My earliest memory is of Jabba the Hutt upon seeing "Return of the Jedi" when it was originally released in '83. My childhood memories between the ages of 2 and a half and 4 are filled with playing with Star Wars toys with my cousins, receiving my Ewok Village playset, Rancor, and Vader's TIE Fighter for separate Christmases. I seem to remember Star Wars being on TV a lot during family gatherings. And this poster - an original my mom took from the theater she worked at when Star Wars was out originally - hung in my cousins' bedroom:As a child, Marty Griffin, Ryan Simmons, Justin Simms, and I would get together and play with our Star Wars toys, often losing the figures in the sand pit we played in. Or we'd actually reenact the movies with Ryan being Han, Marty being Chewie, Justin was Lando (though, having a different ethnicity), and I was Luke. And while there wasn't much in the way of new Star Wars material in the latter half of the '80s and the early '90s, that really didn't stop us.
I fell out of Star Wars around '90 with the advent of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but occasionally went back to it. Upon the release of "Batman: The Animated Series" and "X-Men," I jumped ships again, as often children do while going with the "in" thing. But while I liked the comic book world I was being introduced to (and still dig them), my love for Star Wars never truly went away.
Shortly after we moved from our old neighborhood in '93, I remember finding the young adult book "The Glove of Darth Vader" at the Rock Island Library and deciding to read it. I also remember that while being captivated by the idea of Luke's adventures continuing beyond the movies, finding the book a little bit ridiculous. Not too much later, I picked up the paperback version of "Dark Force Rising" by Timothy Zahn from our grocery store. I tried reading it, not knowing it was the second book in what would come to be known as the "Thrawn Trilogy" and was thoroughly confused and so I quit. But not all was lost. Again the library pitched in and my love for Star Wars was rekindled in '94 when I found the first book in the "Thrawn Trilogy" and read "Heir to the Empire" (to this day it remains the only book I've ever read more than once and I intend to read it again someday).
Jazzed about Star Wars again, I watched the movies over and over. I had plenty of time: I was a home-schooled kid, living in the middle of nowhere. My only friends were back in Colona, from church youth group, or my cousins. Star Wars became my escape: I could identify with Luke Skywalker, stuck on Tatooine, doing nothing. It connected me to earlier, happy and nostalgic memories while allowing my imagination to roam the stars. Sure, I was stuck in Sherrard, but that didn't make me trapped there.
In early '95, I began collecting the MicroMachine vehicles and playsets. I also connected with Josh Howard, one of the older kids in youth group who was also a big Star Wars fan. I was impressed by his collection and he would take the time to talk Star Wars with me, which was pretty cool, being a fourteen-year-old and talking with an eighteen-year-old and allowing Star Wars to bridge an age gap that otherwise seemed insurmountable at those times.
It wasn't long after that when I saw in the latest Wizard magazine that they were coming out with a brand new line of Star Wars action figures, after nearly ten years of being absent from toy shelves. I was excited: I'd been a fairly loyal X-Men collector, most likely due to my friends from Colona and I having been on a superhero kick the last year that I lived there, and so shifting my toy collecting from comics to Star Wars seemed pretty natural. And then, in August of '95, I happened to hit Toys R Us while my parents were in Eagles Grocery Store next door and I found him: the new Darth Vader figure, sitting on the shelf. It was an amazing site to behold: the sculpting on the figure was far superior to the toys I had grown up with. I didn't even mind that he was overly muscular. He was a new Darth Vader and I had to have him. I used all my allowance money and paid the $5.35 that it cost. It was a great day.
Soon Vader was followed by the rest of the action figure line, and for the first time in my life, my collecting took on a more adult focus: I bought two of every figure: one to keep in the box and display on my wall (hanging from thumb tacks) and one to open. I was thrilled when on Christmas that year I received two of the elusive Princess Leia figures, which I had yet to receive. I regularly checked Wizard for Star Wars toy updates and was nearly giddy when I saw the Boba Fett and Biker Scout figures in there for the first time. I continued collection them, and soon a border of Star Wars figures began to encircle the top of my bedroom wall, while the figures posed on shelves and vehicles sat on dressers. The MicroMachines soon went into storage, as did many other random pieces of Star Wars merchandise that family members felt compelled to buy me for pretty much no reason other than they knew I was a fanatic.Which I was. Star Wars was fast consuming my life. I read the books, bought the stuff, talked Star Wars with friends. Which was fine, because in the mid-90s, it was cool to like Star Wars. In '96, a bunch of my friends from youth group, including Justin Anderson, became huge fans of the Star Wars Customizable Card Game that was released by Decipher. We would spend hours playing that game at church, with everyone bringing their cards and holding tournaments. As much of an obsession that Star Wars had become for me, it was about the right time for it, since everyone else was in Star Wars fever too.
"Shadows of the Empire" hit later that year. It was a multimedia event and Lucasfilm likened it to a movie without a movie. There were comic books, a toy line, a novelization, soundtrack, and Nintendo 64 video game. I ate it up. I took the comics with me to summer camp and read them there and my cousin Jared's mom rented him an N64 system so that we could get the game and play it. It was amazing and to this day, bounty hunter IG-88 scares the crap out of me.
And as great as all of that was, we Star Wars fans knew that we had 1997 - the 20th Anniversary of Star Wars - to look forward to. George Lucas had announced that he would be releasing the Special Editions of the Original Trilogy into theaters. They were updated versions of the movies, with new sequences and effects. I was excited. I studied pictures from them in the issues of Star Wars Insider, amazed at what computer animation could do. Then my dad and I went to see Star Trek: First Contact and the trailer for the Special Editions played. I was floored. January '97 could not approach quickly enough.
I saw "A New Hope" opening day, after waiting in line for an hour (that seemed like such a long time back then). Saw it twice that day actually, then went and bought new toys afterwards with Jared. It was an amazing experience to see the opening the way it was intended and it seemed like the Star Destroyer in that shot stretched on forever. And it was great when some jackass used their laser pointer to point at Princess Leia's breasts onscreen and a ton of angry Star Wars fans went off on him. I went to "The Empire Strikes Back" three weeks later with Matt Johnson and still remember the moment he pulled an entire Pringles can out of his sleeve, as well as when the movie stopped and the lights came up early due to projector problems and looking to see Boomer, who had arrived late to the showing, looking very embarrassed and guilty walking down the aisle at just that moment. And I remember seeing "Return of the Jedi" in Galesburg with my basketball team and Boomer getting yelled at by theater staff for trying to walk in with a Pepsi (which he turned around and pretended to throw away, but really snuck in by shoving it in his coat). When those versions of the movies came out, I didn't care about Greedo firing first or Jedi Rocks. All I knew was that I was seeing Star Wars in theaters again and my journey was coming full circle from my earliest memory.
But it wasn't. Not really. For in '96 Lucas had announced he was going to move forward with the long awaited Episodes I, II, and III. The story was just beginning...
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