Space dirt

This article was originally published in the Sierra Vista Herald on 15 February 2015 under the title, "Recalling that first X-Wing Fighter run."

There is a museum exhibit touring the United States right now featuring costumes from the original Star Wars movies.  It was bound to happen.  Pretty much everything associated with entertainment during my childhood is now a museum piece.  Reel-to-reel tape decks, vinyl records, cathode ray tube television sets, and the Atari Pong game are all now just relics in roadside attractions.  How long before Alice Cooper gets stuffed and displayed in a glass booth next to “The Thing” in Benson. 

Young people today don’t understand the impact that the first Star Wars movie had on American culture.  Up until that point, space-themed entertainment was boringly squeaky clean.  Until Luke Skywalker entered the realm of our consciousness in 1977, we had only Star Trek to shape our vision of space travel.  The series had ended in 1969, but it was rerun on TV constantly ever after until everyone in my age group could have detailed conversations about photon torpedoes, tribbles, and Klingons. However, the Enterprise and its crew were always spotless.  You never saw a pile of grease rags in the engine room or excess wax coming out of Spock’s pointed ears.  Even the Klingons were clean and looked like regular humans with deeper tans and Fu Manchu mustaches.  Except for the facial hair, they could have starred on Jersey Shore. 

From the time Captain Kirk began going where no man had gone before until Luke Skywalker began looking for Obi-Wan Kenobi, there was not much going on in the space genre.  Only two films really had any impact during that time.  The first was Stanley Kubrick’s  2001: A Space Odyssey.   This film also featured squeaky clean spacecraft and antiseptic living quarters.  After the initial ape-man scene, pretty much everything looks like it was cleaned by Martha Stewart.  The only other notable space film that premiered during the Star Trek-Star Wars gap was Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda.  Although Barbarella’s living quarters appeared to be lined with Wookie fur, I doubt anyone noticed if it was clean or not since Barbarella removed her spacesuit in the opening scene to reveal…well, everything. 

So, along comes Star Wars, which revolutionized the space theme movie genre forever.  No more spotless spacecraft and conveniently disappearing bodies after being zapped by a phaser.   Finally, a space film with some dirty spaceships, limb chopping lightsabers, alien blasting blasters, and heroes winding up in a garbage compactor with a snake monster.  From the perspective of my generation, it was like someone had crossed The Wild Bunch with Battlestar Galactica. 

A teenager at the time the first Star Wars movie came out, my friends and I went to see it at the fabled Cine Capri in downtown Phoenix.  The movie was a hit of unimaginable proportions.  Star Wars was so popular with Arizonans that it ran at the theater for over a year.  For my friends and I, it was a mind-blowing experience.  We drove to the theater in my 1967 Chevrolet Caprice, but on the ride home my car had been transformed into an X-wing fighter.  We roared back to the east valley, from whence we came, dodging asteroids, imperial battlecruisers, and death stars all the while encouraging each other to “use the force.”  We somehow made it back alive. 

The Star Wars costume exhibit, which will be in Seattle until October before it starts to move about the country, features some sixty costumes from the movie series.  Of course, the Darth Vader costume will be featured and is situated so you can get a selfie with it.  The only restriction is that you can’t use tripods, flash photography, or a selfie stick.  WHAT! You can have my selfie stick when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, Darth Vader, you evil villain!  The other big costume display is that of Princess Leia’s slave bikini. I have to say that until I read of this exhibit, I’d never seen the words slave and bikini together.  Of course, I knew exactly what they were referring to as does every red-blooded American that saw Carrie Fisher wear that costume back in 1983. A bikini made of metal?  A genius marketing tactic for a movie series written and produced specifically with teenage boys in mind. 

Thus, Princess  Leia’s slave bikini and the other hallowed artifacts from the Star Wars movies will be paraded around the United States until the first of the next series of Star Wars movies premiers in December, 2015.  I have no idea what the next series will be like, but hopefully, it will return to the simple, adventurous, gritty storyline that rocked our world back in the 70s. I drive a Ford pickup truck now, but I bet I can turn my vehicle into an X-wing fighter one more time.