first of all…
HOLY COW! Newt did what must’ve been a horizontal standing leap of about 8 feet… from the top of my monitor, over my head, and to the floor in front of my recliner.
Yipe! I was not expecting a flying overhead fuzzy body.. I wish the cam had caught it.
Now, on to my story.
Unlike most siblings, my brother and I got along really well all through our kinship together as kids. We rarely teased and tormented one another, but there were exceptions. I think we got on so well because we had a common enemy in our mother… He was a tag-along at times, but mostly, when it came down to it, I preferred his company. I think part of it was because we moved around a lot, and he and I were the only really constants in each other’s lives, too.
Most of the painful stuff I’ve done to him, or him to me was accidental. We’d have pinecone fights, or wrestle on the roof of the house, only to fall a story to the ground, me on top, his poor bony body squished underneath.
hm.. I’m rambling. What sort of torment did I put him through, or him me? There must be something.
We gave each other Indian burns, wedgies, purple nurples, donkey bites, noogies, Hertz donuts, and wet willies…I told him that an evil disembodied hand lived in the basement.
I’m trying to remember taunting him, and I can’t recall… random childhood memory instead.
It was summer 1977 and I lived in Alexandria at that point. There were some TV ads for this movie that was going to come out that had space fighters flying around fast and making cool noises. Unfortunately, my parents thought it might be too violent for me to see, like the old “Batman” show which I had to go down the street to Robert’s house to watch. My dad even got upset during fistfights (Biff! Pow! Sock!) on Star Trek, and would stand near the set saying mournfully, “Sorry Buddy (yes, he actually called me ‘Buddy’), I don’t think this is suitable for kids” and turn it off (even if it was one I’d already seen. I could never figure that out.)
But eventually pestering proved fruitful, and finally my parents gave in. Off we went one afternoon to see this movie, “Star Wars”. (Point of reference: My brother Derek was five then, my father was doing engineering, and my mom was a hairdresser(?!? I had a buzzcut!) at the local mall. I was 8, and had a Hyuuge crush on one of my mom’s co-workers, a sweet shampoo girl named Mary. She looked like Dorothy Hammil, bought me a dinosaur coloring book, and always hugged me when she saw me. I wanted to live with her, and leave my parents behind. But I digress.)
We saw the film… It started off kind of neat, there was this spaceship which was being chased by a bigger triangular ship, there were these two robots, and so on.[note to self, should I tell what I felt, or has everyone seen dang star wars enough to have to describe it all?] Derek and I shared a big container of pop corn, and a large root beer… (we just passed them both back and forth.. it was mostly for me, but he got to have some whenever he wanted.) We sat two aisles up form our parents, because the theater was full and there wasn’t room for all of us together. The first really wonderful sequence for me was when the Milennium Falcon was escaping from the Death Star and they were being chased by these fighters. To put this in perspective it’s important to remember that the only real experiences I’d had with cinematic science fiction were Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In Star Trek, space combat is fairly simple. As captain, you give the following orders:
- Raise deflector shields
- Lock phasers on target
- Fire phaser one
- Fire phaser two
- Fire phaser three
- Fire phaser four
Even though they are supposedly highly trained, the bridge crew still has to be told to perform each of these actions individually. Maybe it’s the captain’s job to remember that you gotta lock on before you shoot?
If you want, for variety’s sake you can use photon torpedoes…but there isn’t any apparent reason for preferring one over the other…if your ship is hit, it will shake around a lot, the bridge will tilt, and you will be tossed out of your chair. Starfleet is stingy, building a multibillion-dollar starship with warp drive, transporters — the whole bit– and leaving off the seatbelts.
Visually this wasn’t very exciting because the battles take place with the ships crawling along at what look like tugboat speeds (even if they’re supposedly moving at warp 5 or somesuch.) Combat was accompanied by suspenseful music, with pounding drumbeats and pulsating strings, which I really got into.
The only people who did get to see anything are Mr. Spock with his big eyepiece viewer that has blue light coming out, and Mr. Sulu with his smaller viewer that extends up from the side of the console when he needed it. I always wanted to see whatever it was they were supposed to be watching in there, but all you got was hearing what they said about it due to Roddenberry’s budget.
For 2001, it gets weirder: I had a big Marvel comic-book adaptation of 2001 when I was a kid, and I read it before seeing the movie. It tried hard to be visually faithful to the film; I recognized the scene where the stewardess walks around in a circle on the wall to get into the door that’s upside down, the spacecraft were all very true to what’s in the film, etc.
(man, pictures of everything are on the net, except for harmony cereal boxes)
Space travel in 2001 is silent (there is no sound in space, and the filmmakers acknowledged this) which is why the soundtrack had the Johann Strauss waltz and the Richard Strauss “Also Sprach Zarathustra” in it and brought them both firmly into the pop-culture sensibility. (If you see space and you hear a Strauss waltz or those big tympani, you can thank Stanley Kubrick — just as if you see helicopters and hear “Ride of the Valkyries” you can thank Francis Ford Coppola.)
So when I saw “2001”, thanks to the breathless captions which in comic-book style include lots of exclamation points I actually understood what was going on. Probably weirded me out for the rest of my life.
Both these films had to build the excitement up by using music because the actual space action was not very flashy. The totally ground-breaking thing that Star Wars did was introduce the dogfight. Spaceships don’t float placidly through space to classical music, they swoop and zoom and make swooping and zooming noises! Hoody-Hoo!
Scientifically, all of this is of course totally inaccurate. The physics of it are as bad as any weird tachyon particles on Star Trek, and there still shouldn’t be any sound in space…but the space dogfight is the most spiffy form of movie combat ever devised. You get this neat-looking spacecraft with long spiky weapons and big humungous engines and a rakish-looking flat-paned cockpit, and you fly around with guys named “Red Leader” and “Wedge” and a fat guy named “Porkins”. The bad guys fly spacecraft that are very ugly and nasty-looking, and they go around blowing up peaceful planets. So you gotta stop them!
We walked out of the theater after we saw the film, and my head was still swirling around in that climactic dogfight over the Death Star. Countless times I imagined flying around blasting away at those nasty Imperials. All I wanted was to climb into that cockpit and power up those engines… or failing that, get a nifty lightsaber and vrowm around a bit, lopping off arms of those who might give me some lip in the nearby bar. My little brother seemed to really dig it too, and thus began our being sucked into the huge pile of plastic known as star wars toys.
Ugh, this needs major editing, and I’m too tired. make of this what you will. See you kids in the morining.
