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

by John Booth

  Almost thirty years later, I was watching a DVD made from our old home movies, and I rediscovered that actual moment: Me clutching my pack of Empire paintings in our green-carpeted living room, jumping up to hug Uncle Rob, who, naturally, earned himself a permanent spot on my Cool List.

  Since it was the peak of Empire’s reign, and my little brothers would be the beneficiaries of the Ewok-laden Jedi holiday season, that was the last real Star Wars Christmas I had.

  Proof of Purchase

  In one of my middle school classes, we were having a discussion that involved everyone naming a famous person they admired. I picked Harrison Ford – duh, Indiana Jones AND Han Solo? This got me a dramatic sigh and an eye-roll from this girl Beth, who knew I was a Star Wars fan.

  Who’d she pick?

  Carrie Fisher.

  Size Matters Not:

  Star Wars on the Small Screen

  For all the things that make Star Wars a truly big-screen experience, for first-generation fans, there was something special about seeing its spectacle on the television in the living room. There were no videotapes or DVDs or incessant cable channel showings. For years, we settled for bits and pieces of the movie caught in commercials or “Making of…” shows.

  You saw Star Wars in a movie theater or you didn’t see it at all.

  The first Star Wars-related program I remember seeing on television was a science fiction special that was airing, I think, on PBS. The narrator was talking about visual effects in movies, and said something about how 2001: A Space Odyssey had set a new standard that put things like the old Flash Gordon-type shows to shame. “Then,” I remember him saying, “in 1977, George Lucas’ Star Wars…” and something about a wholly new special effects experience, and suddenly the Death Star dogfight was on the television screen right in front of my face.

  I was sitting on a footstool in my living room and feeling that roller-coaster swooping in my belly during the point-of-view shots of fighters diving into the trench and I swear I could hear the lasers sizzling past my ears and my heart was racing. (I tried to recapture that feeling once by running around the house like an X-Wing, with my hands positioned like horse blinders on either side of my eyes, then “diving” towards a photo of the Death Star trench in my Star Wars storybook. Not quite the same effect.)

  I absolutely loved when stuff like that was on TV, especially the Star Wars-specific shows like “SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back,” and “From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga.” I’ve seen the latter a lot over the years – I wore out two VHS copies of it – but I haven’t seen “SPFX” since it aired back in 1980 or ’81.

  Star Wars even playing a passing role on another show was worth getting geeked up about, as in the case of Mark Hamill guest starring on “The Muppet Show,” or seeing a Star Wars parody showcase showdown on “The Price is Right.”

  “The Star Wars Holiday Special” aired on my eighth birthday. (Not that I remember that specifically – it’s just something I’ve learned in the years since.) I have only a fleeting recollection of the show taking place on the Wookiee home planet and there being an oddly uncool cantina scene. I’ve never watched it again, although I have seen the cartoon clip that introduced Boba Fett, which is kind of neat, and the bizarre Jefferson Starship music video that was part of the show, which is just terrible.

  I can specifically remember the first time I saw Star Wars, the actual movie itself, on television, because it was the first time anyone saw Star Wars on broadcast television. It was early 1984, so I was 13 years old. I was on vacation in Vermont with my friend Trevor and his mom and stepdad, and we were staying in a condo at Killington.

  And Star Wars being on TV was a big freaking deal. The commercial breaks were bracketed by short clips of interviews with the movie’s cast and crew. As excited as I was about it in the weeks leading up to it, being on a ski trip, I’d forgotten all about it and we missed the beginning. Still, Trevor was a fan, too, so we camped ourselves on the fold-out couch beneath the shelf-mounted television set and had Coke and snacks and watched the best movie ever for the billionth time.

  Star Wars on television figured into another ski trip years later when I was in high school. Aaron and I were at Seven Springs in Pennsylvania on a youth ski trip and the movie was on during our first night there. (Dinner had been so bad that we and our two roommates had a pizza delivered to our motel room and thought we were clever. The pizza guy showed up in a pie-laden truck and an order for just about every room in the place.) So we watched Star Wars and ate pizza, and Aaron and I got into an argument during the closing credits because I thought they’d rewritten the closing music slightly in order to cut away to a commercial. Aaron insisted they’d broken off at just the right beat within the existing score.

  Watching it later – weeks or months, maybe – I realized he was right.

  When Return of the Jedi came out, I set our family’s boom box in front of the television so I could tape record of one of the movie trailers. (I did the same thing to make my first mix tapes, recording videos off MTV. To this day, if I hear Rush’s “Distant Early Warning,” right after Geddy Lee’s cry of “Absalom! Absalom!,” my mind inserts the sound of me saying “hi” to my mom as she came into the room.)

  Two things happened sometime in my teenage years that forever changed the way I watched Star Wars: First, my family got cable. Then we got a VCR.

  My first “watch-whenever-I-want” Star Wars collection was a single VHS tape with the movies recorded in the wrong order: Star Wars, then Jedi, then Empire. This got me by until I was in college and shelled out fifty dollars – holy crap, FIFTY DOLLARS – for the set’s original boxed videocassette release.

  I rarely sit down solely to watch the Star Wars movies anymore, though I go through the saga a couple times a year, popping the DVDs in while I’m doing stuff around the house or when I just want to chill and maybe doze a bit. The funny thing is, if I’m flipping through channels and I see one of the movies is airing, something stirs in me and I get a tiny leftover adrenaline rush from the years when catching Star Wars on television was a treasured rarity. I usually wind up watching at least a few minutes.

  When Lucas was prepping to put the first trilogy back on the big screen under the Special Edition banners, the first trailer opened with a shot of a television and a single-speaker voice-over saying, “For an entire generation, people have experienced Star Wars the only way it’s been possible: on the TV screen.”

  It hasn’t always been a bad thing.

  Proof of Purchase

  Remember the final duel in Return of the Jedi, when Luke lets his anger get the best of him, and he just wails on Vader and then cuts his hand off, and then looks at his own black-gloved hand with the realization of what he could become? I’d forgotten that he’d put that glove on after getting shot in the hand on Tatooine, and the first time I saw the movie, I thought somehow that Vader’s limb had actually grown onto Luke’s arm, an actual physical transformation instead of the metaphor that was suggested.

  What You Take With You:

  Best Opening Night Ever

  My movie-going experiences peaked when I was twelve years old.

  Notice I’m not saying that when my mom and dad and brothers and my friend Mike S. and I went to Return of the Jedi on opening night that I saw the best movie ever. (Although if you’d asked me right after, I’d have probably said it was.)

  I’m just saying that as an overall movie-going experience, seeing Jedi on May 25, 1983 makes an awfully damn convincing case for my top spot. (This is scored using a complicated formula of three years of anticipation plus best friend coming along plus pre-movie meal and line-waiting in the mall plus insanely-excited crowd multiplied by being a pre-teen Star Wars nutcase.)

  First of all, you’ve got to remember the build-up: Three interminably long years before, we’d all staggered out of theaters having been slapped with the most insane cliffhanger ever – Han Solo frozen in carbonite and Luke wondering if Darth Vader’s his dad.


  In the meantime, I’d filled the gaps as best I could: Between 1980 and 1983 is when I read the first two of Brian Daley’s Star Wars novels, “Han Solo’s Revenge” and “Han Solo at Stars’ End.” I read them in the wrong order, and for some reason, I don’t think I read “Han Solo and the Lost Legacy” until several years later.

  There was also “The Jedi Master’s Quizbook,” which came out in 1982. I learned about it when they profiled the 11-year-old author on the TV show “That’s Incredible.” A couple days after it aired, Dad took me to the Waldenbooks at Belden Village and I remember feeling silly asking the clerk if they had the book, like they would immediately know that I had just seen it on television. (I also remember thinking some of the trivia questions in the book weren’t exactly fair, like the ones that asked when all the Star Wars actors’ birthdays were.)

  A lot went on between third and sixth grade, mostly forming a John Hughes-worthy blueprint for dorkdom: I got glasses, watched my best friend move away, learned to play the clarinet (never very well), co-wrote my first long story (15 pages! With pictures!), finally read all the way through “The Lord of the Rings,” started noticing girls for real, started being ignored by girls for real, and made it to a regional spelling bee.

  In a weird way, I now kind of realize that having been the perfect age – six – when Star Wars came out, I was also at the perfect age for the saga to be closing. By spring of sixth grade, I was pretty much too old for Kenner’s toys, and let’s face it: The prospect of keeping up a teenage Star Wars fan-face in the social meat-grinder of junior high? No thanks.

  At the same time, though, I was still a 12-year-old boy, so lightsabers and spacehips and stormtroopers remained fun ideas, and if you’re going to put Princess Leia in a metal bikini: Again, perfect age for it.

  I don’t remember what movie I went to see at the Gold Circle Cinemas the night I first saw the Return of the Jedi trailer. Heck, I can’t even honestly remember if I saw the fabled original Revenge of the Jedi version. I do remember telling all my friends about it (we were almost all still Star Wars fans on some level, though I feel confident in saying nobody had it as bad as I did), and specifically talking about the shot of Chewbacca picking up a stormtrooper and throwing him backwards into another trooper, which seemed to me the very definition of “awesome.”

  So now it’s late May 1983, and Jedi is set to open.

  On a freaking Wednesday night.

  Arggh! That’s a school night, George! What are you thinking?! I can’t go to see a movie on a school night! You’re killing me!

  Did I ask my parents a few days beforehand? I honestly don’t know. If I did, they hadn’t given me a concrete answer, because otherwise I’d remember bragging at school about going.

  I got home from school around 3:30, and the pestering began. “Can we, Mom? Dad? Please? Can Mike” – this would be Mike S. – “come along if we go? CanweCanweCanwe?”

  Sweet God, they said YES! Mom, Dad, my little brothers Nick and Adam and I piled into our Ford conversion van, drove up to Hartville and picked up Mike and then headed down to Canton to Mellett Mall.

  I seem to think we got to the mall around 5 o’clock for something like an 8 o’clock showing.

  Pulling into the parking lot, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Mellett Mall’s Twin Cinemas’ only entrance was from inside the shopping center, so the giant movie marquee outside hung on a big plain brown brick wall. No flashing lights, no mass of fans gathering in front of the theater. Just Return of the Jedi in big plastic, all-capital letters. Remembering what it was like to see that sign still tightens my chest a little bit.

  When we went inside it was quickly clear this was not an ordinary night at the movies. A line, two and three people wide, led from the theater’s entrance out past the novelty T-shirt shop next door, past Casual Corner and the Little Professor Bookstore and on down the concourse toward Montgomery Ward. I’d never seen a line like this outside of Cedar Point or Disney World.

  And there was an energy to it. Not the kind like we saw in the prequel era, when people came out in costumes and you’d see fully-armored Stormtroopers and robed Jedi and maybe a Boba Fett or four, but just an anticipatory thrill, everybody talking and excited and ready to find out how this whole thing was going to end up. (Did we know it was going to be the wrap-up to the saga? I can’t imagine otherwise, but then, I can’t exactly recall thinking that I was going to see the last Star Wars movie ever, either.)

  So, here we were. Hyper. Frantic. Psyched.

  And facing a three-hour wait until showtime.

  No advance ticket sales here, this was good old-fashioned get in line, tickets go on sale maybe an hour, tops, before a showing, wait your turn and have a friend hold your spot if you have to pee.

  Mom, Dad, Nick, Adam, Mike and I parked ourselves at the end. (People piled in behind us pretty steadily, so we weren’t at the end long.) Mike and I ran up to the front of the line to look at the movie posters and the accompanying photos in their lit-up glass frame, pointing and wondering and yammering about how cool this was and how great it was to be there.

  We ate dinner in two shifts: Clutching some money from Mom and Dad, we ran down to the hot dog shop – it might have been called “Carousel” – and the Orange Julius next door. (That was, I’m pretty sure, all the food choices Mellett Mall had to offer. Food courts wouldn’t reach Canton for another few years.) It felt neat, being 12 years old and kind of on our own. Sure, my family was right down the mall, but these were pre-cell phone days, and there was a sort of freedom in the air as we ordered our own food, found a place to sit, talking and joking while we ate our hot dogs and Orange Julius.

  Then we held the spot in line when Mom and Dad took my little brothers for dinner.

  It’s funny how much of the next few hours I don’t remember from that May evening in 1983.

  I don’t remember the line eventually creeping forward, or the moment our tickets came spitting up through the little slot in the counter, or finding our seats, or the lights going down, or the previews.

  I don’t remember the tense anticipation brought on by the 20th Century Fox fanfare or the chills on the back of my neck at the blast of sound when the Star Wars logo slammed onto the screen.

  What I really remember is a feeling.

  I’ve never seen a movie in an atmosphere like that again. Packed houses on opening nights with hardcore fans, sure, but never again like this one.

  We were there.

  All of us were there in the Tatooine desert, screaming and whooping when Artoo launched Luke’s lightsaber through the hot, wavering air. We were in the cramped, firelit hut when Yoda confirmed Vader’s secret. Yes, we even joined the Ewoks’ battle cries, feeling the ground shake under the thundering fall of an Imperial Scout Walker.

  God, I was so excited to go to school the next day, because this time, it was me who’d gotten to go see the next Star Wars movie first, and I couldn’t wait to talk about it and see if anyone else had been to opening night. Funny thing is, nobody had. Not only that, nobody seemed as caught up in the whole thing, at least, not the way they’d been a couple years before about Empire. Guess that’s what three years, especially those between third and sixth grade, will do.

  Somewhere in the years after Jedi, it became cool to sell the movie short, mostly because of the Ewoks, but also because of the whole Luke/Leia-brother/sister coincidence, and the flip dialogue and the re-hashing of the Death Star battle. And even though a lot of us first-generation fans recognize those things, I’d bet very few of us felt that way right after seeing it. Weakest of the original trilogy? No doubt – but I don’t remember a single person coming out of that theater saying the Ewoks sucked or that they felt ripped off or that Lucas had gotten lazy.

  Because what I remember most vividly about that night is the moment of triumph when Vader is turned at the last, swooping the Emperor up in those armored arms as John Williams’ score assaulted our ears. A wave of awestruck adrenaline rushed through
the theater, and the audience actually stood in unison and cheered, caught up in the climax. I’ve never seen that happen at any other movie screening.

  That’s my favorite movie scene ever. Even a quarter-century and a thousand watches later, it still manages to spark whatever cells hold the faintly-vibrating echoes of that night. For the shortest of blinks, things around me go dark, and I taste hot dogs and Orange Julius and popcorn and Coke and then my throat and guts do a Jell-O shiver and Mom and Dad and Nick and Adam and Mike are there beside me and we’re in a crowd that’s wide-eyed and applauding and grinning in the movie screen’s flicker.

  It always passes more quickly than I hope, but as long as those seconds still happen, somewhere I still get to be twelve.

  Proof of Purchase

  Mom bought me the Return of the Jedi comic paperback at Click’s one afternoon not long after the movie came out. I had started reading it at the magazine racks by the checkout lanes and dove back into it as soon as we were in the car.

  We only lived about 10 minutes from the store, but by the time we got home, I was already about halfway into the book, and I had this faint feeling of sadness that I hadn’t slowed down to enjoy it more.

  ---

  Although I’d already seen Return of the Jedi, I was visiting Jake in the summer of 1983 the first time he went to see it. This was after he’d moved away, remember, and it was great being in the theater with my Star Wars pal again, three years after the late-for-Empire afternoon. When Lando wheeled the Falcon over the Death Star’s surface and dove into its maze of passages, I remember leaning over and saying to Jake, “Awww, yeah – one more time!”

  It’s Not My Fault

  This essay began as an ever-growing list on a yellow legal pad under the header “Stuff I Watched Because of Star Wars.”