Nostalgia part two: Star Wars figures and Legos
by Matt Worley

I think the impact Star Wars had on my life could have been predicted easily. I didn't go to many movies when I was young. Being five when the movie came out, I had an average of about zero movies a year. I don't remember seeing a real movie (not counting Disney cartoons and live action pictures--we always saw these while watching The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights) until Star Wars.

The phenomenon started slowly in my house. First, my older brother got to go see the movie with Dad. The glowing reviews (and ensuing taunting by said older brother-who greatly enjoyed the advantages of his extra year and nine months) caused our parents to decide to take all of three of us kids to the movie. This being said, I'm pretty sure I didn't see the movie until sometime in 1978-a year after it was officially released. No one had cable, VCRs or anything that would make a successful movie pull out of theaters before every last nickel was made. In my cloudy mind, Star Wars was in theaters from its initial showing in 1977 until the second movie came out in 1980. I know this is not true, but the movie was available in theaters for a very large amount of time.

Collecting Star Wars figures began quite modestly as well. At first I only had Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader and Princess Leia: this trio, of course, was revealed to be the first family of the trilogy (quite shocking when the third movie came out). The reasoning in my head for buying these three characters was clear. Luke was the hero, Darth Vader was the villain, and Princess Leia was the girl. The ONLY girl. Somewhere (probably while watching TV) I had grabbed on to the phrase "Battle Of The Sexes" when I was five or six. I incorporated this phrase to mean there was some kind of intergalactic war between men and women, a story I set out to tell by illustrated pictures. Women's ships looked like connected breasts with lasers shooting out of the nipples. The men used more conventional rocket ships, of course. This phase of my life was some kind of pre-school merging of Star Wars and sexual politics that was encouraged by my parents: they bought the crayons and paper. Even as a child, I was quite strange.

I don't have a time scale for Legos. I just know we never had any of the baby Legos, and we didn't like the more advanced Erector sets because they could only be built into what they were specifically designed for. While it was fun to follow the directions for a while, we always deviated into mutant colored constructions of our own imagination. For the longest time, the only thing my two brothers and I could do without getting into large fights was put together Legos. We would take over the living room and build for hours.

When we got enough Star Wars Figures so that teams could be chosen, we would also bring Legos into the mix. Until a large Christmas sale after the release of The Empire Strikes Back came out, we didn't have any of the ships or playsets that went with the figures. We had to make our own. They didn't look like X-Wings, Tie Fighters or the Millennium Falcon, but in our minds they were. What began as a very organized event would always end in mayhem. After the half an hour it took to divide the figures (This was very much like playing chess. We felt that each character had different abilities and mannerisms, pros and cons that had to be weighed as we picked our forces.), another hour and a half was used to put together ships and bases from our large sack of Legos. The actual war between our three armies took fifteen minutes to a half an hour at the most. Arguments about The Force, laser gun accuracy, and the whore/spy abilities of Princess Leia usually brought any sensible type of mock warfare to a stop. The wars usually ended by tossing the Lego ships at each other, whichever one stayed together won the battle. No one was ever declared the winner, although one brother was usually ganged up on by the other two, which always meant there was one loser. Ah, the politics of fraternity.

Now the only fight about Star Wars Figures and Legos is about who gets to keep them. They are currently in our parents' basement, but I'm holding odds that whichever brother has the first child will be blessed with the treasure trove of multi-colored bricks and three or four Princess Leia figures (along with the rest of the cast). The edge is given to our older brother in this fight, as he is the only one of us married and even close to possibly having children. So maybe that's why it might be fun to be an uncle. I'd get to play with the Star Wars Figures and Legos again.

In his attempts to evaluate and ruminate about childhood, Matt Worley has realized that many traumatic events might not have been merely random attempts by the world to scar his psyche.

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