The Imagination According to Star Wars

In my twenties, I worked with a guy who loved Star Wars as much as I did, but with one big difference between us. He loved dogma and I did not.

Back in the 1990s, blockbuster film director James Cameron wrote a treatment for a hypothetical Spiderman film where he took a few liberties with the classic Marvel character. I loved Cameron’s creative ideas, but my coworker got angry. He believed Peter Parker was a specific person with a specific personality and was destined to only ever behave in one way.

The more I said this was ludicrous, the more upset he became. He was also a staunch Catholic and this made even more sense to me. He treated science fiction and comic books like he treated the Bible—without interpretation. He introduced me, a few years before the Internet, into a way of looking at stories that had never occurred to me.

I thought of him again when I discovered the word “retcon” while going down a research rabbit hole on Wikipedia. A retcon, short for retroactive continuity, is when “established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.”

In other words, retconning is artistic license.

In 1980, the The Empire Strikes Back action figures appeared on store shelves a few weeks before the film’s release. It was the first time I read the words The Empire Strikes Back and saw images from the Star Wars sequel. Princess Leia’s hair was different, and so was the stormtroopers’ armor. Luke was in “Bespin Fatigues” and Han Solo was in a “Hoth Outfit.”

I vividly recall the effect those figures had on me. I had no idea what any of it meant. What was a Bespin or a Hoth? They were words and worlds both strange and exhilarating. They challenged and expanded ideas that had lived alone in my mind for almost three years.

Collecting Star Wars figures was idolatry, no doubt about it. They were painted, pagan icons that brought my pre-teen concerns to life in my imagination. I can still go into Wal-Mart or Target and walk down that toy aisle and get a charge from the hanging sheets of cardboard with their clear plastic coffins. I even saved a few to remind me of that feeling.

I never became a collector though. I didn’t want to preserve the figures, row after row, in their boxes, like they were something from my past or something to worship. I didn’t want them to become relics of my childhood imagination because I wanted to preserve my imagination into adulthood. I wanted to keep playing.

Wasn’t that what Picasso said himself? That the creative problem is how not to put away childish things?

I instinctually began to draw, and write, and build. I wrote a sequel to Return of the Jedi when I was eleven. It started out with a dark space funeral for the Emperor preceding his terrifying rebirth and a new type of Star Destroyer that looked like a giant space stingray. I even built one of my Star Carriers out of cardboard and balsa wood. Then I started to write stories that had nothing to do with Star Wars.

I became an artist myself, and much more about license than continuity. I wanted to break clichés—and Star Wars had led the way.

I appreciate now that many of the Kenner action figures never had an identity. The early soldiers and robots, like Death Squad Commander, Power Droid, and Cloud Car Pilot, were generic in name. The aliens, like Jawa, Weequay, and Ree-Yees, could have been species or races or denominations. They were like Mad Libs—fill in the blank.

I discovered later that Kenner Toys, often in a sprint to get new figures in the stores, would call Lucasfilm for character details and a Lucasfilm employee would invent them on the spot.

There was no canon. There was no extended universe. Boba Fett appeared in both films for a total of five minutes. A stunt man played him because he barely did anything. I gave him his backstory. Unbeknownst to me, I spent my youth “retconning,” and I know I was not alone.

The first hint of an authorized Star Wars history was The Jedi Master’s Quiz Book written by 14-year-old, rusty haired Rusty Miller in the early 1980s. While I could answer everything in his book, I never had his interest in keeping the narrative official. I found it limiting.

Notice that a fan and not George Lucas wrote that first authorized history. Lucas wrote the actual films, which were enough. I’m positive the “how many Wookies can you fit in a Millennium Falcon cockpit” fact reporting was what led George to drop the whole thing on Disney’s door and flee.

Today, there are similar Quora.com questions. People post inquiries into plot holes they discover in the old films or the new films and a real Star Wars fan—with a resume—answers them like they’re quoting The Adjutant General’s History of the War in the Galaxy Far Far Away. (There is no such book.) This is all an immense amount of fun when it’s not taken so seriously.

What was great about my Star Wars universe—and my childhood imagination—was the shapelessness. Lucas dropped us into chapter four, without a guide book, and left us to our own navigation. My LEGO sets were “Space” and “Castle.” By the time the Transformers, He-Man, and GI Joe appeared with their afternoon animated plotlines, I already had my own.

Here’s my recommendation for fans that get upset about new Star Wars films and continuities: create your own thing. Not your own Star Wars thing, but a unique story or movie or work of art. Invent something as strange and foreign as a big walking carpet that the audience comes to love.

You’ll learn how hard it is to create anything innovative that resonates and you’ll also learn to cheer on anyone who makes the attempt.