In 1980, when I was eight years old, my family took the closest thing we ever had to a foreign holiday. It was to the island of Guernsey. After visiting preserved sites from the Occupation, and the tomato museum, and a day trip by hydrofoil to France, I think my parents were running out of options for our entertainment. With some reluctance, I suspect, my father took my brother and me to a matinee of a film I had been pestering him about for some time: The Empire Strikes Back.
I must have been unusual as a viewer of that film, in that, despite beseeching, imploring, begging, pleading and throwing tantrums, I had never seen Star Wars, or, as I knew to call it, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. My father’s justification was that it would be on the television soon anyway, and there was no need for us to see it in the cinema. Moreover, we had plenty of “those Star Wars dolls”, as he referred to the action figures. Nor did we need more – “You’ve already got Stormtrooper” – and no argument about there being lots of Stormtroopers in the movie I hadn’t seen convinced him otherwise.
Despite not having yet seen the opening shot of the Star Destroyer looming above the Rebel Alliance ship, I had managed to learn the plot of the film from several separate sources. I had pored over the comics, written by Roy Foster and published by Marvel the month before the film hit the big screen. And I had read the novelisation Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope – by Alan Dean Foster, though attributed to George Lucas – also published before the film’s theatrical release. I knew my Jawa from my Sandperson, from a combination of illustrations, stickers, prose and plastic figurines. With schoolfriends, I had lustily sang along to the theme tune with the words we had somehow acquired: “Star Wars – made me a fortune – paid off my mortgage – bought me a car.” As we left the cinema in Guernsey, I asked my father if it might really be true that Darth Vader was Luke’s father, to which he replied: “Of course, it’s obvious.”
When I eventually saw the first film – on television, Sunday 24 October 1982, a mere four years and 10 months after its original UK film release – my response was not exactly disappointment, but certainly a mixture of quizzical bathos and puzzled anticlimax. The “film” which existed in my head was certainly similar to what I had seen, but it differed and diverged in strange ways.
Why was no mention made of the reason that Vader was “more machine now than man”? (He fell into a volcano during a lightsaber duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi; my memory is that this was part of the original novelisation, but the internet says no, attributing it to interviews Lucas gave – and I would have read cornflake packages to glean information about the film, so it’s likely I got my hands on a copy of Starlog). Why was Jabba the Hutt not in the film – and we all knew what he looked like: a humanoid with a kind of camel-seal face? In the later comics, it was so evident that the romantic leads were Luke and Leia, they were frequently kissing, which seemed a bit awkward once we learned they were twin siblings (though Barbara Gonyo described genetic sexual attraction, particularly between separated siblings, in a 1980 study, coincidentally).
The issue of all the para-canonical material franchises like this produce has come to the fore again, in the threat of a “spoiler jihad” by the devotees of the post-Return of the Jedi “extended universe”. Although I don’t see many people agitating for the return of the angry green rabbit-man Jaxxon or Baron Orman Tagge or even Prince Xizor of the Black Sun criminal syndicate, it’s important to remember that these narratives preserved the popularity of the form.
The mismatch between screen “canon” and other media forms led to some ingenious and baroque attempts at explanation. But there is a more important aspect to this, which does give credence to the idea that Star Wars forms a kind of modern mythology. Nobody worries about whether the “real” Helen of Troy was replaced by a cloud-like simulacrum in the “canonical” story of the Trojan war – as happens in Euripides’s play Helen; or how to square Herakles being the great-grandson and half-brother of Perseus (divine parentage makes for convoluted family trees). Myths are myths because they are open to reinterpretation. Nobody has to choose between Snorri Snurluson’s version of the Ragnarok and AS Byatt’s; or between Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal and Wagner’s Parsifal.
Let there be Lego Star Wars and cod-Shakespearean Star Wars and any number of fugitive stories, accreted tales, interpolated yarns and remixed versions. The greatest danger to Star Wars is Disney treating it like the fanboy collector, and never taking the toy out of the package actually to play with it.
