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

by John Booth

  Of course, it runs deeper than that, because looking back, the Empire era was kind of my Golden Age of Star Wars.

  For starters, Empire marked the first time I’d ever really paid attention to the idea of a sequel. That’s right – I’m eight or nine years old, I’m obsessed with Star Wars, cut-out action-figure proofs-of-purchase are the coin of my realm, and what’s that you say? They’re making another one?!?! Oh, dear God.

  Despite my rabid fandom, I didn’t see Empire on opening day. Maybe not even opening weekend. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why not, given that I’d been waiting for this movie for, at that point, a little less than a third of my whole freaking life!

  Pre-internet, back when we lived in caves and watched our sitcoms on papyrus flip-animation books, there wasn’t much in the way of movie speculation available to your average elementary-school kid. The closest thing I can think of was an issue of National Geographic’s World magazine which had a whole story on some of the special effects in the yet-to-be-released Empire. It came with this great poster of the Millennium Falcon being chased by a Star Destroyer – the familiar publicity shot with the green laser bolts ricocheting near her hull – and just a few photos in the article, but enough to get us really excited about what we were in for. Asteroids! Big metal animal-looking things! Luke and Vader going at it with lightsabers! (I kid you not – in one photo, there’s a background light or something that looks, if you’ve got a little imagination and some hyperactivity, like a ghostly figure. My friends and I wondered if old dead Obi-Wan was making a spiritual comeback of sorts. He did, of course, but not in the way we’d been thinking.)

  There was also a picture of the Falcon sitting on that Cloud City landing platform just after her arrival. I think it may have actually been in the background of a photo showing one of the matte-painting artists at work or something, because the picture was small enough that I couldn’t actually tell it was the Falcon. Only later did I realize that what I’d thought was some kind of alien was actually Han and Chewie’s starship. Even when I’m watching Empire for the umpteenth time, it’s still easy to dredge up just enough of that 8-year-old me to see that landing platform as a creature with a Millennium Falcon-shaped head.

  I remember seeing the previews, the lasting image being that shot of the Falcon careening sideways through a canyon, explosions in her wake. I was even enthralled by the new movie logo, with The Empire Strikes Back framed by a wraparound version of the old Star Wars. Incredibly cool. Even now, my favorite old-school toys and things are the pieces with that logo, because it still stirs those long-ago nerves of excitement and anticipation.

  And then of course, there was the mystery of Boba Fett, tantalizingly offered in glorious full-color Kenner plastic well before we’d have any idea of just how ridiculously small a part he’d play onscreen.

  Empire was also the first time we got to see a full-on Star Wars marketing and merchandising blitz leading up to a movie release, and we loved it. I don’t think I ever did manage to collect all the stickers that went with that Burger King folder, or get all the fast-food chain’s ESB glasses.

  When the movie itself finally came out, I had to put up with hearing stuff from people who’d seen it – and man, oh man, the things I was hearing…

  For starters, there was the glimpse of Vader’s head. “All you can see is veins and stuff,” was what I remember someone telling me, and I imagined it looking like a flesh-colored brain spidered with pulsing purplish-blue tendrils.

  One of the older kids across the street was the first one to hit me with the “Darth Vader is Luke’s dad” news. This rocked me, of course, but I wasn’t mad about hearing it ahead of time. I was eight years old – all it did was make me want to see the movie more. I remember telling my Dad about it and him kind of shaking his head and saying something like, “Well, you never know. Maybe Darth Vader’s just trying to trick Luke, so he won’t kill him or something.” Thinking back to the expression on Dad’s face, I wonder if he wasn’t maybe a little sad that the surprise had been spoiled.

  A kid on my baseball team saw the movie before me, too. (Yes, I played baseball. No, not well. I was one of those outfielders who could probably count on one hand the number of times I actually touched the ball during a game because hardly anybody could hit that far.)

  We were sitting in the cinder block dugout along the first base line at one of our late-afternoon games, and this kid was talking about Empire, which I seem to think I was going to go see that weekend. He had a nasal, smart-ass voice and was chewing gum open-mouthed, and I remember his nod when someone asked him, “Do they really show Han ripping the organs out of that monster?” The image that formed in my head was one of Solo in Cloud City, standing in front of a vague, hulking mass, tearing through its innards bare-handed and tossing pieces back over his shoulder like he was looking for a lost set of car keys in a pile of dirty laundry.

  I’ll never forget the day I finally got around to seeing the movie for myself.

  The night before, my pal Jacob had come over to my house and my mom was going to drive us to Mellett Mall the next day and drop us off for a noon-ish showing. As it happened, some friends of our family were in town, and their son, a kid named Craig who was the same age as me and Jake, wound up coming over to spend the night, too.

  So the three of us stayed up late goofing around and getting psyched about the movie and everything, but when time came to fall asleep, Craig said he wanted to go home. (“Home” being his grandparents house, where he and his family were staying.) Said he couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t even try. Didn’t care that going home meant missing out, for the love o’Pete, on seeing The Empire Strikes Back the next day. He actually guilt-tripped me into going down into my parents’ room at one-thirty in the morning and waking my mom up to ask her to take him back to his grandma’s. Naturally – and I’m paraphrasing here – she said, “No way. Go to bed. Good night.”

  Next morning (yes, we’d finally fallen asleep, even Craig), we had breakfast, gathered up my friends’ stuff and waited for mom to take us to the mall. Mom double-checked the show times in the newspaper and we headed out for a 12:15 matinee.

  Got to the mall a few minutes before showtime. Went up to the ticket window to find that the movie had started at 12 o’clock. Son.Of.A.Bitch. Yep, that’s right – the big reason I’ll never forget the first time I saw Empire is because I missed the beginning. It was so disorienting, walking into that theater late, trying to find a seat and at the same time not wanting to take my eyes off the screen for more than a millisecond.

  Thanks to previews, I figure we missed less than ten minutes. It’s easier to recall what I didn’t see the first time than to remember where exactly we came in: Missed the opening theme music and the yellow-lettered crawl; missed the Star Destroyer and the probe droid deployment; missed the Probot’s impact on Hoth. I think we were there to see Luke get whacked by the Wampa. I know we were there for the belly-slitting scene, though, because I thought, “Well, that’s hardly ‘ripping the organs out.’”

  A few other things stick with me from that first time, like confusing the curved-wing TIE Bomber with Vader’s fighter and thought he was pursuing the Falcon through the asteroids himself. And when Luke was on Dagobah, Jake and I had to explain to Craig the meaning of Yoda’s line “That is why you fail.” (For my part, I utterly failed to realize that Luke was seeing his own face inside the Vader helmet.)

  Later, in Cloud City, when they knocked over the block of carbonite containing Han, I remember thinking that he was “popping out” due to the impact of the block landing so hard.

  And there was this awesome moment: During a pause in the lightsaber duel, while Luke was stalking Vader, I leaned over to Craig and whispered, “I hear somebody breeeaaa-thing –” and right then is when Vader jumped out of hiding with a huge downward slash of his saber.

  When we walked out of the theater after the movie, I hardly remembered that we’d missed those first few minutes. It was still a cou
ple weeks, at least, before I finally saw the movie in its entirety, and I was actually a little disappointed that the super-cool Empire movie logo wasn’t in the opening titles. In the meantime, Jake had gone to see it with his parents and I dragged every possible detail about the movie’s opening moments out of him. Not that there’s a lot there to tell. Still, it was a few moments of Star Wars movie-time that I hadn’t seen.

  I did come away from that first viewing, though, with the two-dollar “Marvel Super Special Magazine” comics adaptation of the movie, since there was a special counter full of Empire merchandise set up there in the theater lobby. I read it until its cover came off and then some. I tracked down a copy within the last few years and was surprised at how the full-color pictures took me back and reminded me of all the differences between the comic and the movie. Luke’s post-Wampa plaster face mask; the ice creatures attacking inside the Hoth base; the Jedi training on Dagobah where Luke tries to slice up a metal bar; the silhouette of Vader’s bare head that actually makes it seem like he’s got curly hair. (I’d also forgotten about the full-page black-and-white ad in the middle of the book: a scantily-clad space-warrior-princess flanked by a couple snarling Yeti-gorilla things advertising a new Marvel Masterpiece – Bizarre Adventures 2! Seeing it sparked the memory of wondering what this had to do with Star Wars.)

  I still have the Kenner cardback from my first Empire action figure, which I was absolutely spastic to find for $2.38 on the pegs at Click’s. I remember standing in front of this huge array of figures and digging through them, looking for some – any – of the new guys. Han Hoth, maybe, with that ultimately cool holster where you could actually hook his blaster; or the Bespin Luke with a lightsaber and a gun, and no more of this sword-embedded-in-the-arm goofiness. Or maybe even that almost-scary new Stormtrooper that looked like a ghost.

  Gotta be honest: I can’t remember if I saw these figures before I saw the movie or not. Looking at this cardback, it was early enough in Kenner’s run that Yoda’s not pictured on it, and I remember as a kid just dying to see what his action figure was going to look like.

  So, you know what figure I wound up with? You know what the only new Empire figure Click’s had was? FX-7, the cylinder-shaped medical droid. Oh, I was excited as hell just to have one of the new guys, but man, what a sucky figure. No feet. Zero play value. Screen time that makes IG-88’s role look like Hamlet.

  I tried to make him cooler than he was: pretending he could fly, opening and closing all those little plastic arms, extending his head and then turning it slightly so it would stay up!!! Ooooooooooh!!!

  No good. He was still lame. Freaking Power Droid kicks this guy’s ass.

  But he was mine. Brand-new, Empire Strikes Back ecstasy mine.

  In late third grade or early fourth, our class made “book plates.” Little cards that said, “This book belongs to ____________.” I designed mine specifically for my Scholastic copy of The Empire Strikes Back Storybook. Two felt-pen TIE Fighters and an orange fireball. It’s still tucked in there, even though there are only a couple brownish stripes where the scotch tape used to hold it in place. Speaking of the storybook, how big a rip-off was it to get this thing and find out it didn’t have a single picture of a Snow Walker in it, unless you counted the close-up shot of Luke hanging underneath it? No bald Vader head, either. It was neat, though, that the picture of Luke and Leia staring out the window at the end shows a big pink and white nebula instead of the galaxy they showed in the movie. I remember that painting from the World magazine article, too.

  I got not one but two Kenner mail-away toys during the Empire era: The Bossk figure, with his lumpy head and red eyes and a rifle that rested along his scaly forearm, and the Survival Kit that came with oxygen masks for spacers exploring giant slug innards, some Hoth-style backpacks and a knapsack for Luke to carry Yoda. Seeing those little white packages show up in the mailbox was pure joy.

  For my birthday that year, my parents threw me a surprise party – Mom sent me to the basement before dinner to get a loaf of bread from the freezer and a bunch of my friends were down there waiting. We watched some Super 8mm movies from the library on the screen my Dad had set up, stuff like clips from the moon landing and maybe, I think, one of those seven-minute excerpts from Star Wars. Among the stuff I got was a Twin Pod Cloud Car, and my friends and I took turns flying it in front of the screen and noting that if you held it sideways, it looked kind of like one of those weird double-barrelled blasters from The Black Hole.

  One of my friends’ parents had wanted to get me a Tauntaun, but they couldn’t find one in time for my birthday. A couple days later, before school one morning, I saw the Tauntaun box poking out from beneath a jacket on our kitchen table, and it took all my willpower to pretend I hadn’t noticed it.

  Besides the Empire figures, there were new ships: Boba Fett’s Slave I (never had it); the Snowspeeder (had it – awesome pulsating laser guns and working harpoon/tow cable combo); Rebel Transport (never had it); Scout Walker – never had one (my brothers got the Return of the Jedi version a couple years later) but who gave a flying freighter about it because it was actually a laugher onscreen, dwarfed by its big brother terror machine, the Snow Walker. This beautiful four-legged monster (yeah, it’s called an AT-AT, but “Walker” just sounded meaner) was Empire’s version of the Death Star, and I wanted one so freaking bad. Never got it.

  On the other hand, I was lucky enough to get the two Hoth playsets Kenner put out: The Turret/Probot set ruled because it was the only way to get your hands on an Imperial Probe Droid, and the Imperial Attack Base was packed with levers and gadgets and clickers that did everything from turning a command center to rubble to collapsing a snow bridge. (The Rebel turret that came with the Probot set also had a detachable top that you could sit a guy in, and sometimes we used it as a mini-ship all by itself. Hell, if Kenner could make up an Imperial Attack Base that never existed in the movie, I was free to send my guys hovering around on miniature gunboats.)

  I remember taking my Probe Droid apart and sneaking it to school in my jacket pocket one winter day, and me and Mike D. and Jake spent a whole recess making a little snowball “pod” to recreate the droid’s plunge to the Hoth surface, and then playing with the robot in the piles of snow behind the chain-link kickball backstop.

  Even the Twin Pod Cloud Car, which had about as much actual screen-time-related play value as FX-7, was great because it looked like nothing else in the Star Wars galaxy.

  While the original Death Star playset was never to be surpassed, overall Kenner outdid itself with the Empire toy line. It was that sugar-rush giddiness of the first “new set” of Star Wars action figures all over again, times a hundred.

  A couple years later, fifth grade was the last year before middle school, so it was the last year we did stuff like have Halloween parties and Christmas gift exchanges in our classrooms. The Christmas spending limit was about three dollars, but since my best friend Mike S. had drawn my name, I was surprised with an Imperial Commander figure, which had cost at least four dollars.

  One of my favorite Empire-age presents, though, wasn’t from the toy line at all.

  I spent a lot of time in the fall of 1980 in the Belden Village Mall Waldenbooks coveting the shrink-wrapped stack of Ralph McQuarrie’s The Empire Strikes Back portfolios. Made no secret of the fact I wanted this thing for Christmas. Bad.

  And I remember without a doubt that my mom had pretty much assured me that she and Dad wouldn’t be shelling out the bucks for it. I seem to remember price being a sticking point, like no way was Mom coughing up close to ten bucks for something I couldn’t even play with.

  As it happened, my mom’s brother, Uncle Rob, spent that Christmas at our house. A little background: Uncle Rob was the youngest “grown-up” that I knew, which made him, you know, cool.

  Uncle Rob, for example, had bought me a boxed set of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” books when I was in first grade. (I got through “The Hobbit” pretty easily,
but I’ll admit it was probably fourth or fifth or maybe even sixth grade before I got through the Ring saga itself. As a little kid, those chapters about “Many Meetings” and “The Council of Elrond” seem like they go on and onnnn.) I remember Uncle Rob being stoked about the then-new Lord of the Rings cartoon movie, and taking me to see it at the theater down by the Gold Circle store. He was going to buy me one of the Gollum posters they had for sale in the lobby, but we wound up seeing the last show of the day, and when we came out of the theater, the concession stand was closed.

  When he’d visit our house, Uncle Rob would camp out on the floor of my room and we’d stay up late while he told me stories about growing up with my mom on the farm over in Upper Sandusky.

  When I was a little older, he introduced me to the works of Isaac Asimov and theories about multiple universes and bending space and time.

  And I remember going to Uncle Rob’s college graduation and seeing the house where he lived at the time. They had a fish tank with a piranha in it and some record album cover set up behind it as a backdrop. (They also had the black-and-white cat that we’d given Uncle Rob as a kitten. He had wanted to call it “Felix,” but his roommates had overruled him and gone with “Moon Puppy.” This was the ’70s, after all.)

  So when Uncle Rob came to stay with us that Christmas, I knew things were going to be fun.

  Christmas morning, I open up my present from Uncle Rob, and it’s that Empire Strikes Back portfolio! I was just crazy excited because I had completely put it out of my mind, since, after all, Mom had shot it down. There weren’t as many weird pre-production ideas in the Empire paintings as there had been in the Star Wars edition, but these prints were bigger, and the 25-picture collection came with an extra sheet of paper that had information about each one. Later, I sat on my bedroom floor looking through the whole stack again and again.