Life During ‘Star Wars’
A personal history of not crying while watching blockbuster space operas
1983. I have always suspected Mike of swapping my prized Boba Fett action figure with his Greedo action figure when we were nine-year-old kids. This is the only way I could explain ending up with two Greedos — that’s four pairs of bug eyes, four pairs of squat green antennae, and two sucker mouths — instead of one.
Boba Fett, the mysterious jet-pack-wearing bounty hunter from The Empire Strikes Back, had been one of the main characters in the Star Wars saga I was planning in the basement of my parent’s house, a sequel to Return of the Jedi. Boba Fett, you see, had escaped from the belly of the Saarlac.
I didn’t have many friends as a boy. But I had dozens and dozens of toys, specifically action figures that I would play with for hours. I had Star Wars figures galore, but also GI Joe and Masters of the Universe. The basement, my domain, was a nightmare landscape for bare adult feet.
I would sometimes be found napping in a pile of toys, exhausted. My stories were epic and full of double-crosses and melodramatic speeches before selfless self-sacrifices. I played with the intensity of God parting the Red Sea.
