The day after Star Wars Day: The Revenge of the 5th

I said this a bit on Twitter, but I’ve been reflecting on why Star Wars means so much to me. A lot of it comes down to this: Return of the Jedi was the first film I saw in the cinema after my family came back to this country from Africa.

I didn’t really understand what was going on. I hadn’t seen the first two movies. I knew there were goodies and baddies and I liked the Ewoks beating the Stormtroopers and Jabba the Hutt was disgusting and the fight over the Sarlacc was dangerous and Luke Skywalker was brave and things exploded and spaceships were cool, especially the Millennium Falcon.

And for two hours I forgot that I had left the warm and known environment of Africa behind and been made to come back to this cold, unfriendly place that people said was my home, but wasn’t really.

As a young teenager I saw Empire Strikes Back for the first time and loved it. We taped it off the telly at Christmas and watched it so often we almost wore out the tape. I still remember where the advert breaks were in that recorded copy. (It was a big Christmas premiere for ITV.) I know most of the dialogue off by heart. It edged out Jedi as my favourite film of the trilogy.

It’s kind of fashionable to beat up on Star Wars and the people who love it. They aren’t the coolest films out there. There are clear plot holes and unlikely coincidences and for some reason Stormtroopers can’t shoot straight and their armour doesn’t work against arrows. Yeah, all those things. And I will line up with anyone else to pour scorn on the prequels, although The Phantom Menace probably gets more vitriol than it deserves whereas the third one should be coated in lead and sunk in a very deep hole somewhere.

And, yes, the trilogy is good for jokes and pastiche. I’ve always loved Spaceballs. I really love the Robot Chicken feature length Star Wars episodes. But you can tell Robot Chicken is done with love and affection for the films, not to poke spitefully at the people who love them. (Even if we are all depicted as weedy nerds by the Chickeners.)

I think the reason May the Fourth has taken off in just a few years from geek joke to major Twitter event is down to the attachment people have for the films.  The original trilogy holds such emotional importance for me I turn to them when I’m poorly or feeling low. Return of the Jedi was my first comfort film; the first movie to transport me away from a difficult situation that I was struggling to adjust to. It helped a confused and, I realise now, grieving, little boy to believe the world could be a place where good triumphed in the darkest of circumstances, where evil could be defeated, where heroism would be rewarded, where little people held the fate of the universe in the balance, even if the big people had guns and scout-walkers and speeder-bikes.

Even now I get a lump in my throat when I watch the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi where Luke throws away his lightsaber and tells the Emperor that he won’t turn to the dark side because he is a Jedi. Like his father before him.

Faced with that choice I wanted to be as brave as Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be a Jedi.

I still do.

Answering the question 'How do you know the one you're with is the one you're meant to be with?'

This year Cathy and I will celebrate our 15 wedding anniversary. That's 'crystal' in case you were wondering. Apparently, we aren't celebrating it by getting a chandelier in our front room. (I've asked.)

I've been asked a few times when I knew that Cathy was 'the one'. I'm not sure I really believe in the idea that there is 'the one' for everybody. But there were a few times when we were first walking out together which gave me clues that we should stick together.

One of the main ones was when I first visited her house away from Uni and discovered she had kept all her Space Lego and Fabuland, with the Fabuland mostly in its original boxes. She even let me play with it (under careful supervision of course!)

I'm not saying I married Cathy for her Fabuland sets, but it was a confirmation that this wonderful person took toys seriously! She could appreciate that I still had most of the accessories from my Action Force and Star Wars figures. She didn't mind that I wanted to collect the entire AF range as an adult, buying the figures I never had as a kid. In fact, many, many trips to boot sales, antique centres and the like prove that she took an active interest.

I had a reminder of the Fabuland moment recently. We've been clearing out the loft in anticipation of fitting insulation and in one of the boxes of Cathy's stuff found a mint copy of the Lego Catalogue from 1986.

I was excited by this as it had two full pages dedicated to the Lego Technic Arctic range. I had the two biggest sets in this range and still have the 6-Wheeled Snow Ranger in near-complete built form.

The mini-bulldozer got broken up for it's pieces, as did the Mountain Rescue Base, although I still have the building instructions and could probably put them back together. Seeing these pictures brings back some good memories of spending most of Christmas Day building the Mountain Rescue Base and using the pneumatics to raise and lower the helicopter lift. It was the first set I had with a pneumatic system in.

Very few people ask me for relationship advice, but I guess the one thing I've learned is to care about the things your other half cares about. That's a measure of how much you love and respect them. That's when you know they may be the one for you.

When I was a Weetabix

Back in the early 80s, Weetabix breakfast cereal was marketed using a collection of anthropomorphic wheat biscuits called the Weetabix Club. Like many multi-character gangs in the comics of the time, these were basically sterotypes. There was Brains (the brainy one), Brian (the normal one), Dunk (the naive one), Crunch (the hard one who wore bovver boots), and Bixie (the girl).

The Club were the stars of short comic strips – found on the back of packets and also printed in regular comics as adverts for the breakfast cereal. Comic strip adverts were quite common at the time. I remember half-page mini-series promoting The Goonies and the early-80s Biggles movie, among others. They’d run for a few weeks alongside the ‘real’ comic strips.

You could, as a buyer and devourer of Weetabix save up tokens and join the Weetabix Club yourself. (The devouring of Weetabixes by hungry children was something that was never discussed in the comic strips, funnily enough.) As a member of the Club you received freebies and could send off for other Weetabix-branded goodies. For ages I had writing paper with the gang members on, and I also had a bright yellow Frisbee I’d sent off for.

I’ve mentioned before how I grew up in a Christian family, and although we weren’t allowed to have Ice Magic dessert sauce due to its occult potential, our family wasn’t quite as strict as some. One day a slightly stricter family came round to our house for tea and I was sent out to play with my brother and their two boys.



Also prohibited!

  We soon hit a problem. The trend at the time was to ‘play’ the TV shows that were popular. There were four of us, which was perfect because we could play A-Team. Unfortunately, the other two had never seen the A-Team, didn’t know the catchphrases, and didn’t want to play (understandably). It turned out that they watched very little television – The A-Team was considered too violent, as was Knight Rider, Danger Mouse, Thundercats, well, pretty much everything.

They didn’t like reading either, so we couldn’t play any comic characters. They weren’t allowed to play soldiers. As you may have guessed, their parents never took them to the cinema. The only possible play-characters we knew and they knew were the Weetabix Gang.

So, finally, with a set of characters we all knew, we started playing. I was Brains, naturally, as I was the one with glasses (I told you it was about stereotypes – brainy people wear thick specs!), the others were Brian, Dunk and Crunch. The game was we were looking for Bixie, who had been kidnapped. We roved the large field next to our house looking for ‘clues’ and avoiding possible threats for most of an afternoon.

I’ve told this story to a few people, but none have yet credited me and my pals with any ingenuity in finding something we could all play. Most people just laugh at how tragic we were. Maybe I was, and maybe my claim to fame is that along with those other three boys we are the only children to pretend to be wholewheat breakfast cereal for an afternoon.

Reliving my childhood through retro packaging

I made an impulse buy in the supermarket tonight - a Star Wars figure on a retro style backing card that reminds me of buying them first time around back in the 1980s.

Having only returned from abroad in 1983, I only ever bought Star Wars figures on the Return of the Jedi backing cards. A whole load of the figures I had back in the day have been retooled and re-released now, including Luke Skywalker in his Jedi Knight outfit, and the Gammorean Guard from Jabba's palace.

I could leave those ones, but when I saw my favourite space admiral ever, I had to have it! Altogether now: "It's a TRAP!"

Occult desserts

My buddy Justin's nostalgic blog post about Ice Magic brought back some childhood memories. Specifically, my Dad refusing to buy dessert toppings with the word 'magic' in the title, because of the occult connotations.

I could make stuff up about my childhood but the truth is way more amusing.

Oliver Postgate RIP

I heard the sad news today that Oliver Postgate who created Bagpuss, the Clangers, Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog, has passed away at the age of 83. He was a great story-teller and communicator, and in many ways a hero of mine. Not only did he create some of the greatest children's TV characters ever, he did it on a minimal budget, filming in a converted farm outbuilding.

He didn't use hi-tech computer wizardry, or marketing publicity overkill. He just told stories, which had real soul. Growing up I loved Bagpuss and looking at it now, the pure simplicity of the animation was part of it's charm. But the real power of Oliver Postgate's work was in his characters - the pompous Professor Yaffle, or the cheeky mice, or Tiny Clanger being scared of froglets, or Noggin taking on the evil Nogbad, or a little steam engine who wanted to sing in the choir. Or Bagpuss, with his ever-so-catching yawn.

A lot of people don't know this, but Oliver Postgate was a pacifist and toured the country in the early 1980s showing the episode of the Clangers which never got aired on the BBC, where the little pink aliens got involved in an arms race and ended up blowing up their little moon. Of course, the Clangers' moon was really our world, just seen through different eyes, and back then there was a real danger of it being blown to hell. It took real courage to stand up against the evil of nuclear weapons, and I admire him for doing that.

Of course, "children's TV" has moved on. It's become a huge industry in it's own right. But along the way it has lost something of itself and it's own innocence. And I'm sad that Oliver Postgate has died as he seemed to understand that innocence is the vital element of childhood and when we lose it we are no longer children. That when we lose the wonder of childhood, so often it is replaced by fear.

Oliver Postgate was a story-teller. He was a creator of magical worlds. And as he moves on out of this world, he takes a little bit of that magic with him. I never met him, but I feel like I know him, because I know his creations.

I'm glad he was willing to share them with me, and thousands of children like me.

Son of Rambow

I didn't choose to go to this. It was a youth outing from church. However, this British film is worth a look. There's plenty of stuff to make you laugh and, if you're of a certain age, a nice re-creation of early 80s Britain, including a Corona Lemonade stand in the supermarket. Now, whatever happened to Corona Lemonade?

The basic plot is two outsiders - Will, a Plymouth Brethren kid who isn't allowed to watch TV documentaries in class, and Lee, a troublemaker who gets kicked out of class regularly - meet in the school hallways while everyone else is in class. After watching a pirated copy of Rambo, they team up to make a film, and things get messy from thereon.

I really liked this film. The two kids who play the lead roles are very good. There is an hilarious incident with a flying dog attached to a stunt kite. And there are plenty of throwaway jokes. The opening lines of the documentaries Will has to sit outside for start with lines like "Fire is man's greatest friend... but also his greatest foe!" followed by screams, or "The wheel is man's greatest invention... and also his most deadly!" followed by screeching tyres and screams.

There's a nostalgia too, for a simpler time, when kids could go running off into the woods, set up stunts and make a movie. One kid says how he always wanted a watch. Okay, some of that nostalgia is idealistic. The early 80s I actually lived through weren't so great. There was plenty of fear around and generally the mood was nihilistic.

But still, this is an authentic-feeling feel-good movie. I liked it and I'd watch it again.

Jongudmund's rating: 7.5/10