Star Wars "The Childhood and Adolescent Years"

Star Wars has been a fun, sometimes enlightening, imagination expanding, often times annoying obsession with me. Some people contend that they're just movies. Well yeah. they're just movies the way that "The Beatles" are just a band, or "the Yankees" are just a baseball team.

Some of the finest memories I have from childhood, were of my siblings and I playing pretend Star Wars upstairs in our old house. With the famous John Williams soundtrack playing on my sisters' record player, we'd have little mock lightsaber and laser battles. I remember being scared whenever the Empire's musical themes would blare out of the speaker. Finding out why classical music scares children would be a fascinating study.

I don't remember, but I'm sure that my sisters would battle over who could do the better Leia, while my brother and I debated (in a 5 and 3 year old way) about who got to be Luke and Han. Luke and I always had issue about who was going to be who. I had the blonde hair, Luke had brown. So naturally, you'd think that I got to be Luke while he got to be Han. But my brother's name *IS* Luke, so that always got a bit messy. The same damn thing always happened with "The Dukes of Hazzard" games. Who was Bo, who was Luke? Age is funny. Ask a young kid, they want to be Luke. Ask an older person, they want to be Han.

One of my all-time favorite movie experiences was when my dad suprisingly took me, and all of my siblings out of school to go watch "Return of the Jedi." A horrible Houston storm knocked out the power to the theater right about the point when Jabba is sentencing Luke and crew to death over the Sarlacc. We were probably pissed at the time, but I remember thinking it was pretty cool that they gave us free passes to the movie later in the week. When you're a kid, going to the movies is cool, just for the sake that you're going to the movies. To be given free passes for a movie you've already seen a quarter of, why that's just incredible.

When I was a kid, before I became enthralled with GI Joe figures, I was obsessed with Star Wars figures. Everybody had the basics. Everybody had a Han. Had a Leia. Luke was a given. Obi Wan and Darth Vader, with the lightsaber that would slide in and out of the arm, were musts. Everybody had at least one Stormtrooper, but lucky was the kid who had more than one. It takes an extra ounce or two of imagination to stretch one storm trooper into a batallion of storm troopers.

But if you really wanted to be "the cool kid," both in your household and in the neighborhood at large, you HAD to have one of the "sets" from the movie. Maybe the Carbon Freezing room, with the Han Solo coffee table accessory. Or the Death Star set, complete with squishy sponge portion of the floor. Or maybe even Jabba with moving platform over the Rancor cage.

Children with toys are like little movie directors. If you have stuffed animals, you manipulate them into scenes that would involve a monkee speaking to a fox. If you have GI Joes, Transformers, or Star Wars action figures, you manipulate them into these huge epic battles. You learn the value of cardboard, and how they can be cut up and pasted, and touched up with markers, to make them look like any kind of set you can imagine. You learn how to make your house stairs into mountains, while using your bath tub as an ocean. You learn to close one eye when flying your toy ships through the air, because it makes them seem closer, and more in focus.

I can't tell you how many times my friends and I played out our Star Wars fantasies on the playgrounds of Texas. Playgrounds were perfect places for my friends and I play out our SW fantasies. Just when Darth Vader has you backed into a corner, you jump on the slide and to your waiting ship.

Speaking of ships, they were a pain in the ass to draw. The Death Star was easy, since all that really required was your ability to draw two circles, and one equatorial line. But X-Wings require a box, an X, and a triangle portruding from the box. And don't forget R2's head. The Millennium Falcon? Forget it. That's a hard one to draw.

Having grown up in the VCR age, I think I must have watched those movies way too many times to count. When I was a child, I probably watched Episode IV the least. The last lightsaber duel in "The Empire Strikes Back" used to scare the crap out of me. Darth Vader TOWERS over Luke. It still ranks as one of my favorite moments of the entire saga.

But I remember "Return of the Jedi" being the movie that I watched the most. It has the most "stuff" that kids my age would go for; space battles, cool action, Luke's a Jedi, and Ewoks.

But as with all things, I started to grow away from "Star Wars." There were only so many times I could see those movies. They became pretty boring. I found other movies and books to occupy my entertainment need. I grew up and went to school.

But on one summer trip, I spottted a book in a bookstore with "Star Wars" emblazened across the top. I begged my dad to purchase it, which wasn't hard to do considering his profound love of books and his incessant need to try and persuade me away from the television. Silly man. The book, the first of a trilogy (how original!) took place 5 years after "Return of the Jedi," and restarted my fascination with Star Wars. Only this time, instead of movies I was fascinated with, I couldn't get enough of the books. If there was a book with a Star Wars on top, I read it.

But just like the movies, I started to grow bored and tired of the books. SW pretty much remained dormant for the next few years until...

(to be continued)