My generation was like none before it because me and my
friends and my enemies and all the other small kids in America (and much of
elsewhere) had one weird thing that bound us all together. To say it was a
movie would be incredibly reductive, because although the whole Star Wars craze—a craze that’s been
active for nearly forty years now but pops to the surface periodically like a
herpe—obviously began with a movie, it has always been more than a movie. I
would wake up every morning on my Star
Wars sheets, wearing my Star Wars
pajamas, part my Star Wars curtains
to allow in the sunlight by which I’d get dressed in my Star Wars sneakers and T-shirt before ambling downstairs to eat Star Wars cereal (C-3PO’s) out of a Star Wars bowl, then strap on my Star Wars backpack and grab my Star Wars lunchbox and head to school
where I’d take notes in my Star Wars
notebook until 3 PM when I’d return home to play with my Star Wars figures until it was time to gobble down dinner off a Star Wars plate and guzzle some sort of
sugar-based formula out of a Star Wars
Burger King glass as quickly as possible so I could pop Star Wars into the VCR before going back upstairs to wash my hair
with Star Wars shampoo, getting into
another pair of Star Wars pajamas, and laying down to dream about Star Wars.
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| Click to see what my brain looked like when I was six. |
This might sound like the behavior of someone suffering from
a cripplingly extreme case of OCD if it weren’t for the fact that nearly every
little boy (because, let’s be truthful, most of the kids who did this kind of
shit were boys... that’s what happens when you create a rich and detailed universe with only one woman in it) I knew did the same exact thing. And today kids of all genders
and interests do the same damn thing with Frozen
and Kung Fu Chickenbots or whatever
else kids are obsessed with these days (amazingly, it’s still Star Wars for a lot of them who weren’t
even born in the century that birthed
the original trilogy!). Equally amazing is that this kind of thing really
didn’t exist before Star Wars. It
didn’t. In the sixties, Batman came
very, very close, but it was not as pervasive and there was no Batman cereal. Other pop-culture
obsessions like Davy Crockett and Planet
of the Apes and even The
Wizard of Oz essentially came and
went.
It’s a weird thing how the over-commercialization of a
children’s movie took over our lives, but kids don’t think about those kinds of
things. As a little boy in 1980, it was just nice. It was an interest the most
golden-hued jock shared with the most ostracized nerd. Those kids probably
wouldn’t end up best friends, but they might share a one-off afternoon
co-mingling their miniature Han Solos and Boba Fetts on the playground.
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| I spent my childhood doing this. |
My history with Star
Wars makes it really hard for me to approach the films with any semblance
of critical distance. Picking apart those first couple of movies—with their less-than-mellifluous
dialogue and corny acting and devil-may-care continuity and severe gender imbalance—is
easy enough to do. None of the flaws matter until Return of the Jedi, which came out when I was too old to sleep
under a Star Wars comforter anymore
and also has Ewoks. Released 35 years ago today, Empire remains my favorite, not because of its deeper character
relationships or darkness or soap opera developments or any of the other things
fans usually cite as examples of its superiority. I was just the perfect age to
see it when it came out: young enough to not react to groaners about “nerf
herders” with cynicism, but old enough to really understand the gravity of the
film’s famous revelation. Really, it’s the most superficial things that I love
about The Empire Strikes Back: its
blue palette and snowscapes; that wonderful, Ray Harryhausen-indebted shot of
the tauntaun rising over a snow dune; how cool the bounty hunters looked all
lined up together; and the way John Williams scored the race through the
asteroid field and Lando’s guided tour through Cloud City. I love it because I
loved the little Empire Strikes Back
“Read-along” record and book set I got for Christmas and listened to over and
over with my friend Matt (who is now all grown up and managing Bob Weir) and the R2-D2 and C-3P0
Burger King glass I used to drink from and the Marvel comic adaptation of the
film with its weird depiction of Yoda that terrified me so much my parents tore
out every page depicting him so I could read the book without pissing my pants.
Maybe Star Wars
and Empire Strikes Back are great
movies. Maybe they’re terrible. Honestly, I have no idea. Judging them like
that would be like critiquing the teddy bear I slept with when I was a toddler.
Those movies are an instant connection to my childhood, so even beyond basic issues of film preservation, I’m squarely with the long-time fans who prefer the films as we remember them (those repugnant
“George Lucas raped my childhood” overstatements need to stop though). However, as much as I’d love to see the un-monkeyed-with
films on blu-ray, and as often as I’d watch them, there’s really no way I’d ever be
able to get inside them the way I did
when I was a kid again. You can’t go surfing on a wave that
rolled out to sea 35 years ago.
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| Certain things,however, do not change: the marble from the Pac-Man Board Game I stuck up R5-D4's butt as a child remains there today. |
