Its 10 a.m. Lights dim. Time For the morning show.Another episode of everybody's favorite all action adventure serial. It could be the King's Theatre, Dundee, Scotland,any Saturday over 50 years ago. I would have endured a Pathe Newsreel, managed a cheeras Jerry outwitted Tom, and would now be eargerly anticipating the next hair and hackle-raising instalment of Improbable Good versus Impossible Evil. However, its not post-war Dundee. It's 2005, and I'm north of San Francisco at Skywalker Ranch. But today I am just a kid again, waiting for the scroll to roll at a private screening of Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, the final filmed episode of the six-part Star Wars saga, where for once, Evil will Vanquish Good, and it will be all my fault. I first encountered Emperor Palpatine at Elstree Studios in the early 1980s. He was staring bvack at me through a make-up mirror, larger than life and fifty times as ugly.Yellow contacts stung my eyes and afforded little vision. As I walked onto a vast sound stage that has had been transformed into a starship hangar, populated by seemingly endless platoons of gleaming white stormtroopers, the scale of George Lucas's vision hit me. This was a space spectacle, a back-drop for a galactic opera of Wagnerian diamension. Time passed. The prequels unfolded and, as Palpatine shed years and dissapeared behind a politician's mask- which happily turned out to be my face-the digital moviemaking revolution gathered pace, as backdrops ceded control to blue cloths. And now, as I watch the denouement of the saga that has been part of my life for over two decades, I am caught up once more in this epic story. As harsh beams of light glint off the freshly minted armour of Palpatine's tragic apprentice, a smug smile of contentment flickers over the reptillian features of his evil master, the self-procalimed Emperor of the galaxy. But there is hope. Twin babes blink as the sun sets on the Old Republic, with the promise that for a future generation, dark will yield once more to light. As the auditorium lights returned me to a sort of reality, I sit, not wanting to move, savoring the heady mixture of saddness and elation and thinking, "Well, they just don't make them like that anymore..." ____________________________________________________________________________________________