"Identifying these and other parallels between the Star Wars films and nineteenth-century children’s literature is more than just a fun parlor game for history and sci-fi nerds. It’s an indication of how little the moral expectations for children’s entertainment changed over the course of 150 years, even as the means of delivering that entertainment have increased so dramatically. These expectations derived largely from families seeking to shape the nature of their children’s consuming habits, and they predate and survive the twentieth-century expansions of corporate marketing to children that so many commentators have bemoaned. Thus when parents like me walk into a store and complain about the conflicts that omnipresent Star Wars merchandise create with children who beg for the newest action figure or t-shirt, we can place some of the blame on Disney. But perhaps we should also assign some of the responsibility – at least for the nature of those products – to ourselves."