Spotlight on Star Wars

How Star Wars ruined my life - A confession by Mark Stay

Please note: The following is based on fuzzy, rose-tinted memories and may bear only the vaguest relation to what actually happened!

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It was all so clear.

I was four years old and had just seen the best thing ever.

A fire engine was parked in the middle of our school playground. It was a bright, gleaming red, with a ladder resting on its roof and giant spoked wheels attached at the back. Its side was covered in flip-up panels, behind which were hidden myriad gadgets, levers, buttons and dials that seemed unfathomably cool to my young mind. It was a chariot of the gods!

From the engine emerged impossibly tall firemen (they didn't have any firewomen back then) who let us kids sit in the cabin, wear their shiny yellow helmets and sound the siren. I knew there and then what I wanted to do with my life. I would ride in that engine with lights flashing and sirens wailing. I would storm into blazing buildings, rescue children from fires, and cats stuck in trees. I was going to be a fireman!

I have friends in their late twenties who still haven't figured out what they want to do with their lives, but when I was four I had it sorted.

Then, on my fifth birthday, it all changed in one instant.

I had read about something called Star Wars in a copy of Reader's Digest while visiting an aunt, and the thing that really grabbed me was that it all looked so real. Was that really a golden robot? It couldn't be a man in a suit, you could see the wires in his belly. What was that big, hairy dog thing? And the tall, scary man in the black suit; was he a robot too? And the spaceships! Something called a Millennium Falcon that looked like it was flying even when on the ground. Tie Fighters chasing X-Wings with laser beams streaking through black space - it was like someone had flown into space and just taken the pictures.

This demanded further investigation.

And so, on my fifth birthday, my dad announced that we were going out. No explanation, just ‘Come on, boy. Get your coat on.' One mystery bus trip later, we found ourselves standing in sight of the mighty Woolwich Odeon, its art deco spire reaching high into the blue sky. My dad pointed at the hoarding above the door, ‘What does that say?' he asked.

I didn't even have to read it, I already recognised the shape of the logo; the way the ‘S' and ‘T' ran into each other, likewise the ‘R' and ‘S' at the end... ‘Star Wars!' I cried.

This was my first ever trip to the cinema and I was being taken to see Star Wars.

Well, it just blew my young, impressionable little mind. The moment that enormous Star Destroyer came thundering from above, and just kept coming... and coming... and coming... I was hooked. All thoughts of rescuing screaming people from burning buildings were instantly evaporated. I watched, slack-jawed at the Star Destroyer, at Han Solo blasting stormtoopers, at Ben Kenobi fighting Vader, at Luke blowing up the Death Star, and the same thought ran through my head: I want to be that. Whatever that is, I want to be it now, please. I had no idea then about writers, directors, actors, special effects technicians, or film crews, I just knew that I had to go to there, even if it meant stepping through the screen.

From then on, I was obsessed.

Comics, books, action figures, posters - I was a fool for the Lucas dollar. Nothing escaped my attention. Every spare moment was spent perfecting sketches of Vader's mask, the odd curves of the Stormtrooper helmets and the precise panelling of R2D2's shell.

I remember the pang of disappointment when friends at school got excited about Superman the following year - why were they no longer as fanatic about Star Wars as I was!? - but they all came crawling back for The Empire Strikes Back.

My memories of that are seeing a clip on TV of Han and Leia's ‘I love you/I know' moment and trying not to blub in front of my parents. Then Dad taking me to see it at the Odeon, Leicester Square, getting balcony seats, wrestling with the plastic popcorn bag, ripping it open and ejecting it contents over the balcony, raining down on the poor people below (my belated apologies if you were one of them).

Then came Return of the Jedi in 83. It saw it while on holiday in Hastings. My mum, not really in the mood for two hours of Jabba and the Ewoks, let me go on my own. My first time in the cinema on my lonesome. There were about three other people at the screening, so it felt like my own personal cinema, but even so I still shrank in my seat at the end, sniffling quietly to myself with the sadness of knowing that it was all over.

Of course, it wasn't. Lucas would come and ruin it all with the prequels, but that was decades away and in the meantime I spent a fortune clinging to the dream.

And here's how it ruined my life... I could have been a useful member of society. A proper hero with medals for rescuing cats and damsels in distress, but instead I blew it all on sticker albums, miniature replicas of spaceships and badly-written tie-in novels.

How many others are there like me out there? People with ambitions to become doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers, who instead - like me - became writers or actors with nothing to show for it but a pile of polite rejection letters?