“Star Wars” was wholly original when it was released in 1977. It was a sci-fi adventure with “A” production values—Saturday afternoon serials combined into one great story. From the opening crawl, to the gigantic ship pursing the tiny one, to all of those crazy, metalic characters, we were mesmerized.

If we'd only known what George Lucas had in mind. Because this is what the opening of the movie, long renamed “Star Wars IV: A New Hope,” is like now:

• A princess in outer space is being pursued by her father, although she doesn't know he's her father, just as he doesn't know she's his daughter.
• So she downloads important intel into a droid, and sends this droid and another droid (who was built by her father when he was a kid) to the random planet below.
• Except it's not a random planet. It's her father's home planet.
• These droids are then bought at a weekend sale ... by her twin brother, who doesn't know they were sent by his twin sister, whom he doesn't know he has, nor that one of them was built by his father, whom he assumes is dead. 
• Meanwhile, in outer space, the father tortures the daughter for information. 
• Meanwhile, the daughter's message finds its recipient: the man who mentored the father when he was a young boy, and changed him from a precocious, cherubic kid to an angry, mopey teenager. The mentor decides to do the same with the son. He starts out by lying about who his father is. 

Really, it's the most fantastic series of coincidences in any story ever.

You could argue it's the Force doing all of this—binding the story together. But then I'd argue that the Force is a pretty shitty storyteller. 

Hopefully, “VII” won't screw things up more.

NOTE: An earlier version of this stated incorrectly that R2D2 was built by Anakin; appaerntly only C3PO was built by Anakin.

Daddy-daughter day: You put the rebel plans into a droid and sent it to my home planet, where it's being bought by my son? I'll torture you for that, young lady.