star wars

I shouldn’t talk about the Ewoks. I’m about to watch – and write individual posts about – both Ewok movies and every episode of their cartoon. I’m going to have to find a lot of things to say about Ewoks. So I should not waste my post on Return of the Jedi by talking about the Ewoks.

Let’s talk about the Ewoks.

I loved them when I first saw Jedi, of course. I was ten years old, and the Ewoks were for me. I mean, that’s the cynical view, right? They’re just in there for the merchandising possibilities? Well, if that’s true, it worked. I loved me some Ewoks.

But I’m an adult now, and trying to watch this as if seeing it for the first time… I still love the Ewoks. If I were to dispassionately analyze the narrative, I’d have to conclude that the Ewoks frigging rock, dude. They’re cute and they’re funny, and it would be easy to play that battle against the Imperials wholly for laughs, but in between scenes of them swinging from vines to knock Stormtroopers over, we get them swarming over a fallen foe to brutally bash them to death. We see a couple of them killed, and one mourning his dead friend. The movie insists we take them seriously. They’re the colonized, killing their colonizers. Who can’t get behind that? (Plenty of people, actually, but nobody I’m interested in knowing.)

I’m pretty sure they ate the dead Stormtroopers. Ewoks are the best.

I also love every other thing about this movie. Leia is really done right by this script. Yes, she’s mostly left out of the family drama, but Carrie Fisher eats that scene where Luke reveals their relationship. Return of the Jedi is almost all action, all the time, so the momentary slow down for what is, I think, the first scene with any significant character-building dialogue between Luke and Leia makes it all the more powerful. Okay, yeah, the whole father/son plotline sidelines the father/daughter dynamic, but even though Leia doesn’t get to take direct part in it, she’s still a constant presence – she’s the last hope if Luke fails, she’s got the potential to be strong in the Force, she’s the one of the two siblings who really needed to be hidden from Vader. Watching this time, I got the feeling that if the Emperor turned Luke, it would be very bad, but if he turned Leia, it would be catastrophic.

Something else I love about Leia, and this goes right across all three movies, is how much of an action star she gets to be. She’s always right in the thick of it – even when she’s captured in Star Wars, she takes charge of her own rescue. In Jedi, she jumps on the speeder bike to chase the Imperials and it’s Luke who has to jump on behind her and hold on for his life. Okay, fine, “Leia kicks ass” isn’t exactly an original thought. But I’m bringing it up because it’s such a perfect thematic justification for her and Luke being twins.

Because both of them display some characteristics that are often considered unusual and some that are considered typical for characters of their gender. I just talked about Leia’s bad-assery, but, I mean, she’s also a princess. She’s an object of desire, from Han and, more disturbingly, from Jabba. (Isn’t it great that she gets to be the one to kill him?) And look at the scene where she first befriends Wicket, by going slow, being kind, offering food. That scene wouldn’t work with Han, or Lando, or…

Well, it would work with Luke, wouldn’t it? I mean, you can imagine that scene playing out almost exactly the same if their positions had been switched. Because as much as Luke is the action hero of these films, he also gets to be soft and gentle in a way that action heroes don’t typically get to be. Especially with this film firmly removing him from the romantic interest category. (One Hoth kiss too late, maybe. Okay, yeah, that kiss in Empire is a little icky in retrospect, but look at it this way – they had no reason to believe they were siblings, but their latent Force abilities were subconsciously telling them they had a strong connection. It’s understandable that they may have briefly mistaken this connection for something else. Now let’s never talk about it again.)

So forget Campbell and his monomyth, Luke’s journey is not the same as… uh… I tried to Google what stories follow the monomyth, and it’s basically every story ever – doesn’t that make it so broad as to be functionally useless for analysis purposes? I’m digressing. All I’m saying is that just as Leia gets to be tough and gentle, so does Luke. They’re the same, and that’s why them being twins, even though it might seem like a plot reveal for the sake of a plot reveal, is thematically perfect. I mean, you want balance in the Force? Forget balancing light and dark, the Skywalker twins are balancing gender expression. That’s the kind of balanced Force I can get behind.

Hey, I found something queer in Star Wars!

Previous: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Next: Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984)

I saw The Empire Strikes Back in theaters when it was released. It was 1980, so I was seven. I loved it, of course, for all the reasons a seven-year-old is supposed to. (Yoda. The droids. Luke being oh so cool.) (I still preferred the safe boys to the bad boys.)

I’ve seen it many, many times in the years since. I saw it in its first run and subsequent rereleases a couple of times. When the original trilogy special editions were released theatrically in the 90s, I was there every opening weekend. I’ve sat down to watch it numerous times when I’ve come across it on TV. I’ve seen this movie more times that I could possibly count.

But of all those times I’ve watched Empire, the one that sticks in my mind the most, my absolute favorite viewing, took place on a crowded bus.

If you’re not old enough to remember, it’s hard to grasp what an incredibly big deal the original Star Wars trilogy was. For everybody, but especially for kids. It was everything. Toys, comics, books, clothes, every kind of merchandise available – I had them all, and so did almost every kid I knew, because it was the only way to relive the movie. It was three years from Star Wars to Empire – three years with no new Star Wars! That may not seem like a long time now, but think back to when you were seven. Three years was an eternity.

Because once it left the theaters, that was pretty much it. Home release of big movies wasn’t like it is now. There was Pay-Per-View, and a few pay cable movie channels like HBO, and sometimes a VHS or Betamax release, but those were all pretty expensive, and the bigger the movie, the longer it took for it to be distributed in those ways. The money was in theatrical rereleases, so the original Star Wars didn’t see homes until 1982, two years after Empire came out. Empire itself didn’t come out for home viewing until November of 1984.

Which is odd, because my favorite viewing was, as I said, in a bus, not a movie theater, but it definitely took place before November of 1984. My friend Tommy lived down the street from me, and he had a birthday party. I can’t remember exactly when this was, but I’m sure this was before Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, and if I’m wrong about that, Tommy and I weren’t really friends anymore by late 1984 (I had started at a new school).

In any event, Tommy’s parents had hired a clown, who performed for the kids inside his bus, which was parked in front of Tommy’s house, just down the street from mine. I remember we were all sat around a table, I think there were some balloon animal shenanigans, something involving popsicles, and then the clown told us we were in for a special treat. He turned on a little color TV, and that music started, and that opening scroll started, and a bus full of children went fricking bananas.

Because this wasn’t possible. You can’t just watch The Empire Strikes Back whenever you want! That’s madness!

But because of this clown we could, and we did. No idea how he got a copy of it. It was cut-down – I think it ran about an hour, so it must have been butchered to hell. I didn’t care. I enjoyed it even more than I had in the theaters, because it was so unexpected, so special. I sat there with a bunch of kids I mostly didn’t know and we ate popsicles and cheered for Luke and laughed at Yoda and whooped at every laser blast and lightsaber swing. Then it was over, and we were out of the bus and into the afternoon daylight.

I just now watched The Empire Strikes Back again, for the umpteenth time, and it was great. I loved it.

But not quite as much as I loved it in the back of that bus.

Previous: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
Next: Return of the Jedi (1983)

I am a firm believer in redemptive readings of texts that are commonly considered bad, but belong to a greater body of work that one is a fan of. If I love something, why focus on the negative? I do that for Doctor Who – I can find something to love about the worst of stories. And I love Star Wars, so that’s how I’m approaching this watch-through.

But holy midi-chlorians, The Star Wars Holiday Special is bad. So bad. So unredemptively bad.

Why does the Empire make watching Bea Arthur tend bar required viewing for all citizens? Why are the members of Jefferson Starship apparently playing themselves? Why would you give Harvey Korman three scenes and not write him a single joke? Why, why, so many whys?

If all you’ve seen of The Star Wars Holiday Special is the odd campy clip from it on YouTube, that’s FINE. Do not feel like you need to sit through the entire two hours, as I just did. It is exactly as bad as everyone says. Fan consensus, in this case, is absolutely correct.

That said.

There are moments.

So I will try.

I genuinely like Bea Arthur’s song. (Only the song, not the sketch before.)

The Wookie costumes are very good. Very expressive. (This is not always a good thing, as whenever Chewie’s son Lumpy is threatened by the Imperials, which happens about fifty times, the camera lingers on the absolute terror in his eyes for an uncomfortable amount of time.) (Also, Chewie’s dad Itchy’s mask is kind of grotesque, so when he gets all horned up for Diahann Carroll’s Logan’s Run porno number it’s also pretty disturbing.) (Sorry, I’ll get back to the good things.)

It’s nice to see the main cast, even briefly. The cold open has Han and Chewie in the Millennium Falcon on the run from Imperials, so you think this is going to have a lot of action, but ha ha no. The lead actors are barely in it, it’s just two hours of boring songs, comedy sketches with no jokes, and Wookies growling incomprehensively at each other. (Sorry, sorry, good things.)

The cartoon is great. I do love that weird Nelvana animation style. The cartoon is the only thing I remember from watching this when it first aired, a couple days before my sixth birthday. I guess I blocked the rest out, or possibly fell asleep before it was over.

I thought for a second at the end that Chewie and his wife were going to kiss, and I was looking forward to seeing how that would work. But then it didn’t happen.

As for queerness… hmm. You could call it campy, but I don’t know. I think campy media that’s also bad needs to be “so bad it’s good,” and this is “so bad it’s unwatchable”. Also, I think creators of camp need to believe they’re making something good, and I can’t believe anyone involved in this thought it would come out well. Bob Mackie did the costumes, so that’s kind of gay, although the only real sense of Mackie’s style you might find is in the little holographic circus performers. Bea Arthur’s in it, that’s certainly queer-adjacent.

There must be something else I liked…

The version I watched had the original 1978 commercials in it. Those made for a nice break.

Yeah. That’s it. That’s all I got. Sorry. The Star Wars Holiday Special broke me. At least I get to watch Empire next.

Happy Life Day!

Previous: Star Wars (1977)
Next: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

I was four years old when Star Wars came out, in May of 1977. I saw it in the theater, I think more than once, although I only remember a few things from that first run. The droids stuck with me – I used to imitate C-3P0 yelling at R2 in the desert. “Well, I’m not going that way.” I had a nightmare about Darth Vader coming down the hallway to get me, his signature breathing getting louder as he got closer. And I knew Luke was the hero and Leia was the heroine, so obviously they would end up together (the sexual tension between Han and Leia flew right over my head).

Like every other kid around my age, I fell instantly in love with the film. That Christmas was all Star Wars – I still have a bunch of that first wave of action figures in my closet. Doctor Who and Star Trek would eventually crowd it out of the top spot of my geek affections, but Star Wars will always be my first love.

Except, I haven’t been quite as devoted a lover as I could be. I’ve seen the original trilogy more times than I can count, and all the other major films, and most of the new live-action series. But I never got into any of the cartoons, and I’ve only seen the prequel series once, on first release. So I’m going back to the beginning and watching all of Star Wars, in release order, partly to rekindle my childhood flame, partly so I know what the hell is going on in Ahsoka.

So I just finished watching Star Wars, again. Despite having seen it a number of times, I tried to come at it fresh, as if it were 1977. Except, of course, that’s not possible. For one thing, the original theatrical release is no longer available anywhere. I tried to find it though some unsavory means, but struck out and settled on the Disney+ version. Which is fine. I miss the little gray rectangles around the ships, and some of the CGI looks faker than the models, but ultimately the story is the same, and that’s what matters.

Mostly the same. The focus on Boba Fett in that restored Jabba scene bothers me, I think because it feels like the camera is saying, “Hey, recognize this guy? You love this guy!”, which means it’s in there for people who have already seen the sequels. If you’re re-editing the first movie in a series, you should come at it with the assumption that it’s the first time people are seeing it. I know, I’m naïve. This is one of the most popular movies of all time and it’s been out for decades. I don’t care. There will always be people seeing it for the first time.

The cast is just perfect. I’m not sure if Carrie Fisher was rewriting her own dialogue yet, or if that didn’t start until the next film, but Leia feels ahead of her time, absolutely the equal of the two boys. And the romantic pairing here is obviously her and Han, no matter how much four-year-old me disapproves. (I didn’t appreciate the bad boys until much later.) Luke sometimes gets accused of whininess, but apart from that infamous power converters line, I don’t find him so. He’s chafing at his uncle’s restrictions, and understandably so. There’s a rebellion on, who wants to hang around a desert farming moisture?

I’d keep things on brand by analyzing the queer subtext, but there isn’t much there, beyond homophobic jokes about C-3P0. (And oh boy, did I force a laugh at a lot of those growing up.) You’d have to squint pretty hard to read anything into Han and Luke’s friendship, as much as I’d love to read that particular story. Considering there are only two women in the whole film, one of whom is charcoal by the end of the first act, it’s pretty straight. Ah, well. Nothing’s perfect.

I’m going to try to keep on posting my thoughts on every installment of the Star Wars franchise as I watch. Once in a while I might have a deep thought or two, but I imagine mostly it’ll be pretty light. (I doubt I’ll find much profound to say about any particular episode of the Ewoks cartoon, for example.) I don’t get a lot of readers out this way (does anybody read blogs anymore?), but I’m happy to shout into the void for a while. (Maybe shout back in the comments, just so I know I’m not alone?)

Last thought on the original Star Wars – fifty-year-old me enjoyed it just as much as four-year-old me, maybe even a little bit more. And not just because of Harrison Ford’s chest hair.

Next: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)