 Fantasy: January 13, 2016 Issue [#7416] |
  Fantasy
This week: A New Force Awakens Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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“Star Trek?” I asked her. “Really?”
“What?” she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together.
“There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly,” I said. “Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This is shocking.”
She sniffed. “This is the post-nerd-closet world, Harry. It’s okay to like both.”
“Blasphemy and lies,” I said.
-Jim Butcher, Ghost Story
So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble — though it would definitely be green.
-Randall Munroe
Always remember, your focus determines your reality.
-George Lucas |
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Last month, Storm Machine  edited a Fantasy newsletter about Star Wars, just after its release: "Beginning to look a lot like STAR WARS?"
But since I have little else on my mind except video games and an upcoming trip to Vegas - the one which I've covered fairly recently, and the other which is more suited for my Comedy newsletter - I'm going to talk about Star Wars, too.
So. Star Wars.
I'll go ahead and admit this: I was old enough to appreciate it when the first Star Wars movie came out. But I wasn't old enough to drive myself to the (single-screen, scratchy film, mono-audio) theater to see it. So my mom drew the short straw and had to take me.
Now, my mom was a good person: kind, thoughtful, loving, encouraging, and all the stuff a mom should be. She was also, shall we say, a bit inconsistent when it came to administering effective punishments to a pre-teen boy. So she told me she'd take me to see Star Wars one day because she figured I'd like to see it. And then I got into trouble for something - I don't remember what. Lighting the dog's tail on fire or hiding a crab in the toilet or sneaking one of my dad's cigarettes that he wasn't supposed to have. You know. Boy stuff. So she told me she wouldn't be taking me to see Star Wars after all.
Now remember, this was 1977. I didn't know what the hell Star Wars was. I was already a budding fan of science fiction and fantasy, to be sure, but at the ripe old age of eleven, I had graduated - or so I thought - from space opera to things like Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) and Dhalgren (Delany). I figured Star Wars was probably "kids stuff." You know how 11 year olds can be. So when handed down the verdict from above, I shrugged, changed into my shorts, and headed back into the bay to swim around and look for more crabs.
And then, sometime later that day, I heard her hollering at me to get ready to go to the movies.
Okay, Mom, whatever. So I headed back to change again, and by that time, we were late, and I'd missed the iconic opening crawl.
Of course, that was the day my life changed. Hell, that was the summer when everyone's life changed, although most of us didn't know it at the time. We'd just gotten done with the fallout from Watergate and the Vietnam War, Nixon's resignation, and the brief and uneventful presidency of Gerald Ford. Television consisted of three commercial networks and public broadcasting; personal computers were in their infancy, and I didn't have one yet; there was no cable or satellite TV, at least not out in the wetlands; and VHS was a rumor. In other words, entertainment was sparse on the ground - which is why I'd picked up science fiction and fantasy books in the first place.
Star Wars became more than just a movie - though of course, it changed the movie industry, too, with its state of the art (for the time) special effects and orchestral soundtrack. (Hell, I bought the soundtrack. On 8-track tape, so it would run on repeat all night. I kept waking up whenever the Cantina theme played.) It changed the way we watched movies. It changed entertainment itself. It became a national - even a world - conversation, with museum exhibits, scholarly works about it, and even a Darth Vader carving on the National Cathedral.
I'm not kidding about that last bit, by the way: http://www.cathedral.org/about/darthVader.shtml
Much later in my life, after my mother died and I was, physically at least, a grown man, I became friends with a family whose kid was a major Star Wars fan. Room full of toys, posters, books, and so on - I was never as into the marketing, but this kid was obsessed with it. So they invited me along when the original movies were re-released into theaters, with all the changes that Lucas made that we didn't know would suck. Kid was 11 at the time, same age I was back when it first came out. I found some meaning in that, but he had the movie memorized, where I'd been seeing it for the first time.
Okay, so I was hyped for Episode VII. But I'd been burned too many times - by the re-release changes, by the prequels, by the cynical marketing - so I didn't get my hopes up too much.
Of course, it turned out awesome. I figured going in maybe I'd feel like a kid again, remember all the other Star Wars movies I'd seen. But no - it wasn't about nostalgia for me; it was about seeing a good space opera, and participating in a cultural phenomenon. A lot of people had complaints about the movie, but whatever. Go watch the prequels again and then tell me.
Anyway, I don't really have a point to this, unless it's to refrain from being a naughty brat if you don't want to miss the first few minutes of a cultural phenomenon. I just wanted to talk about Star Wars.
So may the Force be with you. |
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Last time, in "The Priest" , I talked about the archetype of the Priest. Either everyone agreed with me, or, more likely, I was too vague to even bother responding - regardless, there was no feedback this time 
So that's it for me for January - see you next month! Until then,
DREAM ON!!! |
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