Jay Newnum, dressed in his stormtrooper costume, looks at the some of the Star Wars figurines he has on display in the basement of his Fishers home in 2005.
Daily Journal Archives
News from around Johnson County as reported on May 16 in the pages of the Daily Journal and the Franklin Evening Star from the last 112 years.
On this day in 2005, one of the stories on the front page of the Daily Journal was about the premiere of “Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.”
Stars Wars fans had a choice for May 19-20, 2005: go to work and sip coffee while staring at the clock or skip work and got see the movie – then considered the final chapter of the science fiction epic – they’d been waiting on for years.
Waiting until the weekend to see the film was not an option for devoted fans.
“When people tell me I should wait until Friday night to see this movie, I just laugh at them,” Greenwood resident Erik Caster said.
The film was expected to cost employers as much as $627 million in lost productivity because of workers planning to call in sick or take vacation days when the movie opened, a report said.
Greenwood resident Marcus Kidwell requested Thursday and Friday off from work a year earlier, when the release date of the movie was announced.
The 22-year-old would be trading in his Walmart uniform for an electronic toy lightsaber and “Jedi robe.”
“It’s actually just a bathrobe, but it gets the point across,” Kidwell said.
Five friends planned to meet him at a southside movie theater to watch a midnight showing of the film they had been waiting for since the 1990s.
They planned on having mock lightsaber battles in the parking lot, something they got in trouble for in 2002 when they saw “Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones” in Bloomington.
“The theatre guy thought we were all drunk because we kept fighting around the parking lot and making lightsaber noises,” Kidwell said. “We were asked to keep our lightsaber play to a civil level.”
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Other memorable Johnson County stories from this day
2014
Franklin College President James “Jay” Moseley announced his plans to retire in June 2015.
2003
Numerous questions remained after police said a White River Township woman left her 1-year-old daughter in the backseat of her car. The child died.
1973
Indiana State Troopers arrested five people in possession of more than two dozen stolen Indy 500 tickets.
