by Gib van Ert
NorthPark is no ordinary mall. I understand that better today than I did when I was seven, but even then I had a sense of it. It seemed endlessly large to me, bigger than Penticton. My mother explained that it was a sophisticated place, again in contrast to Penticton. It must be sophisticated, I reasoned, because it had a series of large indoor water fountains throughout the complex, and why would anyone build such things except for sophistication? The architecture of NorthPark was striking to me even as a boy: clean, simple, bright and unified despite the variety of shops it housed. The ceilings were high, the promenades spacious, and the centre’s numerous lobbies and atriums displayed serious, large-scale modern art installations. NorthPark was full of shops, sounds and people I never saw back home. Every visit was stimulating.
But our next destination was my favourite: the Target department store in the Medallion Centre. The difference between the two shopping experiences could hardly have been greater. There was nothing chic or trendy about Target in the early 1980s. It was a discount department store with red-plastic shopping carts, clear-plastic clothes hangers, a greasy cafeteria and dozens of minimum-wage-earners staffing the aisles and checkout counters. But the most important difference between NorthPark and Target, as far as I was concerned, lay in its collection of Star Wars toys. You could find Star Wars toys in NorthPark’s shops if you looked hard enough. But at Target you could hardly miss them. The store’s toy section overflowed with them. Most impressive was the wall of Kenner action figures. It seemed eight feet high to me then and maybe it was—row after row, column after column of the objects of my seven-year-old desire. With the release of Empire Kenner’s collection grew by some 30 figurines and they were all there at Target, though you might have to dig through a dozen imperial snowtroopers to find the ugnaught hidden at the back. Target’s superabundance of Star Wars figures (and playsets, vehicles, T-shirts, lunchboxes, wristwatches, sleeping blankets…) made it easily my favourite place in Dallas, if not the world.
Target and NorthPark were our invariable destinations, but they were not the only ones. Dallas was full of shops of a nature and scale I had never seen in Penticton. The most striking was a travel- and safari-wear outfitter called Banana Republic. This store was full of khaki clothing, flight jackets, binoculars, compasses and other items that would not have looked out of place on the set of another hit movie of the day, Raiders of the Lost Ark. What made the Banana Republic shop memorable for me was not just its clothing but its adventure ambience, the crescendo of which was the full-sized bush plane that hung suspended from the ceiling. The place had an amusement park feel that NorthPark and Target could not match. I do not often go in to Banana Republic today, but when I do I am always disappointed. Other Dallas retail novelties included Pier 1 Imports, Goff’s Hamburgers (the best I ever had, but then again I quit eating meat at age twelve) and a drive-through hot dog stand that was almost as exciting to my sister and me as the Target toy department.
These shopping trips would last all afternoon, leaving my sister and me quite exhausted by dinnertime. When we got home we hauled bag after bag of clothing and toys from the garage into the living room to show my grandfather. He looked on with some interest, never flinching no matter how much of his money we had spent. Later, however, in his bedroom which I always shared (my grandmother had her own at the other end of the house), he gently admonished me to save my money. At seven years old I did not have any money to save. Over thirty years later I still do not. But I have always remembered his advice and hope one day to take it.
*
To a true Star Wars fan, there are some things that go without saying. They are verities. To express them is unnecessary, even gauche. To dispute them would be a transparent admission of ignorance. Chief among these axioms is that The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the three (or, if you must, the six) Star Wars films. Please do not argue the point. You will only embarrass yourself.
Innocence pervades the original Star Wars. Luke, a farmboy living in ignorance of both his future and his past, finds himself suddenly thrown into alien worlds of wizardry, royalty, heroism and rebellion. At the film’s climax, Luke trusts his instincts, and the mystical teachings of an unexpected mentor, to overcome the sprawling, mechanized, unfeeling Galactic Empire. The film’s original viewers were also innocents, plunged into a fantasy world and a cinematographic experience like none they had ever seen.
The mood of Empire is distinctly different. If Star Wars is a story of innocence, Empire is one of experience, failure and betrayal. The contrast between the final scene of Star Wars and the opening scene of Empire sets the tone immediately: the celebrated heroes of the attack on the Death Star are now reduced to hiding from their enemies on a frozen, seemingly lifeless planet. Yet even there the Empire finds them. The appearance of a single probe droid is enough to provoke a complete evacuation of the rebel forces, but not before the Empire launches a massive ground assault on their base. The leader of this attack is Vader, no longer the junior man to Tarkin, now fully in command of the imperial forces from the bridge of a vessel that makes the gigantic Star Destroyer that swallowed Leia’s ship in the opening scene of Star Wars look insignificant. Again in contrast to Star Wars, this time the rebels are routed. They are lucky to escape at all in the face of the giant imperial walkers bestriding Hoth’s frozen surface and the fearsome imperial fleet waiting in its orbit. The mood of Empire does not let up. Though lightened throughout by humour and even a touch of romance, these respites only accentuate the film’s pervasive darkness. Han and Chewbacca, charged once again with saving Leia, repeatedly fail to escape their pursuers, let down superficially by their ship but really by themselves. Luke’s failures are more pronounced. Travelling to Dagobah to be trained by a Jedi master, Luke does not even know Yoda when he sees him. The ancient teacher initially refuses to take him on, asking Obi-Wan pointedly, “Will he finish what he begins?” The answer proves to be No. After repeated failures and disappointments, Luke abandons his training to save his friends—which he does not. Han is betrayed, tortured, frozen in carbonite and delivered to a bounty hunter. Leia, Chewbacca and Threepio escape (the latter carried in pieces on Chewbacca’s back) but not due to Luke’s intervention. On the contrary, it is Leia who saves Luke after a disastrous confrontation with Vader. This duel, the film’s startling climax, leaves Luke disfigured for a second time: he was mauled by an abominable snowman earlier in the film and now he loses his right hand. Worse is the trauma of Vader’s horrible revelation. Ben had lied: Vader is not Luke’s father’s murderer but Luke’s murderous father.
The contrast between Star Wars and Empire reached also to the films’ audiences. The first viewers of Star Wars were thrilled in part because their expectations were so low. No one had ever made a film like Star Wars before, such that every novelty was refreshing, every innovation an improvement on what had come before. For Empire the situation was almost the opposite. Never had expectations for a film been so high. There seemed nowhere to go but down. The film’s director, Irvin Kershner, originally rejected the offer to direct the Star Wars sequel for that very reason—how could it do anything but disappoint? His agent persuaded him to reconsider. Kershner’s job then became to make a sequel that would at least live up to the most popular movie of all time. He surpassed it.
It was during one of our Dallas shopping trips that I first saw Empire. We caught the matinee at the NorthPark cinema. I remember emerging from the theatre into a bright, clear, stifling Texas afternoon reeling with excitement over what I had just seen. It must have been in late June or early July 1980, shortly after the school year had ended and a month or so after Empire had been released. It was not until I was well in to writing this book that I recalled that my grandmother had come with my mother, my sister and me to see the film. It amazes me now to think of that. She was not, to my knowledge, even an occasional filmgoer, and science fiction (as she would have considered it) was as remote and uninteresting to her as Hegelian dialectic. She had almost certainly not
seen Star Wars, and Empire was hardly a stand-alone film: Lucas and company clearly felt entitled—with justification—to assume that every viewer of the sequel had seen the precursor at least once. So for my grandmother to come see The Empire Strikes Back at the NorthPark matinee must have been an act of pure indulgence of her grandchildren.
The film was exciting and mysterious from the moment the subtitle “Episode V: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK” floated across the screen. I could not recall any such subtitle to Star Wars, and in fact there had been none; Lucas dubbed this film Episode V and rechristened his previous work “Episode IV: A New Hope” in re-releases. The immediate effect of this storytelling device was to make me want to see Episodes I, II and III—films that had not yet been made, or even written. I carried this desire with me for nineteen years, when it was pitilessly driven out of me in the first three minutes of The Phantom Menace. For the moment, however, I was fascinated by the implications of this simple phrase, “Episode V”, and transfixed by the words that followed it into space, beginning aptly with “It is a dark time for the Rebellion…”. For the next two hours I was completely engrossed by Empire’s contrasts: gravity and levity, friendship and betrayal, mystery and revelation, all at relentless pace yet intelligible even to a seven-year-old. I left the cinema dizzy with excitement. How soon could I see it again? And how soon could I see the sequel?
The only reaction I remember my grandmother having to Empire was to ask, with real puzzlement, “Who was that little green man?” I had the same question. Yoda was one of the mysteries that made Empire so intriguing. Who was he? The Jedi master who instructed him, Ben had said. But there was clearly much more to Yoda than that. Besides, Ben said in Star Wars that the Jedi were gone. Tarkin had said the same, telling Vader, “The Jedi are extinct, their fire has gone out of the universe”. Yet here was Yoda, a sort of lizard man living alone in a swamp, and a Jedi master. What was the explanation? What was the story? And what, for that matter, was Yoda? I later learned, probably on the back of a trading card, that he was nine hundred years old. I took this to mean he was a nine-hundred-year old man, shrunken and discoloured with extreme age. How he had developed cloven feet, long ears and three-digit hands was hard to understand, but who knew what might happen to a person after nine centuries? But maybe he was not a man at all—nothing was explained. We were left to guess. My grandmother’s speculation was as valid as anyone’s. “He looked to me”, she said, “like a pig with a stomach ache”.
My mother’s reaction to Empire also stayed with me. Driving to our next destination after seeing the film, she gave voice to a feeling I had never heard her express. Very mildly, completely inoffensively to anyone who was not her seven-year-old son, she said something to the effect that Harrison Ford was a very attractive man. I was bewildered. I lacked not only the vocabulary but the sensibility to explain, or even understand, my reaction. It was not that my mother was not supposed to take notice of men who were not my father. She was not supposed to take notice of men at all. This was not jealousy on my part. It was not protectiveness. It was stark fact: mothers, fathers, teachers, human beings in general were neuters. Of course I had heard, and even told, jokes about boys and girls on the playground. And there was that time when the girl from across the street came to play in our basement. But the usual thing was that boys and girls, men and women paid no attention to each other. There was little in Star Wars to dissuade me of any of this. But Empire was different. Of course when Leia kissed Luke, it was a joke. A little more courageous than the playground jokes I knew, but still a joke. She did it to make Han mad. But why did it make Han mad? And later, when Han kissed Leia on board the Millennium Falcon, it was not quite as clearly a joke. Threepio interrupted them, and that was funny, but the kissing part seemed not to be a joke at all. It was hard to say; there were a lot of jokes in The Empire Strikes Back. But there was something else, too. My mother called it romance. It was something I would not learn anything more about from George Lucas.
*
Seven year olds were not the only ones happy to finally see the Star Wars sequel hit the theatres. Cincinnati’s luckiest toy company was about to strike it rich again, and this time it knew it.
Kenner began whetting children’s appetites for new Empire action figures in 1979 with a free Boba Fett promotion: just mail four Star Wars action figure proof-of-purchase seals to Boba Fett Offer, One Industrial Drive, Box 2520, Maple Plain, MN 55348 and Kenner will send you a free Boba Fett with Rocket Firing Back Pack. Or so they said. In fact Kenner ended up sending out a Boba Fett without the spring-loaded, rocket-firing backpack. Instead the figure came with an apology letter from Kenner explaining that the figure’s most exciting feature had been removed for safety reasons. Never mind—Boba Fett was still a great figure, and there were more to come.
Kenner’s initial Empire Strikes Back range consisted of 22 figures, roughly doubling the total number of Star Wars action figures on the market. The best, in my mind, were those to do with the ice planet Hoth. Maybe it was a Canadian thing, but I loved the “Hoth Battle Gear” versions of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Imperial Stormtrooper, all kitted out in winter coats, boots and gloves. Even Princess Leia Organa (described as wearing a “Hoth Outfit” rather than battle gear) was well done. Other admirable additions were Luke Skywalker (Bespin Fatigues) with his much-improved (but still yellow) lightsaber, Imperial Commander (the closest Kenner ever came to a proper Tarkin figure), and Dengar, a character—if you can call him that—who appears on screen for a matter of seconds but whom Kenner nevertheless rendered beautifully in 3¾ inch form. The level of detail in these figures was easily superior to that of most of the original Star Wars offerings.
But there were nevertheless some curiosities, and some duds, in Kenner’s Empire range. Yoda, for instance, was quite a good figure in many ways. But why was he wearing an orange snake around his neck? And why did the Bespin Security Guard figure come in two versions, one a fat-headed white man with a moustache (even though the photo on the card clearly showed him with a full beard) and the other a very dark-skinned black man? I somehow ended up with both figures; commendably uninterested in their racial differences, I ignored them both equally. In a universe of Jedi knights, stormtroopers, droids and bounty hunters, who has time to waste on a mere security guard? Bespin spawned as many bad Kenner figures as Hoth spawned good ones. Lando Calrissian was the most disappointing—Kenner attempted ham-fistedly to capture Calrissian’s charisma with a toothy grin and gleaming white eyes. The effect was ridiculous, especially when contrasted with the blank or even sullen expressions on the faces of most of Kenner’s other hero figurines. A variation of the Lando figure with brown instead of white for the eyes and mouth was an improvement, but both versions sported an unflattering baby blue tunic and a cheap plastic cape with armholes like those found, with equally unsatisfying effect, on the Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi figurines. Cloud Car Pilot and Ugnaught were two more Bespin figures of little interest, despite their unusual accessories: a comlink for the former and a funny little white briefcase for the latter.
Kenner’s Empire Strikes Back line was, of course, not limited to action figures. The company also created new playsets and vehicles drawn from the film. Again the best of these came from the Hoth battle sequences. The stand-out for me was the Imperial Attack Base. Strictly this belonged to my sister, but by this point she was beginning to lose interest in Star Wars toys and it would not be long now before she gave her entire collection to me in an exchange rivalling the Dutch purchase of Manhattan in exploitative one-sidedness. Even before this momentous trade, the Imperial Attack Base playset was effectively mine. The toy was a piece of white plastic, about the size of a small board game, sculpted to look like an iceberg or snow fort with room inside for three or four figurines to move around. To this simple set-up was added a rotating black laser cannon, a military-grey pergola dubbed a command post, a snow stairway leading to an ice bridge, and a hidden land mine which, when triggered, sent the figure stan
ding upon it flying into the air. Both the ice bridge and the command post had secret triggers to collapse them at opportune moments. In short, this playset packed hours of imaginative (if violent) play into quite a small space. It was a winner by any reasonable standard. Its superiority was especially obvious when measured against previous Kenner playsets, many of which consisted of little more than a coloured plastic base with a few footpegs and a cardboard backdrop. Where Kenner really outdid itself, however, was with the AT-AT (All Terrain Armoured Transport). I did not have one. The boy who lived across the street did.
*
Nathan Barlow became my best friend soon after we moved to Penticton. He was one year younger than me, all smiles and freckles, and, by 1980, easily the funniest person I had ever known. He seemed always to be saying amusing, even uproarious things, none of which I can now recall. During sleepovers at our house, Nathan frequently made me laugh so convulsively that I began to heave, often actually throwing up from too much laughter. If my sister was with us (as she usually was) the sight and smell of my vomiting would provoke her to throw up, too. My mother was almost as fond of Nathan as I was, but she did not much care for cleaning up our puke every time he spent the night. After several instances of hilarity-induced vomiting, mum told Nathan he was not allowed to spend the night any more. In any case I preferred going to his house where we could play with his AT-AT.
Kenner’s AT-AT was a giant toy—about a foot and a half high and nearly two feet long. Unlike other Kenner versions of large vehicles or settings, which made no attempt to replicate the original’s dimensions or scale (for example, Death Star Space Station and Land of the Jawas), the AT-AT, while certainly not to scale, successfully approximated the exhilarating proportions of Empire’s Hoth battle scenes. What other Kenner toy could accommodate ten figurines in the cargo bay and two more in the cockpit? Its size alone made the AT-AT exciting. But the AT-AT was also a very decent likeness of Empire’s imperial walkers in other respects: form, colour, details. Faithfulness to the films was a hallmark of all Kenner’s best work, and the AT-AT had it.