Star Wars and Me

Sometimes I think about what it would have been like to have been a science fiction fan back in the 1950s and '60s. I like the idea of the genre being so small that you can take for granted that you and all your geek friends have read the same books, and can thus talk about them as a shared experience. Back then, it seems, science fiction fandom was quieter, more niche. You could imagine that some people didn't even know what the words "science fiction" meant.

Not so today. And that's basically because of one reason.

A little thing called Star Wars.

Sure, Star Trek was kinda big -- science fiction right there on prime time TV. It entered into the realm of pop culture, to be sure. We all knew who Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk were, and what "warp drive" and "beam me up" meant. Maybe it was, in fact, Star Trek (and the drive of the fans that kept it alive even after it had been cancelled for years) that primed the pump of our cultural subconscious and inadvertently got us ready for Star Wars without us even knowing about it.

But Star Wars was a whole different story (literally and figuratively). The lines around the block on the movie's first day. The toys. The magazines. The people who saw it 167 times in one summer. It was a phenomenon. Suddenly, everyone was a science fiction fan. Science fiction was mainstream. And, I would argue, it still is. Close Encounters, ET, the Star Wars sequels, and a host of other movies and TV shows have shown that science fiction remains extremely popular. In fact, out of the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time, eight are science fiction or fantasy. People who've never read a Ray Bradbury book or have never heard of Larry Niven probably watch a science fiction show like Lost every week and look forward to the next blockbuster movie -- which will certainly be SF. They probably don't even realize that they're science fiction fans.

Now, you can make the case that Star Wars isn't real science fiction -- it's fantasy, or it's space opera, but you know what? Whatever. Who cares about how you label it? What value do we really get from such labels other than to help the guy who makes the little plastic cards that divide DVDs on the racks or helps the lady at the bookstore know which section to shelve a new book in?

A Place to Put My Head

The thing is, for me, at age 9, Star Wars wasn't something new. It was the amazing thing that I'd been sure was out there, waiting for me to find it. It required no indoctrination. It just was. At age 9, I was a kid full of wonder, without a doubt that there were incredible things in the world that would thrill me to no end if I could just get to them. (And I was right.)

I actually remember -- as clear as I remember yesterday -- sitting in my basement watching television, waiting for dinner to be ready and seeing the first ad for the movie. I remember stormtroopers, and Chewbacca*, and Luke and Leia swinging over the chasm. I watched it, transfixed. At the time, I'm sure my 9-year old brain said, "Wow, neat." But I'm likewise sure that, had I been able to articulate my feelings a bit more, I would have said, "Finally. There it is. I was wondering when I'd find it."

I'm not suggesting that at 9 years old, Star Wars seemed like old hat, or that I'd already conceived of something just as good. Of course not. It was groundbreaking and it changed everything. But at the time it didn't feel to me like the movie was changing anything, because I had no idea that it was new. Sure, I'd never seen anything like it, but, then again, I hadn't seen that much. Star Wars just confirmed what I had assumed to be true. It pointed me in the direction I knew I wanted to go. It didn't define me, per se, but it did define what I wanted -- specifically, what I wanted to think about. A direction for my creativity. Star Wars provided a frame in which I could place the pictures of my own imagination.

I wanted to think about a place where imaginative-looking aliens were so commonplace that no one gave them a second thought. Where people hopped into a spaceship -- sorry, a starship (much cooler) -- and headed off to another planet like someone would hop on a train or a boat. Fur-covered aliens weren't monsters to be afraid of, they were your co-pilot and pal. And the ships and the guns and the droids looked real. They looked like people really used them. Luke's house really looked like somebody lived there. A new planet wasn't mysterious and unknown, it was just the equivalent of "over there." Star Wars treated the strange as commonplace. The people in that universe accepted weird stuff, and thus, they accepted me.

This approach to the genre allowed me to step in and join them. Han Solo wasn't going to laugh at me because I thought aliens were cool, or because I wanted to own a droid and fly a starship. Luke dreamed of adventure, and so did I.

The Real World Comes C(r)ashing In

The images of the movie imprinted themselves on my brain. C-3P0 walking across the sand with that big skeletal thing on the dune behind him. An X-Wing with a TIE fighter closing in behind it, its laser blasts almost, but not quite reaching it. Han and Chewie holding their guns out, ready for action. (A lot of these images, while from the movie, were burned in by looking at Star Wars trading cards or at books with photo stills. Remember, this was the '70s and I was 9 or10. It's not like I had the movies on tape or DVD.)

These were powerful images, and they spoke of what made Star Wars so... Star Wars. I understood them, almost instinctively. But unfortunately, not everyone else did.

Even then, at 9 or 10, I'd see some product packaging trying to cash in on the Star Wars craze but depicting a Flash Gordon-like rocket ship and a guy with some kind of jet pack and a ray gun. While that was still kind of cool, I knew there was someone behind that product who just didn't get it. Somebody, somewhere was saying, "The kids, they like that space sh**," and got an artist to draw something appropriate for 1965. They didn't realize that there was a whole New Science Fiction World Order.

Of course, that's not to say that marketing schemes to ride on Star Wars' coattails didn't work. I remember watching "Yogi's Great Space Race," for example. All the Hanna Barbera characters from the "Laff-A-Lympics" suddenly were on spaceships, racing around the galaxy. I watched the original Battlestar Galactica (which is a show, while of dubious quality most of the time, whose creators "got it" more than most). I remember that after Star Wars, the Superfriends kept fighting guys with lightsaber-like laser swords (and the Legion of Doom lived in Darth Vader's Head). Oh, who am I kidding? I watched it all. I bought the black-light posters of some almost-but-not quite Star Wars characters shooting blasters and hanging out with barrel-shaped droids. I watched Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, trying to be Star Wars when in fact it was closer to the antithesis of Star Wars. (Gil Girard's winks at the camera when he talked to a robot or an alien were exactly what I didn't want -- Buck did not really live in the world we were shown.) I was in the bull's eye of the marketers and programmers who aimed products and shows at Star Wars fans.

I can even remember being in a department store and seeing a tag on some item of clothing that resembled the Star Wars title font and feeling myself get excited. I was self aware enough at 10 or so to realize that that was just silly.

I suppose in a way, if Star Wars taught me that yes, the cool stuff really is out there, the crap that tried to cash in on it (ever see Star Crash? Message from Space?) taught me that quality was something to be treasured. It wasn't as easy as sticking Yogi and Boo-Boo in a spaceship with Deputy Dawg. Watching the crappy knock-off stuff cashing in on the craze only made me cognizant of the fact that I wished there were more Star Wars out there. Not specifically movie sequels or tie-in products (although that was great too) but more quality creativity. More displays of pure vision. More movies, TV shows, and books that took seriously the stuff that I took seriously. It was strange, at 10 years old, to feel superior to many of the creators out there producing science fiction, but I did (although I never would have put it that way). They just didn't get it. They looked at Star Wars and tried to emulate it, but they didn't look deep enough.

It Really Was New

I said before that Star Wars didn't feel new to me. But in truth, it was. I saw Star Wars and expected to find more like it, but it wasn't there. All I found was either drek riding on its coattails, or the stuff that came before.

I wonder if science fiction fans younger than me really appreciate what Star Wars was: a quantum leap for mainstream science fiction. It's easy to take it all for granted now. But look at science fiction TV and movies pre-1977. With a few exceptions, it's all monster pictures, Flash Gordon, and strange new worlds. (You can see some seeds of Star Wars in Planet of the Apes and a lesser-known -- and not all that great -- movie called Silent Running, but you have to look pretty close.)

I'm sure it's in part because Star Wars drew on non-science fiction influences like samurai movies, Westerns, and war movies. But that doesn't explain it all. There's still a spark of something so new and so bold that it's hard to get your mind around where it came from. Star Wars is so confident. It presents its world to us like we already know what it's all about. Like it's real, and it's understood. You look at the Jawa sandcrawler and you can almost imagine the guys putting it together for the movie made every last detail the way they did because, well, that's what Jawa sandcrawlers look like. It didn't feel like imagination, it felt like simulation -- like the movie makers were modeling something real. Something we just hadn't seen.

(I remember reading an article in some goofy Weekly World News-type magazine from the late '70s that claimed that Star Wars was, in fact, based on reality. That aliens had come down to George Lucas and told him the story so he'd make a movie out of it. Some of the aliens and characters were actually real aliens. Bizarre, but you can almost see why someone might believe it.)

A Fan's Rise and Fall

In grade school, I quickly got a reputation as a Star Wars fanatic. I remember trading Star Wars trading cards with my friends, and talking about the movie with kids whom I'd never spoken to before. I used to draw people pictures of R2-D2, the Millennium Falcon fighting TIE fighters, or -- most often -- of a space bar a la the Mos Eisley Cantina, and they'd give me a book, some candy, or even a little money. (When I was a kid, everyone thought I was going to be an artist. I'd tell them that I was going to be a writer, and they'd tell me that I should write picture books.)

I went through high school and college and, not surprisingly, met plenty of Star Wars fans. But none of them was as big a fan as I was. I was one of those guys who knew which docking bay the Millennium Falcon was in or the designation number of the Trash Compactor. Yeah, I was one of those guys. I was the biggest fan of Star Wars I knew...until I met and became friends with Bill Slavicsek, the author of the excellent Guide to the Star Wars Universe.

But then, I guess around the early '90s, things slowly started to fall apart for me. The amount of Star Wars licensed material -- mainly books and comics, but also games -- was growing fast. Some of it was pretty good, but some of it... wasn't. But I was willing to put up with the stuff that wasn't. I'd read, for example, the Marvel Star Wars comics series that lasted through much of the '80s, and it had far more downs than ups. But by 1995 or so, it basically seemed that the people wanting to ride on Star Wars' coattails had just changed their tactics. Rather than ripping off Star Wars, they got Star Wars licenses. I had to swear off the comics and novels. They may have said "Star Wars," but the creators just didn't get it.

And then Episode I was announced. "Finally," I thought to myself. Finally. I went to see the premier of Meet Joe Black because the trailer for Episode I came on before it. It brought tears to my eyes. I went to the first Star Wars Celebration in Denver before the movie debuted (are you started to get a picture of what a fan I was?). It was an awful experience, for the most part -- the event was poorly planned, set up in tents in the rain, and the guests were along the lines of "the guy who played Dack."

But my faith wasn't shaken. George wouldn't let me down. I saw the movie with a crowd of friends (all fans) filling the theater.

So I sat down in the theater and got a little kid shouting, "Yippie." I got Jar-Jar. I got poop and fart jokes. I came out of the theater stunned. Had my expectations been too high? I talked about it with my friends as though I'd loved it. I mean, I had loved it, right? It was Star Wars -- of course I loved it. I just must have not realized that I loved it the first time.

So I went to the movie again. And again -- because that's what you do with Star Wars movies, right? But as time passed, I realized that I didn't love it. In fact, it wasn't very good at all.

What had happened? Could it be, I dared ask, that even George Lucas didn't "get it?" But how could that be? How could the same man who created the first movies be behind this one? Had he just got lucky with Episodes IV, V and (for the most part) VI?

Oota Goota

Soon thereafter, while at work at Wizards of the Coast one day, someone working on an article for Star Wars Gamer magazine asked on an interoffice messageboard what the famous quote was that Greedo said to Han in the cantina. It was on the tip of my brain, but I couldn't dredge it up before someone else beat me to the punch.

Someone (I think it was the ever-knowledgeable Christopher Perkins) made a post stating that the quote was "Oota goota, Solo?"

I stared quietly at my computer screen for a long time.

I was quiet for much of the rest of the day.

"Oota goota, Solo?" This is what I'd been focused on for so long? Oota goota Solo? This was Star Wars? My beloved Star Wars was laid bare before me. My bastion of creativity and inspiration was just a bunch of baby talk? My idol, George Lucas, wrote a line like oota goota?

I couldn't blame this on the new-fangled movie. This was from the original. The holy trilogy -- the first film, in fact.

It was like I'd been living a lie.

Time Heals All Blaster Wounds

I disavowed Star Wars. Episode II came and went. I saw it. Once. And I grimaced through most of it. I secretly wanted it to be good, wanted to be justified in my fandom, but it didn't really happen.
But then, I watched the old movies again. And, somewhat to my surprise, they were still really good.

Sometimes I wonder if we just have a different perspective now. No, I don't mean it's an age thing, as in, "You have to be 10 years old to like Star Wars, so since I'm in my 30s now the movies don't have that magic." I think that's a load of crap. Plenty of adults were captivated by Star Wars back in 1977. You don't have to be young to like Star Wars (although you might have to be young to enjoy The Phantom Menace). The old movies really stand up.

No, what I mean is, it's just not as "fashionable" in current culture to like things. It's cooler to not like things, to not be impressed, and to not be wowed. Oh so cool. But more than just that, we simply have a different perspective on things now. We have, in many ways, been spoiled by an embarrassment of riches -- wonderful science fiction/fantasy movies, TV, books and games. And ironically it's probably all because of Star Wars. So when my friends who've already seen Episode III tell me, "Eh, it's okay," these comments make me excited. They're high praise in today's world.

Star Wars is a hard act to follow, even for Star Wars.

I guess what I'm coming around to is that Star Wars (and The Empire Strikes Back, and to some extent Return of the Jedi) is a really good movie, but it also came at exactly the right time. Would Star Wars be as successful if it came out today rather than 1977? It's really impossible to say -- it shaped the way we look at movies and science fiction so completely that it's hard to imagine what that aspect of our culture would be like without Star Wars having already come out. It's easier to imagine what we would have thought if Episode I had come out in 1977. Of course, we'd have been blown away.

It's hard to put something like this into perspective. Star Wars isn't the greatest thing in the world, but it's impossible to dismiss. And, if you're a science fiction fan, foolish to deride.

Many well-known science fiction novelists have been very vocal over the past few years about how much they dislike Star Wars. This reminds me very much of game designers who disparage D&D. It's not really a case of biting the hand that feeds you, but more biting the hand that lifted you up onto a much higher pedestal than you'd ever have reached without it (or, in D&D's case, the hand that made the very pedestal on which you stand). It's sad, really, but then the quality of Episodes I and II made such criticisms possible. There was now a chink the Lucasfilm armor. Suddenly Star Wars had a weakness, and plenty of people jumped on that weakness like the White Witch's minions tearing into Aslan after he'd allowed himself to be captured and placed on the Stone Table. They were eager to suddenly reveal, "I was never a Star Wars fan. I always thought it was stupid. And now I'm proven right." They were eager to show their superiority to what had appeared to always be the superior force. "See, Star Wars isn't all that," they said. And they were right, to an extent.

Star Wars, according to George Lucas and Joseph Campbell, follows the structure of a classic myth cycle. A part of that myth cycle is the hero growing up and finally confronting his father, or father figure. I suppose, in a way, that's what I've done as a Star Wars fan. I've confronted Star Wars, which in so many fundamental ways was one of my biggest creative influences. It's a flawed sire, to be sure, but after all these years I've made my peace with it. I'm no longer a fanatic, but I no longer feel betrayed by it.

As I write this, I'm just getting ready to leave to see Episode III. By all reports, it'll be okay. Maybe even pretty good. If nothing else, it will be closure. I'm not sure what to think, really.

Maybe what it all comes down to is the fact that it's not the Star Wars "setting" that's so compelling and made Star Wars a success. So there's no reason to believe that movies set in the same universe (which is what the prequels basically are) would be as good. And maybe it wasn't the story of Star Wars that was so groundbreaking, so getting more background on that story also is no guarantee for success. Maybe Star Wars' success (both creatively and financially) comes from a purity of vision, a confidence in that vision, and combining a lot of different influences that hadn't necessarily been combined before, from the mythic to a light-hearted sense of fun to samurais, Westerns, and WW I dogfights.

If that's true, then the lessons it's taught me and the influence it's given me remain intact. I could no more stop being a Star Wars fan, really, than I could stop being me. Perhaps seeing its imperfections -- peeking behind the curtain, in a way -- is just another way Star Wars is still influencing me even today, at 37 years old, rather than 9.

Oota goota, indeed.

*Don't believe that Star Wars was an important cultural phenomenon? The spellchecker on the word processing program I used to write this knew how to spell "Chewbacca."

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