Incoherent Scribblings

I’m not sure I would say that I have been a Star Wars fan ever since the original Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope) was released. After all, when it was released in 1977, I was only three. I didn’t even see a Star Wars movie in the theatre until The Return of the Jedi. However, by the time the final installment of the first trilogy was released, I was a full-blown fan.

I was just a little kid and was of course, very susceptible to media influence and technically it probably did have something to do with it. However, did I become a Star Wars fan because I had Princess Leia Underoos, because I had a Star Wars lunchbox, or because of the Star Wars toys that I faithfully fished out of cereal boxes?

Actually, no. I became a Star Wars fan as a direct result of my cousins Scott and Jeremy.

The summer before Return of the Jedi was released, I spent three glorious weeks visiting my cousins. In 1982, Amy was a teenager and Matt was just a toddler; but at 9, Scott was only a year older than me and at 12, Jeremy wasn’t yet too big to play with Scott and me.

Though I was never a traditional tomboy, I was never overly “girly” either. During those three weeks Scott, Jeremy, and I were inseparable. We spent some time outdoors playing baseball or running through the sprinklers, but we spent most of those warm summer days in the cool basement rec-room playing “Star Wars.”

Scott and Jeremy had been bitten hard by the “Star Wars” bug and had nearly all of the action figures. They had a ping pong table and two or three card tables set up in the rec-room that had been converted into different Star Wars scenes. They had the “Millennium Falcon,” Luke’s red space ship, and Darth Vader’s fighter pod… all of which could be opened up and the action figures set inside.

It was grand. Jeremy was the “Dark Side” and Scott and I were Luke and Leia. They had seen the movies so many times that they could recite the dialog. In the days before the Internet, they still knew amazing details about the new movie that was still nearly a year away. By the end of my stay, I too felt like I had seen the first two movies at least 10 times.

I suppose I was smitten with my older cousins, for we wrote letters back and forth all that summer and I remember that I suddenly was interested in things that had never before appealed to me. When asked what it was all about, I remember telling my mom that was what Scott and Jeremy did or said.

And of course, the greatest impression they left on me was the love of all things Star Wars, even though I had yet to see any of the movies. Those Underoos, that lunchbox, and those toys that came from the cereal boxes? None of those came into my possession until after my visit to my cousins’.

Every year my cousins came to visit my grandparents over Memorial Day weekend and almost exactly one year after I had been introduced to Star Wars by my cousins, they took me to the theatre with them where I saw Return of the Jedi for the first time. And yes, I have been a Star Wars fan ever since.