Although my dad and I were living in our own trailer now, my grandma’s house was a short run across a field. I had gone back and forth so often that there was a path between our houses. When we moved out of their house, my aunt Nancy moved back in. My aunt was closer to my age than my dad’s. He was 12 when she was born. She was only nine when I was born. So, when I was much younger, I was like an annoying baby brother who was always hanging around her. I used to watch Dark Shadows with her after she got out of school sometimes when I was four, until I would get too scared. Boy, would she get mad.
Nancy had married young, at only 18, to an older “friend of the family,” that she had grown up having a crush on. He turned out to be abusive, so she left him and came back home. Now that she was turning 22 and I was a less annoying 12, She introduced me to one of my most powerful artistic influences, Fleetwood Mac. She had an external cassette player, which she usually hooked up to her stereo system in the basement that my dad and I had just vacated, but for me she brought it up to the living room of my grandma and grandpa’s house. I listened to the cassette of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on her over-ear headphones. She had a big case full of cassette tapes. She listened to them in her Ford Pinto station wagon as well, so she’d let me borrow one or two for a week, while she had the rest for her drive to and from Traverse City, where she worked as a secretary for Grand Traverse Auto. If you’re going to discover music as an important thing in your life, you really can’t go wrong with Fleetwood Mac.
I wore Rumours out, but I also discovered Seals & Croft, England Dan and John Ford Coley, The Doobie Brothers, Captain and Tennille, and more. I found myself watching less TV and listening to more music. There were some really happy days for me, sitting in my grandma’s recliner with headphones on, reading comic books and magazines, and eating a candy bar. Marathon was my favorite. For the money, you couldn’t go wrong. The hard caramel forced you to eat it slowly. Sometimes I picked up Bottle Caps or Spree, because I could portion those out. I was only treated once a week on Fridays, so I wanted to make my treats last.
Marathon Bar
My reading was now expanding beyond comic books and movie adaptations. Every magazine in existence had Star Wars on the cover. It was a phenomenon. Science Fantasy Film Classics launched with Star Wars on the cover, and it ran for years.
Science Fantasy Film Classics Vol. 1, Issue 1
When I had read the feature article on Star Wars about a thousand times, I read about the other movies that were in the magazine as well. I had never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey nor Forbidden Planet. When I asked my dad about the latter 1956 film, he raved about seeing it in the theater when he was my age, 12 years old. I really wanted to see it then, but there was no way to do so back then. We didn’t have streaming services, or even cable TV. There were no home video stores yet. Either you would catch it in reruns somewhere or it was lost to time.
My favorite magazine back then was Starlog. My first issue was #11. I’d seen it in the bookstore in Cadillac several times, but the cost was the same as several comic books.
Starlog #11
I wanted to read about the makeup men in the cover blurb. I wanted to learn how these movies were made. And what’s that? There was a Superman movie coming! We knew this from DC Comics at the time, because they were running a contest to see if YOU could be in the Superman movie!
I think my grandma and my dad indulged me in these purchases because I wasn’t just reading comic books anymore. On the other hand, I wasn’t reading them any less. Although the Star Wars comic series finished off the events in the movie with #6, the comics continued. MORE Star Wars!
Star Wars #7
These Star Wars comics were crazy. Han Solo and Chewbacca were off on their own with more adventures and misdeeds. But, it was all approved by Lucasfilm, so it counted as far as I was concerned.
Superheroes were starting to fall by the wayside in my view. I wasn’t even paying attention to the Marvel Memory Album Calendar anymore, especially with Tomb of Dracula (what else?) representing the month.
Star Wars had been in the news for a while by the time I saw it in the summer of 1977. With all the traveling and baseball, I didn’t have an opportunity to see it until my aunt insisted on taking me to see it. “It’s no big deal,” I said. “I’ve already read the book.” But she persisted, and off we went.
We arrived at the newer theater in Traverse City, one that is sadly no longer there. It was in the Meijer parking lot, in a section to the northeast of the store that is now overgrown with vegetation. By July, you didn’t have to stand in line for hours, but as we arrived, the movie had already started. I got a big bucket of popcorn and a Coke, and instead of waiting for another hour and fifteen minutes, I thought we should just go in. After all, I’d already read the book and she’d already seen it. There weren’t going to be any surprises. We got to our seats during the trash compactor scene and from that point on, I was absolutely enrapt. When Han fires the blaster and it ricochets in the novelization, it reads, “The bolt promptly went howling around the room as everyone sought cover in the garbage.” That doesn’t even begin to cover what I saw. Lasers and energy weapons were common in science fiction, but they didn’t move like that! I think my jaw dropped into my popcorn and from that moment on, I couldn’t look away. Compared to every film that came before it, the movie was paced like lightning. Where starships were usually lumbering giants on screen, the X-Wing fighters darted this way and that, pursued by the screaming TIE fighters. I was not prepared in the least by reading the book, and watching the movie simply overwrote the entire story in my brain. Shot by shot, Star Wars gave us things no one had ever seen on screen before.
After it was over, I did not move. I could hardly wait for the movie to start again so I could see it all from the beginning. Some of the book was still staying with me, like in the cantina scene, when Luke gets knocked down and Obi-Wan has to intercede. In the book, Luke falls back, “shattering a large jug filled with foul-smelling liquid.” There was no mention of it or reaction to it in the movie, but that was seriously the last thing about the book I thought about for a long, long time. I knew there was always a difference between books and visual media from my lessons with The Six Million Dollar Man, but this was crazy.
We stayed through the entire next showing as well, so I got to see the second half of the movie again. I wanted to stay and watch it yet again, but it was getting late. When we got back, I had to describe for my grandparents the entire movie with enthusiastic detail. I talked on and on about it. When my dad got home, he got the same treatment. I told him that we HAD to go see it together as soon as possible.
The next day, I went out to Grandpa’s garage while he napped, and started work. I had to make my own lightsaber. Strangely, there were no Star Wars toys to be had at any store. Action figures wouldn’t be seen for almost a year afterward. There were no lightsabers to be had, either. I sawed, I grinded, I taped, and I painted. And after a few hours, I had built my first lightsaber. I had an old army duffel hanging from the rafters out in the small garage, and it was filled with rags. I had used it for a punching bag for a long time, but now it took the place of Darth Vader and I cut him down about a thousand times.
When I got my dad to take me to see the movie again the following weekend, he was just as enthusiastic about it. He took me to Burger King for lunch afterward and I got the first of the Star Wars glasses to go with my King Kong glass.
Burger King Star Wars glass
The next day, I built my dad a red lightsaber out in the garage, so he could be Darth Vader, and he indulged me with a few duels.
I would see Star Wars two more times in theaters. The final time I saw it was at a drive-in, again with my dad. I had never seen a movie twice, let alone four times before! But seeing Star Wars was a mass experience. Everyone saw it. Everyone talked about it. It was on magazine covers everywhere. And although there weren’t any toys out in stores, there were print products like trading cards. And suddenly, trading cards became part of my collecting habits. Although I wasn’t getting fifty cents for behaving in church anymore, I still earned an allowance of fifty cents a week. And some of that money went to buy the little blue-bordered cards at 15 cents a pack, which I didn’t arrange by number, but instead arranged in film chronology. In doing so, I could recreate the movie visually in my mind. If I failed to remember the sequence of events (not likely), I could rely on the novelization to help me put them together. I even chewed the gum, horrible as it was. It never occurred to me that there was a comic book adaptation of Star Wars. And by the time I did see an issue of it at Jack’s Market in August, it was #5!
Star Wars #5
Naturally, I bought it anyway, making it only the second Marvel comic I had ever bought. Suddenly my focus began shifting, from superheroes to Star Wars. I would sit down at the dining room table and draw the adventures of Luke Skywalker.
When it was time to go back-to-school shopping, I had a Star Wars folder.
Mead Star Wars two-pocket folder
My back to school wear also included a T-shirt that looked a lot like this, but new:
Vintage Star Wars T-shirt
To say that Star Wars changed the way I saw the word would be understating things dramatically. I started expanding my reading beyond comic books and books about Star Trek and began delving into more varieties of science fiction. My aunt had a book about Logan’s Run, a science fiction movie that had come out the year before, and I dove right in to read it. More on that later.
I didn’t see Star Wars the month it opened. I didn’t see it until later that summer. But the funny thing is that I read the book first. I was a voracious reader, and not just of comic books. I read anything I could get my hands on that sounded cool. And when I saw a novel called Star Wars, I picked it up.
Whew! $1.95!Not quite what ended up happening, but that’s not uncommon in Star Wars stories.
When you read the Star Wars novelization now, you wonder what “George Lucas” really knew about his own movie before he made it. But, as is laid out here with more detail than I would ever include, Lucas didn’t actually write the novelization. A prolific author named Alan Dean Foster did.
The first thing that struck me when reading was that the droids’ names were spelled phonetically. There was no C-3PO or R2-D2. They were See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, respectively. It was as if each one had a first name and a last name instead of alphanumeric designations. They were called Threepio and Artoo throughout. I remember passages that described Luke getting knocked over in the cantina into some foul-smelling liquid. But the thing I remember most is the phrase, “Servomotors whined in protest,” which occurs no fewer than three times in the book.
I knew it would take some time before I saw the movie, but my imagination had already begun to run wild with the new science fiction hero. After all, the subtitle was “From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker.”
