by Gib van Ert
One consequence of my parents’ financial troubles in the early 1980s was that we moved house every year or so. The worst place we lived, from an aesthetic and perhaps even a hygienic perspective, was the former front office of a twenty-room, 1950s-era motel. The old motel rooms, situated behind our unit in an L-shape with parking spots in front of each door, were rented out to people in even worse straits than us. My sister and I were forbidden to go back there, and we did not want to. There were no children there (mercifully), only oddballs, hard luck cases and rough characters—men who did not wear as many clothes as the weather demanded, and women who did not mind. All this was directly behind us, connected to our home by walls and ceiling. The sensation I most associate with living there was a determination to keep looking forward, not to turn around, not to look back.
The motel-house had one thing going for it, namely that it was directly across the street from Penticton’s greatest attraction: the long, golden-sanded beaches of Okanagan Lake. For all its drawbacks, living in the motel-house was like being on an extended vacation—sun, sand, water and hundreds of generally happy people just outside our door for about four months of the year. The view from the beach was thrilling. Due north was the enormous grey-blue lake merging with the green-blue hills on a far away, sky-blue horizon broken every ten minutes or so by the sight of a delighted holidaymaker floating through the air supported by a multi-coloured parasail on one end and a speedboat on the other. To the west, parked at the lakeshore no more than a one-minute walk from our front door, were the partly-restored remnants of the S.S. Sicamous, a 200-foot-long, steel-hulled, steam-powered, white-painted sternwheeler that ferried passengers up and down the lake from 1914 until the mid-1930s. My sister and I never quite knew what to make of it, but it was picturesque and mysterious, and added to the holiday-carnival unreality of living there. Far to the east but unmistakably visible was Munson Mountain, a gentle, half-desert hill like all the others that surrounded us, except that on this one the proud citizens of Penticton had, at some distant point in the town’s past, painstakingly laid out thousands of white pebbles in gigantic letters to spell PENTICTON on its side—as if to proclaim, to everyone splashing in the water and sunning themselves on the beach miles below, that they were doing precisely the things for which this place was intended. All this was wonderful. Just don’t look back.
The principal reason for moving to the motel-house was that it was cheap. But it was also close to the site of my parents’ new business: a former garage in a semi-industrial part of town which my mother had convincingly renovated into a fitness studio. How my parents ever hit upon a fitness studio I do not know. There was a craze at the time, led by Jane Fonda’s workout books and videos. But my parents were not sporty. They were not even particularly healthy. My mother had quit smoking but my father had not, and while my mother was naturally small and slender she had no strength or definition to speak of. My father was positively overweight for much of my early childhood, and though he had slimmed down considerably by the early 1980s he was far from fit. And yet their fitness studio in a disused garage in the wrong part of town was a moderate success.
The entrance was completely unremarkable—a dingy two-storey beige commercial building with no signage or visual appeal, situated immediately next to a 7-Eleven and across the street from a Jeep dealership. The front door opened onto a dark corridor with one or two cheap wooden doors on either side giving access to small, dull offices—the kind an aspiring member of Parliament would rent for a month then abandon when his campaign failed. At the end of the corridor was the entrance to the fitness studio, again concealed behind an ugly door. But having made your way through the dreariness, the studio was a splendour. Unlike the rest of the building, the space was not divided into two storeys. Instead its ceiling was twenty feet high, a design that was probably intended to accommodate whatever light industry the building was originally designed for. The dimensions were simple: the space was an enormous empty box. There was no exercise equipment—no dumbbells, no Nautilus machines, no benches. Only a wide, empty dance floor with a wall of nine-feet-high mirrors on the west side. There were no windows, but the rear wall consisted of a large garage door letting onto the back alley. When opened, southern light would stream through, illuminating the floor, the mirrors and the disco ball my mother had hung from the ceiling. Between the entrance and the dance floor was a lounge of low benches decorated with colourful throw pillows and a steep, floating staircase leading to a small, tree-fort-like office tucked into the northeast corner of the studio. Looking out the glassless window my sister and I could watch the aerobics, kung fu and even breakdance classes below. If Star Wars is forever associated in my mind with Highland Place, and The Empire Strikes Back with Dallas, Texas, then the Base (as my mother named this new venture) is the place I most connect to Return of the Jedi.
*
The film I had been waiting three years to see was finally released on 23 May 1983. I watched Leonard Maltin’s enthusiastic review of it on Entertainment Tonight shortly before opening night. Leonard Maltin was all I knew about film criticism in 1983, and his stamp of approval was, in my mind, decisive: the new Star Wars film was great. Nine out of ten, if I remember correctly.
I saw Return of the Jedi at the Pen-Mar cinema either on opening night or shortly thereafter. The Pen-Mar was Penticton’s only movie theatre since the drive-in had shut down. (The Pen was for Penticton and the Mar was for Martin Street, or so I assume.) There was a murmur of anticipation as we queued for tickets and milled about the Pen-Mar’s small concession area, full as fire department regulations would allow, waiting for the doors to open. There were only two screens in the complex, and both were showing Jedi. While I remember these moments before seeing the film quite well, I draw a blank on most everything else. I cannot remember who I saw the film with. I cannot remember any immediate reactions I had to it. I loved Return of the Jedi and felt none of the ambivalence about it that I heard other Star Wars fans express many years later. Yet there may be something telling in the fact that my initial viewing of the film was my least memorable film-going experience of the three. But I say that with nearly thirty years of hindsight; though I do not specifically recall leaving the theatre raving about the best movie I had ever seen, I’m sure I did.
The marketing and merchandising of Jedi found an easy mark in me, as usual. By now I had small amounts of my own money—an allowance of $1 a week contributed by my grandparents and earnings from a paper route—to spend on Jedi toys and tie-ins. Action figures remained the focus of my attention. I collected nearly all the Jedi figures between 1983 and 1985, including the entirely pointless ones made for the sole purpose of swindling little Star Wars addicts like me out of their money three dollars at a time. I mean figures like Prune Face and Klaatu In Skiff Guard Outfit (as opposed to ordinary Klaatu—Kenner actually made two figures for a ‘character’ that had no dialogue in the film at all, and I was dumb enough to buy them both). On the whole, however, the quality of the Kenner Jedi figures was superior to anything the company had done before. Bib Fortuna, Lando Calrissian (Skiff Guard Disguise), Luke Skywalker (Jedi Knight Outfit) and Princess Leia Organa (In Combat Poncho) were especially well done. But Kenner showed little discretion in selecting characters from the film to make into figures; just about every character in Jedi, however minor, was given its toy counterpart. (One exception comes to mind—Mon Mothma. Why she was left out when General Nadine went in is hard to understand.)
I bought many of my Return of the Jedi action figures at the Bay, a department store chain that had a location directly across the street from the Pen-Mar. The Bay is a sort of Canadian institution. It was founded in 1670, under the magnificent name “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay”, as a means of exploiting the fur trade and expanding British possessions in North America. Well into the twentieth century, Hudson Bay Company trading posts and stores were the only commercial outlets to be found in many Canadian tow
ns. Despite this swashbuckling history, by 1983 the Bay was mostly just a department store, and a rather staid one at that. But they sold Star Wars toys, and every time my mother brought me shopping there I would climb the stairs to the third floor toy department in search of new releases.
In contrast to the permanence and mild dreariness of the Bay was the opening, at about this time, of Penticton’s first 7-Eleven convenience store. The arrival of a new American franchise causes a certain excitement in a small Canadian town even now, but this was especially so in the early 1980s. Two things made Penticton’s new 7-Eleven even more exciting for me. First, my parents’ fitness studio was only two doors down from it, giving me frequent opportunities to buy their hot dogs, Big Gulps and Slurpees. I exploited this familiarity with 7-Eleven’s products to good effect with my classmates at school, feigning nonchalance as I pointedly let it be known that I was a regular there. Second, 7-Eleven had a promotional deal with Return of the Jedi to offer Slurpees in a variety of Jedi-themed plastic cups. I collected them all, predictably. Even when that promotion ended, 7-Eleven continued to have Star Wars connections for me. The store had the Atari Star Wars arcade game in it for the entire summer of 1984. I spent hours playing it at 25 cents a pop. I became quite good, good enough that other kids in the store would crowd around to watch me if I was doing well. The admiration of other boys was novel and exhilarating. I imagined this was what it felt like to play hockey like John DeHart or soccer like Dave Sidhu.
Return of the Jedi is easily the least loved of the three original films. There is reason for this. The dialogue is noticeably inferior to Empire, and perhaps even to Star Wars. Han Solo in particular is given some pretty awful lines—not quite Holiday Special awful, but awful by any ordinary measure. Nevertheless I thoroughly enjoy Jedi even when I watch it today. The opening sequence, in which Vader arrives in a shuttle at the still-under-construction Death Star and is greeted by a visibly terrified commander, is impressive. Our first sight of Skywalker, choking Gamorrean guards with the same gesture Vader used in the first two films, nicely foreshadows the choice he must make in the film’s climax. The introduction of Ian McDiarmid as the Emperor is masterful—the character’s emergence from the background of the first two films for the grand finale works very well, due mostly to McDiarmid’s genuinely creepy performance. Similarly, the decision to bring Jabba the Hutt out of the shadows was a delight for fanatics like me who paid minute attention to those few passing references to him in Star Wars and Empire. Finally seeing Jabba on screen is one of the things that made Jedi so exciting—and why George Lucas was mistaken to add a computer-generated Jabba to the “special edition” version of Star Wars many years later. The build-up to the film’s climactic battle sequences, alternating between the frenetic space battle over Endor, the noisy melee on its surface below and the quiet, eerily uneventful interview between Skywalker and Palpatine on the Death Star, creates an oddly pleasurable sort of stress for the viewer. Return of the Jedi has its share of detractors, and I understand the arguments against it: the unoriginality of a second Death Star, the cloying cuteness of the Ewoks, the ignominious death of Boba Fett, the improbable pointlessness of Luke and Leia being siblings, and more. But none of this bothered me when I was ten, and none of it bothers me much now.
I saw Jedi in the theatre several times. The Pen-Mar ran ads in the Penticton Herald announcing that the film had been held over for a second week, then a third, and a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. Finally after eight weeks it exhausted its audience and was replaced by Mr. Mom or Staying Alive or Krull or some such thing. And that was it. The story was told, the trilogy was complete, Return of the Jedi had left town and George Lucas had said publicly he had no plans to make any more films in the series any time soon. Though it was not immediately apparent to me, given the continuing bombardment of Star-Wars-themed toys, junk food, video games, trading cards and novelty items of every kind, the spring of 1983 was the beginning of an end for me. Gradually I was starting my move away from Star Wars and towards other interests.
*
Star Wars did not fade quickly. The release of Jedi in May 1983 gave it momentum through Christmas and into the following year. Kenner helped somewhat by delaying the release of its Emperor and Wicket figures until 1984, thus artificially prolonging its audience’s enthusiasm. But even a film as successful as Return of the Jedi eventually leaves the theatres. And without the promise of future instalments, interest in the franchise began to decline. Not my interest—not by 1984 at any rate. But the market for Star Wars as a whole began to contract. I was keenly aware of this at the time. There were many signs: fewer television commercials for Kenner Star Wars toys; fewer of the toys themselves in the shops, and placed less prominently on the shelves than in the past; fewer pages devoted to Star Wars toys and merchandise in the Sears catalogue and other print advertisements; the disappearance of tie-ins at 7-Eleven and elsewhere; and an intangible aura of familiarity, bleeding into mild contempt, that increasingly hung over everything to do with Star Wars.
The clearest sign of decline, to my eleven-year-old eyes, was the rise of challengers, and ultimately successors, to Star Wars’s previously indisputable leadership of the boys’ toy and entertainment markets. Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe and Transformers were the three great rivals to Star Wars’s dominance, especially on the action figure front. By 1984, all three of these franchises had an enormous advantage: each was producing new content, be it television shows, comic books or just new toys. Star Wars, by contrast, was atrophying. It is no wonder that the boys at school, especially those in grades below me, were turning their attention to these things. None of them ever interested me in the slightest. On the contrary, I harboured a quiet resentment of them. I could see what they were doing. They were displacing, even replacing Star Wars. I would not participate in that. I stayed with Star Wars like a captain going down with his ship.
It was not only my sense of loyalty that turned me against these upstarts. They simply did not speak to me. I had never cared much for cars, so Transformers left me cold. I had a visceral distaste for He-Man—his comic-book muscularity and near-total nudity struck me as obscene, a prudery I likely inherited from my mother. Beyond these superficial objections stood the fact that none of these new crazes came with compelling stories. Star Wars was not about swords and spaceships and explosions. It was about things that could not easily be successfully imitated. There was a story behind it, a real story, not just a plot on which to drape special effects and merchandise like clothes on a hanger. Without a story, these would-be replacements of Star Wars were anaemic.
But it may be that I was judging them too hastily, for the truth is I never really gave them much of a try. The comic books and Saturday morning cartoons for G.I. Joe, Transformers and Masters of the Universe were all, ultimately, vehicles for the sale of toys, and by age eleven I was not really playing with toys anymore. I did not even play with the Star Wars toys I continued to ask for and buy. I still wanted them, but having acquired them I admired them briefly then filed them away with the rest of my plastic treasures, arranged neatly in their cases and boxes in my bedroom closet. I had gone from a child who played with Star Wars toys to a pre-pubescent who collected them.
Lucasfilm must have detected this shift in its audience’s key demographic, for by late 1984 it was beginning to generate Star Wars spin-offs for a younger, more lucrative market. George Lucas made, or allowed to be made, two television specials featuring the franchise’s most self-consciously cutesy creation, the Ewoks. The programs, The Ewok Adventure (1984) (later released in Europe as Caravan of Courage) and Ewoks: the Battle for Endor (1985), both featured children and Ewoks as the main characters, although Battle for Endor added the Quaker Oats man, Wilford Brimley. Lucasfilm again pitched to children in 1985 with two animated series, Star Wars: Ewoks and Star Wars: Droids, both of which were shown on Saturday mornings with no pretension of being anything but children’s programming. Despite my continued infatuation with Star
Wars, I paid little attention to these programs. I had looked forward to ABC’s airing of The Ewok Adventure on 25 November 1984 but was disappointed by what I saw. There were no Jedi, no stormtroopers, almost nothing to connect the show to what I knew of Star Wars except the Ewoks themselves. After that initial letdown, the cartoons and the second Ewok special failed to excite my interest. No one else seemed much interested either.
Star Wars was finally running out of steam. It had enjoyed an extraordinary run, but it was coming to an end. The television specials and cartoons were at best half-hearted efforts to keep the phenomenon alive, and were unfit for the task. No other efforts were mounted. Star Wars was dying off without great resistance from either its creators or its fans.
*
There remained one small corner of the Star Wars universe that endeavoured to keep the flame alive. Marvel Comics Group had begun publishing a monthly Star Wars comic book in spring 1977, breaking the film into a six-issue series. The first two instalments were prepared before the final edit of Star Wars was completed. The books’ writer and illustrator, who had not seen the film, relied on sketches, camera stills and early versions of the script to prepare their adaptation. This explains how these first two issues came to include scenes that did not make it into the final cut of the film, such as Luke’s conversation with Biggs Darklighter about joining the rebellion. It does not appear to explain, however, why Darth Vader’s helmet is green on the cover of the self-proclaimed “FABULOUS FIRST ISSUE”. The six Marvel Star Wars comics were, like all things Star Wars, hugely successful, so that there was never any serious question of whether to continue the comic after issue six. By the time Return of the Jedi was released, some 85 issues had appeared. The challenge for Marvel from May 1983 onwards was to keep telling a story in print which its creator had clearly brought to an end on film.
