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

by John Booth

  JB: So, as far as showing your daughters Star Wars, how have they been exposed to it?

  DBB: I started showing my now 10-year-old the Star Wars stuff … and started with Episode IV when she was probably about seven or eight. I thought she’d be OK for it then. When she was nine, I had shown her IV, V and VI, and then I and II, but I was holding off on III, because that one, that’s pretty rough. That’s pushing the border. You want to protect your kids, you want to be a good dad, and even though I make this stuff, I don’t just throw everything at them. And we’re watching that episode – and she’s a sharp kid: She’s watching it, and halfway through it, she said, “Daddy, I don’t think I want to see the end of this movie. I think I’ll wait ’til I’m 10.” And I said OK, that’s good. I’m very proud that my kids can tell me things like that, and that she can see that coming. But also, I mean, she had been watching the television series … and it’s established that the clones are heroes, and that Anakin is a hero, and in Episode III, everything falls apart, and it goes south, and the good guys become bad, and frankly, that’s a lot for a little kid to handle. You’re establishing what’s good and what’s bad and just the foundation for them to have a bigger perspective on the world, but I don’t need to shoehorn that into her childhood. I want her to have a childhood, which I think is harder and harder for kids to have these days. I was very proud of her for that (decision), and I felt very good about it.

  JB: (As a parent), you’ve got to know your kids.

  DBB: The main thing is that you’re present. That’s what it gets down to, to me. People, they kind of conjure a lot of fear about the media or about video games, and for me it’s about, “You know what? Just parent your kids. Don’t let the device babysit your child. You’ve got to be present. If you’re present, you can talk them through stuff, and they can tell you if they’re uncomfortable, and you can check their reactions.

  Right now (my) kids are working through Nickelodeon’s Avatar series, which I’m very proud of and which – it’s something that’s really important to me: Clone Wars means a lot to me, and Avatar means a lot to me too – I did all the creatures in that. Well, the new Avatar, they put out an audition and they wanted a flashback for the younger Avatar – who is now a girl – from when she was this little fireball five-year-old. I had my 10-year-old audition for it, and it was just two sentences, and, well, my five-year-old said, “Daddy, I want to audition. I want to try this, too,” and so I let her give it a shot. And she booked it. And the name of the series is The Last Airbender: The Journey of Korra – and my daughter’s name is Cora. It was just kind of an odd serendipity. To have her involved, with her playing a namesake, the heroic character of the show, that’s pretty cool. Pretty wonderful.

  But here I am (at Celebration V), in the middle of this thing that was just my dream as a kid, to be involved with Star Wars. I drew a lot of monsters and creatures, and I wanted to send them to George Lucas and say, “I’d like to design your next cantina bar creatures,” but I never did. I’ve still got the drawings, though. My folks made me a Jawa costume for the Halloween after Star Wars opened in '77. In '78, when it was re-released, I was hired by the local cinema to be the Jawa: to dress up all summer long, and I could frighten people with my Jawa sounds and my Jawa outfit and watch Star Wars Episode IV all summer long and get paid with movie passes.

  I really feel like I am living the dream of the thing that I loved so much as a kid. It’s ridiculously exciting. We saw the first two episodes of the new season of Clone Wars – just mind-blowingly good. It’s a prequel of the "Rookies" episode, which is all clones. One of my favorites. And it’s showing them getting their training and getting certified as clones, and in the second half, they’re attacked by Ventress, and Kamino gets this major attack, and there’s this big battle, and it’s incredible, just to be such an integral part of this thing.

  Grievous Geekery: A Conversation With Lucasfilm’s Matthew Wood

  At five years old, Matthew Wood saw Star Wars. Less than two decades later, he was working for its creator.

  Star Wars fans know him as the supervising sound editor at Skywalker Sound and the man who gave General Grievous that hacking cough in Revenge of the Sith, and he continues to work on both sound and voices for The Clone Wars cartoon series. Some may even know he played Bib Fortuna in The Phantom Menace and earned two sound editing Academy Award nominations for There Will Be Blood and Wall-E.

  His has been a geek’s journey, to be sure. At Star Wars Celebration V in Orlando, Matthew talked with GeekDad about growing up from a childhood fan into high school technology nut and eventually finding a place to fit in at Skywalker Ranch.

  John Booth: Even though you obviously get to do a lot of geek stuff at work, do you still then go home and think, “There’s stuff here I want to mess around with?”

  Matthew Wood: Oh, yeah. We have the Maker Faire out in the San Francisco Bay area that comes every year, and I go to that. I love that. I’m a tinkerer. I love to put things together. I definitely like to keep motivated on how things work, and put things together and take them apart and use them in different ways, and repurposing old stuff.

  JB: I’m curious to hear a little bit about your career path.

  MW: I’ve loved Star Wars ever since I was five. My parents took me to go see it, and I think it was even at a drive-in movie theater, back in ‘77, and I remember being just completely transported away to this amazing location and feeling like this universe existed. And then the fact that they had so many toys to back it up was so great, to be able to play with all that stuff.

  The first image I had of a filmmaker was George Lucas. There was an oversized comic book that Marvel made of Star Wars … and the very last page was a picture of George Lucas sitting next to Alec Guinness on the set in Tunisia and I remember thinking, “I know who Alec Guinness is, that’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. Well, who’s that other guy, the guy with the beard and the coat? I didn’t see him in the movie, why’s he in this picture?” I asked my mom, “Who’s George Lucas? What’s this?” and she said, “Well, he made the movie, he directed it. He came up with all of it.” Then it clicked for me that movies are made by somebody.

  And then I remember that before The Empire Strikes Back came out they had this offer to send away for a Boba Fett action figure. Because I grew up in the Northern California area, and my uncle had told me that Lucasfilm had a location out there, I remember thinking when I was sending this action figure request out that it was going to go to George Lucas directly and that he was going to put it in a box and send it away.

  I always had this idea that I really wanted to work for that company, or do something like that. And I was a geek in high school, and my parents got computers really early on. We had all the different kinds of computers you could get, and all the video game systems like the Atari and all that. My dad even had the Pong system before that. I had a little (Timex) Sinclair computer you could attach to your television set. And I learned BASIC programming as a kid, and as soon as we could get a modem I got one and I started connecting up to BBS systems and chat rooms and trading stuff and games.

  When I was probably 16, a friend of mine was running a BBS system in Northern California, and he said, “Oh, hey: A friend of mine wanted me to post this job.” It was, “Video game tester needed in Nicasio, California.” And I was like, hmm: My uncle, I think he told me that Nicasio was where Skywalker Ranch was. So my dad had a fax machine – this was back in 1989 … he was having to do a lot of communication with Japan, and it was just more cost effective. I called the number on the job posting and they gave me the fax number, and my dad helped me make a résumé with MacPaint. I sent it, and it went to the top of the pile over there, because nobody had ever faxed them a résumé before.

  The whole process took about eight months – they kept calling me back and calling me back, and then finally they said, “Okay, we have a job for you.” And I went out and I had my interview at Skywalker Ranch, and I started working on (The Secret of) Monkey Isla
nd. It was a complete dream for me.

  I ended up being the lead tester on that game, and somewhere after that, a position opened up at Skywalker Sound to work on the development team for SoundDroid, George’s non-linear sound editor for film. I had a lot of digital sound experience from the MacIntosh, really playing around and manipulating sound, and I was into filmmaking, and some of the way I employed bug testing on video games they wanted me to do on the program they’d made. I worked on that for a couple years, then we took that technology and used it on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television show.

  My first big supervising job was when I had a field promotion to do Phantom Menace. I worked on that, and ever since then, I’ve worked supervising out there (at Skywalker Sound). It’s just been a dream: My goal in that company was to work on the next Star Wars film … and I remember just being blown away the day I was handed the tapes to watch it.

  JB: Since Episode III, you’ve got the performance side of it as well. Which do you enjoy more – being the performer, or being the guy back at the computer?

  MW: They both work two different parts of my brain, and it (performing) is something I’ve always done. I really enjoy performing, but with my job at Lucasfilm, it’s hard for me to go out and audition with my body because I’d have to leave work. But with sound, I have the same equipment that I use to do my sound work to do my auditions with. So in the morning, I’ll get a bunch of auditions with my agency, and I’ll record them all there and send them out as mp3s. It’s fun to be able to perform something, and then go do the tech after that, which I really enjoy. Lucasfilm has always been great for exploring and trying new ways of doing tech.

  IV.

  In the fall of 2010, I learned that my childhood friend Mike Darrow – Mike D. from the early chapters of this book – had died. What follows here is a compilation of a few blog entries I had written in the days following.

  About Mike

  My family had just moved to Lake Township in the summer of 1976, so when I started first grade, I didn’t know any kids other than the handful who lived on my own street. Mike was one of the first friends I made at my new school and remained one of my very best friends for the next four years or so.

  He taught me how to play chess – and I never beat him.

  He showed me how to recognize the monarch butterfly caterpillars munching on milkweed plants in the field at the end of our street, and how to identify their cocoons.

  One summer, we spent a week away from our parents at Camp Tippecanoe, hiking and swimming and making fun of girls and trying to catch snakes and salamanders.

  Mike was also probably the most fearless and independent kid I knew, but not at all in a show-off way. It was just that nothing – heights, snakes, spiders, darkness – seemed to rattle him. Once, while we were visiting Mohican State Park (I think) with his parents, Mike spotted a couple climbable trees at the river’s edge: They were on opposite banks, but their branches meshed in an arch over the water, and Mike just knew he could scale one and descend the other, safely crossing the river.

  And he was right.

  On another state park trip, we watched him inch ever so patiently onto a teetering, half-submerged log along a lake shore, trying to catch a turtle sunning itself way out on the far branches.

  He’s all through Collect All 21, of course, one of the very few kids whose enthusiasm for Star Wars reached the same insane level as mine. Mike was the inspiration for invisible alien saxophone playing, playground Hoth re-creations, and the use of “Deese!” as an enthusiastic exclamation short for “Decent!”

  There really is something incredible and impactful about an elementary-school friendship, I think, even if it doesn’t last or evolve, simply because for many of us, these are the times when we take those first steps into discovering who we are and what gets us hyper and what bores us and what we think is hilarious and what keeps us up late at night wondering.

  Somewhere in the years between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Mike and I grew apart. It wasn’t until late in high school that I really talked to him again. Fittingly, it was over Star Wars: He had figured out how to grab screen captures from a VCR onto the fancy new Apple Macintoshes in the art room mezzanine, and we spent a few afternoons watching the trilogy and collecting images from my cable-recorded VHS tape.

  Two decades later, in the summer of 2008, I wanted to give Mike a copy of Collect All 21, and thanks to his sister, we met up at a local Borders. We spent almost three hours talking about science fiction and Japanese stories and giant robots and cartoons and literature and fossil hunting and exploring the woods and swamps near his house when we were kids.

  Not long after, a thick envelope for me arrived in our mailbox. I didn’t recognize the return address.

  Inside, there was no note. Just a small packet of something wrapped incredibly neatly and precisely in smooth, featureless light gray paper.

  When I opened that packet, I couldn't stop smiling. Inside were those German Star Wars cards of which I had been so jealous when we were kids. For a heartbeat or two, I was seven years old again.

  So I removed the single flat rubber band and started thumbing through the stack and they were almost exactly as I remembered: Colorful and strange and foreign and a note, stuck in the middle of the pile, sized just so as not to be discovered too early: Written in the top left corner, “These were my sister’s cards.” And then, in the lower right, leaving the middle blank just the way you do when you’re creating the pause before a dry punchline, “I’m not that generous!” - and I laughed out loud, then called Mike to say thanks.

  That was the last time I spoke to him.

  In the big picture, I knew Mike for something like barely 11 percent of his whole life, mostly an awfully long time ago in a haze of sunny days and field hikes and spaceships and sleepovers and action figures.

  And though my memories are undoubtedly imperfect, I’m glad they’re still here. And I’m lucky I had a friend like Mike who made them happen.

  Acknowledgments

  For as much as these are my memories and stories, this book collecting them simply doesn’t happen without the support and guidance and just plain friendship of an awful lot of people.

  At the top of that list are my wife Jennifer and my daughter Kelsey, who love and encourage me beyond measure, tolerating and even managing to embrace this whole Star Wars obsession. They also know when to tell me to get off the computer already and come play Rock Band.

  Adam Besenyodi, my longtime friend and, in recent years, editor, regularly downplayed his contributions during the umpteen revisions of my work. He’s way too modest. In addition to the nuts-and-bolts copy editing he did, Adam – author, by the way, of Deus Ex Comica: The Rebirth of a Comic Book Fan – constantly pulled better writing out of me, and his fingerprints are all over this book.

  Jim Carchidi is my constant fellow Star Wars nutcase adventurer, photographer and artist extraordinaire, and the guy who throws jars of gasoline on every geek project spark that comes out of my head. His enthusiasm leaves point-five past lightspeed in the dust.

  My mom, Pam Booth Caldwell, and my dad, the late Rich Booth, gave me a childhood well worth keeping and a life’s worth of lessons in doing the same down the road. And a lot of Star Wars toys, too.

  Nicholas Booth and Adam Booth pulled the coolest role-reversal ever in handing down their Star Wars stuff to their older brother for safekeeping.

  Kirk Demarais' stunning cover art still freezes me for a moment in a time when cutting out proofs of purchase was not only accepted but jealously admired.

  George Krstic, a fellow Northeast Ohio native whose TV writing credits include Megas XLR and something called Star Wars: The Clone Wars – surprised me with an awfully kind note about Collect All 21! in spring 2009 and has been a fantastic supporter ever since.

  Ken Denmead, editor and publisher of GeekDad, offered me a contributor spot on that way-cool Wired blog in early 2009. The company and encouragement of the wr
iters and editors there has been indescribably rewarding.

  And in no particular order, thanks to the many others who shared these memories, created these moments, and encouraged my fandom and writing: Michael Smit, Mike Darrow, Jacob Maurer, Aaron Archer, Ivan Knapp, Mindé Briscoe, Robert Schoenberger, Lorne Peterson, Matthew Wood, Dee Bradley Baker, Dave Filoni, Mark Corcoran, Renita Jablonski, Trevor Porter, Tracy Besenyodi, Keith Marsteller, the entire Ohio Star Wars Collectors Club and the crew roaming the vintage forum halls of Rebelscum.com.

  Finally, thanks to George Lucas, the Maker.

  Bring on parts seven through twelve.

  John Booth

  June, 2008 and June, 2012