Star Wars

Coloring In (And Outside) The Lines

A Return of the Jedi coloring book. Everyone had at least one of these. Image from eBay.

I have a very vivid memory of the time I was in the first grade and I colored in a phonics worksheet with a big dark green crayon that was from the Whitman company. When I got it back, my answers were correct but my teacher, Mrs. Hickman, had written “Messy! You can do better!” That night, ashamed, i sat at the top of the stairs crying until my parents noticed and came to comfort me.

I suppose I should go on a long rant about Mrs. Hickman and how things like this are scarring to young children and how she destroyed any chance I had toward learning and because of her I never liked school, but I’m not. The truth is, she was one of my favorite teachers and I have great memories of her class. But what I can say is that my tendency toward messiness coupled with being a high-achieving student is probably the reason I’m such an anxious mess all the time (and may be some undiagnosed ADHD, but I’m no expert and I have no idea if that’s true). And I never could color outside the lines. When I think of the coloring books I had as a kid, I think of how so many pages were just scribbled all over. I also think of the ways I’d try to “correct” things when I was older, coloring around the mistakes and filling things in to make them look like they weren’t drawn by a manic toddler.

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Brand Me! (My Favorite Non-Toy and Giveaway Merchandise)

So my son and I were at at our LCS this weekend and we took some time to sift through their selection of Funko Pop! figures. We do this pretty regularly, and while we’re not hardcore collectors or anything, we do like seeing what the company is able to license and sometimes even buy them because we’re suckers for a brand. Then again, we all are and have been since my parents were little and could buy merchandise that tied into Howdy Doody and the George Reeves Superman television series. My generation, of course, took it a step further and spent the 1980s immersing ourselves in the franchises that made up our childhood, gobbling up not just toys but everything from trading cards and video games to the most random piece of merchandise that had a logo or character slapped on its side.

Not surprisingly, seeing these items posted by people on Twitter, in scans of old Sears catalogues, or up for sale on eBay gets me nostalgic and so I decided to sit down and talk about six non-toy merchandising tie-ins that I remember with serious fondness.

The G.I. Joe Flashlight (image: yojoe.com)

1. The G.I. Joe Flashlight: I think this is the closest thing to a toy that is on this list, and I am including it because it was the first G.I. Joe item that I ever owned and was the second-coolest thing that I got for Christmas when I was five (the coolest thing being my General Lee Big Wheels). When the Joe line was revived in 1982 under the “Real American Hero” subtitle, Hasbro came out with a superior line of figures and vehicles. But as anyone who flipped through the Sears catalogue int he 1980s will tell you, there was also a slew of other stuff. A quick look at YoJoe.com shows that in 1982 alone there were 48 different products ranging from the typical sheets, pillows, cups, and beach towels to Colorforms, View Master reels, and Lite Brite sets.

But the coolest stuff was the merchandise that had you playing army as hardcore as possible. There were dog tags, pins that showed off your rank, a whistle, walkie talkies, a canteen, and even a mess kit. The official G.I. Joe flashlight was a real working flashlight that took the same batteries as the red Eveready in my parents’ closet, but unlike the Eveready, it was colored army green and was positioned “military style” so that you had to hold it vertically. It also had a belt clip so you could take it with you on secret missions, unlatching it when you needed to crawl around and look into tight spaces like the ventilation shafts of Cobra HQ or under your parents’ couch because you think that’s where Han Solo’s blaster got kicked.

2. Masters of the Universe Puffy Stickers. Quite possibly the greatest things that ever came out of a box of cereal were the puffy stickers featuring five Masters of the Universe characters in Rice Krispies. A quick look at this old commercial shows that they were: Battle Armor He-Man, Skeletor, Teela, Evil Lyn, and Orko.

These prizes were given away in the summer of 1984 and this is one of those instances in my life where my parents’ strict adherence to non-sugary cereals paid off. Basically, the only cereals allowed in my house were Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Chex, Kix, and Raisin Bran (yes, I know the raisins are coated in sugar, but it wasn’t Frosted Flakes, and my sister’s love for Pro Grain Cereal is a topic for another day). That meant that for the entire time the promo was active, I was eating boxes of the stuff just so that I could collect all five stickers. Of course, collecting them wasn’t easy because the box didn’t tell you what sticker was inside, so any time you opened up a fresh box, you ran the risk of getting yet another Orko sticker instead of the Skeletor sticker you so desperately needed.

My big get, by the way, was Evil Lyn because I negotiated that with my cousin Brian when we were staying at my grandma’s house and came across her sticker in the Rice Krispies box. I can’t remember what sort of bartering went on between us as seven year olds 35 years ago, but I remember feeling pretty psyched because I really liked Evil Lyn. Who wouldn’t? She’s second only to the Baroness when it comes to awesome 1980s cartoon villainesses.

Anyway, I am sure that if we wanted to back then, we could spend our allowance money on a sheet of Masters of the Universe puffy stickers at the local stationary store, but that would have kind of been like cheating. What made the stickers so special was the snap, crackle, and pop of the hunt.

Party favor bags from a galaxy far, far away.

3. Return of the Jedi Party Supplies. I can’t remember which birthday was my Return of the Jedi birthday. I turned six when the movie came out, and since the Star Wars franchise as a merchandising juggernaut by then, it’s very possible that I had an Jedi-themed party one month after it premiered in theaters. But it could have been the next year, considering how long Jedi stuck around in my life before it got replaced by Transformers.

Anyway, I have to say that a kid’s birthday party in 1984 was pretty much your friends coming over to your house for Carvel cake one afternoon and not your parents renting out an entire trampoline park for three hours on a Saturday, so a Jedi-themed birthday meant that mom and dad bought a bunch of cups, napkins, and plates that had the movie logo on it and that’s what you ate cake off of and drank punch out of after you ran around in the backyard for two hours. And hey, they might have even been feeling fancy and sprung for the paper tablecloth.

I think my parents did, anyway. Those supplies were easy to find and weren’t very expensive–they were always right by the entrance to Toys R Us and there were usually piles of them for sale at a decent price. Plus, they managed to get a Carvel cake with Darth Vader’s picture on it (back in the days before entertainment companies started cracking down on copyright) and they even wrapped the party favors–which I think were Star Wars coloring books–in Star Wars wrapping paper. I am sure there is a picture somewhere of said birthday party in an old family photo album and my mom has pictures of the cake or at least the cups and napkins in crowd shots, but just looking at an eBay listing has me feeling cool for being a Star wars party kid when I was young.

4. Masters of the Universe Plastic Cups. Another giveaway that really had us captivated was this Burger King promo from 1983.

These were plastic cups with original Masters of the Universe comic strips printed on the side. I don’t know if these comics were four separate stories or if they were four parts of one big story, but what I do know is that BK released one each week for four weeks in the fall of 1983 and my sister and I spent four weeks begging my parents to take us for burgers.

This wasn’t exactly a small feat in 1983. My parents had nothing against fast food, but going out to eat, even at Burger King, was definitely a “sometimes” type of thing, so to do it for four straight weeks to get a souvenir cup? That was pushing it. I mean, I was six years old and couldn’t care less about that because I stopped everything–even my umpteenth watching of Star Wars–when He-Man came on. I wanted those cups and would eat as many Whalers or Whoppers as I needed to.

Or just hamburgers. I was big on just the BK hamburgers. And the Italian chicken sandwich. Come to think of it, those cups may have been what started what became a pretty regular trip to the Burger King in Blue Point, especially after our weekly piano lessons. And I honestly don’t remember if I got all four cups–I think that I might have only wound up with two of them and they lasted a year or two before the comics peeled off and faded because of repeated trips through the dishwasher.

The 1984 Voltron lunchbox. Kind of makes me wish that I had it now. I’d be the king of the break room.

5. Voltron Lunch Box. I blogged about Voltron years ago, but I still can’t get over how Voltron just sort of was there one day without prior notice. The cartoon dropped right around the beginning of second grade and beyond my insane quest to collect all of “Lionbot”, I rarely, if ever, saw much merchandise until probably the end of that school year and into the beginning of third grade when Panosh Place’s toy line came out and there was a lot more merchandise in the stores, including this.

Manufactured by Aladdin, who made a number of lunchboxes of mine back in the day, this was one of the plastic lunchboxes that were becoming more common as the Eighties wore on, replacing the metal ones that ended, I believe, with a Rambo lunchbox circa 1986-1987. The illustration on the front was straight from the cartoon and the thermos inside was a wraparound image of Voltron and the lion force. I never used the thermos, though, since I bought milk every day or packed a boxed Yoo-Hoo.

I treasured this thing. It was, quite possibly, the coolest lunchbox that I ever owned and I walked around the halls of Lincoln Avenue Elementary feeling so boss because I carried a much-coveted Voltron lunchbox. So you can imagine how terrible I felt when I left it somewhere and never saw it again. I think my parents were pretty annoyed because my absent-mindedness caused yet another thing they had to pay for to go missing, a motif throughout my childhood that also included jackets, a camera, and a mountain bike (which was stolen but I wound up taking the blame anyway).

Thankfully, the lunchbox was recovered. Sort of. I found one in the school’s lost and found but I knew it wasn’t mine because it had a thermos in it. Still, I had seen only one other kid with a Voltron lunchbox and thought that maybe he picked up mine by accident one day and what I was holding was his. Not having yet developed my social anxiety, I approached him at lunch one day and politely suggested that we had accidentally switched lunchboxes. He responded by yelling something at me–I can’t remember what it was but even at the age of eight, I knew that this kid lacked in basic social skills. My parents told me to keep the lunchbox, which I guess is technically dishonest, but it had been unclaimed, so Keith, Lance, Pidge, Hunk, and Princess Allura continued to protect my sandwiches.

When the four puzzles were locked together to form the mural, they would look like this (although these are just the boxes put together). Image: 3Djoes.com

6. The G.I. Joe Mural Puzzle Closing this out where we began, there is the most action-packed exercise in patience you will ever see or experience. According to YoJoe.com, this came out in 1985, but it was still available in stores as late as 1987 when i was at the height of my Joe fandom. And I wouldn’t have wanted it if my mom hadn’t dragged me to go clothes shopping with my sister at Swezey’s, a local department store that I still associate with off-brand clothing and mind-destroying ennui.

Anyway, Swezey’s had a random rack of accessories and pseudo-toys near the girls’ clothes (purses, pencil cases, some stuffed animals, games) and among all of it, I spotted a puzzle featuring G.I. Joe. It was a 221-piece puzzle that, as I saw on the box, could be linked to three other scenes to form a giant mural.

Now, badgering my parents to schlep to Burger King when I was six was one thing, so asking my mom to make special trips to buy puzzles was probably something else. Surprisingly, getting all four of these came easy because puzzles were always an approved form of entertainment–they were challenging, they kept you occupied for a long time, and they were done without the television being on. I can’t remember how long it took me to get all four puzzles, and I’m pretty sure that I paid for one of them with my birthday money one year, but I eventually did get them and assemble them and when the day came that I was ready to make the mural, I got ready to connect them, and … nothing.

To this day, I have no idea what I did wrong that prevented the giant awesome battle mural from coming together, as i stared at the directions on the box for several minutes, made multiple attempts to connect the puzzles, and ultimately said, “Forget it.” I am sure the puzzles were eventually donated to charity, so if I wanted to try one more time as an adult, I’d have to track them down at a thrift shop or on eBay.

Toys, comics, movies, and television shows will always be in the front of my mind whenever someone mentions Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe, Voltron, or anything else I was into as a kid. But what’s special about these things is that although they eventually faded away or were set aside for something new, when they were there, they shared a part of my life and became attached not just to entertainment nostalgia but memories of significant events as well as the everyday.

Pop Culture Affidavit Episode 99: Livin’ Well in 1999

It’s the second of two “milestone year” episodes as Amanda sits down with me once again for a talk about 1999!

Over the course of our (much shorter this time) conversation, we talk music, movies, and television, but also delve into news, politics and culture. We’ll look at the rise of and importance of Millennials, Woodstock ’99, teen pop, The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, Office Space, the dawn of the age of reality television, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?, the Food Network, and MTV’s Undressed, among other things.

Plus, we talk about what it was like to graduate from college in 1999 and how we somehow survived our early twenties, and we also talk about how the issues and serious events of 1999, such as Columbine and the Bill Clinton impeachment still affect our culture and politics today.

Apple Podcasts: Pop Culture Affidavit

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Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page

“That’s Not a Star Wars Movie”

The Return of the Jedi bedsheets I had as a kid. Image courtesy of “Mighty Jabba’s Collection.”

It’s late August or early September 1995. I’ve just started classes at Loyola and I’m sitting in my freshman seminar course for the college’s Honors Program. Our professor is doing a classic icebreaker where we talk about ourselves. I listen to all of the smart and worthwhile ways my classmates spend their time and immediately feel like the dumbest person in the room–after all, renting movies and playing roller hockey are not the most academic pursuits–and then hear another guy in the room profess his love for Star Wars. After class, I catch him the quad and tell him that I’m into Star Wars as well and just watched Return of the Jedi the other night.

He pauses for a moment and said with a sniff, “That’s not a Star Wars movie.”

I don’t exactly remember how I reacted at the time–I might have laughed it off or half-agreed with him–but that moment stands out to me because it was the first time I encountered a snobby nerd.

It seems odd that it took me until my freshman year of college to have such a moment, especially since reading comics and watching science fiction movies was not the domain of the popular crowd in junior high and high school, and I had dealt with a number of rock snobs by then, but this was the first time I had run into one of my own looking down upon the way I approached a shared interest. It was also one of the first times that I realized that there were people who had a problem with Return of the Jedi.

The Return of the Jedi trash can that sat by my bed for a few years. Image from DJbrian.net

I have always had a fondness for Return of the Jedi. That movie, which came out 35 years ago today, was the only film in the original trilogy that I saw upon its initial release (twice if you count the 1985 re-release). Sure, I watched my copy of Star Wars on VHS endlessly and I had a number of toys from the first two films, but Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were movies that came out when I was unaware of movies. Jedi was the one that I was old enough to go see in a theater and the one I talked about with my friends on the playground at school and whose scenes we re-enacted during recess (especially the speeder bikes and the lightsaber fights).

Moreover, it was the film whose logo was emblazoned on just about everything I owned. This isn’t hard to picture, of course, considering that the merchandising for the movie was a juggernaut that I think was so unavoidable that parents were issued at least one piece of Jedi merchandise for Christmas in 1983. And while this isn’t a comprehensive or accurate list, I am sure that I owned, used, or consumed, in addition to toys: bedsheets, a garbage can, a calendar, posters, a lunchbox, an iron-on sweatshirt, records, books, Dixie cups, wrapping paper, cookies, and party favors (for my birthday in 1984). I wore out the “read along” book/cassette and played my picture disk record with sounds from the movie endlessly on my parents’ stereo. I was six years old and in heaven. It was, to say the least, my Star Wars movie.

A special Return of the Jedi poster that was available only to Lucasfilm Fan Club members.

A critical look at the film will tell you that out of the original trilogy, it is the weakest–I personally consider Empire to be the best, which isn’t controversial–and it suffers from the pressure of what it had to do after its predecessors, which is wrap up loose ends and complete the saga in a way that was bigger than anything that had come before. It doesn’t do its job as well as it could have–for instance, there are two particular adventures in the movie that feel like two separate movies shoved into one and I wonder if it were made today, Jedi would have either been a three-hour movie or two movies altogether. Plus, Han doesn’t have much to do aside from being comic relief, and the Tattooine stuff does drag up until the battle on the sail barge (and that’s before the godawful “Jedi Rocks” segment from 1997’s Special Edition).

But “That’s not a Star Wars movie?” It certainly felt like Star Wars when I was six; it feels like Star Wars now.

If this were an isolated incident, I would probably be able to let it go. But even before I graduated college, I remember being fansplained to about the way the Ewoks were the worst thing ever to happen to Star Wars (I never had much of a problem with the Ewoks), and since then I have seen more than a few “Here’s How Return of the Jedi Ruined Star Wars Forever” takes on the Internet. I even had a moment in my LCS around the time of The Force Awakens when a guy scoffed at my then-eight-year-old son’s saying he loved the Ewoks and I had to say, “Well, he’s eight, you know.”

And while I understand that there were earlier versions of the plot that kept the tone of Empire and that the movie is criticized for the sheer amount of tie-in products that were available, I still can’t look down my nose at Return of the Jedi as less-than. It’s disappointing that its legacy seems to range from snark to sneering that it’s “not a Star Wars movie” because when I sit down to watch it, I’m always taken back to being six and listening to my records, reading the storybook, and looking at the poster that I got from the Lucasfilm Fan Club.

For the next four years of college, I don’t think I had another conversation with that guy from my honors class. Apparently, since I couldn’t Star Wars right, that gave him license to be a total prick to me whenever we were in the same class. I’m sure he’s out there somewhere, perhaps lamenting the presence of a little kid holding a porg or something. I’d rather not think about his pretentious ass and instead will laugh at an Ewok stealing a speeder bike.

Comics Prehistory: Star Wars #81

In writing this series of blog posts about the comics I picked up before the period I’ll be covering in the “Origin Story” podcast miniseries later this year, I’ve been deliberately writing about them in publication order because with the exception of a few books, I barely, if ever, remember the exact circumstances of their purchase. So that means while I’m covering things in order chronologically, I’m out of order autobiographically. I have very little reason as to why I’m clarifying that except to be anal retentive or something. Oh, and to say that while Star Wars #81 is to be read after Return of the Jedi, I’m fairly certain I got my copy before the Return of the Jedi adaptation miniseries I covered in the last entry.

While I’m not sure of the date, I vividly remember standing in Unique stationery, which would later become Sayville Card and Gift and looking through the magazine and comic book rack, probably on a night where we had ordered Chinese food and were killing time while the cooks at the Wai Wah Kitchen a few doors down cooked it. Unique had the kids magazines and comics on the bottom racks where we could all reach them and the more adult (and truly adult) magazines were on shelves for much taller people. Anyway, I flipped through all of the comics on the rack and when I saw the cover for Star Wars #81, immediately stopped and grabbed it, then asked for it. The comic was 60 cents, so as was usually the case it didn’t take much convincing.

Besides, looking at the cover, how could you not want to buy it? I’d seen Star Wars comics before, but for the most part was never interested in them, probably because at six years old, I was still too young to start being a full-fledged comics reader. Plus, while I saw Return of the Jedi in the theater that summer and Star Wars #81 came out in December, I hadn’t seen The Empire Strikes Back yet, so the pre-Jedi adventures didn’t necessarily pique my interest. But seeing this cover by Tom Palmer, where Han Solo and Princess Leia look exactly like they did on the screen, I thought to myself, “Wow, it’s really Star Wars!“ and once we had purchased it, I tore into it.

Chewbacca snuggles with some Ewoks.

Like other comics of the time, this one would be lost among all of the other ephemera of my youth–coloring books, comic books, and magazines that would be thrown in my desk and then thrown away as part of a spring cleaning purge. Also, like other comics of the time, I wouldn’t remember much about the story and would focus on the art–I could read very well at six years old, but there’s being able to understand the words and reading comprehension and my reading comprehension skills were not as fully developed as they would be down the line–and I remember moments like Chewbacca snuggling with some Ewoks and Han finding the dice he used to win the Falcon from Lando in a long-ago, still-untold story. And it wasn’t until 30 years later, when I bought a copy of the “A Long Time Ago …” Volume 4 omnibus from Dark Horse that I was able to reread and fully appreciate “Jawas of Doom.”

Written by Jo Duffy, who would write the series all the way to its end (save for a few fill-in issues) and illustrated by Ron Frenz, Tom Palmer, and Tom Mandrake, the story is the first in the Star Wars series that takes place after the Battle of Endor. The rebels are still on the planet, although it’s implied that this takes place just after Return of the Jedi, perhaps even the day after the big “Yub Nub” party. Han needs money and he tries to borrow some from a rebel pilot, who not only refuses him but insults him in the process. Leia suggests that she can loan him some money because she does come from a wealthy family, and that angers him even more, causing Han to stomp off with his pride hurt. The rest of the main characters are wondering what’s wrong and Leia explains that everything has happened so quickly since they freed him from the carbonite that Han really hasn’t had the chance to process everything and probably needs time to adjust.

Chewie gives Han a comforting hug aboard the Millennium Falcon.

Aboard the Millennium Falcon, which is shown having the radar dish that Lando knocked off while racing through the Death Star (something that I found awesome because my Millennium Falcon toy had lost its radar dish at one point, so I could just pretend it was post-Return of the Jedi), Han thinks about what his life is now life, especially since he spent so many years being a loner. He finds the dice that he used to win the ship from Lando and then Chewie comes in to give him a comforting hug.

Han then takes off with Leia and Chewie to Tattooine where he had stashed money years before, and on Tattooine, we see Boba Fett escape the sarlaac pit and get picked up by Jawas who mistake him for a droid. Han lands at Mos Eisley, Han has problems landing and then can’t get his money out of the bank because according to the bank the assets are frozen due to the customer being frozen. We also hear that the death of Jabba the Hutt has thrown the planet into a bit of chaos with various factions vying for the power left behind by the former gangster. Leia remembers that Artoo can probably talk with the bank computers to change the glitch in the system. They return to the Falcon to find Artoo gone and figure out that he’s been snatched by some jawas. Han and Leia borrow a couple of landspeeders and head after the sandcrawler, which has both Boba Fett and Artoo on board.

The Jawas begin attacking the landspeeders and we have a fight where our heroes attempt to get into the sandcrawler while Artoo tries to escape. At one point, Han comes face to face with Boba Fett and Fett has no idea who Han Solo is. Fett helps Han out of the sandcrawler with Artoo and Han decides that he is going to help the bounty hunter as well. It’s only when Leia yells for Han that Fett gets his memory back and starts to shoot at Han, only to be foiled when Han and Artoo jump off of the sandcrawler just as it crashes into the sarlaac.

Now, my judgment and memory here may be off, but I think this is one of the more well-known, and perhaps one of the more well-regarded issues of Star Wars from the Return of the Jedi era. I’d say that its proximity to the film as well as its cover definitely have something to do with that; however, this isn’t a case where it’s just that because this is a great single-issue story. Han Solo was woefully underused in Return of the Jedi and while there is an end to the story overall at the end of that film, something that could be a sort of question regarding Han would be what he is going to do with his old life. Yes, the debt to Jabba has been “paid” (in that Jabba is dead so there’s probably no debt), but does that mean he settles down and doesn’t have adventures anymore or stays in the military? Or does he return to his old life as a smuggler?

After a big fight, Boba Fett and the sandcrawler head into the mouth of the sarlaac.

The Force Awakens has shown that both actually happen and examines how they are wrapped up in particular consequences of the post-Jedi galaxy. “Jawas of Doom” is more of a hangover story–what happens when the party is over and you have to go back to work on Monday morning, in a manner of speaking. And it’s a good character piece that manages to be both fun and serious while furthering those involved without needing to shout THIS HAS IMPORTANT RAMIFICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE. And I know that one of the other notable features of the issue is the “return” of Boba Fett, or at least having Boba Fett “come back” and then be put right back where we found him, but to me that’s secondary to having Han go back to the exact place where he left off, which is Tattooine–the world he was on when he decided to take Ben Kenobi and Luke Skywalker to Alderaan.

There are a number of Star Wars stories that I go back to whenever I want to flip through the old Marvel series and this is one of them. Not, mind you, because of the personal nostalgia of remembering how I picked this one out, but because it’s actually a great read.

Coming Next Month: The Transformers #1.

Comics Prehistory: Return of the Jedi

In my previous post, I wrote about the first comic I technically owned, although I only remember finding it years after I actually had “bought” it as a kid and it wound up feeling way more important later on, especially when I became an avid Batman collector and a fan of DC continuity, especially the continuity that centered around or was associated with Crisis on Infinite Earths. Here, looking at the second set of comics, is something that was purchased because it was associated with the most important thing in my life when I was six years old and that was Star Wars.

To this day, Return of the Jedi remains the Star Wars film I saw the most in theaters and is the only film from the original trilogy that I saw upon its original release. My father took me and my friend Chris to see the film at the Patchogue Indoor/Outdoor drive-in theater (the one that eventually became the UA Patchogue 13, which I wrote about in 2010: “Let’s Go to the Movies”) in 1983, would take me again to see it at the Sayville triplex when it was rereleased in 1985, and Amanda and I would go and see the special edition during spring break in 1997. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the film because of it being the one I saw in the theater (as opposed to Star Wars, which was on television and video and I had watched numerous times before seeing Jedi; or The Empire Strikes Back, which I saw via bootleg copy before it finally came out on video in 1984), and also because of how its merchandising shaped that part of my childhood.

You could not escape Return of the Jedi in 1983 and 1984. You may have not gone and seen the film (although I don’t know that many people my age who hadn’t seen it), but that didn’t matter because no matter what store you walked into, it seemed that there was something with a return of the Jedi logo on it. Lucasfilm licensed Jedi to the hilt and when I was a the height of my kid fandom, I had a ton of merchandise that went beyond the toys: sheets; cookies; Dixie cups; a calendar; and my most prized non-toy possessions, which were the records, tapes and books that told the story of the film. For myself and a number of other kids my age, owning these pieces of merchandise allowed me to relive the movie for at least a few years before I saw it again or owned my own copy on VHS (a copy I still actually have).

A two-page spread of Star Wars merchandise, most of it from Jedi, as featured in “George Lucas: The Creative Impulse” by Charles Champlin

The comics, however, I have to admit, were not really a part of that. My comic book buying as a little kid was incredibly sporadic–if I saw something I liked and my dad had enough pocket change, I would buy it, but there were rarely return trips to the store to get the next issue or anything like that. But I did own the entire Marvel Comics film adaptation and that is because of something that is an integral part of the 1980s childhood nostalgia, which is the comic book multipack.

If you’re unfamiliar with comic book multipacks, these were polybagged packs of three or four comic books that were stocked on the shelves of K-Mart, Toys R Us, and similar stores (for those local to Long Island, you’ll recognize the name TSS). Sometimes they were entire collections of limited series, such as this, but other times they were three comics featuring the same character or characters. I remember a number of times where I would pick one of the multipacks off the shelf and try to see what the middle book was because you only could see the full covers of two of them. Most of the comics multipacks were from Marvel, although DC produced them as well, and at some point in late 1983 or early 1984, the company bagged the entire four-issue series and put it on the shelves for the low, low price of $2.29, which was an 11-cent discount.

I really don’t need to get that much into the plot of the series because if you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with the events of Return of the Jedi, and unlike, say, Marvel’s adaptation of Star Wars back in 1977, there aren’t major discrepancies between the comic and the movie such as deleted scenes left in or lines of dialogue significantly changed. In fact, the thing that does make the Return of the Jedi adaptation unique is that it’s a separate miniseries from the then-ongoing Star Wars title that Marvel was publishing and it is only four issues long instead of the six that were given to tell the stories of Star Wars and Empire. The creative team was the same as Empire‘s six-issue story arc, with Archie Goodwin handling the writing and Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon doing the art (the team on Star Wars back in 1977 had been Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin).

In trying to remember how I got these comics, I seem to recall getting them from Toys R Us in Bay Shore, and it was one of those rare times when my parents took Nancy and I to the store and allowed us to pick something out because we didn’t get toys or anything like that at random very often–they were usually saved for Christmas or our birthdays. Why we were at Toys R Us to begin with is beyond me, but I’m going to assume that either one of us was there to spend Christmas or birthday money or we were there to buy a gift for someone else, perhaps someone whose birthday party we were attending. The comics and coloring books were all located on a newsstand rack that was at the end of the board games aisle at the back of the store (and honestly, the old-school Toys R Us layout is probably worth its own blog post, especially if I can find pictures), and what probably happened is that I saw the comics multipack, asked my parents to buy it for me, and since it was roughly the same price as an action figure (my usual go-to “can you buy me this” item because it was cheap and they knew it wouldn’t go to waste), they said yes.

I’d like to say that I read the covers off of the series, but quite honestly, I only remember one time where I read it in the car on the way to my grandmother’s house and what probably happened after that was that I shoved the comics in the desk where I kept all of my coloring books. The storybook, which had bonafide photographs from the film was more important to me anyway. And what that means was that I had vague memories of it beyond the covers–which, to be honest, are different characters striking simple poses in a way that can best be described as “serviceable” and nowhere near as dynamic as the adaptations of the other two films–so when I read the adaptation as part of the “A Long Time Ago …” Volume 4 omnibus that Dark Horse Comics released, I didn’t have any serious emotional attachment.

Still, I have to say that it is quite a disappointment. Having to condense the entire movie into four issues means that Goodwin and Williamson are almost doing a retread of the photographic storybook, as it’s heavy on narration boxes and the panels look more like stills than dynamic depictions of action. Granted, I know the story and knew the story when I first read it, so I didn’t and don’t need that feeling of “What’s going to happen next,” but this during an era of the Marvel Star Wars comics where David Micheline and Jo Duffy were writing some excellent stories and the work by artists such as Walt Simonson, Ron Frenz, and Tom Palmer was top-notch. That’s not saying that Goodwin and Williamson were bad at their jobs, but reading Jedi as part of that omnibus package had me wondering what the series would have been like if those creators had taken on the task of adapting the film.

Instead, what we have is probably the very definition of a “disposable” comic book. I mean, there are quite a number of comics out there that are ephemeral, but for something that had such a big impact on popular culture and the comics industry (especially Marvel) as Star Wars, the adaptation of Jedi reads as if it were to be consumed in the moment and then tossed aside to be put on a pile of coloring books, storybooks, and other things that would eventually make their way into a trash can at some point during a huge spring cleaning a few years later.

Coming next month: Star Wars #81