Scrooge McDuck, Tommy Tomorrow, EC, and Alfred E. Neuman were all key influences on Lucas’s growing mind, but they paled in comparison to Flash Gordon. Edward Summer can testify to this. Summer is a New York filmmaker, author, and former owner of the New York City comic book store Supersnipe; he became Lucas’s friend and business partner in the early 1970s, when they were introduced by mutual friends and bonded over Flash Gordon. Lucas was looking for original Alex Raymond artwork, and Summer had the connection. In 1974, Summer managed to sneak Lucas in via the back door at King Features, where two friends of Summer’s were tasked with scanning Raymond’s original strips to microfilm. They were then supposed to destroy it, but luckily for posterity Summer and his pals created an underground railroad that found the strips safe new homes.
Seeing those strips again—as well as borrowing reels of the serials for his own private screening room—allowed Lucas to realize how “awful” his favorite series was; he loved them still, but he came to the conclusion that he had been under a kind of spell as a child. He began to understand how rickety were the foundations of space fantasy. For modern viewers, the appeal of those cheesy, grainy old serials remains something of a mystery. But they connected strongly in children’s minds at least until the end of the 1970s (which is when I first saw them). “It has to hit you when you’re a kid,” says Edward Summer. “When it hits you at the right age, it’s indelible.”
Flash’s popularity with the first TV generation had a lot to do with the serial format itself. In the 1950s, newborn TV stations across America were desperate for content. There were a lot of live shows, and a surprising plethora of live TV science fiction (all of it sadly lost to posterity): Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949–1955), Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950–1955), Space Patrol (1950–1955), Tales of Tomorrow (1951–1953). The people behind these shows were no dummies: Captain Video’s guest writer list reads like a who’s who of 1950s science fiction (Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Walter Miller, Robert Sheckley). But while the talent may have been top-notch, the shows had too much time to fill—thirty minutes a day, five days a week—with almost no budget. “They had really cool spacesuits and really dumb sets,” says Summer. “The production values were very poor. So when they started to rebroadcast the Flash Gordon serials, it was like being hit by lightning.”
Serials had been enormously popular on the radio for years. This was the era of weekly hours with mysterious crime-fighters such as The Falcon and The Shadow. So it was hardly surprising that their cinematic counterparts turned out to be exactly what TV stations were looking for. Each chapter ran for about twenty minutes. That left time in a half-hour segment for a cartoon, or a local host recapping the story so far, or, most importantly, the sponsor’s commercials. (Coca-Cola was a frequent Flash Gordon sponsor.) Between the original, 1936 Flash serial and the follow-ups from 1938 and 1940, there were forty episodes of Flash Gordon. You could run them end to end for two months every weekday with no repeats and then go back to the beginning—which was exactly what many stations did.
Flash Gordon isn’t the most well-made or well-received production from the golden age of movie serials, the late 1930s and early 1940s; The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), a twelve-episode superhero serial from Republic Pictures, usually wears that crown. But Flash had twenty-eight more episodes, it was way more action packed, and the kids went crazy for it. Every true believer on the set of Star Wars remembered it fondly. Producer Gary Kurtz, four years’ Lucas’s senior, caught the tail end of Flash’s run in Saturday movie matinees before it even came to TV. “Flash Gordon definitely made the biggest impression of all the serials,” said Charley Lippincott, Star Wars’ marketing chief, who watched Flash Gordon projected onto the side of a library in Chicago. Howard Kazanjian, Lucas’s friend and the producer of Return of the Jedi, said that visiting Mongo in a rocket ship was his childhood dream, to the point that he and his brother once tried to build their own rocket cockpit out of toothpaste tops. Don Glut, a film school friend of Lucas’s and author of The Great Movie Serials, says Flash just seemed more alive than the protagonists of other serials: “Buster Crabbe was light years beyond any other actors in serials. He was handsome, he had the physique, he had charisma. Most serials had no connection between hero and heroine. Flash had personality, characterization, and an incredible sexual dynamic. When Dale says to Princess Aura ‘I’d do anything for Flash,’ it’s pretty clear what she’s talking about.”
The world of special effects had barely advanced since 1936; there just wasn’t that much call for it. “Nowadays you can see the spaceships are on wires, and it looks a little klutzy, but this was state of the art stuff,” says Summer. “And on TV, the resolution was so poor you couldn’t see the wires anyway.” For years, Summer would dream of making a movie version of Flash Gordon. He wasn’t alone; as we’ll discover, Lucas only proceeded to pitch Star Wars after he couldn’t get the movie rights to Flash Gordon. One early draft of Star Wars used a Raymond panel, Flash and Ming engaged in a fencing duel, for its cover.
Lucas has never been shy about refering to Flash Gordon as the most direct and prominent inspiration for Star Wars. “The original Universal serial was on TV at 6:15 [P.M.] every day, and I was just crazy about it,” Lucas said after shooting Star Wars in 1976. “I’ve always had a fascination for space adventure, romantic adventures.” The serial was the “real stand-out event” in his young life, he said on the set of The Empire Strikes Back in 1979. “Loving them that much when they were so awful,” he said, “I began to wonder what would happen if they were done really well? Surely, kids would love them even more.” Lucas paid direct homage with his roll-up—the words that scroll at the beginning of every Star Wars movie, just as they do in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe.* His elaborate screen-wipes are recognizably inspired by the serial, too. Indeed, the thread between Flash Gordon and Star Wars is so obvious to the Flash Gordon generation that it sometimes even sees connections that aren’t quite historically accurate. For example, Lucas friend Howard Kazanjian believes Luke Skywalker is Flash, Princess Leia is Dale Arden, Obi-Wan is Dr. Zarkov, and Darth Vader is Ming the Merciless.
The origins of those characters are actually more complicated, as we shall see. But there is one kind of masked Star Wars character whose origins may indeed go all the way back to Flash Gordon. In 1954, another Flash Gordon series had been produced directly for television. Made in West Germany by an international production company, it diverged significantly from the original; Flash, Dale, and Zarkov work for the Galactic Bureau of Investigation in the thirty-third century. There is no Ming, only a succession of villains in silver suits. Although this version of Flash only lasted for a single season, it had licensed the TV rights to the name “Flash Gordon,” which had reverted from Universal back to King Features. This meant that Universal’s Flash Gordon serial from the late 1930s, the one authorized by Alex Raymond, could not call itself Flash Gordon in the 1950s. Thus, when the original Flash Gordon serial was aired on TV, it bore a replacement title card that called the show Space Soldiers.† Those space soldiers that Lucas drew in art class, then, may have been his first Flash Gordon tributes. And in a way they are also a key—the first of many—to understanding why George Lucas made Star Wars. A young child’s mind is set on fire by a serial story; he is drawn in by the dastardly villain, the love interest, the knowing sage, and most especially the clearly drawn hero. He is hooked on adventures with rocket ships in wildly different settings, with monsters everywhere and peril never more than minutes away, with a cliffhanger every reel. But he surely wonders, as most literal-minded children would, why the title card always says “Space Soldiers,” “Space Soldiers on Mars,” or “Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe.” Who are these space soldiers? They don’t seem to be anywhere in the show. There are Ming’s guards, who walk around in Roman Centurion helmets with strange faceplates. But there never seem to be more than one or two of them hanging around at any one time. Tommy Tomorrow? He’s more of a spac
e policeman. There are soldiers in all the magazines and books lying on coffee tables—heroic, charismatic soldiers, a soldier who became president—but they’re not in space yet.
Then came the day Lucas picked up a 1955 copy of Classics Illustrated, issue 124: “War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells. At the bottom of page 41 is a panel showing the future that the human survivors of the Martian invasion are afraid of: being hunted down by a futuristic army that has been brainwashed, trained, and outfitted by the Martian fighting machines. The soldiers wear sleek round helmets and carry ray guns. Years later, Lucas would leaf through original artwork from that comic at Edward Summer’s house, turn to the page, and say that’s it—that panel is where a lot of Star Wars came from.
Space soldiers also cropped up in Forbidden Planet, the movie Lucas saw for his twelfth birthday, in 1956, at Modesto’s State Theater. Leslie Nielsen was the dashing captain of a whole flying saucer full of space soldiers visiting the mysterious planet of Altaria IV, with its hilarious deadpan robot, Robby, and its cavernous Death Star–like interior.
“He was really taken with it,” remembered Mel Cellini of that birthday screening, to which Lucas brought a small gang of friends. “We were just enjoying the moment. He was learning it.”
Lucas kept drawing space soldiers in art class, apparently even after the teacher implored him to “get serious.” Years later at the University of Southern California, according to his roommate, Lucas would prefer to “stay in his room and draw star troopers” rather than go out to parties. His first wife, Marcia, would remember him talking about space soldiers on the silver screen from the day she met him. Little did any of them know what impact those space troop sketches would have, not just on the films themselves, but also on the foot soldiers who would prove instrumental in spreading Lucas’s vision around the world.
After all, what do space soldiers fight in, if not star wars?
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* One older and larger boy in Modesto at the time was named Gary Rex Vader. No connection has yet been drawn to the Vader of his later years, but Lucas once said that he came up with the name “Darth” first and then tried “lots of last names, Vaders and Wilsons and Smiths.” There are plenty of Wilsons and Smiths in Modesto, but only a handful of Vaders.
† In time, George Sr. became the 3M corporation’s district agent and would focus on his corporate accounts, renaming his company Lucas Business Systems. Later sold to Xerox, it survives in Modesto to this day, with five branches across Northern California. Its website claims it has operated under the Lucas name since 1904.
* Star Wars replicated the exact angle of the Flash Gordon roll-up and ended with the same unusual four ellipses.
† Ironically, “Space Soldiers” would have made a much better title for the West German series, which involved far more interplanetary travel than the original serial.
3.
PLASTIC SPACEMEN
Star Wars was the last thing on Albin Johnson’s mind the grey, wet summer day in 1994 when he skidded into the back of a van in Columbia, South Carolina. The other guy didn’t seem to have any damage, but Johnson got out to check anyway. His hood had popped up, and his grille had broken. Let’s call it even, said the van driver. Johnson, relieved, stepped between the cars to put his hood down. That’s when a third vehicle suddenly appeared, hydroplaned into the back of Johnson’s car, and all but sliced him in two.
His surgeon told Johnson he had lost nearly all of the tendons in his left leg and was facing amputation; his exact words, according to Johnson, were “we’re going to throw your leg in a meat bucket.” Johnson fired him. He underwent twenty operations on the leg and then spent a year in a wheelchair while getting muscles removed, skin grafted on, and bones from elsewhere in his body chipped up and injected into the injury. At one point he nearly bled to death on the operating table.
A year later, left with what he called a “Frankenstein foot,” Johnson finally elected for amputation and prosthesis. Dark days followed, and even his then-wife Beverly giving birth to their first daughter couldn’t quite pull him out of the funk. “I kind of hid in my house and felt like a freak,” Johnson says.
Johnson kept his workaday job at Circuit City—“putting my psychology degree to good use,” he says—and it was there in late 1996 that a coworker, Tom Crews (yes, his real name), made a mission of cheering Johnson up. They talked about common interests: karate, rock and roll. Then they talked about Star Wars. Hey, did Johnson know the movies were coming back to theaters, in so-called Special Editions? Johnson brightened. “All we talked about that day was that opening scene where the Stormtroopers come tearing through the door of the Tantive IV. We couldn’t let go of that concept.”
Memories came flooding back. Star Wars memories.
Johnson had been born in poverty in the Ozarks in 1969. In the 1970s, his parents were called to a Pentecostal ministry in the Carolinas. His Sunday school teacher told him George Lucas had signed a deal with the devil and made his actors sign papers saying they were going to worship the Force. But Johnson went to see the first film twenty times anyway. Every time he came out of the theater he would run along its brick wall, imagining the gaps between the bricks to be the Death Star trench, and himself the pilot in the X-wing. He would run it so fast, and so close into the trench, he would occasionally skid his head painfully against the bricks. No matter—it was worth it to be Luke Skywalker.
Johnson laments that he didn’t grow up to look anything like Luke, and then laughs: “Hey, at least we’re both amputees.” But then there are the space soldiers, the Stormtroopers pouring through the door in all that bright molded plastic. As he and Crews reminisced about Star Wars’ most numerous icons, they realized that so long as the detailing on the suit was right, anybody could embody them. When you’re a Stormtrooper, nobody knows you’re an amputee. You’re supposed to blend in, to be expendable—perfect for a shy, self-conscious guy.
Johnson became obsessed with the costume as “a passport to the Star Wars universe.” He started sketching out ideas for how he could build his own, while Crews searched the nascent web, betting that he could find an authentic Stormtrooper costume—that is, one that matched the on-screen version in every detail, whether Lucasfilm-licensed or not—in time for the Special Editions. This was the pre-Google age, but somehow he stumbled on a Usenet posting in which a guy claimed to be selling an original movie prop costume in an “estate sale” for $2,000. The vendor was actually trying to avoid getting sued by Lucasfilm for selling a reproduction suit without its say-so, without Lucas getting a cut. This was risky, and reproductions in those days were rare. “It was like uncovering a 747 jet in caveman times,” Johnson recalls.
Johnson cajoled Beverly, the real breadwinner of the family, into buying the suit in exchange for the next ten years’ worth of Christmas presents. Soon, awkward plastic molding parts arrived in the mail. He nervously constructed them with Dremel and glue gun. It was horrible: the helmet hung loosely; the suit was constricting. He felt ridiculous: a plastic spaceman with a metal leg. He had no line of sight in that helmet. No wonder Stormtroopers were such poor marksmen.
Still, Johnson wore it to his local one-screen theater for showings of The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition. Theatergoers poked him and laughed. “I had one guy after another saying, ‘You loser, don’t you wish you could get laid?,’” Johnson recalls.
But then Crews found his own costume online—another pricey, hard-to-construct model—and joined Johnson a few weeks later for the Return of the Jedi screening. This time, patrons looked awestruck and a little afraid as the pair confidently patrolled the lobby. “That’s when the switch really flipped,” Johnson says. “The more Stormtroopers, the better it looks. I resolved that somehow, in my lifetime, I would get as many as ten Stormtroopers together in one place. That’s how big I was thinking.”
The pair built a website and posted pictures of their exploits—at comic shops, State Fairs, and preschool graduation, whatever gigs they coul
d get. Johnson wrote captions about a couple of Troopers who were always falling afoul of Darth Vader. He gave his trooper the name TK-210,* a denizen of detention block 2551 on the Death Star. Within weeks, four more Stormtroopers emailed him with pictures of their own. This was before Facebook, before flash mobs, before the golden age of geekdom dawned in the twenty-first century. The Internet had barely become a gathering place for Star Wars fans, let alone Stormtrooper costume owners. Yet somehow, here they were.
Johnson now pictured a whole Stormtrooper legion. He recalled several times back in grade school where he’d tried to organize some kind of juvenile army out of his friends; after Star Wars came out, he dubbed one attempt the Order of the Space Knights. Clearly, that name wouldn’t work for Stormtroopers. He tried to think of names that recalled his dad’s World War II fighter pilot squadron—“something zippy, something cool”—added some alliteration, and came up with the Fightin’ 501st. He wrote a backstory that solved a question he’d formed watching the movies: How come Darth Vader always seems to have a detachment of Stormtroopers at his elbow whenever he needs them? The 501st, he decided, was a shadow legion, off the books, always ready: Vader’s Fist.
It was, friends agreed, a pretty neat idea. They helped him hand out leaf-lets at conventions: “Are you loyal? Hardworking? Fully expendable? Join the Imperial 501st!” In 2002, Johnson mustered roughly 150 Stormtrooper costumers in Indianapolis at Celebration II, the second official Star Wars convention, and offered their services to a skeptical Lucasfilm to let the 501st help out as crowd-control when the event’s security proved woefully inadequate for the thirty thousand attendees. Lucasfilm was won over by the tireless, hyper-organized troopers, and started to use the 501st as volunteers for all its events. Lucasfilm licensees followed suit. If you’ve ever been to one of the Star Wars Days held at dozens of baseball stadiums across the United States, if you’ve seen multiple Stormtroopers, or Darth Vader or Boba Fett at a store, a movie theater, or a mall, you’ve almost certainly been staring at the forces of the 501st.
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 6