When I was a kid, there was Star Wars. I saw it 21 times at the movie theatres. It changed my life.
And then there was the Star Wars Christmas special, a bizarre concoction of crap and schmaltz, with characters thrown into the mixer.
For the most part, it really sucked.
A lot.
For starters, the first chunk- and by chunk I mean 15 minutes that seemed like an eternity- had nobody speaking anything but Wookie language, and doing nothing but hanging out at their Wookie house doing such exciting things as cooking, walking around, and trying to seem cute but coming off as annoying and kind of brain dead.
I was used to this sort of thing on TV. Back then, there was all sorts of stupid shit on television. And even if something was good, given time, TV had a way of making it terrible.
The one cool thing on that baffling special was this short cartoon of Boba Fett, a character we hadn't seen before, as this was before The Empire Strikes Back. Boba was mysterious, cool, not really good or bad or ugly. Just tough as hell.
And he rode a space dragon thing.
It was awesome, and the only think we spoke of at Rogers Junior High the next day. Junior High is what we had before there were Middle Schools. It was 7th and 8th grade only, and sort of a Lord of the Flies kind of experience we all had to go through before the slightly lesser pain known as High School.
Boba Fett has always been a mix of awesome and suck, from the first time I saw him. Now, after that special, there came Empire, which was amazing and awesome and is considered by many to be the best Star Wars movie ever made.
And then came Return of the Jedi.
Good, but not great. It had some amazing stuff, to be sure. But it also had C3P0 kind of break dancing with Ewoks.
Ewoks are the Cabbage Patch Kids of the Star Wars universe. Evil and wrong.
And Boba had this stupid, ignominious death right at the top that was disappointing, anti-climatic, and as full of suck as anything I've ever seen on screen.
It seems like the current TV show is trying to carry on that tradition of combining awesome with suck. Some of it is fantastic, exciting, new and brilliant. And some of it is hackneyed, dull, and unimpressive.
And they still kill off the wrong characters in really boring, anti-climatic fashion. Yes, there are some fabulous episodes (5 & 6 being my personal faves); but there are also some that just don't do anything for me but wish and hope it's all a bad dream.
Maybe this is good.
Maybe that mix of joy and disappointment, of rapture and frustration, has helped prepare me for the ups and downs of this world.
Maybe.
But it would be nice to have it all be Empire.
Here's a song. It's the Jefferson Starship performing Light Up the Sky, as seen in the Star Wars Christmas Special. I'm sorry.
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