While merging photos I’d inherited from my mother after her passing with my own, I came across this one of mine, which was taken nearly nineteen years ago to the day, back when I was representing Sci-Fi Entertainment magazine at a Television Critics Association press tour.

That’s me hanging out at a party with Mystery Science Theater 3000 writers and stars Bridget Jones and Mike Nelson. We were at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, probably on the night of January 19, 1997.

We’d all been brought there by the Sci-Fi Channel. Jones, Nelson, and a few more members of the MST3K cast were promoting their show’s move over from Comedy Central, while I was present because Sci-Fi Entertainment was the official magazine of the Sci-Fi Channel. (Note that I was not yet an employee of theirs, but still worked at the time for Sovereign Media, the company behind Science Fiction Age, which was publishing the magazine under license.)

Earlier that day, we—along with Glen Morgan and James Wong of X-Files fame—appeared on-stage before a packed room of journalists answering questions about all things science fiction—including the then-upcoming 20th anniversary release of the Special Edition of Star Wars.

What I found surprising (once I dug out my complete transcript of the event, which of course I still owned, and which runs 24 pages) was that one of the questions directed toward me expressed skepticism that anyone would actually bother heading to a theater to see Star Wars!

QUESTION: Scott, here, Scott, here on your right. On your right, Scott. USA and Sci-Fi have been running the Star Wars trilogy over and over. And I wanted to ask you from your perspective, do you think fans are so used to seeing this on home video and cable that they might stay away from the theaters when the 20th anniversary re-release comes out?

EDELMAN: Oh, I don’t think so, I think it’s going to be big, because, you know, seeing the Death Star blow up on your screen this big, and seeing it blow up on the big screen, it’s a big difference, and people don’t remember anymore what it was like to go into a movie theater when Star Wars first came out, how different that was, and how special that was, and how it really blew everyone’s mind.

You talk about sci-fi being dark. That was the first science fiction movie that showed things actually lived in, spaceships with dents and nicks and falling apart and so on. I think the audiences are going to go to that. I’m going to be there. …

My son’s 11 and he wants to go see at least all three movies on the VCR, and he’s dying to see it when it comes out. And I think, all of our kids are desperate to see what it’s llke to see it in a real theater.

I was proven right, don’t you think?

A little later in the session, the questioning shifted to whether we’d start seeing some of the literary classics hit the screen.

QUESTION: Well, Scott, for years the classic science fiction literature, the Asimov stories, the Dune stories, always seemed to be quite a bit ahead of the movies and TV, as far as story complexities and cerebral content. Are TV and movies catching up to this now?

EDELMAN: Well, I think the advances in special effects are going to help in that, because I can sit down and write a short story and spend about a $100 million in five pages and blow up planets and have all these bizarre things happen. And you could not make a movie that way.

There are many science fiction scripts that would be wonderful but they would cost you a billion dollars to make. And I think as we’re getting into the computer-generated imagery and so on, that the science fiction film makers are going to be able to do the things that the writer at one time could only do.

QUESTION: Would this mean that we’ll eventually see writers like Asimov or Sturgeon represented on the screen?

EDELMAN: Oh, I certainly hope so. I know there’s a wonderful unfilmed script of Asimov’s that was done by another Sci-Fi Channel personality, Harlan Ellison, that would probably cost, you know, $400 million to make or something. But it’s a magnificent script that represents everything that Asimov wrote about, about his robot stories and so on. I think that time will come as the producers go around looklng for stories to be worthy of these effects.

I will I’d been proven right there, too!

But alas … no.