Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek - Expanded Edition

by John Booth

  I don’t know that I ever did assemble a whole series of any of the Star Wars cards as a kid, although enough of my Empire cards survived until I reached a point as an adult where I was back into collecting, and I was able to piece together the red and blue series with some buys over the Internet. And when I did get them, I stacked them all in a pile and was surprised to find how my hands still held the muscle memory of cupping the cards in my left hand and thumbing them over into my right as my eyes flicked over each image. All I was missing was the gum.

  Proof of Purchase

  In fourth grade, our English teacher had us compose letters to authors, and I remember my friend Mike S. writing to Brian Daley about the book “Han Solo’s Revenge.”

  “How come,” Mike wrote, “on the cover, it looks like Han’s going to shoot Chewie?”

  I don’t think he ever got an answer.

  Along A Different Path:

  Taking Star Wars into Our Own Hands

  I have a copy of Marvel Comics’ Star Wars issue #5 framed on my wall. Classic example of artistic license on the cover: nothing like what you saw in the movie, but incredibly cool anyway. The Rebel Base hangar’s taking direct fire from the Death Star, these fat green lasers shattering walls into rubble; Chewbacca and Luke are charging toward the Millennium Falcon; Han’s waving his blaster over his head (Seriously: Why? It’s the DEATH. STAR.) and shouting, “It’s too late, kid! We’re finished!”

  Mounted next to this comic book is a yellowed drawing in pencil, crayon and magic marker. I can still remember working on this when I was six or seven, concentrating hard on the details and being disappointed that my art didn’t exactly measure up next to the comic’s. Blocky and balloon-headed, Luke, Han and Chewie are at the bottom like they’re in a police lineup. None of them have elbows or knees, and their legs look like moon boots. Above them hovers a stark white crayon Death Star criss-crossed by red marker lines and a dead-center circle that represents its planet-killing weapon. At least I got the fat green lasers right.

  I copied Luke’s dialogue straight from the Marvel cover – “Hurry CHeWBacca! We’re Being attaCKeD By the Death Star!” – but also gave Chewie a voice. He’s saying “gRRRRRR!” and because his word balloon is tall and carrot-shaped it looks like the kind of thing you’d use to illustrate a growling bear charging off a cliff.

  Han’s dialogue, though, had me pumped, because within his word balloon is my own craft at work: “There’s no Time KiD! we’re Doomed for sure!” The last four words are lettered like ice cream squished into the bottom of a cone.

  Compare and contrast, class:

  “It’s too late, kid! We’re finished!”

  “There’s no Time KiD! we’re Doomed for sure!”

  Now that’s a rewrite.

  Another drawing from about the same time has C-3PO and R2-D2 in what’s clearly supposed to be the Tatooine desert, but with a funky green and red Dr. Seussian plant thing growing on a cliff above them.

  See, from the very beginning, I wanted to put my own fingerprints on Star Wars.

  I associate a big part of this “make it our own” philosophy with my friend Jacob.

  Jake moved to our school district in second grade, I think. We were good buddies in third grade and best friends by fourth, which was the last year we went to school together because his dad worked in the lumber business and they moved to Virginia.

  So we met post-Star Wars, pre-Empire.

  I always thought Jake was a lucky sonofabitch because he had two grandmas who seemed to be in a perpetual race to see who could buy him more Star Wars guys. He was the only kid I know who had some of the giant action figures, and when Empire figures started coming out Jake was the first kid I knew who had some. The guy had two Yodas (one from each grandma) before I’d ever even seen the little green Jedi master in a store.

  Sometime in the 1980-81 school year, our English teacher, Mrs. Yoder, told us to partner up and write a story. I remember the exact phrasing of Jake’s idea: “The continuation of The Empire Strikes Back.” Too daunting for me, and we didn’t wind up doing it, but that desire to have some storytelling fun in George Lucas’ world was there.

  It was just such a damn fun place to play.

  Jake and I stayed in touch after he moved away the summer before fifth grade, and a couple years later, he came to Florida one spring break with me and my family.

  One of the best things about our Florida vacations was that my parents used to drive non-stop overnight from Ohio. Because I’m seven years older than my middle brother, Nick, I was allowed to bring a friend, and I loved staying up late into the night talking and listening to music on our boom boxes, falling asleep for an hour or two here and there, feeling the air outside change in temperature and taste.

  The year Jake came along, I’d brought a cassette tape of the read-along Empire Strikes Back storybook for some reason – I was too old for it, so maybe I had it for my little brothers – and on the drive home, Jake and I started messing around with it, putting pieces of paper over the recording-prevention notches on the cassette and adding our own yuks.

  I think it started with a joke about Emperor Ovaltine. (This was after Return of the Jedi, so we knew the Emperor’s name – Palpatine – by now.) That led us to the likes of Admiral Snackbar and Land O’Lakes Calrissian. And so we populated our parody, recorded piecemeal over the existing story of Empire.

  We began with a few simple phrase changes.

  “There is a great disturbance –” the creepy Emperor’s hologram intoned, and then you’d hear this click and rattle while we paused the tape and hit “record,” and then Jake’s impression of the Emperor finished with “– in the plumbing system.”

  My turn. Vader: “He will join us –” clickclickrattle “– or be flushed, my master.” (Yeah, we middle school boys always went for the highbrow humor.) Later on, Han’s Cloud City carbon freeze became immersion in a vat of bubble gum.

  Eventually, these gags just descended into total chaos as we recorded over bigger and bigger chunks of the original story recording. By the time R2-D2 was attacking C-3PO for abandoning the script to pitch his new breakfast cereal, we were in freaking hysterics, clutching our guts, stifling laughter during the tapings, bursting into howls with tears running down our faces as soon as we hit the “stop” button. Jake peed his pants a little bit he was cracking up so hard, and of course, I had to have my little brother announce it into the tape recorder, earning me a not-too-hard punch in the mouth and a bit of a bloody lip from Jake, even though we were both still laughing.

  That tape got lost somewhere over the years, but I know it never got erased.

  As much as we loved Star Wars, we still loved making fun of it.

  Jake moved to Cincinnati after being in Virginia for a couple years, and I remember visiting him for a week one summer. Those shiny silver paint pens were popular at the time, and we did a vandalism number on his Jedi storybook, adding the usual moustaches and goatees and devils’ horns and stuff like that.

  When I was in middle school, I fished our family’s old 8mm movie camera out of the crawlspace, shelled out my allowance for batteries and a light bulb and tried to make my own Star Wars films.

  One winter, I took it outside in the snow, dug a makeshift Death Star trench – I added twists and turns to make it, you know, more exciting – and then filmed my own point-of-view attack run, never thinking that, duh, I was holding the camera by its handle – in other words, upside down.

  I was a little more successful with the flick I made using my little brothers’ Scout Walker. I managed to do some fairly steady stop-motion animation of the AT-ST’s head rotating back and forth, its side guns twitching up and down, and then I had my brother Adam work its legs, stomping them up and down while I shot a close-up. Then we stop-motioned the top hatch opening and a Scout Trooper emerging (okay, he didn’t so much “emerge” as he popped into existence from one frame to the next) and then – gasp! – quick cut to a skyward shot and a streaking meteor
that was, in actuality, a lava rock my parents had brought me back from their 15th anniversary trip to Hawaii. And again, not so much streaking against the sky as being dropped by my brother with my textured white ceiling in the background.

  Poor trooper never saw it coming. Caught it on the noggin, and… as the black haze closed in on his battle-scarred mind, he barely felt his walker toppling, its legs crumpling, never to stride into war again.

  Aaaaaaaaand – scene.

  The four-minute film reel containing this 30- or 40-second masterpiece survived long enough to make it onto a DVD we compiled as a Christmas present for Mom a couple decades later. Holding up the cardboard sign labeled “Assistant: Adam Booth,” – I’d taken top billing as director and cameraman, naturally – my youngest brother looks like he’s squinting into binary suns, the lamp on the movie camera’s so freaking bright. We actually melted a tennis-ball-sized circle of carpet during filming when I accidentally put the bulb housing on the floor after a shot.

  Another time, I set up an even more complex and special-effects-driven scene in the basement, though I didn’t bother filming it.

  Using some straws taped to the underside of the Jedi-era orange-brown AST-5 mini-rig and a couple pieces of string stretched from the ceiling near one end of the basement to a spot near the floor at the other end, I set up a glide path for our heroic pilot. (Playing “Heroic Pilot” in tonight’s production is “X-Wing Luke,” whose previous credits include Battle of the Lunchbox and Kitchen Death Run II.)

  Our basement had one of those suspended ceilings made of foam tiles supported by a metal framework. (Once, when my little brothers were going through a phase collecting these StarCom toys that all had magnets in them, my buddy Aaron and I stuck every one of their action figures and spaceships to the metal ceiling bars. It looked like one of those old futuristic science paintings with astronauts walking upside down next to their rockets parked on spaceports in zero-G.) These ceiling supports came in handy during Heroic Pilot’s descent, because they gave me places to anchor the lengths of sewing thread I tied, respectively, to the ship’s detachable cockpit and to our hero himself.

  At the lower end of the flight path, I set up a couple pillows to serve as a gun emplacement for my Death Star’s turret cannon. (Missing its entire front end, this was the last remaining piece of that once-glorious playset. Space war is hell.)

  So, I take the ship up to the highest point of its flight path, and the stage is set: Our hero, under heavy Imperial fire from the hidden nest of laser cannons, finds his ship has taken one shot too many and is going down. (Release the AST-5, and it starts its dive, hidden straws slipping smoothly over the string.)

  Feverishly wrestling with the controls, Heroic Pilot makes a final adjustment before punching the eject button, sending the overhead glass whipping into the atmosphere, lost in the roar of his wake. (The thread tied to the cockpit tightens and yanks the plastic piece free of the ship, which continues its descent.)

  Flicking his eyes downward, he squints into the hail of lasers from the rapidly-nearing turret before muttering a quick curse. He pulls one more lever and rockets from his ship as the boosters fire beneath him. (Thread tied to Heroic Pilot tightens, pulling him free of the doomed fighter.)

  Inside the turret, two Imperial gunners realize, too late, that they’ve missed both their target and their chance for survival as the AST-5 plunges toward them. (Ship continues on its final run, crashing into the cannon and knocking it from the pillows.)

  Our hero smiles grimly at the expanding fireball below, mutters a last goodbye to his ship, and scans the terrain for a place to land.

  Aaaaaaaaand – scene.

  Remember when I mentioned Jake’s idea from fourth grade about writing a follow-up to Empire? Well, in late middle school or early high school, my buddy Aaron and I actually did dive pretty far into a post-Return of the Jedi project we called Episode VII: The Emperor. Aaron had a basic story idea to start things rolling, and I added my own ideas, and pretty soon, I was actually working on a screenplay and he had done some storyboards for it. We even had the opening crawl written. What we planned to do with all this, we had no idea, but it was an absolute blast. This is what I was working on when I’d shut myself in the walk-in closet with my boom box and mom’s typewriter, Star Wars stuff on the walls and shelves around me.

  We’d created a very cool scene, at least in our minds, opening our sequel with that climactic moment from Jedi, but showing the Emperor’s fall from his point of view. Then we cut to the camera falling alongside him. (Yes, I swear, we thought all this out.) As he plunges, he tosses some of that Force Lightning from his hands and uses it to stop his fall by pushing it out against the walls. Sweat dripping into his eyes, he looks up toward the distant edge of the chasm … and the mothereffer smiles. Smiles and then, with a huge effort, brings his hands together in an explosion of Force Energy and disappears.

  We kept all our notes and sketches and typed pages in a huge three-ring binder. It’s long gone, and I’d trade my Blue Snaggletooth in a heartbeat if I could flip through those pages again.

  Here’s what I remember:

  After that opening scene, we’re off to the wedding preparations of Han and Leia, where everything’s peachy except Luke’s pretty messed up in the head and he bolts the festivities early to head to Dagobah to meditate on the Force.

  We next see Palpatine in an underground throne room on a small, barren moon (Vadox? Vladox maybe?) that he’s making over into yet another Death Star, since the first two worked out so well. Close up on his eyes, and then we see him snap his fingers. Across the galaxy, former stormtroopers drinking sullenly in cantinas or working in gritty underworld settings suddenly stop and cock their heads, as if they’ve heard … a call.

  So, Emperor’s summoned an army and he raids the Good Guys’ base during the Han/Leia wedding, and he kidnaps Leia and totally fries Han with a hefty dose of lightning. I vividly remember two of Aaron’s sketched storyboards from this battle: One of the Emperor looking over his shoulder as a blaster bolt from Han bounces off his cloak, and one of Chewie standing, arms to the sky and howling, Han lying motionless at his feet. Beneath this, Aaron had written, “One shot, the end of a hero. Sorry, John.”

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch – that is, Dagobah – Luke’s wandered into a funny place: a clearing of black sand with no living things inside its border. At the center is a black crystal globe on a pedestal. The glass is partially encased by fingers of stone. (True story: Years and years later, Aaron became a toy designer and worked on some comic book properties and related films. And in one of those movies, there’s a snow globe prop that has this same kind of general look to it, because my old buddy Aaron designed it.) So this black ball thing, we decided, is the physical manifestation of the galaxy’s Dark Side energy. And it’s on Dagobah because as we all know (especially by now, but we had some idea even then, apparently), the Force loves its balance. So, ultimate good guy Yoda lives on the same planet as this pulsating Heart of Darkness.

  Well, Luke gets word that things have gone to shit back home, so he rockets back for Han’s funeral, and guess what he’s learned in his meditations? Han, my friends, is only, as Miracle Max might say, Mostly Dead. Luke’s able to bring him back with some digging-deep Light Side action, but it comes at a price, right? Because as he’s tapping all this good karma, that ball back on Dagobah is buzzing. And when Han comes back to life, that thing friggin’ explodes. It’s all about the balance – you want the good stuff, you’ve got to deal with the bad stuff, and what was born out of that crystal was the darkest of dark knights: an empty Vader suit, walking around on its own, fueled by nothing but pure Dark Side badassedness.

  It sounds cheesy as hell, I guess, but there’s a lot in Star Wars that’s cheesier. (Maybe I was tapping into this bizarre memory: When I was littler, someone had gotten me a big Darth Vader model kit with the glow-in-the-dark lightsaber and eyes, and his head had broken off and, I kid you not, rolled into the hole in our b
asement where the sump pump drained. That thing floated in there for awhile, and every so often I’d move the hole’s cover aside and see Vader’s pale greenish-white eyes and get the willies.)

  Beyond all that, I can’t remember much. I know Han and Luke wind up leading a raid on Vadox/Vladox and rescuing Leia, and that our ultimately super-cool ending was to have The Emperor get killed by none other than that phantom Vader. All about the balance, after all.

  And yet, after some thought, Aaron and I ran into this problem: Vader sacrificed himself to save Luke and turn away from the Dark Side. If the Emperor’s not dead, it means that sacrifice was for nothing. It bugged us. (And it still bugged me in the early 1990s when a reborn Emperor was the villain in the Dark Empire comics, even though that series helped re-ignite interest in the Star Wars universe.)

  Still, in a weird way, it was fun for Aaron and I to see, even years later, that we hadn’t been alone in some of our notions, and that we weren’t the only ones who’d been thinking about putting our fingerprints on the saga.

  Proof of Purchase

  Long before Lego started selling Star Wars kits, I built my own Star Destroyer out of the things. Green and red and white and blue and with a single clear brick to serve as the bridge, it bristled with blocky laser cannons and had nothing on it that looked remotely pointy or menacing. But it was my Star Destroyer, dammit.

  There is Another:

  The Empire Era

  The Empire Strikes Back is a special movie.

  From a strictly cinematic standpoint, it’s the best Star Wars flick in the bunch: It’s a visual stunner, the script’s genius, and the plot and its cliffhangers rock.