Collect All 21! Memoirs of a Star Wars Geek - Expanded Edition Read online

  The first Star Wars figure I owned was R2-D2, with an asterisk in the record book, because I really count Darth Vader as number one. Here’s why:

  There was a kid down the street, about a year younger than me, named Chris. I don’t think his family lived there very long because I only remember him from my first year in the neighborhood, when I was in first grade.

  Even though Chris was only in kindergarten, I remember him as kind of a bad kid. Not like stealing or hitting or smoking bad, but he was the first kid I ever heard swear regularly. Among his favorite expressions was “Well, what’re we waiting for, Mr. Magoo shit?” His mouth actually got me in trouble once: My dad sat me down one night to tell me that Chris’s mom had heard her little angel using naughty words, and that he said I taught them to him. I think Dad was pretty well aware of the true situation, because the talking-to I got seemed more out of obligation than actual concern about me running around with a Richard Pryor vocabulary. The conversation ended with Dad laughing and saying, “No more swearing, dammit.”

  Chris used to meet me sometimes when I got off the school bus in the afternoons, and sometimes we’d sit on the small stacks of bricks that flanked the drainage ditch in a neighbor’s front yard and I’d share leftovers from my lunch. Then we’d walk up the street to my house and maybe have a snack and then play outside for awhile.

  Chris was the first kid I knew who ever had Star Wars toys. The bus pulled up the street one day and from my seat, I saw him standing by the stop sign clutching a Landspeeder. Sweet God, a Landspeeder right out of the movie, just waiting in his hands there at the little crossroads where our school bus stopped. I dashed up to him, spastic at the sight of the thing, and he completely ignored me. He said hi to Rick, the kid who lived across the street from me, though, and then turned to me and said he was going to play with Rick that day.

  I seriously thought I was going to cry, watching them walk up the street. Come on! Rick wasn’t even a Star Wars fan! What the hell?!

  Once, Rick and I camped out in a tent in my backyard. We hadn’t invited Chris, but somehow he found out and apparently was at home crying. His older sister came over to my house before we’d settled in the tent for the night and asked if Chris could pleeeeeease sleep out with us? He really, really wanted to, and look, she’d brought us some little baby toads she’d caught in her yard, and we could have them if we’d just let Chris sleep over in the tent, pleasepleasepleeeease? (Wow. That’s a strangely dedicated older sister, no?)

  We gave in, though we turned down the baby toad offering. That night, Chris told me that women’s boobs were sometimes called headlights, and that his little translucent green toothbrush with silver flecks in its handle was actually a Star Wars toothbrush. Really! It used to have stickers of Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin on the handle, but they’d worn off, for real!

  Chris did eventually share his Star Wars toys with me, and I convinced him to trade me his R2-D2 figure for something, but I don’t remember what. His initials were written in black marker on the bottom of Artoo’s feet. I treasured that figure. Didn’t put it down, clicked the dome head back and forth, made him stroll over boundless carpetscapes and probably even hid it under my pillow that night. I didn’t tell my parents about it, because I didn’t want to be the kind of kid who ripped off littler kids, even though we’d made a trade and it wasn’t an outright con.

  It was a glorious time span of less than 24 hours. The next day, Chris told me his mom had ordered him to trade back for the figure. How’d she find out? Oh, well, see, she had put a little spring in his pants pocket, Chris explained, so that he couldn’t hide things in there, and when he came home the day before, and there was no R2-D2 sticking out of his pocket, his mom had obviously known that he’d given it away, and she’d gotten reeeeallly mad, so he just had to trade it back.

  And so my Star Wars action figure count dropped back to zero.

  There was an upside, though: It wasn’t too long before my parents did actually manage to buy me all 12 of the original figures, and because I’d collected the whole dozen, I used their proofs-of-purchase to buy a mail-away display stand advertised on the cardbacks. I still have it – the backdrop fell apart years ago, and the stand is cracked in a few places, and the label on the front is partially torn off, but I’ll never get rid of it.

  Before the figures came, though, I got a Landspeeder of my own.

  I don’t remember where I got it or why, but sending it zipping through our kitchen on its spring-loaded, “floating ride” set of wheels was a sheer plastic-driven rush. I’d shove it careening against the baseboards and try to make a head-on hit that would pop open the engine compartment cover. I’d flip the wheel-activation lever so the speeder would rest flat and lie still, like a wolf waiting to leap at prey, and then I’d flick the switch that engaged the wheels and I could imagine the jet-engine scream of the Landspeeder turbines rocketing it across the desert flats.

  Within a day or two, the thrill was gone. Not in a bored-with-it sense, but in a John-lost-his-favorite-toy-ever sense.

  I’d been playing outside in the front yard with some of the other neighborhood kids, including Melanie, the girl from down the street, and I thought it would be fun to pick up our cat, Tabby, and put her on Mel’s back.

  Tabby was an outdoor cat, so she had her claws, and she sank them into Mel’s back like she was clinging to a maple trunk. Mel screamed, and Tabby’s claws raked down her back. The cat ran off, and Mel kept crying. I felt horrible.

  After making sure Mel got home okay, my parents lectured me something fierce and then asked me to pick a punishment, something they’d never done in my seven years of existence. (They also offered me the chance to get a spanking. Like I was going to choose that.) I tried the “no dessert for a month” bit. Denied: We didn’t have dessert regularly anyway. I’m sure my parents probably put forth some sort of television restriction, but please, why not just ask me to stop breathing?

  Then I thought of the Landspeeder. I offered to give it up for a week. They said make it a month, and we had a deal. They packed it back in its glorious full-color packaging and set it on top of the refrigerator, where I could see it constantly, that kid on the side of the box mocking me.

  When the calendar changed, I asked for it back. No dice, my parents said, it’s only been a couple weeks. Punishment started mid-month. I’d known that, but I figured it was worth a try.

  Eventually, when I got it back, my Landspeeder needed a driver.

  Time to get my first Star Wars figure.

  We went to the Hobby Center store at the mall, Belden Village. The figures were $1.75 apiece, and the display towered over me. I pretty quickly narrowed my choices down to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, but that deadlock lasted awhile.

  I made the case for Luke: It’s his Landspeeder, for starters. And he is the hero, since he blew up the Death Star and rescued Princess Leia and all, even if he’s not as cool as Han Solo or his ship.

  But then there’s the pro-Vader side: Come on. He’s Darth Freaking Vader. Luke’s a farm kid in a dirty shirt, this guy’s a towering mass of black metal who can crush your throat single-handed or no-handed, and besides, the Luke figure is almost just like a miniature Ken doll or something, whereas the Vader figure is cool and sci-fi and looks like no other action figure in the world.

  I picked Vader. Had him tooling around in the Landspeeder, imagining he was cruising around on the surface of the Death Star. Ridiculous? Not to a 7-year-old. I mean, physics aside, Vader’s in that suit, and he could probably do a cannonball into the sun for all I knew. I remember telling my parents that Vader was just “more exciting.”

  After that, I don’t remember the specifics by which my collection – though we didn’t call them collections then, they were just our Star Wars toys – grew. I got the Land of the Jawas, and still have it, though the cardboard Sandcrawler backdrop is long gone. (Even though it looked cool, the tiny elevator was a pain to work smoothly, to say nothing of trying to fit figures on
to the microscopic pegs sandwiched inside the thing.) The escape pod the set came with was pretty neat, though, and I loved the system of footpegs, levers and spring plates by which I could carefully set up the Jawas’ ambush of R2-D2. I got an X-Wing – again, still have it, even though all four laser guns, three of the wings and the plastic cockpit window are missing. And a TIE Fighter with the pop-off wings, too. Great not only for simulating battle damage, but for rigging any manner of catapulting experiments.

  I never got the Millennium Falcon, but the Christmas of 1978 I got the best toy ever: The Kenner Death Star Playset. A better non-electronic toy was never made, and even the original Atari Video Computer System I got a few years later only barely edges it on my all-time favorite list.

  Years later, when I started seeing Death Stars for sale in their original boxes, I was surprised to see how small the package was, because I remembered the toy as being huge. But then, thinking about it more, I realized that the thing came in about a hundred pieces.

  And it was worth every painstakingly-applied decal.

  Four full levels, a working elevator, an exploding laser cannon, a trapdoor, a trash compactor with foam-rubber garbage chunks that mashed the figures ever so nicely and popped open an exit hatch at the last minute. The set even seemed to fill in details that were either unseen in the movie or glimpsed just barely, like that giant laser cannon, the interior monitor screens showing the climactic dogfight, the bridge across the chasm that Luke and Leia could’ve used if he hadn’t blasted the control panel, and the mysterious trash compactor monster, the Dianoga, whose name I didn’t know until a few years later when I read The Jedi Master’s Quizbook. (In the movie, you only saw an eye and a few tentacles, but the toy version of the monster had a bizarre Jaws-inspired mouth that was nothing like I would have pictured.)

  And the detail of incorporating a narrow ledge and the tractor beam controls at the top of the elevator shaft? Absolute genius.

  I remember playing with it the day I got it, trying to get Dad to snap a picture of me just as I “blew up” the cannon on the top level.

  With so many pieces, I know it probably didn’t take long for my Death Star to start falling into disrepair. By the time I was in middle school, I think the only parts left were the elevator shaft, the trash compactor and monster, and the body of the laser cannon, though without its long extended muzzle.

  The only problem with the Death Star was that it was a strictly stay-at-home toy. Ships and action figures you could take over to your friends’ houses, but not that thing.

  In first grade, Mike D. was the first friend I ever had who didn’t live in our neighborhood. Sometimes our parents would send notes to school and let us ride the bus to each other’s house. Mike was the only other kid I knew who was really as into Star Wars as I was. I was insanely jealous because his dad had brought him some Star Wars trading cards back from a trip to Germany, and they were these cool glossy things, like playing cards, and they came in a pack of 50 or 60, not like the flimsy cardboard Topps cards I collected in packs of less than a dozen.

  Mike, who would grow up to be an artist, also had the Star Wars Portfolio, that collection of Ralph McQuarrie pre-production paintings, which I thought were just amazing. Once, we spent a few hours sitting and tracing bits and pieces of each painting to create our own custom Star Wars pictures. When we were older, he gave me that portfolio. You can still see our pencil-point indentations on some of the prints.

  Mike’s parents had a stereo with a record player, and they’d gotten him the 45 rpm single of the Star Wars theme (disco rendition), which we thought was particularly awesome because it included laser sound effects. The flip side was the Cantina band theme, similarly rendered. His mom had some friends over once, and while they were sitting in the family room, we put the Cantina music on and paraded through the house playing invisible alien saxophones.

  We didn’t play much with action figures over at Mike’s house. I remember running around inside and outside and pretending we were tearing through the Death Star and blasting Stormtroopers and confronting Darth himself. And I know Mike had the small-scale die-cast X-Wing, because I remember careening around the big wraparound porch at his house, weaving in and out of the pillars with that ship in my hand while he flew my die-cast Millennium Falcon.

  That Falcon was the only one of the little metal Kenner ships I had. Dad was going to Click’s one day – this was the closest grocery and department store, and it was technically called “Click” or “Acme Click,” but nobody ever said they were going to Click, because it just sounded funny. Maybe that’s why now it’s called Acme Fresh Market and has nothing but groceries. I took fifty cents of my own money with me, even though I knew fifty cents wouldn’t get you squat in the Kenner/Star Wars world.

  What I found was the die-cast Falcon. I’d never seen it before, except in a weird white-and-red prototype form that Kenner put in one of the toy catalogs they included with other Star Wars toys. The one sitting on the shelf in front of me, though, was gorgeous and detailed and featured not only retractable landing gear, but a rotating laser cannon and radar dish!

  I picked it off the shelf, took it to Dad.

  He was skeptical. “How much is that?” he asked.

  “Um…five,” was all I said.

  “Do you have five dollars?”

  “NobutIhavefiftycentswithmeandIcanpayyoubacktherestandI’ll doextrachorespleasePleasePlease.”

  At a buck a week allowance, this was like signing a mortgage.

  But seriously: We’re talking about the Millennium Falcon here.

  I still have that one, too, only it’s been missing the plastic radar dish for decades. I call it my limited edition post-Return of the Jedi version.

  When Mike and I were in high school and hadn’t been close for a number of years, we kind of renewed our friendship over a couple afternoons in the computer art department. Fiddling with the video cameras and the nifty new Apple Macintoshes, Mike figured out that you could also hook the video cable to a VCR, and we captured a bunch of Star Wars screengrabs off a video tape of the trilogy I’d recorded from cable TV showings.

  Sitting there, watching Star Wars frame by frame, pausing and rewinding and talking, for a little while, it was almost 1978 again.

  Minus the invisible alien saxophones.

  Proof of Purchase

  Mom got me a Star Wars cake for my eighth birthday. This was 1978, mind you, so this wasn’t a photo-icing cake or even a cartoon-style airbrushed cake: This was a “Cake Lady in Canton, could you do please do something for my son who’s gonzo for this movie” cake.

  This was plain white icing sheet cake and line-piped bootleg-looking drawings of a Jawa and R2-D2 and Vader and a TIE Fighter, with a bright yellow lightsaber in the middle and Happy Birthday Johnny in orange and white letters.

  And I loved it. It was the coolest looking cake I would get until my high school graduation, when Mom had my best friend Aaron draw a cartoon of me driving a Corvette, which she had the Cake Lady in Canton render in icing, and even that one’s a close call.

  My brother Nick got a Return of the Jedi cake when he was ten: Vader and Luke dueling against the deep blue backdrop of the Throne Room window outlined in fat white icing lines. It’s a little more detailed than mine was, and by this time they were able to color in backgrounds and stuff.

  I was 16 by then.

  I was still a little bit jealous.

  Into A Larger World:

  Star Wars Jumps off the Screen

  For either my eighth birthday or Christmas 1978, I don’t remember which, my Aunt Carol gave me three books, wrapped together in plastic. Their spines read “Star Wars” and “The Marvel Comics Illustrated version of Star Wars” and some weird-sounding title I’d never heard of that made me think, “What does she think I am, a novelist?” because I thought “novelist” mean someone who read a lot of books with small print and no pictures.

  That third book was “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” by Alan Dea
n Foster, and when I actually took off the shrink-wrap and realized that I was holding a previously-untold Star Wars story, I was just bowled over. I still re-read it every few years and find that my mind creates the same mental pictures as when I was little. (“Splinter” was adapted into a comic book in the 1990s, and I never read it, in part because the illustrations clashed so violently with those in my own imagination that I decided after seeing just a page or two that I’d rather keep my 8-year-old interpretation intact.)

  A couple things in “Splinter” have always stood out in my head: The gross-out scenes, like the one where a prisoner has an eye put out by an Imperial officer, and the description of a post-fight combatant as he “chucked the double handful” of an enemy’s remains on the ground, where it lay “moist and glistening”; Luke, pinned face-down on a pond floor in a hand-to-hand battle as he feels “the clean grains [of sand] pressing into his nostrils.”

  When the Return of the Jedi Sketchbook came out about five or six years later, I was surprised to see references to “Yuzzum,” described as creatures with little round bodies and long, spindly legs, and I thought it was odd because there were Yuzzem (with an ‘e’) in “Splinter,” but these were serious bad-ass guys – one of them turns an Imperial into that glistening double-handful of slop – that I always pictured as a cross between a Wookiee and an orangutan.

  I was always confused, though, by a bit near the end of the book. Luke and Vader have just been Force-beating the snot out of each other: Vader’s lost an arm and is staggering around, Luke’s in an exhausted heap on the ground. Then comes this line: “I’m sorry,” he murmured, turning his head to where the Princess lay crumpled on the temple floor. “I’m sorry, Leia. I loved you.” Problem is, the previous paragraphs are so packed with action and description going back and forth between farm boy and Sith Lord that it’s not immediately clear who “he” is. For years, I assigned the line to Vader. (This was way before anybody knew the whole brother-sister-dad thing was going on.) It was only when I re-read the book in my late twenties that I realized it could have been – and in fact, probably was meant to be – Luke’s line. I could go look it up in that comic version, I suppose, but I like keeping the memory of the mystery.