The original Star Wars trilogy, along with Cheryl Tiegs, banana-seat Schwinn StingRays, Eddie Van Halen, skateboards, Kiss, roller rinks, Micronauts, The Dukes of Hazzard, Pink Floyd's The Wall and the classic X-Men run of issues #108-143 by Claremont/Byrne/Austin, defined the more positive side of my suburban Philadelphian adolescence. In May of 1977 I was eight years old, and perhaps a bit slow to catch on to the sweeping Star Wars phenomenon—many of my friends had seen it (or claimed to have seen it) several times before I managed to talk my parents into taking my brother and me to the drive-in theater in July or August in Matamoras, Penn., near where my family owned a trailer in the Pocono mountains. I was nine by then and my brother was just seven.
Before long, however, my brother and I were seduced by the dark side of the Lucasforce (i.e., the marketing side), and I soon had an original X-wing fighter by Kenner while my brother had an equally impressive tie fighter. Among our action figures and their accessories were Han Solo and Princess Leia (with blasters), Chewbacca (with his Wookie pulse-"crossbow"), and Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi and of course Luke Skywalker (all with extendable light sabers). We also had a land-speeder that did a convincing job of hovering on hidden springy wheels, and perhaps Greedo or Walrus-Man, though these less-monitored characters may have been partially chewed into unwitting amputees by Tippy, the family mongrel we had just rescued from the SPCA to replace our first dog (hit by a car), Gretel. My mother fashioned us Luke and Han costumes out of clothing she brought back from the church thrift shop she ran, and eventually I would pump endless quarters into the original Atari Star Wars coin-op video game that hit the arcades in 1983, just as Return of the Jedi was making the theatrical rounds.
Drawn from archetypal myth, from the quintessence of good and evil, the Star Wars story provided much for the young male mind to devour—a boy's coming-of-age ponderance that, though perhaps more juvenile, was still reminiscent of lessons laid out in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Robert Bly's Iron John. Many were the times I begged the mall hairstylist to reproduce Harrison Ford's perfectly feathered hairstyle—time was of the essence, for my up-till-then platonic friend Barbara Foster was quickly growing breasts before my very eyes, only one seat away from me in Mrs. Marky's eighth-grade typing class (which, obviously, I failed). The echoes of laser blasts ricocheting off the Death Star's trash compactor walls were much akin to the Jackson Pollock-trajectoried hormonal chaos that was torturing my pubescent body. Adolescence, by nature, is a minefield of pleasure and pain, physical awkwardness and emotional upheaval. Where, oh where could a 12- to 14-year-old turn for guidance, for wisdom? A guidance counselor? No, Mr. Haviland was no help, and he had something against me ever since I had been caught stealing a purse from Mrs. Raye, my "gifted classes" teacher (the proceeds from which financed my comic book addiction). My parents? No way—I was adopted, and they were much older than I was, branding them the farthest thing from "in tune with the universe" as far as I was concerned.
Fortunately, Lucas provided. It was 1980 when the second Star Wars film (The Empire Strikes Back) came out, and it brought with it Yoda, a 900-plus-year-old muppet whose clarity and simplicity channeled everyone from Lao-Tzu to Treebeard to whomever David Carradine's Shaolin master was in TV's Kung Fu. Had he ever ollied his skateboard on the Police Station steps, or bedded a dazzling babe like Valerie Bertinelli in his nearly millennium-long life? Who knew? It mattered not, as Yoda himself would say; these things were trifles. (see below for selected quotes of Yodic wisdom). To this day, Yoda-speak has survived as both a language of spiritual tutorial and a college drinking game of moderate difficulty (depending on how much alcohol one has already consumed). For some reason, it was much easier for me to absorb the teachings of a fictional being than anyone in the real world who remotely resembled an authority figure.
Alas, this generation has no Yoda, as far as I can see. No Luke Skywalker, no Han Solo—hardly a Princess Leia. Their celebrities are hollow shells like Paris Hilton and "K-Fed"; the only gurus extractable from their pop culture seem superficial, heroes and heroines and even clowns who've been re-re-recycled to the point of integral collapse and complete consumer apathy. Though amusing and one might even say brilliant cynics like Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert give some relief to the jaded, there is no one spouting cryptic phrases of pseudo-moralistic mysticism, especially from the soft, organic motions of a muppet's human-actuated lips. Why, even Yoda himself has been reduced to a CGI character, which is great when he needs to engage in light saber battles, but somehow just wrong when it comes to his continuing proliferation of Confucianisms, chin-scratching cosmic conundrums and recollections of the "Old Republic." Indeed, fear I do for a future that is but a reflection of the past. "
