by John Booth
Should’ve added “or Read or Did or Thought Of” in there, too, because I can’t think of a single science-fiction or space fantasy, future-seeing or rocket-fueled book or movie or TV show that I saw before the age of six.
After the summer of 1977?
Ate. It. Up.
Nothing touched Star Wars, but Star Wars touched everything.
Even movies or TV shows with actors from Star Wars in them were must-see stuff, sci-fi or not.
I watched Force Ten from Navarone every time it aired on Channel 43 out of Cleveland thinking it was awesome because Harrison Ford starred in it. Oddly enough, that kid Craig who was with me and Jake when we went to see Empire was over visiting one of those times.
I was eleven when Blade Runner came out and I was dying to see it because Han Solo looked like a badass and it was totally a science fiction movie with future cities and floating cars and stuff, and I remember my parents either seeing it or seeing a preview for it and my mom declaring, “Absolutely not.”
I had to settle for owning an orange Matchbox version of Deckard’s car with the movie logo stamped on it.
I wouldn’t see Blade Runner until my freshman year of college, when my friend Jen was watching it in one of her classes and asked if I wanted to come along. The prof was showing it on a TV with muddy sound, and we were in a really old, echo-y building, so honestly, I think I dozed through large chunks of it because the dialogue was lost in the Vangelis soundtrack. I loved it anyway.
There was Corvette Summer, watched on TV and starring Mark Hamill. I must’ve seen this with a babysitter or something, because I can’t imagine my parents letting me sit through this movie about a high school kid and his new hooker friend tracking down his stolen car.
American Graffiti, naturally – I fell in love with this movie long before I had any business doing so.
Little Lord Fauntleroy with Alec Guinness. Ugh. I tried, Obi-Wan, I tried. Ten minutes and I was bored to tears. (Sir Alec made up for it years later when I finally got around to watching The Bridge on the River Kwai.)
Just after my family got our first VCR (complete with our first remote control, which was – wait for it – attached to the VCR by a long cord), Mom picked up some movies from a place where you could rent them and watch them at home! Oh. My. God. How. COOL.
I kid you not: This store was, literally, the refurbished living room of someone’s house. I mean, it was clearly a home-business setup – there were video racks and movie posters and a cash register and everything, and it wasn’t like there were couches in there – but you still went in through the front porch.
Mom had brought me a movie called Destination: Moonbase Alpha. It’s goofy and ridiculous in retrospect, but at the time, it was a space movie, and that was good enough for me.
Same sort of memory when Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars was shown on TV – wow, this was silly stuff, and a little embarrassing when the characters started talking about alien sex, but the formula held: John + space movie = kid enthralled.
I made a point of watching The Martian Chronicles miniseries long before I discovered Ray Bradbury for real, but I missed the middle episode where everyone on Mars watches Earth erupt in nuclear fire. I don’t think it would’ve made a difference, though: The only scene that sticks with me is the end of the series, where Rock Hudson and his family go to see the Martians and he takes them to see their own reflections in a river.
I’m fairly certain I didn’t get it.
Confession: I still like The Black Hole, Disney’s attempt at jumping on the Star Wars Bantha-wagon. The commercials showing the flat plane of space as a green-on-black vector grid stretched obscenely by a whirlpoolish pit gave me the kind of creepy stomach butterflies I still get from heights occasionally.
Visually, it wasn’t Star Wars, but The Black Hole had some cool things going for it: The hole itself, for starters, massive and slowly rotating, its menacing maw in the background; the double-barrelled hand blasters; the spooky lobotomized human zombies in their mirrored masks and dark robes; the devil robot Maximilian and his shred-o-matic attack blades. (Pretty vicious for a Disney flick, but then, you never really saw anyone get their chest turned into coleslaw – it was way more about the suggestion than the event. When we played Black Hole on the playground after seeing the movie, everybody relished their turn at being Maximilian.) Then there was the Cygnus – the ghost ship teetering on the edge of the black hole itself. I remember Dad telling me he thought this was a pretty cool ship, with its old-time feel of decay and antiquity, and its exposed girders and expanses of glass.
Oh, man, there was Krull, and believe it or not, Jake and I saw this on one of my visits to Cincinnati and we freaking loved it. Clearly, I’d caught some kind of “bad sci-fi is still sci-fi” virus.
On TV, there were new-to-me episodes of the old “Lost in Space” series in those kid-friendly after-school hours from 3 to 5 p.m., along with my first taste of Japanese cartoons: “Battle of the Planets.”
Mornings, I’d get up early to catch the Japanese serial cartoon “Star Blazers,” another role-playing inspiration for Jake and me. The idea of this old World War II battleship converted to a spacefaring machine with its “wave motion engine” kicking ass from the back and the gaping “wave motion gun” roaring from the bow was just tons of fun. (And though Jake swore he saw an episode where the female lead, Nova, had her uniform tear, exposing her cartoon boob, I missed that one and wasn’t sure I believed him.)
Mike D. and his parents took me to see the Gil Gerard/Erin Gray Buck Rogers in the 25th Century movie, and I naturally got hooked on the TV show it launched, but nothing on the small screen came close to touching Battlestar Galactica.
Cylons and their never-ending whoom-whooming red eyes and the Vader-esque grill where their mouths should be, and the emotionless and chilling “By your command” repeated endlessly? Freakshow good.
Vipers and launch tubes and cold-blooded Cylon Raiders and Basestars and the Galactica herself, who looked like some kind of snake-headed alien machine creature on the attack.
Seriously – this crap was awesome. The episode where they go up against a guy who’s apparently the incarnation of Satan scared the bejeezus out of me, and the two-parter with Lloyd Bridges and Galactica’s long-lost sister Battlestar Pegasus holds up, I swear, loaded with cheese as it is.
I started seeking out sci-fi books, too. Uncle Rob, having sown seeds of nerd-dom with the Lord of the Rings books, gave me a non-fiction Isaac Asimov paperback about space and time and the universe that just blew my mind and led me to his short stories. And I’m pretty sure my old first edition of Robert Silverberg’s “Revolt on Alpha C” came from Uncle Rob’s boyhood bookshelf.
There was “Dar Tellum, Stranger from a Distant Planet” and “A Wrinkle in Time” and its sequels and the abridged kid-ified versions of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “War of the Worlds” and “The Time Machine.”
Once, when I was in the Waldenbooks at the mall looking through the science-fiction shelves with a gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket, a guy browsing nearby recommended Frederick Pohl’s “Gateway.” I read the blurb on the back: Long-dead alien civilizations, space trips to forgotten planets – sounded like my kind of thing.
Only it wasn’t: It was conversations with a psychoanalysis computer and sex talk and people learning how to flush complicated rocket toilets. And I remember awkwardly telling my parents, when they asked how it was, that it was OK. It had the f-word in it, though, I confessed, and I never managed to make it through, even though I know now that it’s a sci-fi classic.
In fifth grade, my friend Mike S. and I wrote a 15-page interplanetary adventure, “The Creanaz Syndrome,” about a couple kids on horseback getting abducted by aliens. The origin was a box of “story starter” cards in Mrs. Tomits’ classroom that gave you a couple paragraphs by way of introduction, and then you were supposed to conclude the story. Mike and I picked one that began with a girl – Joan, I think –
wondering where her friend Rick had disappeared to during their short horse-trail trek. From there – BOOM! – aliens. (I told Mike I could take any plot device and use it as the basis for an outer-space story. “Archaeology,” he challenged me. Piece of cake, I responded. You dig up something in the desert or wherever, and it turns out to be from another planet. Obvious as it seemed, this felt like a particularly cool notion at the time, since we were in fifth grade and we hadn’t seen or heard that idea a billion times yet.)
It wasn’t just fictional outer-space stuff that hooked me either: I started subscribing to “Odyssey,” an astronomy and space magazine for kids. Home, in fact, to my first published work: A two- or three-paragraph story based on seeing the image of Cleveland Indians mascot Chief Wahoo in the moon.
I couldn’t get enough of space shuttle coverage when NASA launched the program in 1981; at sixth-grade camp, I remember being to scared to ask this girl Denise to dance, and then going outside to look at the rings of Saturn through the science teacher’s telescope.
Even in my twenties when I lived in Orlando, I took every possible opportunity to drive out and watch shuttle launches from Cape Canaveral, and they never stopped giving me goosebumps.
Star Wars helped make me a bit of a geek.
I’ve learned to live with it.
Proof of Purchase
As a kid, I wrote fan letters to Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, both care of Del Rey Books, publishers of the Star Wars novels and the spin-offs. Long after I forgot I’d sent those letters, I received autographed 5-by-7 black-and-white photographs in the mail.
Harrison’s was in marker, so I couldn’t really tell if it was a stamp or the real thing, but Carrie’s was in ballpoint, and you could see the imprint on the picture.
I lost the Harrison picture, but still have Carrie’s and the autograph seems to match up to the ones I’ve seen from public signings she’s done.
Being twelve and getting a signed picture of Princess Leia in the Jabba’s Palace Slave Girl outfit? Cool. Sharing it with your parents when they ask, “What was in that letter today?” Squirmy.
Perfect Hibernation:
The Lean Years
I’m lucky to have two brothers who are seven and eight years younger than me.
Lucky because it meant I got Star Wars all to myself during the early years, and lucky again because later on, when I was supposed to be outgrowing my Star Wars toy addiction – say, the last year before Return of the Jedi came out in 1983 – Nick and Adam had grown into Star Wars territory, so the pipeline from Kenner to our basement never went dry. Though they both moved on to Transformers and Micro Machines and other stuff after the Star Wars phenomenon faded, it’s thanks to them that I have some of the later toys like the Ewok Village Playset and the Imperial Shuttle and the Speeder Bikes and the B-Wing and Jabba the Hutt.
The last Kenner toy I specifically asked for was the Y-Wing, and I remember Mom giving me a “Really? Aren’t you a little old for that?” kind of look. Might have even been a direct question.
Maybe so. After all, the Y-Wing came out around the same time Jedi did, so I was 12 years old turning 13 when I asked for it. Couldn’t help it. This thing was light years ahead of the old X-Wing, and armed with not only that squealing laser cannon, but a rotating top turret and a plastic bomb to drop from its underbelly, and a socket behind the cockpit for Artoo units. I may not have actually role-played with my figures anymore, but I did send that ship on many a run over card houses built in our living room, and somewhere in our family albums there’s a snapshot of me using the ship to dive-bomb Adam and his Knight Rider-inspired remote-control black Camaro.
Growing out of Star Wars was happening all around me. Mike D. and I weren’t close friends anymore, my other Star Wars-obsessed pal, Jacob, had moved down to Cincinnati, and after the final chapter of the saga came out, things just seemed to quiet down.
I kept my fandom mostly low-key in those years, breaking out only the occasional quote among close friends.
In seventh grade, the Scholastic book order form that was delivered to our English class once a month included the Return of the Jedi Sketchbook. I placed my order for it, only to have my money returned a week or so later when the teacher told me that the class hadn’t met the minimum order amount. I think I responded with something along the lines that my birthday was coming up anyway, so no big deal.
“And,” she told me in what was supposed to be a consolatory tone but instead just sounded incredibly condescending, “maybe you’ll be over your Jedi phase by then.” I did, in fact, get a five-dollar Waldenbooks gift certificate for my birthday that year, and I did go to Belden Village and use it to buy that sketchbook. Jedi phase, indeed.
Still, for most of middle school and high school, my Star Wars bug was kind of holed up, nearly dormant, nibbling on the occasional scrap that fell its way. A girl I dated when I was 16, for instance, had a dad who was an executive at a record store chain, and in her basement, in a box of discarded record albums, I found the Return of the Jedi soundtrack, which she gave to me. And when the local newspaper ran an Associated Press story headlined “‘Star Wars’ still with us after 10 years,” I clipped it out and saved it. (Yes, I still have them both.)
Literally and metaphorically, the Star Wars habit went into the closet: My surviving toys were arranged as best I could fit them on the shelves in the walk-in I had in my bedroom: There was my original banged-up display for the first dozen action figures, and my small metal Millennium Falcon, and a Tauntaun and my Landspeeder, which was now missing its top engine pod. I used that blue sticky-tack stuff to attach prints from the Star Wars Portfolio to the wall, along with a collage I made by cutting up the photos from a bunch of my action figure packages and sticking them to what had been part of my Y-Wing Box. (I also had a folding chair, a boom box, and an old television tray-table in there, where I’d sit and write with Mom’s Smith-Corona typewriter while listening to cassette tapes.)
When I was in high school, I got a job at the Children’s Palace down by the mall. For most of the 1980s, this was the toy store we begged our parents to take us to. At the time, it seemed absolutely monstrous – it had faux castle towers on its façade, which helped – because the only other toy stores were Kay-Bee Toys and Hobby Center in the mall, both of which seemed just plain pathetic when compared with Children’s Palace and its acres of toys stretching impossibly high into a distantly buzzing haze of fluorescent lighting. I can remember when the place had its own Star Wars section, a canyon wall of black and silver packaging, that familiar logo reproduced into infinity. You’d stretch an arm back between rows of figures hanging on their pegs, craning your neck and pushing each toy aside just slightly to see the one behind it, looking for the one you didn’t have.
Later, when the toys were on clearance, I found a huge pile of Rancor Monsters at the rear of the store, marked down to five bucks each, and I bought one to replace Nick and Adam’s, which I’d broken an arm off of.
I worked nights and weekends, starting as a seasonal employee before Christmas of 1988, straightening merchandise, re-stocking shelves. I stayed part-time there for the next two or three years, mostly working the floor and spending some time in the warehouse, unloading trucks and pulling items like bicycles and swingsets for customers, who had to drive around the back of the building to pick up the big-ticket purchases.
I also spent time in the Peter Panda suit. Peter Panda was the corporate mascot, and once a month or so, someone was asked to put on the suit and spend a work shift wandering the aisles and either making kids smile or inadvertently scaring the shit out of them. The panda suit was a huge, padded thing, hot and heavy, but I liked volunteering to wear it. For one thing, it meant not having to interact with the customers, because Peter wasn’t allowed to speak. No having to fake a smile, either, thanks to the one sewn onto the oversized panda face. (Though I have to admit, I smiled at about two hours’ worth of little kids during my first time in the suit before I realized it was just wa
sted effort. In one of my later Panda stints, I stood largely motionless outside to promote a sidewalk sale and actually put on headphones and listened to Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine.) Panda time also earned the wearer something like a 10-minute break for every 20 minutes on duty, which really made a four-hour weeknight shift fly past.
I even talked my bosses into letting me borrow the thing to wear to my then-girlfriend’s high school graduation party, which was fun, especially driving over to her house wearing the body of the suit, with my huge, furry bear paw cocked nonchalantly out the window as I tried my best to work the gas and brake pedals while wearing costume tennis shoes with soles the size of turkey platters.
There wasn’t a defined Star Wars section at Children’s Palace anymore by the time I worked there – the big crazes during my tenure were The Real Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – but for awhile, there was still some Star Wars stuff to be found sulking on the clearance shelves and squirreled away in the piles of old merchandise on the shelf-tops. I remember pegs near floor level displaying Return of the Jedi badges and pencil cases, just above some Emperor’s Royal Guard plastic banks. They were all as far away from the rest of the real toys as you could get, sandwiched between the baby bottles and teething rings and the bicycle department.
Using one of the big metal ladders – they were more like staircases on wheels – I fished around the stuff on top of the shelves in the action figure aisle and came up with a Chewbacca Bandolier, a Kenner Micro Death Star Compactor Playset, and a Laser Rifle Carry Case to hold action figures. (There was an Indiana Jones truck up there that I should’ve bought, too.) And during a warehouse shift, I was poking around in the loft up near the ceiling and found a big cardboard box with “C-3PO Cases” written in marker on the side. Inside was a single shiny-as-new action figure case. I was amazed to find that clearance prices for this stuff were still in the computer system: The Bandolier cost me 90 cents; the Micro Death Star $2.90, and the carrying cases were, I think, $1.90 each. And I either bought or swiped (sorry, CP executives) an Emperor’s Royal Guard ink stamper and the Parker Brothers Return of the Jedi Play for Power card game.