Give in to the Dark Side

MY STAR WARS HISTORY, PART 2

As I explained in my earlier post, the Star Wars phenomenon landed on Earth in the late 70s like an out-of-control Star Destroyer, and pop culture was never the same again. By the mid-80s, however, the franchise was dead.

Then, early in the next decade, it was resurrected by new novels and comics that formed the foundation for what became known as the expanded universe. I read the first book trilogy by Timothy Zahn, which directly continued the adventures of Luke, Leia, Han, and the crew. But I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it, and other interests (and life in general) came to fill my time. Fast-forward to '97: George Lucas used the original film trilogy to experiment with the advances that his company Industrial Light & Magic had made with computer-generated visual effects, and he released the results to theaters as his "special editions" so that, in essence, he could make fans pay for his experiments. Of course, I fell for the ploy, too, as I was eager to see the scenes that had been cut from A New Hope; I knew about that material because it was included in the storybook version. But my expectations were foiled when little of that footage actually made it back into the film. Lucas was too busy making Greedo shoot first and showing a Play-Doh Jabba to give me more Biggs Darklighter. Beyond that, my basic assessment of the SEs is this: Lucas didn't fix the low-budget flaws of the original movies, he just put a band-aid on a third-degree burn. While adding lots of digital elements to existing shots and creating entire new scenes, he ignored other glaring problems that had always bothered me.

But I shrugged off that experience and moved on. Jump forward another two years to the event known around the world as Episode I. The internet was still relatively young at that point, and movie advertising wasn't heavily done on that platform, so fans still had to go to a cinema to see the highly anticipated trailer. I just shook my head in dumbfounded wonder when I heard that tons of people had bought tickets to the film Meet Joe Black, filled up the theater, and then exited en masse as soon as the two-minute preview for The Phantom Menace was over. Youtube has put such absurdity as that in the past. Anyway, I saw the movie and enjoyed it, but I didn't make a huge deal of it. I must've been one of the few old-school SW fanatics not to tear out his hair over the perceived heresy that Lucas inflicted on the saga. Jar Jar sucked, Darth Maul was cool, Padme was pretty, but her accent was inexplicable. Life continued.

Then there were some big life-changes for me in 2000 and I found myself with a renewed interest in Star Wars. It started innocently enough with the purchase of a few action figures, from both the Power of the Force II and Episode I lines, after which I figured those guys needed a playset or two. But once I discovered the SW-themed websites, things began heating up. Especially interesting to me were the sites about action-figure customization, which demonstrated how to create new figures using paints, baking clay, and parts from other toys. And there were the ones filled with AF comic strips and humor panels; I wanted to make my own of those! There was even one guy who spent all his spare time and money building elaborate and accurate playset-dioramas for the toys. I didn't for an instant think of following his lead, but I did want to collect all the available playsets and accessories.

That's where eBay came in. Once I'd used that "candy store" to impulsively buy up all the stuff I'd wanted for years but couldn't locate elsewhere--toys, books, movies, music, what-have-you--I realized it was a bonanza for Star Wars treasure, and I took advantage of that to begin acquiring as much of the toy-related merchandise as I could afford (or as my credit-card limit would allow). When I wasn't doing that, I was haunting the local toy stores--the retail places for sale and clearance items as well as the second-market locations for used stuff. You would be forgiven for suggesting that I had an addiction.

And this obsession extended beyond material acquisition; I read anything about Star Wars that I could lay hands on, both online and off. The expanded universe had grown exponentially in ten years, through novels, short stories, comics, toys, video games, role-playing games, audio productions, and even big-budget fan films that were approved by Lucas. There had even been an official multimedia event called Shadow of the Empire, set between TESB and ROTJ, that involved a pulp-style novel, comic miniseries, action figures, video game, and more. The EU felt limitless, and its potential truly was. And I wanted to take part in it by creating my own characters and stories, set during the time of the Empire. It was loads of fun.

But it wasn't all that healthy. Besides throwing all my money at the franchise, I was thinking Star Wars all the time, even when it wasn't appropriate. I failed in my marketing-job duties because I preferred immersing myself in behind-the-scenes articles on the original trilogy or news and rumors about Episode II. I can still see myself hunched over my computer in my spacious office, where SW toy dioramas and playsets were displayed everywhere; I can only imagine what my coworkers thought. Once the shock of 9/11 had started to subside, I decided to compose my thoughts in a short story--a Star Wars story that featured my own characters reminiscing about the destruction of the planet Alderaan--and email it to family and friends.

In my defense, though, I can say that I learned some positive things about storytelling during that time. While studying the original trilogy, I discovered Lucas's inspiration for its structure: the Hero's Journey. This template, developed by myth expert Joseph Campbell in his book Hero with a Thousand Faces, starts the protagonist in the "normal world" and then forces him on an epic quest of material and spiritual fulfillment during which he meets new people, learns new things, and (usually) saves the day. I mentioned in the previous post that the success of Star Wars impacted how Hollywood approached the production and marketing of movies, but it also affected the way stories came to be told on film. At first, other filmmakers just aped what they thought was the formula of Star Wars, but then Christopher Vogler adapted Campbell's structure into 12 steps specifically for future movies to follow. And they've been doing it faithfully ever since.

My SW obsession didn't improve after Attack of the Clones: the toys for Episode II may have been terrible, but I still bought them all up. The major difference was that I was no longer in a job where I could spend my working hours trawling the 'net, so I wasn't all day on eBay and SW websites, and my thinking began to expand once again to other interests. In 2004, I got back into community theater, where I made a lot of interesting friends, so that, by the time of Revenge of the Sith in the summer of '05, I was pretty much just buying the toys out of habit and a need for completion. Finally, the sheer volume and weight of the toy collection began to irritate me, so I quickly got rid of it all, through yard sale and donation, before I had time to reconsider what I was doing. The collection I had invested so much time and money in ended up returning me literally pennies on the dollar, at best.

For the franchise in general, things slowed down somewhat after Episode III. Even though Lucas promised there would be no more films, he still supposedly planned a live-action TV series, and there was the Clone Wars computer-animated show. The toys didn't vanish from stores again, they just got more expensive, and I didn't feel so bad about not collecting anymore. Then came the momentous news that Lucas had sold the whole ball of wax to Disney, but that's a tale for another day, because my Star Wars story pretty much ends here. Except that it doesn't really, because that saga will be in my head forever. It changed my way of thinking, in terms of story and imagination, and it will always have a bearing on those things. I still frame my adventure plots in the Hero's Journey and I still plan book series as trilogies, so it's obvious that galaxy will never be far, far away from me.

#multimedia #movies #structure