So about twelve hours from now, if all goes as scheduled, we'll be watching the Watchmen movie. 6:40 showing at the Cinemagic Westbrook.

I'm trying to not get overly excited for this movie, as the 12-issue, 400-some-odd page comic book on which the film is based is quite sprawling. There are ample ways in which the film could be screwed up. Terry Gilliam, David Hayter, Darren Aronofsky and others have tried to make this and failed.

But still, I'm pretty excited.

Somehow, in preparing to go to this movie, I'm reminded of another movie that fanboys united were drooling over just about ten years ago. Hindsight being what it is, I guess we all should have been worried when we learned the full title was Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But we were young, naive.

In May of 1999 I was just a year out of college and working at Disney Animation, in the story department of what would eventually be named The Emperor's New Groove. I think at that time we might have been calling it Kingdom in the Sun, or possibly my personal favorite Production 1331. (No, amazingly enough "The Emperor's New Groove" was not the first name we kicked around. Imagine that.)

Anyway, the AMC Theatres in Burbank had an Episode 1 showing right around noon, so somehow the story artists convinced the department manager that they needed to see the movie as soon as possible. She agreed. Why they needed me, their trusty production assistant, to come along was never fully explained. Guess I could have taken notes if someone said something pertinent to the llama-based cartoon they were supposed to be writing at the time.

As we all know, Episode 1 was one of the worst movies ever to be shot on film. In fact, I think the real reason George Lucas shot the last two movies in that series on digital video was that Eastman Kodak and Fujifilm teamed up and decided never to sell another frame of 35 mm film to Lucasfilm. But I digress.

The worst part of the Episode 1 experience, I mean, besides watching that God-aweful piece of junk (Midichlorians make people Jedis? Are you serious?!) was returning to work at 2 or 3 pm. Disney Animation, at that time, was still one of the largest installments of movie nerds on the planet. Especially Star Wars nerds.

We were silent.

The few people who did ask us how it was were fended off with non-statements such as, "You can wait to hear about it, the Force is strong in you."

Lying to the wide-eyed Star Wars nerds turned my stomach.

Then again, so did Jar-Jar. My ever-present desire to cause no harm to the animation artists almost caused me to write a building-wide email pleading everyone to stay home that night, rewatch A New Hope with a loved-one.

Of course, that was before midnight screenings, and the blogosphere, so I'm sure right now on the internet there are many, many reviews of Watchmen out there. Spoilers, if you will. Which is why, for the next twelve hours, I'm only reading news from ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports.