Baseball and Star Wars

Today is May the 4th. No I will not say "May the 4th be with you." (Dammit. I just did.)

I wasn't reminded of the "holiday" by anything on social media. I mean, it's not even that day in the U.S. yet, so the social media barrage will probably not come until tomorrow.

No, I was reminded of it just by watching a weekend's worth of baseball.

I can't give you specific examples because I watch a lot of different games, and I can't remember what I saw where. (You may recall I play fantasy baseball, so I don't watch any one specific team. In fact, I don't have anyone on my fantasy baseball team from my own major league team, the Red Sox, so I might watch them just about the same amount as I watch any other team where I have no players on my team. The Red Sox have won four World Series in the past 22 years and that's good enough for me, so now I'm basically all fantasy baseball, all the time.)

But the point is, I don't need to try to remember where because pretty much every baseball park seems to have some sort of May the 4th tie-in.

In fact, they have it even if their team isn't going to be home on May the 4th. The ones I saw this weekend were probably for teams who were home over the weekend, but are going on the road for the actual May the 4th with the series that begins on Monday. Either that or they just think a promotion night works better if you also do it on a Saturday.

I just think it's kind of funny. What do Star Wars and baseball intrinsically have in common?

I guess they are both extremely popular, but maybe less so for both. Baseball used to be America's sport, but it has been surpassed by basketball and football for several decades now, as those sports seem to speak to a wider demographic. Star Wars used to be American's favorite franchise, and it might still be, but The Mandalorian and Grogu will break a seven-year drought between films as the TV shows are also getting fewer eyeballs, even when they are of high quality (like Andor). 

In theory, athletes and space fantasy geeks don't overlap very much in the Venn diagram. You are probably more likely to find baseball fans who like Star Wars than Star Wars fans who like baseball, because a sport is probably always going to be a bit more selective in its appeal than a cultural phenomenon that speaks to people the world over. As just the most obvious example, American football may be the biggest sport in the U.S., but people generally don't care about it in other parts of the world. 

So each year I scratch my head a bit when I see them going to great lengths at baseball stadiums around the country to bring Darth Vader on the field to throw out the first pitch, or give away bobblehead figures where one of the players on the team is dressed up like a Jedi.

Look, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of both. They can intermingle however they want. But I just find it strange.

The real answer?

Baseball teams play 81 home games a year. That's a lot of games. They need to do something to jazz up an average Tuesday night game (or in this case Monday night, or maybe even the Saturday before). Which is also why you might see them celebrating Christmas in July, or Flag Day, or -- well there aren't any holidays in August. But you better bet the big other holidays during the baseball season -- Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, Labor Day -- get plenty of play at the stadium. Baseball players even use pink bats on Mother's Day. 

But I think the reason I also get "annoyed" about it -- "annoyed" enough to write a blog post like this, anyway -- is that I've never really embraced May the 4th. It was clever that one guy 20 years ago (or whenever it started) realized that May the 4th sounded like "May the Force," and it could have ended there. Instead each year people are given a reason to post memes or put on a flowing robe or go to some other great lengths to show you that they are more of a Star Wars fan than you are.

Maybe there's a part of me that feels like the real Star Wars nerds -- those of us who saw the first movie in the theater when we were three years old, and played with the action figures for ten years after that -- need to be distinguished from these johnny-come-latelys who haven't really earned it. And when I hear 65-year-old baseball broadcasters talking about "Chewbacky" as they are forced to incorporate into their telecast that night's Star Wars mania at the ballpark, it just reminds me that there can sometimes be too much of a good thing.

A Hardcore obsession with Star Wars

As you recall, I've been reading through Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation since around the start of November. Tarantino's conversational book, a recollection of movies from the late 1960s to the early 1980s that he saw when he was too young, would not have taken me so long, except that I decided to watch all the movies I hadn't seen that he talks about in depth -- which has added eight viewings at a very busy time of year for viewings, with one still to go. I'll try to fit that last viewing in before the end of the year, and also finish the book before we roll over to January.

The penultimate film he discusses at length is Paul Schrader's 1979 movie Hardcore, which has that memed scene of George C. Scott looking increasingly distraught and anguished as the chracter watches images of his daughter in a porn movie, culminating in him screaming "TURN IT OFF!!!"

Instead of this salacious subject matter, today I'm going to discuss how many times the movie references Star Wars. 

It's three, by my count. Which seems like it must be intentional, though given the prevalance and popularity of the movie at the time this movie was made, it could have also just been that it was inescapable background material that was impossible to shoot around. 

Of course, we know that's never the truth with any filmmaker who puts an ounce of care into the movie they're making.

The first reference that I caught was when Scott's character is in his daughter's bedroom, back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after she has already gone missing from her church trip to California. I believe this is after Scott has already contracted Peter Boyle's seedy private investigator but before that investigator has returned with the porn scene featuring his daughter. (Tarantino rightly wonders in the book how Boyle managed to find this movie, which I wondered at the time I was watching, but that's hardly his only criticism of the film. In fact he may be harder on this than any of the other films he's discussed.)

Anyway, in Kristen Van Dorn's bedroom there is a Star Wars calendar on the wall. The picture this particular month is near the start of the movie, the iconic image where Darth Vader has lifted one of the rebel soldiers off the ground and is on the verge of suffocating him. 

Then later, when her father Jake is out in Los Angeles trying to find her, the camera pans along a Los Angeles street from the building above, and catches a Star Wars billboard on its path.

But the one that really drove it home was when Jake finds himself in one of several dens of inequity searching for his daughter, and in this one, there are two half-naked women on stage, engaged in a lightsaber battle. Of course, it's not a realistic lightsaber battle, but more of a cheeky ballet in which lightsabers happen to factor in.

I decided to write this much about this post before seeing what the internet has to say about this, but I'm going to go check that right now. 

I found a video where Schrader talks about it on stage in a Q&A, and he says "I was having fun sort of tweaking George [Lucas]." And then "And years later George said to me 'I don't know why I ever agreed to that.'" Much laughter from the audience.

I guess it was nothing deeper than that.

I don't know if I will write one more Cinema Speculation post when I watch the last film, The Funhouse, but if I don't, I'll say that it has been a fun and instructive exercise to watch along with this book, but I don't think it's a standard I could maintain in any future similar scenario, while also hoping to get through the book at a decent clip. 

Which franchises do we actually need?

I was out with two of the critics who write for my site last, who each write separately as well as jointly with each other, as what has historically been called "The ReelGood Christmas Party." This is actually a thing that has only happened about four of the 11 years I have been associated with the site, five at the very most, and at some point I think it happened another time of the year entirely, but was still called that. We used to record a podcast and then we would go out for many libations, but my new house is by a main road and not advantageous from a sound perspective, plus I'd have to remind myself how to work the recording technology. 

To give you some idea of the scarcity of these parties, this was our first since 2020. Yes, we did have one during the pandemic, when that might have been hard, though that summer (it's summer in Australia) we were essentially COVID-free for a blissful couple of months. And then we have not had one since, when it would have been easier. In fact, we almost cancelled this one when one of the two guys couldn't make the original date, which was next Friday. Instead of delaying it until an unspecified time early in 2025 (which would likely mean it would never happen), we pushed it forward a week and had it last night. I had the guys over for drinks and BBQ in my back yard (even though it was lightly raining) and then we went out for drinks afterward. 

I'm telling you all this because of course we talked about movies almost non-stop. In fact, it was one of those conversations where when you get to the end of it, you think of all things you might have discussed that just never came up. Always better that way than running out of things to say halfway through the evening.

And as inevitably happens, we talked about franchise fatigue, about how many intellectual properties had completely run their course, but Hollywood was too risk averse to abandon them in favor of new ideas. And believe me, I get that. New ideas often fail spectacularly, and Hollywood is not a business that can afford to fail with any regularity.

And then this question occurred to me:

"Well, we have to have some franchises. Which are the ones we actually need?"

No one had a satisfying answer to this question.

And if you are reading this piece in the hopes that I have come up with the answers in the 14 hours since this conversation occurred, many of which have been spent sleeping and severely hungover, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

One of the guys ventured that some of the horror franchises had continued to sustain interest, a theory I did not openly disagree with, though I do sort of disagree with it. But I countered that horror franchises were always going to be a different story because although they appealed to a passionate subsection of the moviegoing populace that's eager and willing to spend their money, they were never going to rake in $300 or $400 million at the box office. For that you need something that can appeal to everyone in the family.

And no one could think of an example.

We didn't linger on the topic very long. In movie conversations, there's always another fruitful tangent to be followed. 

But I've lingered on it in my mind, a bit, at least enough to write this post. I still don't really have answers, but I have a few ideas. 

What you're really looking for, here, is an intellectual property that's new enough to not have exhausted us through a half-dozen or more cinematic incarnations, but reliable enough to be an easy green light for a studio. Dune was one idea I had. We're not sick of Dune yet, and I think this version of the franchise with these characters could sustain at least two more features before we reach that point. But Dune is also a bit of an anomaly, a fundamentally sort of inaccessible text that was matched up with a director who could really enthrall us. Dune is not your everyday reliable IP.

Using recency bias, I suggested Wicked. But immediately kind of ate my own words. There will only be one more Wicked, though if it's as big of a hit as this one, I could see spinoffs like Scarecrow: From the World of Wicked. Still, in trying to produce answers to this question, we're not talking about something that is fresh and new (even if its origins go back some 30 years to the publication of the novel), we're talking about something we already knew was viable a month ago. Then again, I guess Wizard of Oz is really the franchise here, so that's been going on a lot longer. 

I have no idea if they're making a Barbie sequel -- I'd be surprised if someone wouldn't want to do it, even if that person is not Greta Gerwig. But a single sequel is almost guaranteed to be the most more we could take of the concept without really turning on it, and it's far more likely to be a creative failure than a success.

If you try to look for guidance from the biggest franchise in movie history -- Marvel, DC, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, James Bond, Jurassic Park, etc. -- it's really hard to find one that has been relatively judicious in its engagement with the cinematic landscape, enough not to wear us out by the year 2024. It doesn't mean we, especially I as a critic and a completist, won't see these movies. It just means we won't be enthusiastic about the prospect, and will grouse about them at film website Christmas parties when given the chance.

There's one franchise, though, that I specifically excluded from the list in the previous paragraph. Because we were also talking about this as a continuation of a discussion in a message thread earlier in the week, I proposed that I would really look forward to another Star Wars movie. It's been five years now, and as I sit here, I don't actually know if any of the proposed plans for future trilogies is actually going forward at this point. I know the Patty Jenkins movie was scrapped, and I think the various creative teams who had been assigned an idea -- like the Game of Thrones guys -- are also in some sort of turnaround. I suspect we'll get something before 2030, but I don't know what it will be.

And when I realized that made me sad, it also made me realize that I do, in fact, have an answer to this. We need Star Wars.

These guys are younger than I am -- one 12 years younger, one 17 -- so I had the opportunity to regale them (not for the first time) with the story about how I had seen the original Star Wars in the theater on its initial release. But instead of that just being another rehashed story, not unlike the franchises themselves -- and we had a talk about rehashed personal stories too last night, though not related to this -- it was an opportunity for me to lay the groundwork for why I will give Star Wars an unlimited number of additional chances to wow me. Any time I see a new character activating a lightsaber in a setting I've never seen before, it will stir the excitement of that child who saw the first lightsaber ever extended. 

And it's not the same to see it in a TV show. I think Disney ultimately knows this. In fact, I have only watched one episode total from the most recent two Star Wars series.

We all know that the movies are where franchises truly live, truly exceed the limitations of the small screen to exist in all their glory and grandeur.

And I don't know about the rest of you, but I need Star Wars to prop up my personal cinematic landscape.  

Rewatching Rogue One on American May the 4th (sort of)

A few days before May the 4th -- a day I mildly look down upon, all evidence to the contrary in the date-specific viewing I'm about to tell you about -- I thought about how Star Wars Day was falling on a Saturday this year, and it would make a good opportunity to finally rewatch Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Then I plum forgot.

But I remembered in time for Sunday night, and since many of the hours of our Sunday here in Australia are Saturday in the U.S. -- May the 4th, in case you've already forgotten -- I thought I could squeeze in the viewing Sunday night, even though Saturday would have expired in all U.S. time zones by then (yes, even Hawaii).

But first let's get into why I look down upon both May the 4th and Rogue One.

If you truly love Star Wars, then you don't need a day to celebrate it. You do Star Wars things at regular intervals. Not daily, of course, because that would be too nerdy by half. But you'd keep Star Wars in your heart and home -- "keep" in the sense that Ebenezer Scrooge talked about keeping Christmas -- and you wouldn't need to draw special attention to it once a year. For a real Star Wars fan, May the 4th is for tourists. (When every major league baseball team playing a home game on May 4th has some sort of Star Wars themed night, you know it's become too commercial by half. Much like Christmas.)

And Rogue One? A true Star Wars fan does not like Rogue One.

How do I figure? Well, I say, a true Star Wars fan does not believe that the stealing of the plans to the Death Star was an epic battle with the loss of many lives, starships and planets, the kind so consequential that they'd devote entire history books to it. A true Star Wars fan thinks the stealing of the plans for the Death Star was a cloak and dagger mission involving clever betrayals, intrigue, and probably only the deaths of a couple Imperial soldiers who might have gotten in the way.

Yet Gareth Edwards' movie did indeed posit that this epic battle had taken place immediately before Princess Leia came into possession of said plans, which is the biggest, but not nearly the only, reason I didn't dig the movie when I saw it back in 2016, and had not yet rewatched it.

When I watched and appreciated Andor, I started getting the hankering to give Rogue One another shot. I thought I'd wait until after the second and final season of Andor, but I also found myself getting impatient for that to arrive. As it turned out, I would have only had to wait three more months, as it'll be on Disney+ this August.

But Cassian Andor was decidedly not one of the things I appreciated in Rogue One. He had to grow on me in his eponymous show. I generally like Diego Luna, but I did not think he was right for this movie and I did not think his performance was up to snuff. The fact that English is not his first language was likely a factor, but I also thought he just had a big charisma deficit. Again, I've softened that stance since then.

And true enough, Cassian Andor was not a bother to me this time around. He might not stack up to other recent iconic additions to the Star Wars universe -- your Oscar Isaacs, your Daisey Ridleys, your John Boyegas, your Adam Drivers -- heck, pretty much everyone in that whole trilogy -- but he's fine here, and it's not really his story anyway. 

But I also had an issue with Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso. My memory was that I thought her facial expressions were too overdetermined, and that she needed a sure-handed director to tell her not to be going off the reservation with the looks she was giving the camera. 

I must say, I really don't know where I got that the first time. I sat there during this viewing and I specifically tried to detect why I reached that conclusion about Jones. I could not. She, too, is fine, perhaps better than that.

While we are on the cast, in 2016 I did not like Donnie Yen's chanting about being one with the force and the force being with him. I guess I just don't feel like the force and incantations go hand in hand. Shouldn't you just be able to feel the force, and have it serve or not serve you, without speaking about it? Perhaps Edwards was intentionally drawing a comparison between belief in the force and religious zealotry, but if so, I was not a fan of that comparison.

Guess what? Didn't bother me so much this time.

Riz Ahmed's mumblings about being the pilot?

Didn't bother me so much.

Forest Whittaker's admittedly scenery chewing performance?

Didn't bother me so much.

The story?

Yeah that still bothered me. 

I still don't like that this movie culminates in a battle costing the lives of, would it be exaggerating to say thousands of people? That's not so good.

But I found myself appreciating the staging of this battle, at least, on the level of pure spectacle. The beach scene with the palm trees is a good place to have a Star Wars battle. And some of the stuff going on up in space, with the assault on that invisible shield, is good material.

This is not me becoming a Rogue One acolyte. I promise you it is not.

Though it is someone who does not like dislike the movie anymore, and might already watch it again after I conclude Andor after all. Yes, even if that means two Rogue One viewings within about a year's time.

I am eager to see if they are consistent with the depiction of Andor, whom they had not conceived as the center of his own TV show when they set out to make this prequel. His killing of a person who appeared to be a friend or colleague during his first scene does not, for example, seem consistent with his character -- or not consistent, anyway, with the person he seems to have become by the time the show ends. To see how they sew this all together, it probably really will behove me to watch it right after I watch the show.

Anyway, this leaves exactly one Star Wars movie that I have seen only once. And you should be able to guess what that is.

That's right, it's Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I always considered to be worse than Rogue One and looks a lot worse right about now. 

I can't imagine the circumstances that will come along to make me want to watch that one again ... but if my feelings toward Rogue One can be rehabilitated, I won't rule out that same thing being possible here.

After all, there's another May the 4th only about 363 days away.

Star Wars Episode III: Return of the Star Wars

Okay, that subject makes no sense.

We all know that in Star Wars parlance, Episode III refers to a 2005 movie called Revenge of the Sith. We're not up to that in our viewing, and who knows, we may never get there.

But in the parlance of my family, we had our third movie-length Star Wars "episode" this past weekend on Easter, which was finally watching Return of the Jedi -- the third movie made, but Episode VI using the episode numbering that all Star Wars fans, and most other people, are familiar with. 

I say "finally" because it's been an eternity since we watched The Empire Strikes Back, following a similar eternity since we had watched Star Wars. (I won't name the episode numbers for those movies, because when they first came out, they had no episode numbers, and that's the way I like it.) 

Maybe "eternity" is a bit of an exaggeration. It was actually October 4, 2020 that we watched Empire, so only 18 months ago. But my hope had been that Empire would be such a hit with my kids that they would want to gobble up all the remaining Star Wars movies in short order, and that we wouldn't have another gap like we had between watching Star Wars, which we did on December 22, 2017, and Empire.

This gap was shorter, but it was still indicative of my kids' feelings on these movies in general.

However, maybe that's about to change. 

"What did you think of it?" I asked my older son, who is now 11, as the credits rolled. 

"Good," he said. "I finally like a Star Wars movie."

He knew there was something at stake here just as much as I did.

The younger one didn't directly answer the question, but he was making shooting noises and explosion noises in the play he uses to fill up brief moments of downtime, so that may have been answer enough.

The Book of Boba Fett was what gave me confidence to reintroduce Star Wars to these guys now. They're into "Star Wars" as a concept, having watched two seasons of The Mandalorian in addition to Boba Fett, but the movies have never worked for them -- "too old," "too slow," "looks bad" have been the sorts of complaints they've offered. They obviously don't have a geek's relationship to the material, but I had hoped that recognizing a lot of characters/locations from Boba Fett when they watched Jedi would be the kind of thing that would crystallize feelings of excitement about the show and transfer them to the movies.

I'm not sure if that really happened, or if they just liked the movie on its own terms. I didn't subject them to an extensive exit interview and was just happy with the positive reaction. But because they didn't spontaneously emit exclamations like "Hey, it's the Rancor!" or "Hey, it's a Gamorrean Guard!", I wasn't sure they actually felt that excitement of recognition I had been relying on, and wasn't sure if the movie would work for them at all.

They did seem to find the Ewoks somewhat charming, as my wife and I would sometimes produce little laughs at things Wicket W. Warrick (the original www?) would do, and they seemed to go along with that. 

If I had to guess what finally clicked for my older son, I'd suggest it was the happy ending -- the repudiation of the Emperor (I won't say "death," because we now know he didn't actually die), the redemption of Darth Vader, and the survival and celebration of all the characters we love. I think the ending of Empire had left him perplexed, since there were so many open wounds, and he was unaccustomed to watching movies that ended on a down note. Jedi definitely wraps things up in a nice tight bow.

Then I suppose I also must consider the role of the scope of the movie. We watched it on the projector in our garage, which is as close to a cinematic-style projection as he's ever gotten on a Star Wars movie. We've started to watch a lot more things in our garage so it's perhaps less of a novelty, but a Star Wars movie deserves a bigger canvas, and this one finally got one.

I have to say it was not a 100% success. In the context of his positive review, my older son did mention the pacing issues and made a comment along the lines of "For about ten minutes there I was bored to death." But I guess if a movie's slow patch only lasts ten minutes, that's not too bad, and it means something came back along to stoke your excitement after that. (I don't know which ten minutes it was that bored him so much, but in my mind I imagine it's the conversation between Luke and Leia on Endor. Then again, the moment he did call back to a couple days later was when Luke elevates C3PO to prove to the Ewoks that Threepio is a god, which he obviously enjoyed and which was only a minute or two before that.)

Now the problem is, where to go from here. If their interest in Star Wars is, indeed, stoked, we could move on to one of the next two trilogies. The question is: Which one? If we went only in the order the movies were released, it would obviously be time for The Phantom Menace. But it's possible we'd have better luck with the newer (and better) movies, meaning my personal favorite of the most recent six, The Force Awakens, would be up next. That also picks up where the story left off.

The only thing is, I don't know if they're ready for the successive deaths of each of the three main characters in the next three movies they watch. If my son was perplexed by the ending of Empire, I can only imagine how he'd handle a whole movie where Luke Skywalker is irritable and glum, only belatedly redeeming himself at the end. Should Luke Skywalker be a character who requires redemption? (This is what I asked myself, and still ask myself, about The Last Jedi.)

I suppose whichever way we go, if we go, I will let my children dictate the pace this time. I've already force-fed them the three movies I really want them to see, and anything from here is a bonus. We'll watch Obi-Wan Kenobi when it comes out soon, and if they continue to enjoy that, it would make an easy transition into watching the same actor portray that role in the three prequels. 

But I won't push it on them. They need to make the choice now. My indoctrinating days are over.

Part of me thinks that now that they've enjoyed Return of the Jedi, they should try Star Wars and Empire again. But I've got to just let it go. 

Recreating your own childhood with your kids is an enterprise that is always doomed to failure, be it Star Wars, or the books you loved as a kid, or the sports you played. You can make suggestions and point them in directions, but they've got to take it on themselves at some point, or it can't possibly have that value to them.

At least we went 1-3 on the original trilogy, which was much better than a big fat zero. 

Action figures can only take you so far

Snake Eyes was supposed to open here on Thursday. I guess it did, in some parts of the country that aren't locked down. But the country's most populous two states -- Victoria and New South Wales -- are both locked down, so I'm sure it was a pretty lame domestic opening weekend.

But I like to think it might have been lame anyway because of the subject matter.

A strange comment to make about the brand that helped bifurcate my childhood obsessions after I grew out of playing with Star Wars figures. 

I'm not sure exactly what age it was that G.I. Joe figures supplanted Star Wars figures for me. Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, when I was nine. My best guess is that the third (and then final) Star Wars movie would have sustained me for at least a year after its release, so let's say I transitioned to G.I. Joe action figures from when I was ten until when I stopped playing with toys, probably around age 13. (If you stopped playing with toys earlier than that, don't judge.) So I might have played with Star Wars figures a little longer, but I was into G.I. Joes just as intensely.

I'm still into Star Wars today. I treat the release of every new Star Wars property with the same glee that I experienced when I played with the toys. 

I could not give a shit about G.I. Joe.

Or maybe I couldn't give two shits. Which statement is stronger?

I remember when G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra came out in 2009, there was no doubt I was going to see it. But was I excited about it? Not in the least. I ended up seeing it at the drive-in, and it was just as disappointing as I imagined it might be.

I didn't see the sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which was released in 2013. Which is kind of funny because I thought it actually looked like it might be better than the first, and it had Bruce Willis, which was still a good thing back then, in addition to Dwayne Johnson, who might have still been called The Rock. To this day, I have not yet made time for it.

Now that the third blockbuster film with the G.I. Joe brand is being released, I don't have any more interest in seeing it than I have in correcting the Retaliation omission. I kind of thought I'd have to see it for ReelGood, since the bigger releases get more clicks, but maybe this lockdown has bailed me out of that particular obligation. 

So why have I stayed loyal to Star Wars and shunned G.I. Joe?

Some thoughts:

1) The G.I. Joe figures were maybe cooler than the Star Wars figures. Not because of their design, as such, but because of how they could move. While the Star Wars figures didn't have elbows or knees, the G.I. Joe figures had both -- did some even have rotating wrists? I think not yet. But their arms and legs could go to the side in addition to going forward, as they had shoulder and hip sockets. They were much better equipped than Star Wars figures to meet the demands of my advanced tween action figure play. 

But because of that ...

2) I was overlooking a mythology that didn't mean much to me. Although I did watch the G.I. Joe cartoon and had some sense of the progression of the story over time -- I remember when Destro and Zartan came into the narrative, for example -- I didn't ultimately care about the characters the way I cared about the characters in Star Wars. It was more about the toys themselves.

So therefore ...

3) When only the mythology remains, it has to be a lot better than the G.I. Joe mythology is. Could I even tell you today what is driving any of these characters other than beating Cobra? Could I tell you anything about the personalities of any of the characters? I could not.

And also ...

4) When you come down to it, it's a property that glorifies the military. I'm not saying I don't "support our troops," but "our troops" are not something that I want to rest my fantasy dreams upon. There's something just a tad too right-wing about it to really resonate with me.

The thing is, the Hasbro and Paramount people are not stupid. In resurrecting the G.I. Joe franchise, they've concentrated on what is undoubtedly one of the most memorable characters (and coolest action figures). I might have preferred Snake Eyes' Cobra counterpart, Storm Shadow, in terms of character design, but Snake Eyes was damn cool. Every kid knew that.

Not only that, but Henry Golding is a great choice to play Snake Eyes. Coming off Crazy Rich Asians, he may be today's most marketable actor of Asian descent. He's got charisma to spare and he is handsome as fuck.

Still don't care.

Is this a betrayal of my childhood in some way? I don't think so. I think it's fair to say that the part of childhood that we feel most sentimental about ends by the time you hit double digits, and all of my G.I. Joe play was from ten onward. I suppose if I want to find a parallel in, say, my sister, she would probably not feel disappointed in herself about not giving a shit about a New Kids on the Block reunion tour. We don't have to always be proud of everything we liked when we were young.

But given that I watch almost everything that comes out, whether I have a personal history with it or not, my shunning of Snake Eyes is a real indication of how far G.I. Joe has fallen since then, or how little I feel they've done with it so far in its existence as a cinematic franchise. A judgment I'm prepared to make, apparently, with having only seen one of the three movies they've made.

My guess is that I will ultimately catch up with Snake Eyes before the end of the year, as the end of our lockdown will probably find me prioritizing other things that were supposed to have been released in the interim, like Old. And when I do, maybe I'll come back here and let you know what I think of it.

And yes, you read that correctly -- I did just say that M. Night Shyamalan is more of a priority for me than G.I. Joe. 

My Christmas miracle

So even though this is a movie blog, I meant to write about The Mandalorian long before now.

We finally got access to the show when we got AppleTV and Disney+ in August, and my wife and I quickly watched the first four episodes. Then we watched them again, due to a command decision on her part that may have helped save Star Wars in our house.

Without going into too much background -- I've written about it before -- my kids had been skeptical about Star Wars at best. My older son had simply not taken to the first two movies in the saga, even at the ripe old age of ten when we watched Empire in October, and the six-year-old had spent a lot of time running up and down our hallway pretending to shoot blasters while the movie was on. While that's marginally a positive reaction on his part, it doesn't represent real engagement when you aren't even watching the screen.

Instead of plowing ahead undaunted to Return of the Jedi, which had been my plan, my wife suggested we see if we can hook them on something more recent.

The Mandalorian has been a total hit with them, almost from the very first moments. I'll say "almost." The pilot episode has a character that gets bissected by a closing cantina door, you may remember, and the older one almost wigged out at that scene. Strangely, there has been nothing quite that visceral in the time since then -- Baby Yoda eating frog eggs doesn't count -- so the rest of it has been smooth sailing. 

We still have one episode to go in the second season, so if you are inclined to comment on this post, please, no spoilers. 

Now the ten-year-old has been known to say things like "The Mandalorian is the awesomest thing ever." The younger one is still distractable and doesn't always fully watch what's going on, but he absolutely loves Baby Yoda -- Grogu, we now know him to be -- and even asked for a Baby Yoda for Christmas on his letter to Santa. "The one with the necklace," he wrote.

And that's where my Christmas miracle comes in.

This is "the one with the necklace":

Just as cute as anything related to Baby Yoda, you will agree. 

I should stop to say that I, personally, love Baby Yoda. I know, big revelation there. I'm sure I'm the only one who loves Baby Yoda.

But I literally had no choice but to giggle every time he was on screen, even if he was not doing anything. His default facial expression made me giggle. If he moved a little to the left? I was done for. That reached its culmination in season 2, when we learned his name. Mando would say "Grogu" and BY (as I call him) would immediately turn and say "Huh?" That did me in every time.

If anything should be this year's version of a Furbee or what have you, it should be this Baby Yoda with a necklace, who also makes noises and other small animatronic movements.

But when I started at Target last Thursday night, there wasn't a single Baby Yoda in sight. Like, I mean, his face was not on anything. Not on a board game. Not on a book. Not even on a greeting card.

I knew my mandate was to get "the one with the necklace," but at this point, I would have been happy to get a pair of socks with Baby Yoda on them.

This story would be a lot better if it had taken five or ten other toy stores before I got lucky. If they ever make the movie, I'm sure that's a detail they'll change. But I have to be honest with you and tell you that Big W, the rival to Target, was my salvation, and it was the next place I stopped.

I was disconcerted enough by striking out at Target, and feeling a hopeless certainty of failure sink in, that I was kind of listlessly wandering through the toy aisles at Big W. 

And then there it was: the Baby Yoda with the necklace.

It was just sitting there by itself. I'm not even sure if it was in its right place. In any case, there was no price tag on the shelf, indicating its proper storage spot. There were other Star Wars toys in the vicinity, but this guy was just on his own, no others of his kind around. 

I grabbed him, almost as if he might disappear if I blinked.

And he might have. Not five seconds after I laid claim, two teenage girls next to me said "Ohhhhh, Baby Yoda!" I had no indication they were in the market for him, but it was another reminder of how universally beloved this character, and consequently this toy, have become. 

I figured he might have been returned by a customer -- for some reason -- and only just "restocked" (haphazardly though it may have been) ten minutes before. And he likely wouldn't have lasted another ten. 

I made such a quick beeline for the checkout area, perhaps fearing another desperate parent might grab him out of my arms, that I didn't even have time to consider what this thing might cost. If I had been asked to guess, I would have said $50.

Turns out, it was twice that.

So what. What's $100 when an animatronic Baby Yoda will make your youngest son's Christmas?

It wasn't until I got home that I remembered even to test out the toy's capabilities. And this is where my Christmas miracle got even more amazing. When you touch its head, its eyes open and close, its ears wiggle a little bit, and a kind of humming chorus of Jedi angels emits from it. 

Score.

Merry Christmas all, and may you find your Baby Yoda with the necklace this year, whatever it may be. 

Five years in the doghouse is long enough

Five Octobers ago I watched The Empire Strikes Back for the first time in eight years, as the fifth in a six-movie preparation prior to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That viewing shockingly upended my previous comparative rankings of Star Wars movies. For some unknown number of years, I had claimed that the sequel to the original Star Wars was my favorite Star Wars movie. In one two-hour viewing of an albeit "scruffy looking" copy of the original Empire, I lost all that. (You can read the full post here.)

Not only had it been my favorite of the Star Wars movies, but it had been my fifth favorite movie of all time. Its #5 ranking on Flickchart put it only three spots ahead of Star Wars, so the difference there was negligible. But that also meant it was ahead of some 4,000 and change other movies.

In the time since then, there has been a corrective on Flickchart. It started with Do the Right Thing beating it (as discussed here), and then went on from there. The movie that was once #5 on my Flickchart is now ... #46. Still very high in terms of its overall 99th percentile, but quite a fall from grace for a no-doubt top ten movie up until five years ago. 

Every time a movie would beat The Empire Strikes Back, sending it a notch further downward, or beat a movie that was ahead of Empire, which had the same result, I greeted it with some concern. Too much more of this, and it might threaten to fall below Return of the Jedi, which is at #58. For five years now, I've known that another reckoning with Empire was necessary. I just didn't know when.

It should have come before now. It was Christmastime in 2017 when we watched, as a family, the original Star Wars. That meant me, my wife, a relatively sentient seven-year-old and a likely clueless young boy who was a week away from turning four. The goal was to watch one Star Wars movie each Christmas until, I don't know, we got to the prequels at least. 

But we didn't watch The Empire Strikes Back in 2018, nor in 2019, nor so far in 2020. And that had everything to do with the relatively sentient seven-year-old, who is now ten. 

Although he liked Star Wars fine, he has told me on a number of occasions that he doesn't like "Star Wars," as a concept rather than a single movie. This despite an interest in Star Wars-related paraphernalia, like our Where's the Wookiee? books.

So we didn't push that next viewing. It likely wouldn't have happened Sunday either, except my wife wanted to do a family movie, but we were all Marvel'd out. Since getting Disney+ at the end of August we have watched Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange and Ant-Man -- each of which successively became my ten-year-old's favorite movie he'd ever seen. Ant-Man and the Wasp seemed like a logical next step, and I'm sure the kids would have gone for it, but my wife put on the kibosh -- wanting to save it for later, so it felt fresh again.

We were throwing around other movies -- the merits of Frozen II were half-heartedly considered -- but the time our pizza was arriving was fast approaching, so I just made a command decision. Tonight would be the night that I, that we all, would reckon with The Empire Strikes Back. (It being the 40th anniversary of the movie also appealed to my internal editor's sense of a good news peg.)

After only a few moments of the pristine version of the movie available on Disney+, my "scruffy looking" takeaway from the previous viewing was as thing of the past. I suspected, without outright knowing, that the rest of my complaints would fall by the wayside, too. I immediately felt as though I were back in the company of an old favorite.

One of the things that helped me recognize that was how much investment I felt in whether the kids were enjoying it. If I no longer vouched for Empire, I probably wouldn't care much. But it was clear that I did, and that I do.

They were both incredibly restless, for different reasons. The younger one (now six) was running back and forth on the side of the room, shooting lasers. That's a positive outcome.

The older one was wriggling from one position to another in a beanbag chair, apparently bored.

We used different strategies to quiet them down, with varying success. Though as we have both obviously seen the movie many times, my wife and I didn't try too hard.

Despite all this evidence of my ten-year-old's fitfulness, I was still surprised to hear his assessment when it was all over.

"Did you like it?" I asked.

"No," he responded, definitively. "It was really bad."

I had girded myself for the likely response from a soon-to-be-teenager, which I imagined would be "It was okay." But this really surprised me. I didn't ask any follow-up questions.

It was time for them to go to bed, so I didn't want to impede that part of the process. But I remained sitting on the couch during the credits, befuddled.

Before I had a chance to get up, my son returned to the couch and apologized for not liking the movie.

"That's okay," I said. "You don't have to like it. But what do you think it is about it that doesn't connect with you?"

It was here I was reminded of what an essentially weird movie The Empire Strikes Back is. Especially when you only sort of remember the events of the first movie, which you saw three years ago -- which might as well be 20 when you are a kid.

We should have known from the start there were disconnects here. Not four minutes into the movie my son had asked to pause it, to clarify what was going on. He only sort of remembered the characters from the first movie, and says he does not even remember the Death Star blowing up. We had just read the crawl aloud, but it had not helped. And now suddenly they were on this planet covered with snow, which had nothing to do with any of the settings he may have vaguely remembered from the first movie. 

He didn't ask us to pause it any more times during the movie, perhaps because he allowed the momentum of some of the action scenes to propel him along, perhaps just because he sensed we were annoyed by the interruption. But it was clear he had never fully gotten on the wavelength of this movie.

As he tried to explain what was wrong with the movie, he said "A lot of things happened that seemed like they were important, and then they didn't end up seeming as important as they should have."

I think what he's describing here is the lack of resolution at the end of the movie. As a middle movie in a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back could end without a happy ending. But my son has seen very few movies that have cliffhanger endings. In fact, he might have seen none. (Avengers: Infinity War is still far off in our Marvel future.) 

I think his comment could be describing that Luke Skywalker loses the lightsaber battle to Darth Vader (and his hand), or that Han Solo is taken away frozen in carbonite, his face a kind of horrifying death scream. I wouldn't be surprised if he were also disturbed by Luke's face appearing in Darth Vader's decapitated helmet after their confrontation on Dagobah, which certainly got me, back in the day. I had to explain that it was a vision, and they didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I think they were also confused by characters like Lando Calrissian. They are not accustomed to processing ideas like betrayal, or how a compromised character can redeem himself as the movie goes along. 

But the real mind-fuck the movie put on him was also the most surprising thing, to me, about his whole viewing experience:

"Why was Darth Vader Luke's father?"

"Didn't you know that?" I asked.

"No," he said.

Now it's me that's mind-fucked.

In this post I wrote about my worries of Star Wars being spoiled for my kids through supplemental material, like the storybook Darth Vader and Son, which includes a bunch of cute drawings of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker engaged in banal father and son activities. I had wanted the reveal in Empire Strikes Back to still have an impact on my kids when they eventually saw it, but assumed that it was not possible.

When I asked what he thought that book was talking about, apparently, my son thought it had been a joke, like if you made a book where Frankenstein's monster was Superman's father. (That's my example, not his.) He didn't think it was like, you know, real.

That's because in a child's world, it's really hard to comprehend that the epitome of evil and the epitome of good could be related to one another. It's a really adult concept to try to grapple with.

In the ten minutes after the movie ended, he had already done some of the grappling. In just talking about it on the couch for a few minutes, he had upgraded his assessment to "pretty good." In the coming days, he will likely continue to process it, and maybe he will unlock more of the experience he had.

As for me, Empire is back in my good graces. I don't think it's going to be back in my top ten on Flickchart anytime soon, but I can easily see it working its way back up to the 20s. I still like Star Wars better, but most of my previous affection for Empire has officially been restored.

The period of reckoning for my son may determine where we go from here. If he can come around on Empire, maybe a viewing of Return of the Jedi will be in the offing, and we'll go from there. Maybe a love will be born. My wife has already suggested something only tangentially related to this storyline, like Rogue One, as a next possible viewing, to see if that helps steer the ship.

Or maybe Star Wars just won't ever be his thing.

As for the younger one ... well, we already know he loves the lasers. 

The ongoing adventures of Johnson, Chewbacca illustrator

It is almost never advisable to try to translate an inside joke to someone who wasn't present for it. The thing you found so funny about it makes no sense out of the specific context in which it originated. But today on my blog, I'm going to discard that wisdom and try anyway.

A couple weeks ago I bemoaned the fact that I haven't properly been able to get my children ensnared in the Star Wars phenomenon. They saw and liked A New Hope, but have never clamored to see the rest of the movies. So we haven't forced it on them, much as I might have liked to.

The same has not been the case for Star Wars-related storybooks, specifically, the ones that function as something of an activity book, and even more specifically, the ones that function as a Star Wars version of Where's Waldo?, known in British Empire countries as Where's Wally?

The first one we had was popular enough, featuring a two-page spread from each of the six Star Wars movies before The Force Awakens, and then three spreads from The Force Awakens itself. You had to find about eight items per spread, from Sebulba the pod racer to specific ships in a space battle to little trinkets in a junk shop on Jakku. It provided enough enjoyment for my younger son to request reading it at least a half-dozen times.

The quantity hasn't been there for Where's the Wookiee and its sequel, Where's the Wookiee 2, the latter of which we just got this Christmas. But the quality of enjoyment has been much higher, a fact confirmed by the fact that his older brother has gotten involved in these ones. They may not have the same longevity as a repeatable experience -- once you've found Chewbacca in a thicket of frenzied Star Wars activity, you develop a memory of where he was the next time you try. But the initial task is far more satisfying.

In fact, sometimes finding Chewbacca is so difficult that I developed a narrative around the man who did the drawings, a narrative that involved him getting chewed out (no pun intended) by his boss for failing to include a Chewbacca in one particular spread.

But first, a little about these books. They involve familiar settings from as many Star Wars movies as existed at the time -- The Force Awakens and Rogue One have been added into the second, which has been on the shelves since November of 2017. But instead of a relative scarcity of characters as in the movies, they are overflowing with aliens and activity, almost Hieronymus Bosch style. The characters don't have to be from the planet in question -- I think I saw Jabba the Hutt on Endor -- and as there is in Where's Waldo?, there are a ton of what we call "fake baccas" to try to fool you into thinking you've found the real Chewy. It's a lot of fun.

One time, we had so much difficulty finding the correct Chewbacca that I came up with a character name Johnson, an illustrator working on these books, who is taken to task by his gruff boss for forgetting to include a wookiee in one particular spread. As in "You had one job, Johnson! To put Chewbacca on this page!" (The actual illustrator is someone named Ulises Farinas, but that just doesn't roll off the tongue.)

The kids love it. They can't get enough of it. I want something like this to come up organically, but anytime we read one of the Wookiee books, they say "Do Johnson!"

So I do.

Usually it doesn't take more than three minutes to find Chewbacca, and sometimes you spot him in the first 15 seconds, which is a little unsatisfying. But we really got our money's worth on one spread earlier this week, when we searched for a combined total of more than a half-hour, which included going on to the next spread and going back to it, and even my wife giving a cursory look for a minute. For anyone who has Where's the Wookiee 2 and is curious, it was the scene in the droid factory on Geonosis.

Johnson, it seemed, really did require a dressing down in this case. It was time for me to shine.

"Okay Johnson," I said in my most supercilious version of the boss' voice. "You say you drew a Chewbacca on this page. So I ask you: Where's the wookiee?"

Hysterics.

Then it was time, for the first time, for me to actually play Johnson.

"Yeah sure boss," I said. "He's right there." I dragged my finger across the page in a way that purposefully failed to identify any actual quadrant where the wookiee might be.

"I don't see him, Johnson! Show me exactly where!"

"He's in the top-bottom. He's on the left-right side of the page."

"Where, Johnson? WHERE?!?"

"He's near the [unintelligible word]."

It went on like this. The kids were loving it. I was loving it too.

The thing that made it all the more funny was that we still couldn't actually find Chewbacca.

What if they had actually forgotten to put Chewbacca in one of the spreads?

I was on the verge of googling it to see if it was some kind of internet scuttlebutt, that indeed the makers of the book had failed in their "one job," when finally I did locate him, really not that hidden at all. It must have been some kind of collective mind control that kept us from finding him before then. Or maybe Johnson quickly scribbled him in when we weren't looking.

I tell you this story not because I expect you to find it as funny as we did. I tell you it because I now have "a new hope" about my kids' interest in Star Wars. Maybe I just needed to find the right entry point, and maybe that entry point was a bumbling illustrator who couldn't do his one job.

Now that we've looked at these books as much as we have, maybe when they see the actual movies and see these locations on screen, it'll give them an ever-renewing sense of engagement as they go through and continue to see more.

I can't promise them Jabba the Hutt on Endor, but maybe the rest of it will be enough.

My last midnight Star Wars

Tonight, a bunch of things end.

Never say never, but I doubt I’ll be watching the various new Star Wars spinoffs at 12:01 a.m. Australia time, even if it will give me bragging rights over all you who have to wait 24-48 hours beyond that to see the movie.

Because will any new Star Wars movie be as momentous as this one?

This is the end of a saga that began 42 years ago, when more than half the world’s population was not yet alive, when we didn’t know Luke Skywalker from Luke Starkiller, Chewbacca from tobacco and stormtroopers from … well, the Nazi variation thereof.

Sure, what transpires in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will probably bear very little resemblance to the twinkle in George Lucas’ eye back in the mid-1970s. As much as he may say he knew about where the whole saga was going, he hasn’t had much say in its ending, as it turns out.

I’m not finding that to make the experience any less pure. It’s the same actors – those who are still alive, anyway, and some appearing posthumously – plus the return of one we haven’t seen since the early 20^th century, and one we haven’t seen since 1983. It may have been George Lucas’ story, but in terms of what’s up there on the screen, it’s their story, and that matters.

In terms of my actual plan, I almost titled this post “A Hoyts for every Star Wars.”

Seeing Star Wars movies at midnight started for me in 2015 with The Force Awakens, the result of my wife buying me a ticket for my birthday. (Yes, Star Wars tickets were already available in late October.) That was at the Hoyts at Melbourne Central.

In 2017 I hit up the Hoyts at Hightpoint Shopping Centre, as that was more convenient for the two guys I was seeing it with. (Plus, I’d gone there to see Rogue One the year before, which I’m not including in the current calculation because it’s not part of this saga, and because I don’t like it very much.)

Now in 2019 I’m seeing The Rise of Skywalker at a Hoyts that didn’t exist for the previous two releases, the Docklands Hoyts, which I only attended for the first time last year to see The Grinch. (And what a memorable viewing experience that was.) This is the closest to my house, and involves only an easy ten-minute bike ride home along a bike path at 3 in the morning.

I’m sure I’ll have follow-up posts with my thoughts on the movie, so I’ll keep this preview post short.

But 24 hours from now, I’ll be groggy at work, wondering how I’m going to get through the day, hopefully still delirious with the joy of a successful conclusion to one of my life’s great adventures.

No pressure, right?

Star Wars will end without my kids

I'm pretty excited for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But it's an abstract excitement based on almost no imagery from the movie. I've (mostly) kept up my same strategy as for the last two movies in this saga, where I avoided trailers. I'd have been 100% successful in that effort except that an ad came on while I was watching an on-demand version of Survivor, of all shows, last night, and I did not turn my eyes away from it.

I'll even be preparing for it by re-watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi in the two nights leading up to it. I'm devoting Monday and Tuesday nights of that week to my fifth (!) viewing of Episode VII and my modest third viewing of Episode VIII, before I am among the first in the world to access Episode IX Wednesday night at midnight.

Unfortunately, I don't really have anyone to share this momentous occasion with, at least not locally.

I did watch The Last Jedi with two "mates," two years ago, but only one of them was really geeked for the midnight showing while the other one went along with a skeptical look in his eye, and ultimately regretted his decision. Barring last-minute plans, I doubt we'll be doing that again.

But I'm not bemoaning the lack of physical companionship in watching this movie, as I only watch maybe one out of every 40 movies I see in the theater with another person. (Adult movies, that is -- my kids join me more frequently for movies aimed at them.) As a film critic as well as a person who can't regularly see movies with his wife because of babysitting considerations, I usually go alone. And don't think twice about it, if I ever did.

No, what's really giving me a mild case of the blues is that I won't have been able to share any part of this Star Wars experience with the people whose excitement would nourish me the most: my kids.

When Star Wars restarted in 2015, it was a few years too early to really be appropriate for my kids. My older son was only five and a couple months then, my younger son almost two. Now granted, I was not even four yet when I saw the original Star Wars in the theater, but those were different times.

I guess I hoped that as they got a little older, my kids would catch up with the Star Wars series and might watch either The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker in the theater with me. Fast forward a few years, and the older is now a couple months past his ninth birthday, the younger one nearly six.

These midnight screenings have become a fun tradition for me, but I'd trade them without a thought if it meant getting to share the experience with my kids, even if we had to wait three days after opening to see it on the weekend. How sweet that period of excitement and anticipation would be, as we all wondered what would become of Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren and the rest.

Something went wrong somewhere along the way.

In the same Christmas season that The Last Jedi came out, we watched the original Star Wars with the kids, and they liked it. The plan was to watch one movie each Christmas season, which would have only brought us to Return of the Jedi this year. But I could have stepped up the pace if they were really loving it, and we could have whipped through the prequels (if need be) as well as the last two new movies in order to prepare for Rise of Skywalker.

Instead, the pace went in the other direction. No one seemed to show much enthusiasm for The Empire Strikes Back last year, so it simply never got watched.

That lack of enthusiasm has continued. When I mention Star Wars to the older one, he tells me he's not really sure if he likes it. Even though Star Wars as a worldwide phenomenon is as strong as ever -- just look at how The Mandalorian has dominated social media, without me unfortunately -- it's apparently not something that his friends talk about very much. Which is not to say he would suddenly becomes obsessed if his friends were talking about it, but it sure would help.

If the older one's not interested, I'm not sure if it even helps for me to get the younger one interested. Especially as I secretly still think some of the stuff in these movies would be too intense for him. (I couldn't handle Han Solo getting a lightsaber through the stomach at age 42, so I don't have any idea how he'd react at age 5.)

Funny thing is, when I came home from the library with my rented copies of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on Thursday (I don't have Disney+ yet, as alluded to above), I squelched an opportunity to pique their interests. I usually place library rentals on a bookshelf near our TV, for all to see. But in this case I stored them in our bedroom, where the kids don't spend very much time.

See, I didn't want them to suddenly get interested in Star Wars and ask to see these two movies before they'd seen the others. In my ideal world, I even want to submit them to the prequels before these movies. Same order as the order I saw them, in an ideal world.

So at this point I am going it alone, even without my wife, who will undoubtedly see this movie in the theater but does not express very much ongoing interest about it.

The good news -- if you want to call it good news -- is that Disney is not nearly done delivering Star Wars to us.

I may not be able to finish the Skywalker storyline with my children, but maybe that's okay, since I didn't start it with them either. Maybe the real goal will be to meet whatever new characters Star Wars gives us next, together, and go on that adventure from start to finish, with the same emotional journey. I can't remember who's responsible for the next installment of Star Wars movies at the moment -- I know both Rian Johnson and the Game of Thrones creators are out -- but whoever it is, there's some hope it will be allowed to be new and fresh, something we can discover simultaneously, without carrying in the baggage of our own personal Star Wars histories or lack thereof, without excessive fan service and baby Yodas.

So having just shed my "mild blues" about things I can no longer undo, maybe now I'm free to just concentrate on the end of my own emotional journey -- a journey that began back in 1977.

Quantifying Peter Mayhew

I think I've missed May the 4th in every time zone in the U.S., and it's already late in the day on May the 5th here in Australia. But this post has an unfortunate timeliness that has nothing to do with a Star Wars Celebration Day on the calendar.

As you probably know, Peter Mayhew died a couple days ago. And as you probably know, Peter Mayhew played Chewbacca in most of the Star Wars movies (in every Star Wars movie in which Chewbacca appeared up until The Force Awakens, which means he was replaced in The Last Jedi and Solo even before he died).

But this may be the only thing you know about Peter Mayhew, including what he looks like.

Because Peter Mayhew -- the memory of Peter Mayhew, anyway -- deserves for you to know what he looked like, here here is, or was:

There have been a lot of nice gestures toward the memory of Mayhew on social media, the nicest of which is the one I stole for the image above. (Though I do wonder why Obi-Wan doesn't get to stand with them also; did Alec Guinness die too long ago?) I myself have not been particularly sentimental about his passing, though, and I think it's because Mayhew is one of a number of Star Wars actors who had an unusual relationship with us.

As did many of my compatriots, I learned early on the names of all the Star Wars cast members. We didn't stop at Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. We went deep, learning with a fascination that exceeded the level of trivia the names Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, David Prowse, and yes, Peter Mayhew.

Even then, though, I kind of wondered what it meant that these actors played the characters they played.

Anthony Daniels -- C3PO, of course -- seemed to give the most recognizable "actor performance" of the four. Not only did he walk around inside the protocol droid's shiny metal costume, but he also provided Threepio's voice, which is at least 80% of the charm of that character.

But the others were a real gray area. On the other end of the spectrum from Daniels was Kenny Baker, who died in 2016. We all knew he played R2D2, but given that he did not make the noises R2D2 makes, and that no part of his physical appearance was visible or can be said to have manipulated the physiognomy of the robot, knowing that Baker was the guy sitting inside costume seemed, to me, abstract at best. And I hate to say that because I, too, view Baker as something of a beloved figure, just because.

Prowse, who is still alive, and Mayhew, who now is not, were the two in the middle. Clearly they brought something to their parts, as they walked around inside the costumes and contributed a physicality that was indeed important to both characters. But neither provided the voice for their characters. Prowse -- who played Darth Vader if you didn't know -- yielded much of what made the character iconic to James Earl Jones, while Chewbacca's inimitable wookiee noises were created by sound designer Ben Burtt.

I believe all those people on social media who were very sad that Peter Mayhew died, but I'm not sure even they understand what their relationship was to him. Although purists will likely shout me down on this, I'm not sure most people could tell the difference between Mayhew as Chewbacca in The Force Awakens or Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca in the last two films. And maybe that's only because Mayhew did such a good job giving birth to his essential Chewbacca-ness, allowing any old pretender to step into the role and for us to still love him. Chewbacca was pretty under-utlized in The Last Jedi, which I think is a failure of the script more than Suotamo's performance. I do think Suotamo is quite good in Solo, though.

In the end, it is impossible to know what another actor might have done with Chewbacca, because another actor did not play Chewbacca. Peter Mayhew did. And if any part of why we love him was the result of Mayhew's choices, then he deserves our love and our sorrow.

I don't think just anybody would lace his hands behind his head in a gesture of pride at Han Solo's line "Wookiees have been known to do that" in the original Star Wars. Mayhew gave a "walking carpet" personality. I don't think he was replaceable; I think if Joonas Suotamo successfully replaced him, it was because he studied Mayhew's creation with the same love and admiration we all felt.

No better than Cobra or the Silver Surfer

Star Wars titles have never been a paragon of cleverness, but sometimes they have at least been distinctive (The Phantom Menace) or poetic (The Last Jedi).

Rarely are they derivative of trends that have been so beaten into the ground, I wrote a blog post parodying the trend a whole five years ago.

That was this post, in which I bemoaned the lame over-usage of the word "rise" in movie titles. Now, a Star Wars movie has succumbed to that deader than dead trend.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the title of the last movie in the Skywalker saga, the implications of that title notwithstanding. It's not a great title (and does have me asking a lot of questions), but I don't object to the Skywalker name drop. It's the use of "rise" that gives me pause.

You may recall (if you haven't clicked on the link above) that the impetus for my complaints over "rise" was The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro, though it turned out that was only a title used in Australia and some other non-U.S. territories. But other titles with some variation on that naming convention, that were used domestically in the U.S., were Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Any time a Star Wars movie is taking leads from Fantastic Four and G.I. Joe, it's time to be worried.

Of course, I don't for a moment believe that a title previews the potential quality of the film itself, so I'm not really worried. However, questionable decisions are questionable decisions, and it's hard to know for sure to what extent they permeate the project.

Unlike millions of people I have not watched the teaser trailer, and I think I will continue with what has been my standard practice for a good five years now, which is to take whatever measures I can to avoid trailers of movies I'm excited about seeing. But I have seen a couple stills from the trailer (accidentally, while googling for the image above), and I must say it's exciting to be within eight months of another full-on, non-spinoff Star Wars movie.

I just hope it's not the last one I ever care about. I'd like Star Wars to keep rising, even as the Skywalker saga falls.

The mellowing of our Star Wars expectations

Solo: A Star Wars Story opens this week.

Ho hum.

Han Solo is arguably one of the most popular characters in movie history, yet a movie devoted to him is not causing the stir we have come to expect, especially from Star Wars movies.

I think this says more about the state of Star Wars movies than it does about Han Solo.

Forget the “troubled production,” about which the average person likely knows diddly squat. Also forget whether the previous movies have been good, because some people have loved each of the three newest Star Wars movies and some people have loathed them. There isn’t one that can be acknowledged generally as a turd, the way the prequels were.

But we are now in our fourth straight year with a Star Wars movie, and we’ve just mellowed out on all this hype and other tangential buzz. Which is both inevitable and a bit disappointing.

Even 18 months ago, when Rogue One was released, I made sure I was there at a midnight screening. Actually, I think the midnight screening was necessitated by the fact that I needed to record a podcast about it two nights later, and had to be sure I’d get to see it before then. If something terrible happened and I missed the screening, I’d have time to compensate with another showing before the podcast recorded. But I suspect I would have been drawn to that midnight screening anyway.

What Rogue One and Solo have in common is that they are both prequels, meaning certain characters were guaranteed to escape them alive. Spoilers were not the big factor they might be in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

What they don’t have, or seem to have, in common is the hype leading up to them.

For one, I noticed that they already screened Solo for critics. My editor has already written and posted his review, even though the first public screenings are still nearly 32 hours off as I write this. For the previous three movies, they wouldn’t show anybody the movie until about six hours before those midnight screenings were set to happen. My editor beat the rest of us plebes to the screening, but only by a short time, barely even enough to brag.

Then I noticed the relative paucity of midnight screenings tomorrow. At the Village Cinema at Crown Casino, where I have started to go for my big budget movies on large screens, there’s only a single midnight screening, and it’s actually at 12:15. Hoyts, the other option for big screens, does have three screens showing the movie at 12:01, but only three, and only once each. When The Last Jedi came out last year, I’m pretty sure it played a good 20 times before weary Hoyts theater staff got to go to bed that night.

Again, I don’t think it’s the fault of Han Solo. But I do think Rogue One makes a good point of comparison, as these both have the “A Star Wars Story” label on them. Just 18 months ago, people were hungry enough for more Star Wars, any Star Wars, to line up for a midnight showing, even when they knew that nothing they didn’t already basically know would happen in the movie. Now, not so much.

You could argue that the narrative of stealing the Death Star plans is inherently more interesting than watching Han Solo on just some random adventure, though I’m sure the movie will do its darnedest to convince us of the stakes of this particular adventure. But I really don’t think so. Solo allows us to explore a beloved character – three beloved characters, actually – while Rogue One focused on characters we didn’t know and only hinted at a few we already did. (We knew Darth Vader was going to be in it, and we probably thought that was going to be cool, but I don’t think it could be described as the film’s primary draw.)

What I really think is that this is the first sign of our Star Wars fatigue, the fact that a new movie is coming out this week and only in the past day or two did I even start to think about my intended strategy for seeing it. Basically, I don’t think I’ll need one. It’ll be playing enough, with few enough total people seeing it, that I’ll probably be able to just roll up to the theater on Thursday night and use my critics card to snare a ticket. (I am going to see it in its first 24 hours – I haven’t mellowed that much.) But I also am not that worried if I go and it’s sold out. A need to see it does not feel desperate. Too bad, because it should.

I guess I partly blame Rogue One, as I didn’t really care for it and it demonstrated to me that the characters I knew probably played more of a role in my affections than I wanted to acknowledge. Or maybe these particular characters were just lame. Or maybe they turned the stealing of the Death Star plans into an epic battle the likes of which would be discussed in history books, when it should have been a cloak and dagger mission. But now I’m getting sidetracked.

I blame Rogue One more as the first sign of the new normal in the Star Wars universe, where after 2019 we will continue to get Star Wars movies but they will each be a bit more shrug-worthy than the one that preceded them. Once the Skywalker saga is (presumably) over next year, each new Star Wars movie will be a Solo, with increasingly fewer midnight screenings, increasingly less urgency over how soon we see it, and increasingly fewer characters we care about.

I don’t totally mind the mellowing, mind you. That day after the midnight screening is always rough, and my this Thursday at work thanks me in advance.

But there’s something I’ll miss about the excitement of Star Wars, which reduced my capacity for rational thought and just turned me into a fanboy.

I guess I’ll get one more shot with Episode IX next year.

In the meantime … Alden Ehrenreich, eh? I still wish they’d gone with Anthony Ingruber.

Star Wars. Finally.

I didn't get to a second viewing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi this week, but I did get to a tenth? eleventh? viewing of Star Wars, the one they now call A New Hope for the sake of clarity. It was nice to reacquaint myself with the original incarnation of characters who are now, in some cases, being taken in directions I don't totally like.

But this viewing was far more important than that, and driven by something else entirely.

After being on this planet for seven years, three months and 28 days, my older son has now, finally, seen Star Wars.

It was a full year-and-a-half ago that I wrote this post, in which I offered him what had previously been a forbidden fruit: the chance to watch this movie that all of his friends had been talking about. He declined the offer on the grounds that it might be "too scary."

Since then he has never fully demanded a viewing, as I am led to believe kids usually do in these situations, but he did start talking about hearing about the recent Star Wars movies "with Kylo Ren," and in that conversation indicated he was ready to get started. We decided to spring it on him for the last day of the school year, which fell yesterday, as we are now on summer break here in Australia.

That also meant that his younger brother was going to get to watch it at a much more "appropriate" age. And by that I don't mean that he was better suited to the themes or violence or anything like that. By "appropriate" I mean that I was just about the same age he is now, maybe just a bit younger, when I saw the movie in 1977. He turns four next week.

So we engaged in a bit of "special occasion behavior" and ate our dinners in front of the TV, to get an earlier start on the movie. We followed dinner with popcorn, an ice cream the kids had each picked out at the store, and one additional sweet treat I had relented and given them as part of the path of least resistance.

This was when my nerves kicked in.

A lot is riding on a child's first viewing of Star Wars. I had been told that many kids think the first Star Wars is "boring" -- even that some adults who came of age a generation later than I did think it's boring. And your first exposure to something dictates whether an addiction to it will take hold. I felt there was a lot riding on my kids becoming addicted to Star Wars. Though you can't expect your kids to follow in your own footsteps in every way or even in most ways, there are certain dreams you just don't want to give up on.

We had long ago decided against starting with a "less boring" Star Wars movie. One of the big debates people have about exposing their kids to Star Wars, though I think most people believe there is one far better choice, is whether to start with Episode IV or to start with Episode I. In fact, we had to have a whole conversation during the movie last night explaining why this was episode four and promising him that he had not missed three other movies.

The only real argument for starting with The Phantom Menace, as I see it, is that it is a far more visually stimulating film. It has all the lights and colors and swirly things that a child demands. And sure, it also has its slow stretches, but children are less likely to get bored by a bad story than by a deliberately paced one. What I always remind myself of every time I watch Star Wars is how long it spends on Tatooine before "getting to the good stuff," if that's your perspective on it. The Phantom Menace, of course, also spends a long time on that planet, but it has a pod race, an appearance by Darth Maul, and a number of other stimulating elements.

Indeed, the kids did squirm during this part. In fact, the term I used was that they were "flopping." They floundered about on the couch like fish out of water, frequently banging into me and turning themselves upside down. Their treats, which we had been hoping to save for the second half of the movie, were being regularly demanded. To make matters worse, this was when our BluRay from the library was also at its most technically challenged. Even after we removed it to wipe off smudges, it still had a moment or two when it stuttered, then jumped ahead by as many as 15 seconds.

My wife, who is less precious about these things than I am, was giving me "that look," the one that says "This isn't working." She asked my older son if he was just too tired to watch this right now. I didn't want that question to be aired, but once it was, we couldn't put it back in the box. We'd have to go with whatever his response was.

"No," he said in that way that indicates no uncertainty, and perhaps some bemusement that the question was even being asked. It seemed pretty clear to us and the viewing continued. The younger one even managed to settle down as well. A bit.

They indicated their engagement in age relevant ways -- my younger one pointing out characters and vehicles he was already familiar with, the older one not vocalizing as that was the way he becomes engrossed in something. With relief, I could tell at this point we would make it through the whole thing.

The second half of the movie does, of course, have a lot more of the elements that traditionally entertain a child, and our two kids were no exception. There was a dip in their attention between the part where the Millennium Falcon escapes the Death Star and the X-wings start to attack it, but it didn't last. And though my younger one was flopping about again and regularly dropping these flat plastic Christmas ornaments on the ground in a way I found incredibly distracting, I had long since given up trying to govern his behavior. He'd take in Star Wars in the way he saw fit. And just because my attention span was much better at that age -- or maybe it was the fact that I was a captive audience in a movie theater -- or maybe it was that this was the only thing available that would stimulate me in quite this way -- it doesn't mean I could really blame him for it.

When it was over, the older one told me it was "the worst." However, this was just him trying out his Daddy's sense of humor. He had a big grin on his face and eventually gave his real answer. "It's my favorite movie," he said.

When I incredulously asked for clarification on his answer, hoping for something like this but never daring to expect it, he said "So far."

The only real drawback to the experience was something I had feared and something I also aired on this blog back in February of 2016. My kids had received a gift of Star Wars storybooks that told the story of the six older movies, and my big concern at the time was "What about spoilers?" I vainly hoped that the "I am your father" moment, for example, could be as much a surprise for them as it was for me. But knew that Star Wars had become legend, and that all the essential story elements would likely reach them before they had a chance to see the movies.

So indeed, as we may have read the storybook based on Episode IV a good ten times, the older one was regularly saying "Oh this is the part when." And then "Yup, I knew it." The good thing is, I didn't get the sense this was detracting from his enjoyment. I mean, adults will still watch Shakespeare even though they already know Hamlet is going to die, and how. Perhaps Star Wars is now the kid equivalent of that. They don't watch a Star Wars movie to see what's going to happen -- they watch it to see how it will happen.

And how it happened was pretty darn great for my kids.

My wife wants to make it a Christmas tradition and see "the next one next year." I can't imagine waiting a whole year to show them The Empire Strikes Back, and part of that is for selfish reasons -- my last Empire viewing was sub-par, and I am eager to revisit it so I can decide if that was a one-off reaction or if, in fact, I don't really like the movie as much as I have always said I liked it. Besides, the BluRay set we've borrowed from the library contains all three of the original trilogy.

Part of how soon we watch it may be determined by whether they a) realize we have the other movies in the house, and then b) demand the viewing. And something happened this morning may give me a preview of at least the b) part of that equation.

As I started writing this post, they started watching Star Wars again. I was only too glad to accommodate the request. However, after less then 20 minutes I heard silence coming from that room. I found that my older son had shut it off and gone back into his room.

"What happened?" I asked. "Bored?"

"Yeah," he said. "I just needed a break."

Whether it'll be a year break, or just a couple of days, The Empire Strikes Back will be next.

And I think, indeed, an addiction has been born. Maybe not the type that needs to be fed by immediate or regular or complete viewings, but one that develops into a life-long Star Wars fandom.

Of course, some of that is dependent on how good the next 15 Star Wars movies are. And that's the biggest reason to watch Empire soon. We need to get them ready to see the final of the nine movies, Episode IX, in cinemas in late 2019.

Before then, there will be lot of Star Wars goodness, some not-so-goodness, and potentially a bunch more "favorite movies ... so far."