Star Wars Memories

“EEEEEEE!”

The younger squealed with delight and pulled his blankie over his mouth to try to contain himself.

“Aww, they’re sooo cute,” the older said, sitting up in his beanbag seat to get a good look.

The scene that elicited those reactions was a quick one, but it was enough. They knew it was coming. Return of the Jedi (1983) was their favorite of the first three Star Wars movies, the trilogy. In the last third of the movie, the Ewoks defend against the Empire, who have tracked down our rebel heroes to their jungle-planet home, Endor. The kids lit up during the whole battle sequence, with it’s deft blend of comic cuteness and David-v-Goliath feel, primitive jungle dwellers rigging traps and using manual weapons to bring down the laser-equipped space-war forces of the Empire. It’s a terrific sequence, not quite on the level of my favorite scene from the trilogy, the attack on ice-station Hoth that opens The Empire Strikes Back (1980), The kids liked Jedi better, though, mainly because of the Ewoks. They were so damn cute.

“Is this your favorite Star Wars movie?” I had asked the younger earlier.

“Yes, except for when Boba Fett dies and when Yoda dies.”

Those parts had passed, and now his uncontrollable shrieks of delight weren’t from the Ewoks’ ingenious maneuvers. They were for one brief cut amongst the rapid sequence of images. The one they’d been waiting for: the baby Ewoks.

The baby Ewoks.

My kids sat with their blankies and beanbags on the living-room rug, surrounded by a collection of stuffies including a stuffed Chewbacca and a Boba Fett, the older kid already twice as old as I was when I first saw Star Wars (1977). What they were loving about Jedi was exactly what I had hated. I had seen Jedi during its premiere week, waiting in a long line to get in. It was the Joy Theater on Canal Street, I believe, although I could be wrong about the details. Much of what I recall about the way I experienced the original trilogy is clouded by the haze of memory, but the basic facts still stood out. One was that I loved Empire the best, always had, from the way it first blew me away, at an age, a moment, that couldn’t have been better timed. Another fact was that the reason I had hated Jedi, much as I’d wanted to love it, was the cuteness factor, not just the Ewoks, but the other Muppet-like characters and scenes from the the Jaba-the-Hutt sequence in the beginning. What the hell was that? I remembered thinking, Muppets playing horns in a Star Wars movie? For laughs? To me Jedi had started bad and gotten worse. I was eleven years old, and I was done with the whole thing. Or so I thought.

I recently saw a clip of comedian Jordan Klepper saying that he was sad for his kid because he knew his kid would become a Star Wars fan, which to Klepper was a comment on the pathetic state of entertainment and nostalgia. Why weren’t there any new stories? Why was this stuff still around?

My father took me to the theater to see Star Wars when I was five. I was scared going in. It had the word “war” in the title. I didn’t want to see a war movie. The first scenes were quite terrifying, an indelible white-knuckle moment, the rebel troops preparing to be boarded, a flash of smoke and a laser shootout. People getting blasted left and right, killed by laser blasts that left them crumpled over with smoking black holes. Then the moment the fighting is over, just as I caught my breath, Darth Vader appears onscreen for the first time, a holy-fuck moment for a five-year-old. Dude is choking out his own commander, with his mind!

By the time the action moves to the desert planet Tatooine setting, I was entranced. Everything about the film is absolutely riveting. The allegorical aspects, good versus evil, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the force, his mission and Luke’s role in it, the concept of the Jedi, all of this is readily accessible to a kid of five. Obi-Wan’s death at the hand of Vader was shocking and moving. The rebels ultimate victory and destruction of the Death Star were exhilarating. I left the theater happy.

My dad never saw another Star Wars movie in the theater, and only crossed paths with one again years later, with his grandkids, at our house. Did you think this stuff would stick around, I had asked him, when you took me to see it forty-something years ago? No way, he said. No one was less equipped to comprehend the ongoing fascination with the Star Wars universe than my father, despite having launched me headlong into the first wave. He did have a sense of the vast scale of the world beyond the movies, the products and merchandise, he’d seen my toys as a kid, of the existence of all of the other movies, sequels, prequels, novels, shows, even comics, fan fiction, graphic novels. He may have known it was all out there. But for adults?

Were my kids destined to be Star Wars fans? Would it have happened anyway, even if I hadn’t helped it along? I did wonder about the effects of what they were seeing. I took the older to the theater to see Rogue One (2016) when he was four. Everyone dies in Rogue One. It’s among the darkest movies in the franchise. Not only that, but whole planets get destroyed, as they bring back the planet-destroying capabilities of the Death Star from the first film, only now they give it to you from the perspective of being on the planet. Everyone and everything dies, and more than once. Holy hell, I did that to my kid!

The destruction of Alderan, Princess Leia’s home planet, in the first movie is a devastating scene, but we’re removed from the actuality of it and experience it through Leia’s reaction. Those deaths and the death of Obi-wan are intense, but as parts of the plot, they’re set up in a way that guides one’s emotions. We’re aided in response by the flow of the movie, the music and other character’s reactions. And in those two scenes we’re spared from gore, unlike in the most shocking scene, from the first part, when Luke returns to his family’s home to find the charred remains of his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. As a five-year-old, I couldn’t quite process that one. I knew I was looking at smoldering bones, but I couldn’t allow myself to see it as such.

Did my kids do something similar? Some mental gymnastics to deal with the images of death and destruction? Was four too young? Was five too young? I had a good friend who didn’t grow up with Star Wars the way I did. He wasn’t from the U.S and was too young for the first wave, and considering there was basically no activity between 1983 and the mid-nineties reboots, too old for any other wave. He questioned the sanity of Star Wars for little kids, rightfully so. Wasn’t it too dark? He certainly wasn’t going to show it to his kids. But would they find it on their own? If so would they experience it in the same way? If not, would they be better off not having seen it? If they could somehow avoid it, then maybe it wasn’t inevitable that Klepper’s kids grow up Star Wars fans either, not without his help.

Star Wars was by no means the most questionably appropriate movie my dad took me to see, and Uncle Owen’s smoking corpse was nowhere close to the most horrific image. He’d been taking me to movies for a few years by 1977, in addition to some memorable home screenings as a very young kid. My very earliest movie memories include King Kong (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1936). Basically he’d started me as kid on movies for adults. Also around that time was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1936) which was where I first recall people getting killed onscreen. Men are hit with arrows and fall dead. There is no blood. They get stuck with swords and fall, all without blood. In Star Wars the rebel soldiers and the stormtroopers get hit with lasers and fall dead, sometimes with the smoke, but always without blood. It’s an old way of depicting death in films, and in TV westerns, and I had been introduced to it very young. Also in those early years was She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), which set up not just a way to read some of the plot and action of Star Wars, but which crucially led to my understanding, years later, of the Uncle Owen scene, and its direct connection to a scene in The Searchers (1956). It’s the key scene from the beginning, the shocking discovery of a burned homestead and the abduction of a young girl, played by Natalie Wood, which sets up the plot. Similar positioning in the arc of both films, similar desert backdrop, similar smolder. (I’m not the first to notice. I think George Lucas may have even talked about it.) Also around this same age my dad took me to Kurosowa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), and a few years later when we saw Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), we discussed the similarities of the plots, the assembled ragtag band of fighters, David v. Goliath. We lived in Los Angeles at the time. People had stayed for the credits, like we had, and clapped and cheered for names they knew during the end credits.

Empire hit me like a ton of bricks. Nothing I’d seen in movies up to that point had prepared me for a sequel that was better than the original. The new settings, Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City. New plotlines, I didn’t love Han and Leia kissing, but I liked that the battle station was crumbling around them as they did. Yoda might have been on the cute side, but he wasn’t cuddly, and the Dagobah training scenes are dark and creepy. New characters: how badass was the assemblage of bounty hunters? Lando was amazing as well. New costumes. I had collected the original action figures and had saved the proofs-of-purchase and sent in for a special bonus figure, a Boba Fett, in what must’ve been one of the first Kenner promotions. The new figures came out before the new movie. We were left to imagine what roles they would play. And the Cloud City finale, wow. Han encased in carbonite can’t be beat. Should’ve ended the franchise right there, mic drop, but it was already setting up another one. The bad guys were winning, and money was pouring in.

Around 1981, firmly in the throes of first-wave fandom, my parents took me to a wallpaper store for an unavoidable and boring weekend outing. Hard to conceive of now, but wallpaper was once so vital that it had its own stores. What a cool surprise it was then when idly flipping through the binders I found an Empire Strikes Back wallpaper print that I had to have. My parents relegated it to one wall of my bedroom, but what a wall! A repeating collage of images including Luke mounted on a Ton-Ton, and a face-to-face Han and Leia about to do the deed. We moved from that house not long after, and I wondered how long future occupants kept that paper up.

I didn’t remember the exact order of events of my kids’ introductions to the franchise. The Force Awakens had come out in 2015. The older had seen that one at home before I took that chance on going to the theater for Rogue One. Either way by the time he was five, and the younger was three, he was fully immersed in the Star Wars world, knowing all of the main characters, their backstories, the basic villains, and even how the movies relate to one another, the lineage of the heroes and villains and understanding the cut-up chronology of the feature films. The fact that the older had absorbed all that didn’t necessarily say anything particular about Star Wars. Absorbing fantasy worlds was his thing, mainly through books. The first had been Harry Potter. The way that his emerging reading life had coincided with some of the move versions in that franchise ensured that that world would be his first big experience with an all-encompassing, multi-genre fictional universe. It hit hard. He went for two Halloweens in a row as Harry Potter. Star Wars was next, second only in that regard. In scope, scale, size, in total convergence of real and imagined worlds of boundless narratives and endless consumerization, what else was there that could even compare?

We had a DVD box of the trilogy and watched all three regularly. The older put it all to memory and arranged it in his head. His little brother came along because he had no choice. Soon he was learning the ways of the force as well. It wasn’t long before they were telling me things I didn’t know about the Star Wars universe. A lot of it came from a book, an illustrated atlas of the worlds and planets of the Star Wars galaxy. They had given it to me as a gift, but they got more use out of it. It was a great book, with large, meticulously illustrated planet maps. They studied it closely. I would send them to it when questions came up. Sarlac or Rancor? Check the bestiary in the atlas. Darth Maul’s home planet? Check the atlas. The spine on the hardcover eventually split, and I repaired it with black duct tape.

This was the era of the Jedi Academy kids’ book series, by Jeffery Brown, ingenious little graphic-novel/comic-book hybrids that told the tales of young padawans far from home learning the ways of the force, while experiencing the tribulations of a prep-school-like setting. Titles in the series include “The Force Oversleeps.” Another popular book was by the same author (this guy did some heavy lifting!), called Darth Vader and Son. In this one, Vader solo-parents Luke as a little kid. They use the force to make breakfast, bury the droids in the sand, and visit the zoo to look at mythosaurs.

By the time of The Last Jedi (2017), they were primed. The older was five, the younger three. We went to the theater to see it with a family group that included their grandfather on their mother’s side. We took a photo in front of the cardboard promo cutouts in the theater lobby, everyone doing an action pose, the younger with an imaginary light saber. Soon they had matching Kylo Ren toothbrushes that lit up and contained little voice snippets of some of his lines from the movie. I feel it again, the pull to the light. Brush brush brush. Let nothing stand in our way. Spit, rinse. The grocery store ran a promo, hologram collector cards and a binder to hold them in with points from purchases. Old school, I loved it. They noticed the cardboard cutouts in the store, Kylo and BB-8 lurking around the aisles, popping up from behind a tower of Sprite. Why is Star Wars in the grocery, they had asked? Good question, tough to answer. They were starting to get the picture.

The Last Jedi wasn’t good, but the scenes at the end with Luke’s grand deception and Leia’s drawing on the force to ensure yet another alliance victory were powerful and hard to deny, even as a jaded older fan. Mark Hammill and Carrie Fischer had had roles in The Force Awakens, but it was in The Last Jedi when they seemed to recatch their vibes from way back when. I never liked how the franchise turned to raw nostalgia, seemed too cheap and easy, but Awakens did its job in packing theaters with Gen Xers and let us share some moments with our kids. Last Jedi was enjoyable enough. The Rise of Skywalker (2019) was the worst abomination of a movie I’d ever seen, seemingly written by an algorithmic poll of moronic fans and clueless studio executives. It saddened me that that was the conclusion of the saga, for the moment at least. I liked Adam Driver as an actor, but his Kylo was a bore, too serious and overblown. Star Wars villains need a little more mischief to them, a little more fun. That said, when Driver is Hammill’s age, at least he won’t be trading exclusively on that one role. There was something slightly pathetic about Hammill seeming to need that role so badly, something akin to a grown man collecting action figures and keeping them preserved in the packaging. Fischer we know had a whole other acting life to speak of. But I did enjoy watching the two of them in those last scenes of The Last Jedi. Fischer died in 2016, before the move’s release. The boys’ grandfather died in 2021.

The Ewok battle had ended and the celebration was underway, a freaky treehouse party. There was one more brief cut of the baby Ewoks, which elicited more Awwws from the boys.

“Is this your favorite Star Wars movie?” I asked the older.

“Hmm,” he thought for a minute. “I like all of them except for Revenge of the Sith.“

“Why not that one?

“Oh my god, dad, don’t you remember? Anakin’s face is burned and it’s like melting off. Ugh.” He shivered a little just thinking about it. “It was awful.”

“What about Phantom Menace?” I asked. “Wasn’t Darth Maul pretty scary?”

“Yeah, but he was the only bad part in that one, and he gets killed. The rest of it was pretty good. Not like in Revenge of the Sith. That whole thing was just terrible.”

A couple years back the younger had dressed up like Luke for Halloween. His sandy brown hair had grown out to a perfect Luke length. He knew exactly which Luke he wanted to be: black-clad with the green light-saber, from Return of the Jedi. In pictures from that night, he’s got the stern face and the extended-arm, angled-up saber pose.

For my fiftieth birthday my mother gave me a color illustration of the major Star Wars characters from the nine main movies, done by a friend of hers. She had played a little joke by hanging it up in her place and waiting until I commented on it to give it to me.

“I hope you like it,” she had said.

It definitely looked out of place in her home, but in mine it looked okay, We already had a Star Wars shower curtain in the guest bathroom. Mom did have some experience with Star Wars-themed wall decorating. The illustration hung in our kitchen just above the sheet where we kept track of the movie-night picks. The older noticed that Kylo was on there twice, once with and once without his mask. I could identify most of the characters, but I needed their help with a few.