Month: May 2007

And now for a word… I signed on the dotted line today to run an ad in the July bridal issue of Entertainment Fort Smith for GreenhouseFX.tv. I’ll be spending the next week putting the ad together to send to them. I had been thinking of running an ad in there at some point, but a little bird (who happens to write entries in Elabeth’s LJ blog) tipped me off to the bridal issue. I figure a video production outfit that can’t get business from an ad in a magazine’s bridal issue has to be right up there with someone who can’t get laid in a women’s prison with a handful of pardons. 😆 If this doesn’t work, then it’s clearly time to think of something else!

Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars… I’ll shanghai my own response from Digital Press’ “post your memories of the original Star Wars” and add more stuff to it here, since it’s Star Wars Day. This way, even the DP folks get something new out of the deal. Kinda like that one “new” song that some band slaps onto a greatest hits CD so you have to buy it.

I was four, just about to turn five, when I first saw Star Wars. So much of what is important in my life can be traced back to my first viewing of that movie – my lifelong fascination with space, my curiosity about special effects and movie/TV production, and even my computer and video game fixation can be traced on a straight through-line from R2-D2 to Pong to Space Invaders to Pac-Man to home consoles and computers. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the soundtrack completely altered my listening palette. I’m still a soundtrack fan to this day, and still have the double LP of The Empire Strikes Back just about memorized, note for note, instrument for instrument. Even my ELO fixation has its starting point in Star Wars – later in 1977, my older brother was trying to get me to be quiet and leave him and his date alone, and finally out of exasperation gave me an 8-track of “A New World Record” and told me to listen to the beginning of “Tightrope” because “it sounds like Star Wars music!” 😆

Star Wars completely altered any course my life might have been thinking about taking. I wasn’t a kid who wanted to be a fireman or a doctor when he grew up. After I saw Star Wars, I wanted to be a Jedi Knight. Upon learning that there really was no such thing, five-year-old me was deeply disappointed, since I had already been running around the house in my bathrobe (which I had hated before, but loved now because it looked like Luke’s farmboy duds) and practicing my lightsaber technique with the family flashlight. My parents suggested to me that maybe I should be an astronaut, so I latched onto that. Turns out I didn’t meet the requirements for that either, and besides, astronauts didn’t have lightsabers or droids or wookiees!

I was truly glad when the prequels came out when they did. I’m not going to try to get into a debate with the camp who thought Episodes I-III were an abortion, but I was more than happy to watch them and generally enjoyed them quite a bit. And I loved collecting the figures again. Yeah, let’s not forget about the figures – I think in the end I stopped just 15 short of having all of them. I’d like to have a full collection someday, and have even done some eBaying to close that gap, but I understand realistically that it may never happen. But there’s nothing like classic Star Wars toys – and even some of the new ones, especially if they’re characters who didn’t get turned into figures back when Kenner was in business – to make me feel young again.

I remember my family’s next door neighbors had a CED player – you remember, the poor relation of laserdiscs that RCA did, where movies were encoded at slightly-better-than-VHS-6-hour-quality onto a non-opitcal medium that resembled an LP in a huge cartridge casing, and they got Star Wars on CED just because we were over there so much. They really had no interest in it, but they knew that I thought grown-ups were kinda boring. (A perception that, now that I am a grown-up, I realize was completely and entirely correct.) Around this time, my dad bestowed me with the nickname of “Luke”, which is what both my parents called me until I was about 10 or 11 or so. Up until I started getting old enough that I thought I was clearly too cool to have a nickname, I just ate that up.

Sometimes I’d like to go back in time and tell myself that there’s nothing cooler than being a kid with a room full of Star Wars toys and video games. Then again, even if I did, my younger self would look at my older self, see he’s a boring grown-up, and ignore his advice! 😯… Read more