This week sees the release of the latest installment in the Star Wars saga, The Last Jedi. Star Wars is a special thing for me personally. Like many others I have never known life without it. It has been a companion in some form since infancy. At times it was the centre of my entire universe and days without the battle of the heroic rebel alliance against Darth Vader and the evil empire whether on-screen or on a bedroom floor, were not true days at all.
Recently I had the pleasure of attending a screening of “IT”, the remake of the 1990 made for television mini-series which was itself adapted from Stephen Kings horror opus about a killer clown that feeds on children. No really.
The originals, first half, if you will, was set in 1960 (as opposed to the novels 57-58 setting) and saw a group of outsider children square up against the monster terrorising their small town lives during school vacation. It was all white picket fences and crew cuts and pompadour hairdos. Why? Well, it’s simple really. Stephen King himself grew up around this particular time. The ‘50s are to him, what the ‘80s are to a lot of us and so it is a decade, which he has referenced quite a bit in his work.