by John Booth
Collect All 21!
Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek
By John Booth
Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek Copyright 2008, 2012 by John Booth
All trademarks and copyrighted works referenced in this book are the property of their respective owners, and no infringement is attempted. Star Wars in particular is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., and though this book has not been authorized or approved by Lucasfilm Ltd., it has without a doubt been inspired by its works.
Although this is a work of non-fiction, some names may have been changed, some conversations may not have occurred exactly as transcribed and some things, it’s quite possible, may have happened differently than I remember them. A lot of this stuff took place between 20 and 30 years ago and I was just a little kid, for Pete’s sake.
Expanded digital edition, June 2012
Front cover by Kirk Demarais
First printing, July 2008
TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Where the Fun Begins: Summer 1977
• Proof of Purchase [I]
• The Droids We Were Looking For: How Kenner Took Ownership of My Childhood
• Proof of Purchase [II]
• Into a Larger World: Star Wars Jumps off the Screen
• Proof of Purchase [III]
• Collect All 21!
• Proof of Purchase [IV]
• A Certain Point of View: Imaginations in Hyperdrive
• Proof of Purchase [V]
• Bounty Hunting: A Pack-A-Day Star Wars Habit
• Proof of Purchase [VI]
• Along a Different Path: Taking Star Wars into Our Own Hands
• Proof of Purchase [VII]
• There is Another: The Empire Era
• Proof of Purchase [VIII]
• Size Matters Not: Star Wars on the Small Screen
• Proof of Purchase [IX]
• What You Take With You: Best Opening Night Ever
• Proof of Purchase [X]
• It’s Not My Fault
• Proof of Purchase [XI]
• Perfect Hibernation: The Lean Years
• Proof of Purchase [XII]
• Dark Times
• The Future, the Past, and Old Friends: The Special Editions
• Surrounding Us, Binding Us: An Appreciation of the Prequel Era
• A Few Special Modifications: An Addendum of Interviews, Updates and Extras
• Acknowledgments
For Jenn and Kelsey:
I wouldn’t trade you for a pair of Rocket Firing Boba Fetts.
Foreword
It was 1986. The next Star Wars movie – showing what happened after Return of the Jedi – was going to be released. For three years, I’d been waiting. Star Wars appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983. Of course the next movie would appear in 1986.
This was before the Internet. It was hard to find information on movies in (or not in) production. As 1986 drifted on, surely the advertising campaigns and merchandising tie-ins would begin soon.
I had a much longer wait than I’d ever anticipated.
This was what being a Star Wars fan in those heady times was like. It was the yearning, the desire for more, that made the little bites of life in a galaxy far, far away all the sweeter.
The memories of those times are something deeply personal, yet also in a sense shared with everyone else who imagined they were Chewbacca, lusted after the newest Star Wars playset, and drew crude cartoon pictures of the Death Star blasting a ship into oblivion.
My most vivid Star Wars memory is from the first time I saw Return of the Jedi. I was in high school, and old enough to see it with friends, without parents. We were of the right generation and incredibly excited. The action exploded onto the screen as we gaped and took it all in. During the climactic final battle, Luke had just given in to his anger and Darth Vader crumpled under his furious rain of blows. A girl in our group was so caught up in the action that she yelled, “Kill him! Kill him!!”
None of us knew Vader would be redeemed in the next five minutes of screen time. He was still the epitome of pure evil. The girl wasn’t joking – she was clutching the back of the seat in front of her and desperately willing the hero to victory.
The movie ended and we left, exhilarated by what we’d seen. The wait had been worth it, and it was officially the Best Movie Ever.
Until the next Star Wars movie came along in another three years’ time, of course.
These are just a couple of my memories. Reading John Booth’s memories of the same times brought these, and many more, flooding back. Any Star Wars fan of our generation will have their own fond recollections. They are our own, but in them we share a common bond. Star Wars is a fabric that weaves the lives of a whole generation together.
And we’ve been very lucky. We got to relive much of that keen young excitement 20 years later, when many of us had spouses and jobs and kids of our own. We’re older and more sophisticated, of course, and it’s easy to find flaws in new things, while ignoring those in the things we loved as children. But we never let Star Wars die, and the anticipatory excitement we felt was just as real as when we were kids.
Anticipation and imagination are most of the fun of being a fan. Seeing the movies is wonderful, but nothing beats the thrill of waiting in line for an hour, thinking and chatting with friends about what you’re going to see, racing for the best seats, settling in to a comfortable position for the next two hours, squirming uncontrollably as the lights dim, the curtains part, those familiar blue words flash on to the screen, and then the crash of the John Williams soundtrack blasts you into another galaxy...
Relive it again now, and see why, after all these years, Star Wars still delivers wonderful new memories.
David Morgan-Mar
March 2009
David Morgan-Mar is the creator of the online comics Irregular Webcomic and Darths and Droids. He also writes for the GURPS role-playing game line, has designed computer programming languages for orangutans and evil necromancers, and has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Sydney. He lives in Australia with a very patient wife.
Introduction
When I was in my mid-twenties and living in Florida, I was obsessed with the idea that there were still long-lost Star Wars toys lying hidden in the house where I grew up in Ohio. On visits home, I’d crawl into the darkness underneath the basement stairs, back into regions far too scary and cobwebbed to have braved as a kid, sweeping my hands along the cement floor, peering by flashlight into the corners. I’d lie on my stomach on the floor and stretch my arms underneath the cabinets where we still kept games like Foto-Football and Battleship and Risk. I’d squeeze back into the corner behind the water heater and poke my fingers into the track that held the sliding access door.
My only successes were finding a tiny blaster – I’m thinking it was Lando Calrissian’s – and discovering my old Greedo lying behind the deep freezer, grime-coated and missing his antennae completely.
I looked through the hot, stuffy attic, too, thinking maybe there were some empty boxes or old action figure cardbacks tucked inside bigger cartons. (No Star Wars stuff, but I did find our original Atari Video Computer System package up there. Mom was real big on saving boxes.)
Writing this book’s been a lot like those searches.
In early 2007, with the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars movie release coming up, I started keeping notes for a project I called in my head “Every Star Wars Memory I’ve Ever Had.
” I carried notepads everywhere and wrote myself memory-jogging snippets like “Blue Snag Carnegie Library” and “Vader funhouse – William.”
I published the first resulting essay, “Where the Fun Begins,” online and, encouraged by a local radio journalist friend, adapted it into a commentary for WKSU, a Northeast Ohio affiliate of National Public Radio. Eleven more essays followed online, and during the writing, I started working toward the goal of collecting them in book form, along with previously unpublished essays, too.
The great thing was, along the way, the more I organized and collected these memories, the more I rediscovered. It was like all those times I’ve sat down with other Star Wars fans and talked about the fun we had as kids growing up absolutely nuts for these movies and toys and characters.
These are some – maybe even most – of the Star Wars memories I’ve been carting around in my head for three-plus decades. It’s been fun poking around under the basement stairs in my brain. Consider this book my sharing of the flashlight.
John Booth
Where the Fun Begins:
Summer 1977
I don’t remember the first time I saw Star Wars.
I remember wanting to see it, and I remember having seen it.
That actual first time, though, that I saw “A long time ago…” glowing blue in the darkness, and heard that slam-you-back-in-your-seat opening score, and read the majestic opening crawl, that’s all gone. “Lost” probably isn’t the word for it – more likely it’s just pulped in somewhere with 30 years’ worth of other Star Wars memories, and I just haven’t looked in the right corner of my brain yet.
I was only six-and-a-half, after all, back in the summer of 1977. (And I’ll always believe that was the absolute perfect age to be for a movie like Star Wars to come along and sear itself into my head.) How could I know that I was supposed to be committing these all-important moments to memory?
Some of the stuff I do remember about Star Wars back in that summer after kindergarten: My first little brother was just an infant, and we had just moved from our house near the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, out to what were then the boondocks of Lake Township. There are Star Wars memories that can’t possibly reflect actual reality. For instance, my friend Ford, from kindergarten, and his older brother had seen it. They’d also seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and one night their dad was bringing me home from a day at their house, and we were talking about the movies. We were riding in their dad’s Jeep, and Ford and his brother were kind of talking about both movies at once, and his brother said, “Yeah, they had these great big heads and skinny bodies,” – obviously talking about the Close Encounters aliens – and Ford and I were confused because we’d still been talking about Star Wars.
Here’s the thing, though: Close Encounters didn’t come out until November of 1977, months and months after Star Wars. And I know that night in the Jeep, I hadn’t seen Star Wars yet, but I’m also absolutely certain I saw it the summer it came out, or at least by fall when I started first grade.
So I can’t work that memory out, but it still doesn’t make it any less real. Maybe Ford’s older brother was talking about a preview or a magazine article or something he’d seen with the Close Encounters aliens in it. That still feels more like an after-the-fact justification, though, than what really happened.
I have the feeling, though I can’t be sure, that the first time I saw Star Wars was at the McKinley Twin movie theater on 30th Street in Canton. Great movie theater – cavernous and deep and boasting both a main level and a balcony. The last movie I remember seeing there was Tim Burton’s Batman the summer after I graduated from high school. Since then, the McKinley’s been converted into a big video rental store.
Still, I can’t remember actually seeing Star Wars for the first time. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a reverse Total Recall done – have Star Wars taken out of my head so I could watch it for the first time again. Then I think what a gut punch it would be if I didn’t like it.
I do remember sitting on the living room floor at home afterward with a box of crayons and a stack of construction paper and feverishly illustrating a project I cleverly titled “My Star Wars Book,” which consisted of probably eight or ten pages, each with a single character portrait. I don’t have the book anymore, but I do have some drawings from early 1978 (God bless Mom for not only saving them, but labeling them in ballpoint on the back!) that are probably pretty similar. There’s C-3PO, and an R2-D2, and my own interpretation of the cover of Marvel Comics’ Star Wars Issue #5.
I know I struggled with a couple aspects of “My Star Wars Book.” For starters, I had no black crayon. I know this because while I don’t have my drawing of the “Storm Trooper” anymore, I’ve got a pretty decent mental picture of it, and the poor guy’s drawn in white and blue-green. And his helmet’s a big blocky square. (Don’t ask how I drew Darth Vader without a black crayon. Either I didn’t even bother to attempt it, or it came off so poorly I’ve banished it from memory.) I remember asking Dad how he thought you’d spell “Kenobi,” because I was meticulously labeling each drawing. I was also apparently trying to perfect the art of reproducing the Star Wars title logo, since it’s all over the drawings that survived.
Two of those pictures from 1978 also poke into some foggier memories. One is a pen-and-crayon drawing of a green lightsaber (my light blue crayon must’ve been MIA, too), the other of a red one. Nobody’s holding them, and there’s no background. They’re just floating there.
And I labeled them “The Good Force” and “The Bad Force.”
I guess I can see the whole “energy field created by all living things” bit going well over my head, but I still don’t know how exactly I managed to somehow turn “The Force” into the actual lightsabers themselves.
While I can’t remember seeing Star Wars for the first time, I can remember a few of the other times I caught it on the big screen.
Once was at a drive-in, and the only scene that really sticks in my head is Han’s meet-up with Greedo in the cantina. That was the first time Dad saw Star Wars, though he’d been hearing me rave about it incessantly, I’m sure. I remember him asking me if I thought he’d be able to understand the plot.
Then I asked him what a plot was.
I’m pretty sure I also saw Star Wars at the Belden Twin Cinemas (long since replaced by a series of interchangeable and forgettable strip-mall shops), and at the old Mellett Mall movie theater during one of the re-releases.
I saw it 23 times in the theater. At least, that’s the number I settled on decades ago when I was trying to count and lost track.
It’s funny – seeing a movie over and over used to mean a lot more than it does now. It required commitment and time and, for me, an adult to drive the car and buy the tickets. In the videotape and subsequent DVD eras, repeated viewings are the norm. And movies once took eons to make the jump to the television screen, so it literally took me years to come close to the two-dozen-viewings mark for Star Wars. My daughter had probably seen Toy Story twice as many times by her third birthday.
There’s no way, after almost 30 years, for me to even estimate how many times I’ve seen Star Wars. And when I say Star Wars, I mean STAR WARS. As big a fan as I am of the entire film series, even the hyper-flawed but still mostly-fun Episodes I, II and III, the first movie, in my mind, will always be known by the saga’s overarching title. Growing up, even after The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi came out, my friends and I never referred to the first one as A New Hope. It was always Star Wars.
Just like the first time.
Proof of Purchase
Star Wars even made school supplies cool. I still have the 9½-by12½-inch Mead portfolio folder I carried around in second grade. Obi-Wan’s on one side, two Stormtroopers on the other, and on one of the inside pockets, there’s that rear-three-quarters shot of a Star Destroyer. The Finney’s 39-cent price tag is still stuck inside. The folder’s in two pieces, and the edges are w
orn soft as old socks, but when I hold it, I can smell crayons and purple-ink mimeographed worksheets and Elmer’s School Glue and brick walls and the cement floors of the second-grade basement hallway at Hartville Elementary, and remember sitting on the carpet in our room listening to Miss Hogan read “James and the Giant Peach.”
The Droids We Were Looking For:
How Kenner Took Ownership of My Childhood
I watched as much television as any other kid in the early 1970s. Probably too much. And for every brain-building show like Sesame Street, there was a Sigmund and the Sea Monsters or a Road Runner cartoon to even things out.
Either way, the television screen was an impervious and immovable boundary. When the set was turned off, I didn’t clear the kitchen table to set up my Electric Company “Heyyyy Youuuuu GUUUUUuuuys!” Board Game or beg my parents to get me the cave playset and an extra sleestak to take on Marshall, Will and Holly in some backyard Land of the Lost action. (Land of the Lost intrigued me to no end. I was really sucked in by the sort-of-scary hissing sleestaks, the mystical hovering pylons, and the power crystals glowing on what looked like cafeteria trays hidden in black-lit caves. I enjoy those memories, which is why I haven’t tried to watch the show in years. Did that once when Cartoon Network showed the 1980s animated Godzilla production. It sucked so bad I wept for the Saturday morning hours wasted.)
And then came Star Wars.
Seeing it in the movie theater made the first, deep and indelible Bantha track, but things really got rolling with the merchandising – the toys and the games and the comics and the books and the bed sheets. For Pete’s sake, bed sheets! What else besides Star Wars could have gotten a 7-year-old excited over a set of freaking BED SHEETS?
I still have my Escape from Death Star board game, and a 140-piece puzzle of Han Solo and Chewbacca, either of which could be the first Star Wars toy I ever got, since Kenner didn’t manage to get action figures out until 1978. (It’s almost unfathomable these days to imagine a movie like Star Wars being launched with absolutely no toy production plans in place. As I’m writing this, it’s late April 2007, and I’ve already seen stuff in the stores for Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third, neither of which will hit theaters until next month. This is, of course, all Star Wars’ fault, for better or worse.)