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

by John Booth

  I was a thousand miles from That Girl, sleeping in the house where I grew up, looking out at the rows of towering pine trees Dad and I planted when I was about seven, and the tree fort on stilts we built with Rick and his dad.

  And I felt like the real me for the first time in a long, long while.

  I think my brothers and a couple of their friends were outside shooting hoops in the driveway.

  After a few minutes, Dad turned to me and said, “Go play.”

  He died late one morning while I was out running errands.

  My old friend Aaron came over. That night, he and my brothers and I watched the series finale of “The Wonder Years.”

  Despite my asking her to stay in Florida, That Girl came up for the funeral and managed to make things even shittier than they already were – a challenge, no doubt, but That Girl, she was more than up for it. Friends I thought I’d lost through my own bullheaded stupidity came to Dad’s funeral, and I wanted to cry hard because even though I’d behaved beyond badly, they were here and God, I’d missed them.

  But with That Girl back in town, the old me shriveled up to a husk and hid again, and the two of us left and went back to Orlando a day or two later.

  Life went on.

  We bought a computer at Sears, which I used mostly to play the X-Wing game, losing myself in the cockpit of a cheap barstool sitting at our kitchen counter.

  The Star Wars Radio Drama was released, and I was an immediate fan for life.

  Another store that had become one of my regular stops hosted Dave Prowse, the original guy in the Darth Vader suit, for an autograph signing one afternoon. (This was well before Star Wars celebs were making regular appearances anywhere. He drove up in his own rental car, got out his own box of stuff and walked in just like a regular guy.) Five bucks got me his signature on a trading card and a photo of us sitting side-by-side at the card table where he was signing. It was just about the coolest thing ever, and I even managed to wear my Imperial Walker shirt.

  I bought a longbox for my comic books and customized it into a Star Wars vault. I walked to the nearby branch of the Orange County Public Library one day with a handful of change and a stack of Star Wars comics, book covers, record sleeves and other stuff and spent a while making black-and-white copies. At home, with magic markers, I added highlights to some of the images, then glued them all over the comic box and the lid and covered it all with contact paper.

  I had one friend during this time whom I refused to let That Girl push me into excising from my life. She still lived in Ohio, but in late summer, 1993, she was in Florida to visit some friends she’d worked with one semester at Disney – she had sent me a C-3PO shirt my sophomore year of college because she said I used to remind her of him – and we spent a day together, That Girl-free. She stopped by the apartment and I remember showing her my closet-and-dresser-top display of Star Wars stuff and the lid to the comic box, which was all I had done at the time. It made her smile.

  I hold tight to the memory of standing in the back room of that apartment, white walls and burgundy carpet and a sliding glass door letting sunlight pour in, along with the rest of that afternoon, because she died less than a year later, and that day was the last time I saw her alive.

  The comic box has proven durable: It saw the end of the Dark Times, two apartments, a storage unit, a duplex, and three houses, and it still sits here beside my desk.

  In the last months of that year, I finally broke up with That Girl and she moved out, and I blinked a lot as the world slowly brightened.

  I had gotten a second job working as a tour guide at the Disney-MGM Studios, so I got to spend a lot of spare time hanging around Walt Disney World and riding Star Tours a ridiculous number of times. (I had a scheme to steal one of those orange flight suit Star Tours uniforms once, but never had the guts to pull it off, even though it totally would have worked.) The gift shop at the end of the ride sold tons of Star Wars loot, and during a weekend when cast members – this is how Disney refers to employees – got an extra discount on top of our normal one, I picked up a long-coveted three-volume signed and hardbound set of the complete Star Wars comic strips that Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson had done for newspapers back in the ’80s.

  And that November, I met Jenn, the girl I’d marry a little more than three years later. I was working the grill at yet another McDonald’s and she was an insanely cute manager running the back drive-thru window. Our first just-as-friends date was a dollar-theater showing of Jurassic Park on 15-minutes’ notice, and even though we didn’t so much as hold hands that night, the Dark Times officially came to a close.

  They were only two years, but even almost two decades later I still feel like I’m ripping off a scab when I remember how I treated my friends and family. When you’re in your early twenties, it seems like every choice you make is an amplified earsplitting shout, every emotion a spiked lightning bolt, every tenuous bond a grip that will gash and scar when broken. Only later do you realize how quiet everything was to the rest of the world.

  Everybody’s got their Dagobah cave, I suppose.

  Instead of seeing my face in Vader’s helmet, I ran into That Girl in an Imperial Walker shirt.

  The Future, the Past, and Old Friends:

  The Special Editions

  SWSE.mov.

  That’s the file, and it’s taking for-freaking-EVER to download.

  It’s late 1996, and I’m sitting in the office/toy room of the two-bedroom apartment in Altamonte Springs, Florida, where Jenn and I live. My IBM PS/2 and its 486 processor and my newly-self-installed 24,800 baud modem are rattling and clanking their way through this then-massive two-megabyte download.

  While waiting, I have cooked and eaten dinner and cleaned up and this thing is still loading.

  It’s dark outside, and Jenn’s at work until 9 o’clock tonight.

  From the three shelves mounted on the wall brackets above one end of my “computer desk” – it’s a six-foot work table from Home Depot – a few dozen old and new Star Wars guys and ships keep me company.

  Whirrrr. Whirrrrrrrrrrbuzzwhirr.

  It finishes. I close up Netscape and open QuickTime. My hands are shaking at the keyboard.

  Within the small frame: darkness, unblemished.

  Then the soft but powerful strains of a score, familiar and haunting, and there is a tightening in my chest. A television appears in the movie player, a tiny, boxed-in Star Destroyer chasing a still-smaller Rebel Blockade Runner, and a voice-over, tinny and pinched like water from a kinked hose reminds me that it’s been an awfully long time since anyone’s seen Star Wars anyplace besides television.

  My entire body is goosebumps and my scalp is tingling and tense, and OhMyGodThisIsSoFreakingAWESOME, and then the music explodes and an X-Wing soars out of the television screen and all the way into the camera’s point of view and the scene fills the frame and I think I just peed my pants.

  Two minutes later, I watch it again. And again. And amen-freaking-again.

  And when Jenn gets home, I’m pestering her to watch it the second she’s in the door.

  Because Star Wars is coming back to the big screen.

  Hell, yes, I was excited. That little blurred and blocky movie file was adrenaline joy and hypertastic whoopage like nothing I’d known in years. I watched it daily for weeks.

  Think of it: Star Wars. In a movie theater.

  I don’t care how many times you’ve seen it or how big your TV is or how ear-rippingly impressive your home sound system is, nothing touches Star Wars on the big screen. The darkness of a massive theater is somehow deepened by the projected blackness of space, then gingerly touched by the blue glowing words “A long time ago…” and then shattered by the sunburst of John Williams’ opening Star Wars trumpets.

  And it was coming back.

  The glimpses we got of the computer-generated additions were, at the time, cool. (We’ll nitpick them later. For now, we’re still too giddy.) Seeing Jabba – even that goofy-looking vers
ion – talking with Han in Docking Bay 94 was neat because it felt like a nod to all us die-hards who remembered that scene from the novel and the comics. Newly-packed streets of Mos Eisley? Sweet. Sharper X-Wings in a camera flyby? Awe. Some.

  My friend Mindé, who I used to work with at Disney’s Backstage Studio Tour, had a second job working in a local strip mall movieplex, and when the Star Wars Special Edition teaser hit, she let me know what film it was attached to so we could go see it. And that’s how I lost two hours of my life watching Space Jam. (It wasn’t a solid two hours, at least: Halfway through the movie, when the next Space Jam was starting in the theater next door, we ducked out to go watch the Star Wars trailer again.)

  Rumor was, after a time, that the trailer would be on the Independence Day videocassette when it came out. It wasn’t.

  The hype over the Special Editions built as January 1997 got closer.

  By this time, I was working in the composing room of The Orlando Sentinel newspaper, and I watched the Arts & Entertainment pages religiously for updates on the project. When they ran a section-front article on the revamped trilogy, I asked for an extra printout of the page and its full-color overlay. I pulled extra copies of the ads we were pasting on the pages and took them home. Still have them, too.

  Mindé got me one of the big teaser posters for the trilogy – the double-sided kind made to be displayed in a backlit frame – that had the ‘awwww, yeah’-inducing tagline: “Three Reasons Why They Build Movie Theatres.”

  We ordered our opening night tickets for Star Wars about a month ahead of time, I think. About six or eight of us met up to see it at Downtown Disney, home of what were then the biggest and loudest movie theaters in central Florida.

  The place was packed. I thought of Jedi opening night, except this time, there were handfuls of people in Stormtrooper armor and Jedi robes, and at least one paunchy Trekkie in a mustard-yellow Starfleet uniform.

  The lights dimmed, and I squeezed my wife’s hand, and then … we were watching Star Wars.

  It was awfully loud, I remember, and Jenn says that Kelsey, still more than two months from joining us in the outside world, was kicking during the main theme.

  What I also remember is watching that movie like I hadn’t in a long time: eyes wide and darting across the screen trying to take everything in, wondering every few minutes if I was seeing something new or just re-noticing things I hadn’t really looked at in years.

  Hell, even the Greedo-shooting-first thing didn’t bug me much at the time – although it started doing so pretty soon after – because I was just so caught up in the whole experience.

  When Empire came out a few weeks later, Mindé got me and my friend Jim and my wife’s little brother Andy into a late-night pre-screening. There were Trekkies in front of us in line scanning us with a fake tricorder. Honestly.

  Jedi soon followed, and I saw it at another employee preview. This was one night after my Sentinel shift, which ended at 1:15 a.m. One of the temps I worked with was a kid named Jay who also worked at the mall cinemas down the street, and he said we could get into a showing that was supposed to start after the place was cleared and cleaned up from the last of the shows – about 1:15 or so.

  We busted ass to hit the composing deadline and tore out of the Sentinel a few minutes early. Got to the theater with a couple minutes to spare.

  And found the place looking locked down and empty.

  It wasn’t, of course, but looking through the front doors at the lobby and counter area, we saw everything cleaned and closed and not an employee in sight. They’d already wrapped things up and headed into the theater for their show.

  Jay and I dashed around the back of the building to the appropriate exit door. We could hear the previews running and the sound system booming and people talking and laughing, and we banged on the door hoping someone would hear.

  After about two minutes – long enough that I was ready to give up and head home – the door opened a crack and one of Jay’s co-workers let us in. The place was surprisingly full, but we got our butts in a couple seats just as the previews ended.

  Star Wars and Empire were still showing in a couple places, and there was one weekend where I desperately wanted to go see all three movies in a single day. It would have meant going to two different theaters practically across town, but it was possible. I don’t remember why I didn’t do it.

  My daughter Kelsey was born in late March that year.

  When she was six weeks old, I bundled her into her car seat/infant carrier, packed a couple bottles and diapers and baby stuff into a backpack, and drove to the one-dollar movie place where my wife and I had seen Jurassic Park on our first date. Star Wars was still showing back in the smallest theater. Maybe 70 seats, tops, and a sound system comparable to an eight-double-D battery boom box.

  It was noon on a weekday. I think there may have been one other person there.

  I sat in the back row on the right, put Kelsey’s carrier on the seat next to me, and held her in the crook of my arm.

  She probably slept through most of it. Never fussed or cried or squirmed.

  But I looked down at her a lot during those couple hours – for some reason, I remember doing it during the Han/Jabba scene – and saw her little eyes wide open and glinting with the reflection of Star Wars on the screen.

  Proof of Purchase

  In 2005, while exploring the hotel room sales at Star Wars Celebration III in Indianapolis, I bought an original Han Solo action figure from Japan. Same figure as the Kenner version, but the beauty of vintage Japanese figure packaging was that it was just a little box, with the figure in a baggie inside. Nothing to tear open, nothing to ruin, and the small plastic bag had only been sealed with long-since-brittled tape.

  For the first time in 20-some years, I opened a Kenner Star Wars guy.

  Oh, sure, I’d gone through a phase of collecting Hasbro’s remakes when they put them out in the mid-1990s. Hard not to get caught up in seeing Star Wars on the pegs and toy store shelves again, looking for figures I hadn’t gotten yet, and wishing I could get all the ships. But as neat as it was seeing toys that hadn’t existed when I was a kid – Luke’s T-16 Skyhopper, a Grand Moff Tarkin figure – it didn’t take long to tire of the hunt, and I realized I’d rather save my money and buy old Star Wars stuff.

  So I opened this Han figure, and there was a whiff of brand-new plastic, just like when I tore into my Boba Fett and my Darth Vader and all the rest. The joints were squeaky tight, and the paint was still shiny, and suddenly things long gone didn’t seem so far off at all.

  Surrounding Us, Binding Us:

  An Appreciation of the Prequel Era

  Bad Star Wars is better than no Star Wars.

  I found myself saying this a lot between 1999 and 2005.

  A lot.

  And I believe it, too. I really do.

  Here’s the thing, though: A big part of that is because the best memories I have of the Prequel Era aren’t about the movies themselves. The joy was really in the anticipation and excitement and energy and sharing those things with my friends, family and fellow dorks.

  Maybe it’s because the original trilogy is too deeply ingrained in my psyche to be affected by what came after. Honestly: When I watch Star Wars and Empire, Darth Vader is as creepy and cold and straight-up terrifying evil has he ever was, because I’ve lived with that image for a lot longer than I’ve had to deal with the idea that it’s just a grown-up whiny teen-angst Anakin in that suit.

  So when I hear people moaning that these movies should never have been made, or read yet another online rant that “George Lucas raped my childhood,” I kind of mentally shrug my shoulders and let it go, because I managed to have a lot of fun during those years, even if I did have to put up with all-too-conveniently hungry sea monsters and pointlessly-shapeshifting bounty hunters.

  Part I: Every generation

  I was working in the Sentinel’s ad dummying department by the time the buzz was building over the first ne
w Star Wars movie in 16 years.

  I’d read a fair amount of speculation about the movie – my buddy Ivan and I once mailed each other copies of the Entertainment Weekly issue with an article about Ewan MacGregor as Obi-Wan, neither of us having any clue the other was chucking the same thing in the mail – but when it got closer, I decided to stay spoiler-free, limiting myself to the occasional sterile Lucasfilm-issued statement or picture.

  Which means that by the time The Phantom Menace teaser trailer showed up online, I was hungry for it. I downloaded it onto my workstation the first chance I got, and it took me a bunch of tries because the connection kept timing out or locking up.

  When the words “Every generation has a legend” appeared, I actually felt a lump in my throat. God, yes: Every generation – my generation – and this was our legend, returning to the big screen…

  I watched it over and over and over. I downloaded a screensaver program that would play it silently on my desktop when I wasn’t there, and I’d come back to find people hovering at my cubicle. The paper’s movie writer asked how we could get the file up to his computer since it was too big to send through the office email system.

  When they showed it on the local evening news, I videotaped it. I may not have known what to make of it, but I had the thing memorized within days.

  My friend and co-worker Jim – also a lifelong Star Wars nut – and I talked about the trailer frame-by-frame: The odd-looking younger Yoda; Jedi knights blocking laser bolts left and right; the double-bladed lightsaber; this monstrous demon-looking guy whose red-and-black tattooed face I initially mistook for the burned visage of Darth Vader.

  I was a little put off by this floppy-eared thing that made funny noises, but c’mon, how bad could it be? (I know, I know.)

  When the second trailer came out and debuted on “The Today Show,” I videotaped that one, too. And grabbed it for the work computer. And when my brother-in-law and I went to see The Matrix, we called ahead to make sure we were catching a showing with the Episode I preview attached.