Star Wars! pt. one

My free week is almost over. I've spent most of it readying my apartment for the new couch and love seat I bought Wednesday. You know you're an adult when new furniture is one of the most exciting things that's happened in your life in the last six months.

I've been gearing up for the new Star Wars movie next week. From what I've read on the Internet, Episode III will easily be the best of the prequel trilogy. I'm looking forward to seeing it. By no means am I bouncing-off-the-walls excited (and I'm not even that excited for Land of the Dead, which I am looking forward to more than Ep. III), but I am looking forward to it. I am mostly reminded of how much I like the Star Wars movies I grew up with. Feeling nostalgic for days of old, I accompanied my Mom to Toys'R'Us to look at the Ep. III toy line. Yeah, I know. Score another one against me for being a geek, but you don't understand. Back in the day I had every single Star Wars toy and action figure produced through the Return of the Jedi line (I had a few of the Power of the Force figures, but not all). I sold a lot of them as a Senior in high school to pay for a four-track multistudio, among other things. Though I loved the four-track, I sometimes regret what I did.

Back to Toys'R'Us - we've been hearing a lot about how dark the film is with Lucas telling us not to take little kids, it'll be PG-13, etc. However, the marketing produces a startling synaptic disconnect. Yoda on TV using Jedi mind tricks to steal a Diet Pepsi, Darth Vader recruiting M&Ms into the Empire. I'm not one of those geeks who thinks this is somehow "disrespectful" to the "seriousness" of Episode III, but I do think to a certain extent that it undermines the suspension of disbelief crucial to the success of any moviegoing experience. It's like the advertising is conditioning the film's audience to become emotionally detached from the story before the movie even opens. Case in point: there are toys, cute little toys, depicting Anakin's scarred visage post-Obi-Wan-lava-planet duel for sale at Toys'R'Us amid the toy lightsabers, collectible card games, and ridiculously overpriced Star Wars versions of Risk, Monopoly, and Stratego. One of these toys is a Lego set (!) of the Darth Vader operating table ("Lord Vader, rise!") that features swappable Anakin and Darth Vader heads. Another is a doll with changable heads, one of which resembles Ralph Fiennes in the English Patient. What the hell? And all of this beneath a 10 foot by 8 foot cardboard display of a Darth Vader mask engulfed in flames (which, I'm sure would've scared the living daylights out of me when I was a kid).

But they don't make them like they used too. The Star Wars toys we had as kids were simple; these are exaggerated in their design. However, I was still interested in buying something. I'd heard that they were doing reproductions of some of the original action figures (cool!) This is only partly true. They have reproduced the front of the cardstock packaging for the old action figures (With the same movie stills, etc.), but coupled it with the modern, overarticulated versions of classic star wars figures. What's strange is that these toys come in a plastic keep case already to ensure that the tab used to hang the card is never punched out! This is symptomatic of the very thing that drove me out of collecting toys and comics in the first place (well, that and actually wanting girls to talk to me): forced collectibility. Isn't collectibility just supposed to happen? Instead, we've got companies purposefully manufacturing limited runs, encouraging the vicious pack-rat mentality of "the collector." Then there's the number one nostalgia-killer: money. Those "classic" Star Wars action figures were $9.99. Needless to say, I left Toys'R'Us empty-handed (and un-emasculated).