So, Star Wars ROTS comes out tomorrow.

I won't be getting a ticket. I have no interest in swelling George Lucas's pension fund.

I stopped being a fan a while ago now, grew up playing with the toys - I had a Millenium Falcon, a landspeeder, an X-Wing, loads of figures. Always wanted the Snowspeeder.

I lost count of how many times I've watched Ep 4 when I got to 32 times. It used to be a daily event, come home for lunch, wag Games in the afternoon, stick my copy of "A New Hope" in the Betamax - the original, taped off ITV the first time it came on TV, Christmas Day, 3pm 1982. I even spent some of my Holiday spending money on a box that looked like a book to keep it in. It was still working twenty years later while I watched it in my first flat.

Every second of the film is ingrained in my memory, even the faults in the recording - when Dad pressed "stop" instead of "pause" at the first break, when the tape distorts slightly during the lineup outside the Jawa's sandcrawler. It is, it was an integral part of my youth.

I've watched The Empire Strikes Back just as much, every part of it is etched on my memory but there's not the emotional attachment there, nor with Return of the Jedi.

They were continuations of the great epic, addenda. And when we saw Anakin (the old man), Yoda and Obi Wan embrace in an Ewok village that was the end. Yes, there was backstory. It was hinted at in the novels - quotes from fictional history books at the front of the novels, but that's all it was, mythos.

Episodes 1-3 are just plain wrong. The story wrote itself thirty years ago. What Lucas has done is pick two cliffhanger moments, fill in the non-plot moments with fanwank and cameos of comic strip characters, cover the vapid dialogue with eyewatering FX and groundbreaking techniques and call them movies.

They're not movies, they're cartoons. Yep, best looking cartoons in the world, but cartoons all the same. And there's the thing. They look wonderful, but knowing that most of the filming was done infront of green screens and that 99% of the work was done in post-production spoils it for me. There's noting real about it. Everything you see has been drawn by people. There's no atmospheric canyons with little droids trundling down them, no icy wastelands, no dense, atmospheric forest, just paintings, CGI vistas and cityscapes. Luke's house exists. Out there in the Moroccan desert is Luke's house. Where can you go to walk through the forests of Naboo? Can you walk down a Coruscant street?

There was something real about Star Wars, something that touched you. There's nothing real about Phantom Menace, Send in the Clones or ROTS. They're cartoons, they're Lucas's retirement fund, they're a poor excuse for a fanflick wrapped up in the kind of CGI that money can't buy.

And he ain't getting my money, the same way Bill Gates ain't.