Picture the scene: you’ve convinced your nearest and dearest to take the plunge and watch Star Wars, but what comes first? Do you honor Lucasfilm’s release schedule and begin with A New Hope as George Lucas intended, or do you journey back to the very beginning of the Skywalker Saga and choose Episode I:Â The Phantom Menace?
Frankly, it’s a difficult question, and one that Collider posed to Mark Hamill (The Last Jedi) during an exhaustive interview about Luke Skywalker, Rian Johnson and the possibility of a Force-projected cameo in Star Wars: Episode IX.
But when it comes to the ideal Star Wars viewing order, Hamill believes the saga ought to be watched in the order it was chronologically released: Episode IV first, followed by Empire Strikes Back, Jedi and, well, you get the drift.
The way they were chronologically released, I think. Now, I may be wrong, because if you’re starting out fresh, you’re gonna go one, two, three, four, five, six…Rogue One? Wait a second…Rogue One comes before four – so you’ll have one, two, three, Rogue One, four, five, six, seven, eight…I’m guessing!
Hamill continued:
It must be jarring for young kids, because the technology is so advanced now, the original Star Wars trilogy looks primitive compared to the prequels, where CGI flourished. Again, it’s really just up to each individual. I said to George when we were making [A New Hope], ‘why are we starting with four?’. Even the crawl was to make you feel like you had come into something that had already existed. [It was] to mirror the serial chapter plays that was modeled after, the Flash Gordans etc.
In related news, the Star Wars legend recently expressed his concern about oversaturation – because sometimes you can really have too much of a good thing – along with the cringe-inducing Tosche Station line.
