While Benjamin decides which movie to watch (above)*, I’m second-guessing a parenting decision.

Benjamin received a very cool Star Wars sticker book for his fifth birthday. He came to a page with Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace characters on it and asked, “Do we have the one with these guys in it?”

I happily answered, “Yes,” and told him it was the one with the pod race (a scene he and I have watched together many times). He opened the DVD cabinet, removed the correct disc, and inserted it into the DVD player.

While he hasn’t seen Star Wars as many times as he has Cars, he has seen it a handful of times on movie night. The subsequent two films he has seen once each.

When I first tried to watch The Phantom Menace with him, however, he asked questions like, “Where’s Luke?” and “Is Darth Vader in this one?” He also was confused by Ben Kenobi’s youthful appearance, and after I explained it he still didn’t understand what the heck Liam Neeson was doing there. I’m very proud to say he laughed at Jar-Jar only once and never seemed the least bit taken by him.

He lost interest after the pod race and instead played with his action figures from the original trilogy. As a fan and a father, I was proud.

I wonder sometimes whether I should be showing him these movies at all.

The first three films feature death but do not depict it graphically. During those scenes Benjamin asks questions like, “Did he go to Heaven?” and, “Daddy, where do bad people come from?”

To the first question I responded, “Yep,” without missing a beat, because it’s made obvious later that Yoda went to Jedi Heaven alongside Obi-wan and Hayden Christensen (don’t get me started on that crime of revisionism).

The next query required a little more thought, but my initial reaction was easy. “The same place good people come from. They’re born.”

I then tried to shift from labeling people “bad” or “good,” and babbled on. “Somewhere along the way they start doing bad things. But people who do bad things can turn around and do good things again.”

At least I didn’t launch into a discussion of the modern penal system and the arguments for and against rehabilitation. Good thing, too, considering he probably would have asked, “Daddy, what does ‘penal’ mean?” and I would have laughed, because that word is just funny.

The next three films show fights resulting in stabbings, separation of legs from torso, severance of all four limbs and both hands (respectively), and just lots of death in general. I figured all of that could wait several years for Benjamin.

Then, just last weekend, he asked again to watch The Phantom Menace. I rationalized. Hey, the character who gets stabbed doesn’t give us time to get attached to him, and the one who gets cut in half isn’t shown as such until he’s in the distance. Plus, he’s a bad guy.

Oops. There goes that labeling again.

After that viewing, Benjamin said, “Daddy, let’s play Star Wars. I’ll be Ben and you be Qui-Gon Jinn.” That last is Liam Neeson’s character, for all you who are not SW geeks but somehow made it this far in both life and this post.

Until I had a child I never considered Star Wars a particularly violent series of films. I saw the first one several times at age 7 — during its original theatrical release. While I may be a bit desensitized to violence in movies, I’m terrified of it in real life. I know that not every child is the same when it comes to these matters, but for Benjamin’s sake I’m hoping that when it comes to handling the films’ themes, his age 5 isn’t too far from my age 7.

* Before anybody gives me a hard time about my son picking out a movie when it’s sunny outside, I’ll just tell you that it was about 104 degrees. In the worst of Texas summer, our outdoor play times are morning and evening.

(Note: I covered a similar topic in “Star-Crossed Innocence Lost,” wherein I detail Benjamin’s reaction to his first viewing of Star Wars)