This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Lizzie Peabody.

There's a famous story you might have heard.

How does it begin in a galaxy far, far away, a long time ago?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Okay, in a less famous story, you probably haven't heard.

So a modern amount of time ago in a suburb of Illinois,

young Eric Jens, seven years old, goes to the movies with his family. Eric is a curator of

entertainment at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. But back in 1977,

he was a consumer of entertainment, a little kid.

In the day his parents took him to the theater to see the very first Star Wars movie, he had no idea what he was in for.

He snuggled into his theater seat, the lights went down, and the iconic, copyrighted, music began to play.

I remember just being blown away, very beginning from the scroll to the end, just being fixated, excited.

Excited.

Just my world opened up and changed. It sounds really dramatic, but it's true.

Eric, in all his seven years on earth, had never seen anything like this. Oh, wow, robots,

ray guns, you know, evil, like strange religions.

It's like all was new, right?

It was a revelation to Eric that movies or TV could even be like this.

Oh, this is something for me.

This is something I like.

It's not something like you're brought to or something that's like supposedly for kids or like a Disney thing, which I liked. But, you know, there's a moral and a message to it. This was like exciting. Like, wait, what? There's kind of aliens. It's kind of scary. It's funny. Like, the whole idea of the force, like, to me, that was like, whoa. And the second he left the movies, all he could think about was how to get back there and see Star Wars again.

...