A head start on the Star Wars anniversaries

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the original Star Wars, as many have already noted, but one thing that's also occurred to me is that even before May it'll also mark ten years since the release of the Star Wars Special Editions. (In addition to that, it's been sixty years since the breaking of the sound barrier, fifty years since the launching of the Space Age, and forty years since the Toronto Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup, a melancholy observance for many in my area and even beyond... but I digress.)

Today marks exactly ten years since the premiere of the Simpsons episode "The Springfield Files." Beyond its own merits, I also remember (and checked up on through some Usenet archive searching) that a commercial for the Special Editions aired during it. Having read about a Special Edition trailer on the Star Wars Usenet newsgroup (and having hoped it just might show up when I went to see Star Trek: First Contact, to no such luck), finally seeing a bit of it (in a crowded university residence TV room) was a pleasant experience. I can suppose, though, that having an X-wing burst out of a TV screen on to... a TV screen would be sort of a dimunition of the full effect.