For an astonishingly large segment of the global population, a list of four related names triggers immediate recognition, even if you don’t know quite why or how you know them: Anthony Daniels; David Prowse; Kenny Baker; Peter Mayhew. Three of the men known by those names have shuffled off this mortal coil, and each time, every newspaper in the English-speaking world—and more than a few others—has reminded you that they’re part of the cultural firmament.
So let’s do clues. That all four names belong to white British men born in the 1930s and ’40s probably wouldn’t help you. (Ambassadors? BBC news anchors? Avatars of postwar Western imperialism? All three?) That one white British man was very short and one was very tall probably wouldn’t help you. (Winningest doubles teams at Wimbledon? Abbot and Costello impersonators?) That all four were actors whose most enduring work kept their faces obscured, though, might do the trick. That’s because you probably only know Daniels (who is still with us) as C-3PO, Prowse as Darth Vader (in body if not voice), Baker as R2D2, and the 7’2” Mayhew as Chewbacca.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know that I ever felt any kind of emotional connection to Mayhew’s Wookiee, or to any of the four characters. But the universe they populated was a different matter entirely.
I didn’t see Star Wars when it came out. Not only was I young, but I was … sensitive. The very first movie I saw in a theater was 1978’s Superman, and my only memory of the experience is making my family leave during that scene with Lois Lane falling out of a helicopter. For a kid who was already scared of dogs and certain Sesame Street bits, that shit was terrifying.
Star Wars had come out the year before that, when I was all of two years old; if I couldn’t handle screaming Margot Kidder, there wasn’t a chance I could have dealt with Tusken Raiders. But by the time I finally got around to seeing it years later (at a friend’s house, on what I’m 99% sure was LaserDisc), I already knew the movie damn near backward and forward. Kinda seemed like everybody did. Between action figures, playground retellings, and The Star Wars Storybook, even preschoolers knew the vibe. Hell, I’m pretty sure I read that thick-ass Marvel Comics version of The Empire Strikes Back long before I saw the first movie, let alone the sequel.
This is important, though. Beyond the usual stew of merchandising and word of mouth, all those things had something else in common: they hinted at the idea that Star Wars wasn’t the whole story. The Storybook, which was filled with photos from the movie, featured a conversation between Luke Skywalker and his childhood friend Biggs that never made it into the film. (And judging from said photos, Biggs was the Andrew WK of Tatooine.) The Empire Strikes Back comic had to be produced before the film was finished, which made for a Yoda who was both a) purple and b) of completely indeterminate size.
I was too young to understand the concept of the cutting-room floor; all I knew was that Star Wars wasn’t exactly constant, wasn’t exactly stable, and it made me a little dizzy. It was the same feeling I got whenever something I thought was fiction spilled into real life, like urban legends about Satanic backward messages hidden in music. Or the rumor that George Lucas was eventually going to make nine movies. The thought of characters and stories that were inside the world of Star Wars without being depicted in Star Wars, the thought that these things were being dreamed up and made and no one might even see them, electrified my brain. This wasn’t about Star Wars as much as it was about storytelling, but I’d never encountered it before.
Then the summer of 1983 came along. Return of the Jedi was out, and someone decided to hold a Star Wars trivia contest in the lone shopping mall in my hometown. My next-door neighbor, Jason, decided we should enter it together. Why this occurred to him I have no idea; he had four or five years on me, as well as the advantage of having seen all the movies. But he knew how I felt about my Jedi lunchbox with the Ewok thermos, and he had what was at the time the definitive source of Lucasalia: The Jedi Master’s Quizbook. Famously written by an 11-year-old superfan, the paperback touched on everything I could imagine from the first two movies, and as far as I was aware was the only place that stuff was written down. And when I tell you I memorized that book, please believe that I memorized. That. Book. Thanks to time and weed, the only bit of it I can dredge up today is a single word: Jettison. (It was part of the answer to something about the Death Star, and was also a singularly cool-sounding word.)
The trivia contest, though? That’s a different story. I remember the stage being full of Older Kids, who were probably teens but looked like straight-up grownups to my second-grade eyes. I remember them making weird Older Kid jokes. I remember being convinced that one of the Older Kids had a bomb, for some reason. I remember Jason and I winning the contest, or maybe finishing second; either way, we each wound up with a dishwasher-sized prize box filled with the absolute dregs of the Star Wars Merchandising Universe. An oversized embossed belt buckle in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet. Princess Leia shampoo that smelled like a fragrance chemist had described the concept of “flowers” to an angry baby, then given it the run of the lab. There were probably three Hammerhead action figures in there, because no one cared about Hammerhead. (His name is actually Momaw Nadon, you say? Sorry to this man.)
None of the toys or tchochkes in that dishwasher-sized box made an impact like the Quizbook did, though. In a way I couldn’t articulate, that book reinforced my realization that Star Wars was more than a trilogy of movies. It was a world that people hadn’t just made, but imagined, and as such it was a world where Other Stuff happened, whether or you were there to see it. Behind the droids and dogfights, intent lurked.
I had no idea the depths to which that was true, of course. No idea that over the decades, Lucasfilm kept serious tabs on everything that its ever-sprawling universe of tie-in books and comics and cartoons and games would include. No idea that it would one day hire a guy whose sole job was to make sure it all fit together without paradox or conflict. And while I never got into all that—the Expanded Universe, as it was known before Disney bought Lucasfilm and pared it all back to a single trunkline of revenue—I liked that it existed. Not the puritanical insistence on canon; more the endless expansion of imagination.
Just like we’d played “Star Wars” on the playground, everyone fighting to be Lando or Chewie or Leia or Boba Fett, that’s what authors and screenwriters and animators were doing in their creative process. And when the original trilogy got rereleased in the late ’90s, and the slapstick-ass prequels (followed, and even when that childhood rumor turned out to be true and yet another trilogy came along, some part of me liked imagining that every minor character had a story that extended well past their screen time. (Yes, that includes Watto.) No matter what I read or watch or play or listen to these days, one thing hasn’t changed: if something sticks with me, it’s not just because of what’s on the page/screen/track. It’s because of the Other Stuff budding just outside the frame.
One Thing I Can’t Get Enough of This Week
📺 Uzo Aduba on In Treatment
The first three seasons of the HBO drama, all of which happened back when Netflix was only shipping DVDs, tore up and reassembled the idea of an ensemble drama. As many as five nights a week, the show depicted therapist Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) in session with a different patient each episode. Weston had his own stuff going on, even getting an episode of his own each week to unload to his therapst, but while Byrne performed ably, the thunder was usually reserved for the actors sitting across from him. Heavyweights like Blair Underwood, Hope Davis, and Irrfan Khan were the ones going through it, dissembling and manipulating on their way to clarity. But In Treatment’s long-overdue and just-completed fourth season switched it up entirely, casting Uzo Aduba in the therapist’s chair, and let me just say: Holy shit. The spoke-and-hub narrative format is still in effect, yet Aduba as Dr. Brooke Taylor manages to give that hub an entirely new gravitational force—one that overpowers the aftertaste of so many shows casting Black women as therapists, then reducing them to mirrors for the white characters they counsel. (See: You’re the Worst, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Mare of Easttown.) Aduba already has two Emmys for Guest/Supporting performances in Orange Is the New Black; this time around, if she’s not the favorite for her first Outstanding Lead Actress award, I’ll be the one on the couch. (HBO)