Life During ‘Star Wars’
By: John Devore
Tags: Science Fiction, Movies, Fantasy, Star Wars, Star Wars The Last Jedi

Life During ‘Star Wars’

A personal history of not crying while watching blockbuster space operas

1983. I have always suspected Mike of swapping my prized Boba Fett action figure with his Greedo action figure when we were nine-year-old kids. This is the only way I could explain ending up with two Greedos — that’s four pairs of bug eyes, four pairs of squat green antennae, and two sucker-mouths — instead of one.

Boba Fett, the mysterious jet-pack wearing bounty hunter from The Empire Strikes Back, had been one of the main characters in the Star Wars saga I was planning in the basement of my parent’s house, a sequel to Return of the Jedi. Boba Fett, you see, had escaped from the belly of the Saarlac.

I didn’t have many friends as a boy. But I had dozens and dozens of toys, specifically action figures that I would play with for hours. I had Star Wars figures galore, but also GI Joe and Masters of the Universe. The basement, my domain, was a nightmare landscape for bare adult feet.

I would sometimes be found napping in a pile of toys, exhausted. My stories were epic and full of double-crosses and melodramatic speeches before selfless self-sacrifices. I played with the intensity of God parting the Red Sea.

I didn’t have friends but I had an older sister who, I swear, could use the Force. She’d wave her hand and say “Get me a Fresca” and I would. But she didn’t need to use her powers on me when she asked if I wanted to see Return of the Jedi with her and her teenage friends. No one else had invited me. So I went and didn’t blink and when I came home I got to work. That’s when I realized the star of my collection was missing.

I hadn’t wanted to hang out with Mike, who was one of many boys named Mike in my fourth-grade class. My mom and Mike’s mom had conspired to have their two sons to play together with their dolls. If you’re reading this right now, Mike, I know what you did.

After Boba Fett was stolen, I had to rewrite my entire Star Wars episode. After the destruction of the second Death Star, our heroes celebrated. But it turned out that Greedo, killed by Han in the first Star Wars movie, had brothers. Two brothers. Two vengeful brothers. My new story involved Stormtroopers who had turned, post-Empire, into space pirates, and a new Sith Lord played by guest star Destro, a chrome-faced villain from G.I. Joe, and the murder of Luke Skywalker by the Greedo Brothers. How best to hurt Han than to kill his best friend?

My space opera stretched over the course of days and required the sacrifice of the most expensive Christmas gift I was ever to receive — the Millennium Falcon — which I threw out of my parent’s second-floor window and onto the patio below. To this very day, my mother wistfully wonders what small fortune that toy spaceship, a collector’s item today, would be worth. She was angry at the time but also, somehow, understood that R2D2 had lured the pirates onto the ship and had remote-control piloted it to their doom, thus saving the day.

The climax of my story was this: Princess Leia, the very cool Battle for Endor version, picks up Luke’s lightsaber when cornered by Destro, who I had renamed Darth Destruction, and when she fires it up the Force comes spilling out of her and calls to all of the surviving Jedi who had been in hiding all over the galaxy. That included: ‘Battle Armor’ He-Man, GI Joe ninja Snake-Eyes, and I also decided that Lando Calrissian had been a secret Jedi all along.

Anyway, the Jedi showed up and saved the day.