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

by John Booth

  Oh, and one last thing: On the cover, Luke’s hair is too long, and you can’t see his face, so he looks like a girl. This also confused me when I was little.

  “Splinter” was a relatively easy read for me, even at age eight. There were words I didn’t know – “hirsute,” for instance, and “troglodytes” – but it was still Star Wars, so I just kept on plowing through the pages.

  The Star Wars novelization struck me as much tougher, probably because the opening of chapter one – “It was a vast, shining globe and it cast a light of lambent topaz into space – but it was not a sun.” – immediately put me off my guard. What the hell? Where’s the gigantic Star Destroyer? Where’s the laser barrage and the explosions? How am I supposed to know what’s going on without those yellow-lettered paragraphs floating past? And what’s “lambent topaz” mean anyway?

  I was also blasted by the prologue, which ended with the designation, “From the First Saga, Journal of the Whills.” Huh? What’s this “first saga” thing? Decades later, when I was in college, I even searched for “Journal of the Whills” in the Bowling Green State University library’s computer system, since this was before the Internet as we know it. Part of me is still a little tweaked that 30 years and a prequel trilogy and a cargo hold of Star Wars spinoffs later, there’s no more mention of the Whills, but then again, since Episodes I-III gave us midichlorians, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with an unanswered question or two.

  Another thing that stuck with me from the Star Wars novelization is the Jabba the Hutt scene in Docking Bay 94, not because this bit wasn’t in the movie, but because it was on the pages bracketing the book’s glossy section of film photos. (I eventually tore those pages out – presumably so I could look at the pictures without the incredible hassle of actually opening the book.)

  The third and slimmest volume in my paperback trilogy collected the first six issues of Marvel Comics’ Star Wars printed in black and white. I saw this version before I saw the actual comics themselves and I was stunned when, at my friend Trevor’s birthday party, I saw the explosion of colors – particularly in the two-thirds-page illustration of the Falcon’s jump to hyperspace – in the giant-sized color edition he’d gotten.

  The comic books did make it into our house eventually, because I think dad bought a bagged set of them, maybe in a couple three-packs. The taffy-pulled interpretation of Ben Kenobi’s death by lightsaber kind of weirded me out, like the one I had in a Spider-Man Read-Along-Record book where the villain is transforming from a human to a lizard and there’s a portrait where he’s got a human face, but he’s green and yellow.

  Inspired by the Marvel Star Wars, one day I was coaching my friend Rick in our garage during what was supposed to be a re-creation of the Vader-Kenobi duel. We were wielding these miniature cues from a toy pool table, and I was trying to get him to play out the dialogue, only somehow he just wasn’t getting the nuances right, so his delivery of Vader’s “Your powers are weak, old man” was a lot closer to, say, Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard – all hyperactivity and loud threat – than it was to James Earl Jones’ slow and deadly onscreen taunts.

  At school, I remember spending a rainy first-grade recess reading the Star Wars comics with a couple other kids. Along the back wall of our classroom was a set of orange and yellow cupboards, two rows high. The lower left corner space, though, was just an open cubbyhole area, and two of my friends and I sat in there reading Star Wars. (That cubby is also where I learned the trick of breaking crayons with my middle three fingers and a slap on the leg. Went through a box of 64 in one sitting.)

  My daughter attended that same elementary school and had first grade in that same classroom. The cupboards are still there, including the one with different hinges on its door because I broke the original set by swinging on it. The cubby was still there, too: It had one of those small two-drawer filing cabinets in it, which filled the entire space. I couldn’t have squeezed myself in there these days, much less two pals and a set of comic books.

  I was never a comics kid except for Star Wars, and even that didn’t last very long. I had the next six issues, I think, that continued the heroes’ stories beyond the original movie, but really wasn’t in for the long haul.

  I do remember an issue starring Han and Chewbacca and a rabbit-alien and a guy named Don Wan Kihotay (imagine my astonishment in high school at realizing this had been a literary reference). And there were others with a red-bearded space pirate and a girl pirate named Jolli, who lives in my brain in a flashback sequence showing her as a little girl watching her father leave his family behind, and then in her death scene, when Han plants a kiss on her cold lips.

  I took these comics on a family vacation to Myrtle Beach, I think, and read them in the back seat of the car during the drive down. I was reading that bit about Jolli when my aunt – the same one who’d given me the paperbacks – asked my if I ever read any “regular” comics. Like, you know, “Archie.” I did have a couple of those little volumes of Archie and Jughead, but Star Wars had its hooks in me pretty damn deep by this point and was first choice from here on out.

  Lighter Star Wars reading was also out there: The Activity Books (I had the Chewbacca edition, and either the Luke or Vader one, too) with their pencil-and-paper brainteasers and suggestions for games like “Rebellion,” which requires a regular deck of Earth-made playing cards and bears a striking resemblance to “War.”

  My favorite kids’ book, though, was “Star Wars: The Mystery of the Rebellious Robot.” Lots of pictures, simple plot, spaceships and droids gone bonkers and pesky Jawas galore. But it was the pictures that sold this one: These weren’t bland renditions or just airbrushed versions inspired by movie stills. These were squiggly and cartoony caricatures that are still just a ton of fun.

  One of the neatest things I’ve been able to do as a writer was track down the illustrator of that book, Mark Corcoran, with the notion of writing a feature on the book’s 25th anniversary back in 2004. I wrote him a letter, we had a few phone chats, and I turned it into an article for TheForce.net.

  I even bought one of the original “Rebellious Robot” illustrations for the book from Mark. It’s one of my favorite pieces of Star Wars, kept a shelf or two above the one where you’ll find the paperback copy I had as a kid.

  Paper’s not as durable as action figure plastic, but I have almost all of my Star Wars books from those days, my name fat-penciled inside their front covers, worn soft and faded, spines glazed with yellow, brittle tape, pages hardly held in place. I could find better copies on eBay or through other collectors, or buy reprints from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but somehow, that would change the stories I remember.

  Proof of Purchase

  At one point, I thought it would be cool to re-invent my Star Wars storybook by cutting out all the pictures and pasting them together on new pages, then doing the same thing with the text. That way all the great pictures of spaceships and aliens would be grouped together, undisturbed by those boring columns of type.

  I honestly don’t remember if I actually managed to start cutting up my book before realizing that pages are printed on both sides, and this plan wouldn’t work.

  Two movies later, when I should have known better, similarly poor planning led me to staple all my red-border Return of the Jedi cards to a piece of poster board, leaving gaps for the ones I didn’t have. Never mind that I didn’t know whether to leave vertically-oriented or horizontally-turned spaces: The thing already looked like crap. And no, I never filled it all in.

  Collect All 21!

  When I was little, getting Star Wars stuff was great. And yet it’s easier to remember the deep-seated wanting of the toys – and I mean really, relive-the-feeling-physically remember, like the memories of wrecking my bicycle or slicing my knee open – than it is to recall the actual getting or having.

  Having Star Wars stuff really only increased the wanting. Have you looked at a modern-era Star Wars figure? Hasbro pictures 10, maybe 12 other figures on
the packaging. Know why? Because since relaunching the Star Wars toy line in the mid-1990s, there have literally been hundreds of Star Wars figures produced. Having them all, though possible, isn’t even a practical marketing ploy anymore. But as a kid, imagining the day when you had every Star Wars guy (That was the generic term we used: “guys,” as in, “Should I bring my Star Wars guys over?” Never “action figures.”) was a pastime rooted in reality. Even up through Return of the Jedi, Kenner never lost sight of that, showing every figure on every cardback and encouraging us to “Collect all 92!”

  In the fall of 1978, I started second grade and had an assigned seat on the bus with two other guys who were also Star Wars fans. (We were still small enough to sit three to a seat, which made for at least one less-than-fun ride home when one of my seatmates barfed up his school-cafeteria mac-and-cheese all over the seatback in front of us. The three of us rotated spots daily, and that incident really made sitting in the middle no fun because the resulting stain never fully faded and stared you right in the face.) We regularly used to flip through our Topps Star Wars trading cards or sneak a figure or two into our bookbags. And then one day, Doug (I think) brought the backing card to a new Star Wars guy he’d just gotten, and what I saw on the back of the package made me sugar-buzz hyper: Eight new Star Wars guys.

  And what a bunch. As cool as the original dozen figures were, even with the “exciting” figures like Chewbacca and Darth Vader, it was a pretty bland color palette – the bright spot was the lemon-yellow hair on Luke’s head, unless you counted the lightsabers. Lots of black and white and gray and shades of brown. Even shiny gold C-3PO was kind of subdued. These new guys, though, stood out on the back of the package as bright as Life Savers: Luke in his orange X-Wing flight suit; sun-struck-grass green Greedo; bright red accented R5-D4 and squat, dark red Snaggletooth. OhmanohmanohMAN I had to get those guys! Hammerhead! Power Droid! Death Star Droid and Walrus Man!

  Half the new guys were from the famous scene in the cantina, which you could now re-create in your own home, thanks to the playset advertised on the package too.

  To this day, the thrill of seeing those new guys resonates: Looking at one of the old cardbacks I have, that particular version with the 8 new figures (“Collect all 20!”), I can feel the distant thrum of gut butterflies, like the vertigo you get sitting high in an arena and looking out at the girders supporting the roof.

  After school, I begged begged begged my Dad to take me to Kmart to get one of the new guys, any one, I didn’t care which – I’d have even been happy with Power Droid, even though he was about the lamest of the bunch – because that’s where the kid on the bus said they were. Whether it was that day or the next, it wasn’t long before Dad and I made the five-minute drive to the North Canton Kmart and I made for the toy aisles, only to find nothing new at all among the Star Wars shelves. Zippo. Same old Stormtroopers and Jawas and Hans and Lukes. And those gut butterflies fell silently in a heap.

  Whether because he felt bad for me or because I whined a lot, Dad bought me a couple Battlestar Galactica figures instead: A four-armed Ovion and the purple lizard-esque Imperious Leader. (I wanted funny-looking aliens, after all.) They were weird and felt chunky, like preschool toys, next to the neat, straight-limbed Star Wars guys at home. I kept them for years anyway.

  That Kmart, though completely overhauled inside, is still there, and I can still picture where the Star Wars toys were, and remember fishing frantically through the shelves trying to find a new figure.

  As with the first bunch of Star Wars guys, I remember the heartache of not getting them right away much more than I remember the times I actually got them. Eventually, though, I did, and of course, needing a properly wretched hive of scum and villainy for these guys to hang out in, I got the Cantina Playset. This is another toy I still have, although the backdrop is a full-color copy and the swing-open saloon-style doors are long gone, and I don’t think any of the action levers work anymore. All that really survived was the molded plastic base with its semicircular bar and that round table that sat in the back booth.

  Action levers were a great thing about the Kenner playsets: You’d stand one figure atop a small slot in the base, then put another figure on a little platform nearby. Pushing a lever rotated the platform and then, at a certain point, activated a little spring-loaded fin that would pop up through the slot and make the first figure tip over. Instant barfight! (Or Jawa attack or Stormtrooper ambush or whatever.)

  I used to meticulously set up Han and Greedo in that back booth of the Cantina, positioning them so that Han would draw his bead on the bounty hunter just as the spring popped into position, sending the bad guy sprawling. I’d even try to get Greedo to fall across the table, since the Kenner designers had gone to the trouble of printing the image of a spilled drink on the tabletop’s decal.

  During this second surge of Star Wars stuff, my family and I paid a visit to grandma over in Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Among Upper Sandusky’s claims to fame are an old Wyandot Indian mill, a cemetery headstone recognized by Ripley’s Believe It or Not because it says “Feb. 31”, and being the home of a character in the Infocom text adventure “Leather Goddesses of Phobos” when those games were the computer geek rage in the 1980s.

  My grandma was a librarian at the Carnegie Public Library in Upper, so I spent a lot of time there. Classic old brick building with narrow staircases and a basement that felt dark all the time. I can almost imagine into existence the wood and plaster and book-page smell of the place.

  Up near the front door was a glass case where people would display collections of things, and on one visit, my grandma wanted me to see the collection of Star Wars toys in there. And that’s where I saw something that would confound me for years: an action figure that looked kind of like the short, red-suited Snaggletooth I had – same face, same hands, same belt buckle design – but this guy was tall and blue and had shiny silver moon boots.

  Now, of course, this guy’s well-known as the Blue Snaggletooth, product of a Sears exclusive Cantina set and a Kenner design fluke. I wouldn’t learn that, though, until I was in my early twenties. Right then, I was just too fascinated and jealous and mesmerized. I stared at this thing, trying to figure out what it was and where it had come from and why wasn’t it in any of the Kenner Star Wars catalog booklets and how, good God, could I get my hands on one? (Wouldn’t happen, by the way, until I was married and living in Florida almost 20 years later, and that was an $80 purchase I scrimped for months to buy. Eighty bucks for a Star Wars guy! Somewhere, 7-year-old me was passed out in shock.) I remember telling my friends about it, and none of them had seen or heard of one of these things either, and I probably sounded like that kid on my street talking about his supposed Grand Moff Tarkin toothbrush. It didn’t help that I never saw another Blue Snaggletooth as a kid.

  This second wave of Star Wars toys also included the Droid Factory Playset, which was, I think, the first toy made for the action figure line that didn’t have an on-screen counterpart. In fact, you didn’t need any action figures at all to play with it – the point really seemed to be putting together robots, most of which really didn’t look like they belonged in Star Wars at all. There was a book of blueprints to follow if you wanted, including instructions for a monster droid that used every single piece in the playset, and was impressive from that standpoint but was really a pretty goofy-looking thing when it was done. You could even build an R2-D2 that included his third leg, which put it a step ahead of the regular action figure, although it also fell apart pretty easily. The factory had axles and wheels and arms and skinny tubing and little rubber pegs that held stuff together, and I’m sure I started losing parts about five minutes after I opened it.

  Now, with all these new guys, I had the full potential for a real battle royale. A laser-gun massacre in plastic. So I divvied them up one afternoon up in my room – good guys vs. bad guys, with the unknowns (most of the Cantina guys and extra droids) split up between both sides. For some reason, I set this u
p like you sometimes see pre-American Revolution battles illustrated: Two forces at a standstill, face-to-face. I lined up the good guys in a row on the orange-brown carpet of my room, and had the bad guys hunkered down in a plastic old-style lunch pail propped open and standing on its lower front edge, making a two-level “base.” (I never had a real case for my Star Wars guys, so I’m pretty sure that lunch pail was also one of the many places I kept them when I wasn’t playing with them.) All the figures were sitting, since it was too hard to make them stand on their own.

  Then the firing began.

  I handled all the dialogue and all the taunts and all the final, dying words and all the laser noises and all the explosions. One by one, my Star Wars guys perished. (I don’t seem to recall any lightsaber fights, actually. Back then, we didn’t know how kick-ass Jedis and Sith could be. They were just swordfighters, no matter how clumsy and random they thought blasters were.) I was a very nearly equal-opportunity battle god, inflicting heavy casualties on both sides.

  When the smoke cleared, and the camera panned up from the carnage of the battlefield – yes, I actually used my hands to frame the shot as if I were watching it on a movie screen – there were just two survivors. The good guys had won, but only Luke and either Han or Chewbacca (time and trauma of the battle have scarred my memory) had lived to tell the tale.