Star Wars Day 2023 has come and gone, marking another year of the illustrious sci-fi fandom’s unprecedented embrace of one of the most nauseating puns in existence. Nauseating in a good way, of course, as all puns are.
The “fourth” seemed to be with everyone yesterday, with fans making an extra-special effort to honor Star Wars: Visions, the animated anthology series that received its second season to mark the occasion. Indeed, this year’s Star Wars Day may have made history by being the first to be dedicated to the franchise’s non-canon content.
And while that aforementioned history nearly goes all the way back to the original release of Star Wars itself, Star Wars Day, as we know it today, is actually a much more recent development.
When did the first organized ‘Star Wars’ Day occur?
While the “May the fourth…” pun and its association with honoring Star Wars dates back to 1979 thanks to Margaret Thatcher of all people (the U.K. Conservative party used the phrase in congratulating her ascension to Prime Minister at the time), the first time Star Wars Day was officially celebrated in an organized manner was on May 4, 2011.
The 2011 event took place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Toronto Underground Cinema, and featured a variety of events and entertainment such as trivia, costume contests complete with celebrity judges, and big-screen viewings of fan-made tributes to the storied franchise.
Star Wars Day was legitimized even further following the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney in 2012, after which Disney would go on to officially celebrate Star Wars Day, complete with Star Wars-themed events at their theme parks and other official observations/acknowledgments, every May 4 since 2013.
For those of you who missed out on properly honoring the day of our lord George Lucas yesterday, there’s no harm in retroactively celebrating by catching the second season of Star Wars: Visions on Disney Plus.