the forsythia, not the hollow between the two oak trees.  Not even hiding place behind the house where the building cantilevers over a gravel-covered nook. I hear the bigfolk say that location is everything, and they're right. And my location is the very front walkway to their house, isolated from the warm earth by stone, unnaturally dressed and cut into neat shapes. It's still quickly become home. I hide my new treasure under the soggy tulip petals; a hairpin, stolen from the child's room. There's just enough iron in it to give me a bit of a tingle when I handle it, a delicious taste of mild poison.

Even this tame place, with its tamed grasses and boxed in trees and regimented flowering all in rows has its rythm. Yes, the ancient patterns of sun and moon, but also the random habits of the old feral cat, the comings and goings of the birds and the restless burdens they carry, the hidden dance of worm and insect deep below the even-cut grass.

Spitefully, I tear some of the grass out by its roots and exhale sourwet breath onto the damp earth. Perhaps in the shade soft mosses will grow, crowd out a bit of the manicured green blades.

At night I'll whisper the child that mosses are a glorious thing.

Already I see the changes. Just now, do you see the child pause before the wooden stockade fence, eyes tracing the delicate strands of spiderweb?  A day ago, the child would have walked through the web without thinking, destroying it. A day before that? Perhaps brushed it apart on purpose, delighting in petty safe destructions as children sometimes do.

This child will no longer delight in destruction. I'll teach it that.

See how the child no longer plucks the brightyellow flowers from the forsythia bush, but gathers the ones which drop on the ground? I taught it that. A whisper into its ear at night, a hint carved in the sacred geometries of the spiderweb.

A century ago the parents would see the change, would think I'd snatched the child, replaced it with a fae simulacrum of a small human. Today? THe bigfolk gaze upon their young through a magic glowing rectangle which views but does not see. 

The child is not a changeling, but I can teach it anything I wish.

Camping Out on the Bridge - is HDBaseT Here to Stay?

Last week I appeared on the AV Powerup podcast to discuss, amongst other things, HDBaseT. Taking the time to listen to myself (this is a sign of responsibility to monitor messaging and personal branding, not at all vanity. Honestly) it seemed that I was quite negative on HDBaseT as a technology - I described it as largely a bridge between the point-to-point systems we build yesterday and the shiny new IP systems we'll be installing tomorrow. (You can hear the entire conversation, with Malissa Dillman of Kramer along Corey Moss and AVPowerup's usual cast of characters - here on rAVe Radio). After sounding what sounded like a death knell for HDBaseT I went to sleep and, the next day, went into the office to work on four projects, two of which will use HDBaseT transport. So... is HDBaseT here to stay? Is it a bridge we're crossing - or have already crossed? What's the place for it today?

Separate Networks and Separate Networks
If one is deploying video over IP, one needs to be careful to assure proper network configurations. This could mean QoS to prioritize latency-sensitive video traffic, IGMP settings for multi-cast streams, and other considerations. This will very often involve a logically separate network and, in some cases,  a physically separate network. A physically separate network consisting of structured cable, endpoints, and a dedicated switch for AV traffic sounds very much like the definition of an HDBaseT system. True, it isn't an IP-addressable system and, as such, there is no equivalent to "switch hops" within an IP-based system which allows a single logical network to be built with many switches. And yes, there is no "routing" equivalent allowing communication between networks. In the majority of AV use cases none of these are issues. In quite a few cases (including several of the projects on which I am now working), AV systems are largely self-contained and if they are to expand it will be via a higher-latency lower-bandwidth compressed signal such as H.264/H.265.

Why is IP the future?
That said I still firmly believe that IP is the future. Why?

First, scalability. It is very, very easy to add endpoints to an IP-based system. All one needs is an open switch-port or, at the very worst, another network switch. Expanding an HDBaseT system will often require shutting the system down to add input or output cards and, past "choke points" (8, 16, 32, 64), an entire system redesign. There's no good way to expand a full 16x16 switch, for example, without throwing it away and starting over again. IP-based systems are easy to grow and don't have the inherent size constraints that HDBaseT systems have.

On a related note, IP-based systems are flexible - not only because any IP video stream can be routed system-wide, but because it creates easy means of manipulating video streams. Adding a transcoder, a windowing processor, recording appliance, or anything else becomes a simple matter of connecting another network device. Manufacturers of network-based systems often create ecosystems including quite a few ways to manipulate the video stream.

There is a universality to using UTP for IP routable endpoints and only IP routable endpoints. One ends up with a single structuted-cable contractor for an entire job and no confusion with cables that look like network cables yet aren't. While this seems like a small issue, it does create an increase in efficiency in terms of both installation labor and infrastructure, as well as simplifying the physical system topography.

Why is HDBaseT Not Going Away
Even as IP is clearly the future and, increasingly, the present, I see new HDBaseT products appearing with some regularity. For AV systems which fit comfortably into a single HDBaseT switch there is a measure of simplicity in using dedicated, purpose-built AV switching hardware. Because we're dealing with a dedicated AV switch rather than a standard network switch, we can get local inputs and outputs for AV devices co-located with the AV switch. Eliminating the need for a transmitter or encoder at each device can, in systems with local sources, decrease overall wiring and count of individual devices.

The innards of an HDBaseT Wallplate

HDBaseT is also present in the "all-in-one" presentation systems which combine video routing, audio routing, audio amplification, and AV control in a single box. A system appropriate for a presentation switch such as this would usually be point-to-point, and gain little if any benefit from IP routing.

A big positive for HDBaseT is that it is a standard with a measure of interoperability; IP video transport is, at present, not. Yes, IP is standard, but different product lines do not allow their streams to be decoded by competitors. This means that, for example, a videowall processor with HDBaseT inputs can take a signal from an HDBaseT transmitter and then send it to HDBaseT embedded displays. An entire pair of transmitters and receivers just vanished! There's not yet the universality to do this yet with IP-based systems. I'm not sure when or if there will be.

So today, is IP better than HDBaseT? The answer is the same as the answer to every AV question:

It depends.

Book Review: Of Noble Family, by Mary Robinette Kowal

With Of Noble Family, Mary Robinette Kowal closes out her Glaourist Histories series of novels. These five books took us from a Jane Austen inspired romance through the Napoleanic wars, a visit to London for exploration of early industrial revolution and social upheaval, a stop in Venice for a complicated caper, and now to Antigua do deal with both family and the realities of the slave trade. While the opening volume, Shades of Milk and Honey, was a regency romance dealing with the relationships and marriage prospects of upper-class families, the series did a very credible job of speaking to the concerns of the common folk even while keeping its focus on wealthy and increasingly powerful characters.

This is a challenging book to review without giving spoilers, but we'll try. For those who've not yet picked up this series, it deals with an alternate world  in which exists a sort of magic called glamour. Glamuorists manipulate the ether (which, in this world, is a real thing) primarily to create visual and auditory illusions. We've even seen glamourists working with heat and cold (perhaps by extending their work into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum? This is never clear, but doesn't really matter) at significant cost to their health. It creates am entire layers to culture, economy, and even military tactics. Our viewpoint character, Lady Jane Vincent, and her husband Sir David Vincent are two of the most accomplished in this art. 

We pick up their story after a safe return to London after the misadventures in Venice, chronicled in Valor and Vanity. This respite is short-lived as we receive word that Sir David's estranged father Lord Verbury has died of a stroke in his estate in Antigua, to which he fled to avoid trial for treason. Family has been an issue for Vincent throughout the series, and a return to the estate of his father - a cruel and demanding man whose name Vincent no longer carries - is not to be taken lightly. Through the ensuing pages we learn of Lord Verbury's legacy, meet both slaves and fellow slave-holders, and explore the fraught relationships in a deeply disfunctional family. Lord Verbury casts a deep shadow  throughout the book as a return to the family estate brings out some of the worst in Vincent.

One of my favorite things about this particular volume is the way Kowal's characters maintain recognizable, believable personalities even as circumstances completely alter their behavior. We see this in Vincent's increasingly short and dangerous temper and again with a slave woman whose speech patterns are completely different with field hands (with whom she speaks in a nearly opaque dialect) to perfectly standard English when speaking with the island's black doctor.

There's much about this novel which I love. One passage which stayed with me after I set it down is a bit of dialog from Frank, not only a slave of Lord Verbury's, but also the man's oldest son in which he speaks of the old man's surprising generosity. 

Perhaps one needs to have an awful person or two in ones family, but to me it's perfectly clear - and more real - to have the manipulative, cruel patriarch also be sometimes generous, sometimes engaging and - if one doesn't look at the big picture - actually likeable in the moment. It explains the influence Verbury had in life, as well as the complications in his relationship with Vincent.

If the novel has a flaw in  my eyes, it is in the character of Pridmore, the dishonest, embezzling, and cruel overseer. The character not only seems single-dimensional, but making the overseer violent, unlikeable, and hatefully racist strikes me as too easy.  I much prefer the moments in these novels in which a character we otherwise like shows signs - subtly or not -  of being infected with the racist or otherwise intolerant attitudes of society as a whole. We saw this clearly in the middle volume ( Without a Summer ) when Lady Jane was quite mistrustful of a family because of their Catholic faith. We see hints of it again here when she - in an absolutely beautifully imagined part of the novel  - begins the effort of writing a book comparing the theories and even language regarding glamour across cultures. When Nkiruka, one of the plantations slaves, learns that the reason Jane has been discussing this with her is to write a book, the woman reacts thusly:

“You take…” Nkiruka growled and turned to Amey, speaking rapidly with phrases accented by gestures at the paper then at Jane. 

The young woman shook her head as she replied. Jane could only watch the conversation with an increasing want of comprehension, until finally Amey turned to her. “She upset that you writing a book and taking credit for her drawings and ideas.” 

“Teach each other. That ah one thing. Book? No. Done tek enough, done profit enough.” 

“Oh, but…” But … that was precisely what Jane had been prepared to do. It had not been her intention to steal Nkiruka’s ideas or to take credit for them, but nowhere in the structure of her book had she allotted space to acknowledge that half the ideas were not hers. 

She is, of course, right. What makes this  scene work for me is the way it's so easy in the nineteenth century - and even today in the twenty-first - to ignore the agency of someone we instinctively see as lesser or, at the very least, other. In a way, it said more about the evils of slavery than having slaves beaten by a malicious man; had an otherwise good man been overseeing the slaves, the conflict would be much more poingant to me

Overall, this was quite the engaging book which, in a slightly sentimental denouement, nicely wrapped up the entire series.  All five volumes are highly recommended. Now that this is finished I very much look forward to seeing what Kowal does next. 

Memories of Star Wars Past, a look towards Star Wars Future

"Robots don't have names. They have numbers."

Do I remember that explanatory whisper, now four decades ago? The year was 1977. The film - the first film I  ever saw - was, of course,  Star Wars. It was a time when going to the movie was something special, when it was the only way to see a movie. It would be over a decade before VHS would win its battle over Betamax and bring movies - albeit cropped or letterboxed - to our living rooms. And - while it would have been more thematically appropriate from my father - in my head I hear the whisper in my mother's voice. Was I confused by the opening in media res during the imperial attack on Princess Leia's ship? I think that I was, that I sensed that there should have been something before, but that's another memory I can't trust. Remember, I was five. If I was five. These are my thoughts and memories about that, and the new ones. 

Three years later came The Empire Strikes Back. I remember not believing the big reveal - thinking at the time that the villain was lying because he's a villain. Saturday morning cartoons had taught me that the hero always wins; I found it profoundly disorienting to walk out of the theater with our heroes at such a low point. Later, in discussion, I cried about the unfairness of it (I was, in my way, a sensitive child). This brings me to the earliest "boys don't cry" moment I can recall - an admonition from my father that I was crying not only about a movie character, but a movie character who hadn't even died. It came with the wholly empty threat that there would be no more movies for me if I couldn't handle the sad parts. 

I loved those movies, right through the last one -  with an uncritically, whole-heartedly, unconditionally. And for me, like for so many other kids, Star Wars grew past the movies into the real world. There were the action figures (I specifically remember an Obi Wan Kenobi with a lightsaber that extended from a hollowed out forearm), toy blaster guns, activity books. I remember the Jawa sand-crawler made from an empty milk-carton. The line-tracing game to reattach C3PO's severed arm. I remember bicycles as  X- and W-Wing fighters, the sidewalk the central trench of a new Death Star (not always, of course. Sometimes a bicycle was an orange Dodge with what I didn't know to be a horribly racist symbol painted on its roof. Sometimes it was a black Pontiac that talked to you. And sometimes - quite rarely - it was just a bicycle). There was an interesting quirk  to this play; my brother would always want to be Luke Skywalker, other kids Han Solo or even Chewbacca. I always wanted to be a background character - an unnamed rebel fighter pilot. It's not because I didn't want to be a hero, but it's because I wanted to be the hero, and that Luke's story was already told. Perhaps that was the genesis of my later life as a storyteller.

My feelings about the prequels are more complicated. There is, for me, something about the John Williams score that brings me back to that day in 1977 when I first learned what a movie was. Scroll the introductory text up along a black field of stars as the score plays and - for a moment - I'm again five years old. This fit thematically one  more time in my life, on May 18th, 2002. It was the first day in a long time I'd not spent the night with my then-fiance, the lovely Karine Suskin. The next day we'd wed, and we'd wanted to separate for the day to add a symbolic specialness to our official joining in matrimony. So, the day before, full of nervous energy and hope and excitement I let Lucas take me back, accepting this movie as a bookend to my childhood.

It wasn't a very good movie.

You know that it wasn't; the characters were flat, the comic relief character was, arguably, a stereotype. The plot hinged on coincidences implausible enough to make Dickens blush. It was, as it was happening, pleasant enough. I saw it in a nice, single-screen movie theater (the Syosset Universal Artists, long since gone). It was an experience that, after it ended, felt somewhat empty. There wasn't any more there than there was on the surface and, in some ways, less. The good guys were good. The bad guys were bad. It was great spectacle, but not great fiction.

Today, as a new set of films is approaching, I'm reminded of this and reflecting on the ongoing experience. Horror writer Joe Hill said it quite well in  a discussion on Twiter:

I gradually had to admit, upon rewatching, that the original STAR WARS films had some really agonizing flaws, especially JEDI.

— Joe Hill (@joe_hill) April 10, 2015

I had unrealistic expectations that the prequels could never have lived up to. A real assessment of the originals could've prevented that.

— Joe Hill (@joe_hill) April 10, 2015

He's right. The film we now call Episode IV: A New Hope was, at the  time, the best movie I'd ever seen. It was also the only movie I'd ever seen. It's all tangled up with the cabinet full of action figures half of them missing their little plastic blasters, in the discussions about Darth Vader's real identity, in the pretend X-Wing fighter dogfights, the newspaper comic strip serial, and all of the things that go into a spectacle.

All of the flaws that I mentioned from the prequel trilogy? The reliance on coincidence, the stereotyping, the sloppy storytelling? Characters who are little more than pure archetypes? All of those flaws exist in the original movies. Coincidence? The entire plot of all three films hinges on Luke Skywalker happening to need to buy a droid at exactly the  time the Jawas had captured R2D2 and C3PO - and that of all the people on Tattooine,  he happened to be the one to buy them (instead of any others). Stereotyping? Is the shiny-gold cowardly and somewhat effeminate  robot any less a gay stereotype than the broken-English speaking Jar Jar Binks is an African American stereotype? Speaking of African-Americans, is it coincidence that they chose to dub an African American man's voice over the black-clad villain?

Flaws aside, I still love those films the way that I love Cadbury Creme eggs, the way that I love milk mixed with Coca Cola,the way I love a McDonald's hamburger. These things are, objectively speaking, terrible. I can acknowledge that and still, on very rare occasions, indulge the part of me that wants to look back. Perhaps I will indulge that part of me this winter; I will confess that the second trailer - the one showing the Imperial Star Destroyer half-buried in what I assume ot be the desert sands of Tattoine - strikes a chord with me. The Star Destroyer and X-Wing are such powerful icons of my youth, it's hard to not be drawn in, even if just for a moment. Whether that moment will sustain a whole movie is to be determined.

What I'll not indulge is the romantic notion that these are the greatest films of all times, and that the judgements I made at the age of five still stand today. Tastes change and people change. I stopped reading A Song of Ice and Fire because I'm not the person I was when George RR Martin wrote A Game of Thrones twenty years ago; I'm certainly not the person I was nearly four decades ago when Lucas gave us the first of the Star Wars films.