I was eight years old and Harrison Ford was the swashbuckling rogue that every girl age 2–90 had her eyes on. In the 1977 original release of Star Wars, in the cantina scene, Han Solo shoots the bounty hunter Greedo. To be more specific (and there are indeed frame by frame images and websites to prove this point — check out www.wookiepedia.org sometime) Han Solo shoots first and kills the bounty hunter in the midst of conversation, his gun hidden by his leg and a bar table. Greedo never knows what hit him and Han Solo, ever the self-preservationist, goes on to adventure with his new clients that eventually lead to a new life.

But in the later 2004 reissue of Star Wars, Greedo the bounty hunter shoots first so that our hero Han is shooting and killing only in self defense — the way a good guy does. Never mind the implausibility of Greedo shooting at point blank range and missing.

Likewise, in the original E.T. the cops crouch behind their squad cars armed to the teeth to shoot at something they don’t understand. In the reissue the guns become walkie talkies. One of the children is originally dressed as a terrorist. Can't do that these days.

I wouldn’t ponder and quibble so much about what this teaches children about their parents' youth and the popular culture they've inherited, but this is dangerously close to trying to edit one's own past. Establishing a false past with our children can only lead to more misunderstanding.

As an instructor, a major issue in teaching young people today is that there is little cultural context given to anything taught. If we know, for example, that Han Solo is the anti-hero and reluctantly joins the good guys, then it's logical that he shoots first. He’s a rogue, after all. But in today’s climate we can’t seem to have well-rounded characters that develop over the course of the story. They have to be basically good from the get-go. Is this realistic? Does this show who we were as a culture in the 1970s or does this whitewash an entire decade? Should we update and re-envision cultural icons from our collective past for the contemporary era or should we let our children view media in a cultural/historical context? It shouldn't come as a surprise that today's teenagers think they invented sexuality given the sanitization of our cultural history. The sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s never happened as far as they know.

In November 2007 Sesame Street “Old School” was released on DVD with reissues from the first season of Sesame Street (which originally first aired in 1969). The reissue stated that the intended audience was adults and “may not meet the needs of today’s preschooler.” Today's preschooler is not to know about where milk comes from or what protesting wars is all about. Warner Brothers released Looney Tunes boxsets putting all "offensive" cartoons on one disc so that they didn’t accidentally co-mingle with the non-offensive cartoon violence of the rest of them. The problem? Warner Brothers cartoons were a little heavy on the racial stereotypes.

Heaven knows our childhoods of the 1970s and early 1980s weren't perfect. After all, this decade saw the rise of the latchkey kid, divorce, and macrame owls, but it seems like we are doing our children and country a disservice to edit our icons and censor the past. Is this any different from soviet censorship of pre-soviet history or the Chinese Cultural Revolution? What happens when our kids find out we are lying to them and they discover that American life is not so sticky sweet, safe, and perfect as we, myself included, are feeding them now?

Readers, what editing of the past have you found? And what do you tell your children about the era in which you grew up?

And for the record — We don't call the original Star Wars "The New Hope: IV" in our household. We call it the original. And in our household, Han shoots first.