Today’s Bloganuary prompt asks us to “describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth”, and “what became of it?”.
I was a child of the Star Wars generation. I was the perfect age for the movies, the toys, and the universe of marketing that followed it. I was five when the first movie appeared at the cinema. I don’t remember going to see either of the first two movies, but I do remember Return of the Jedi.
My strongest memories of the cinema as a child are of the Pearl and Dean adverts before the movie (along with the “Asteroid” soundtrack), ice creams being sold during the movie, and leaving at the end - feeling like you were walking on air, and wanting to run out into the evening with your arms out wide, making laser blaster noises.
It was always dark when you left the cinema.
I think the first time I ever went to the cinema in the daytime was with my cousin from America. She was over visiting, I got the afternoon off work, and we went to Oxford together. We saw “Shakespeare in Love”, and bought a book of Shakeseare’s sonnets in a little bookshop in Gloucester Green.
Anyway. Back to the writing prompt.
Throughout my childhood each birthday and Christmas would bring new figures and spaceships. I looked after them like the crown jewels. By the time I started at secondary school, I remember a high shelf all the way across my bedroom, filled with spacecraft, walkers, and monsters of all descriptions.
My only regret? It was all given away.
As I grew up computers took over from toys, and they Star Wars collection gathered dust on the high shelf. One day a family across the road was collecting for a charity jumble sale and my Mum donated all of it. Apparently somebody bought the entire collection before it went anywhere near the sale venue.
I suppose - being honest - I don’t regret giving away the Star Wars toys at all. They were not “mint in box” - they were played with. They had survived countless adventures in the mud ravaged fields of the “Back Garden” planet, and the “Back of the Sofa” system. I suppose there has always been the hope that they would have gone on to be played with - not to be restored and locked in glass cabinets.
Random memory - the Tie Fighter pilot smelled of trifle. I never did figure out why.
So yes. Star Wars was “my jam”.
It took over an hour to write this, because I got side-tracked watching recordings on YouTube of fan reactions to the various movie trailers as they have arrived. Then I fell apart again watching John Williams conduct the orchestra following Carrie Fisher’s death. How her daughter managed to read her famous lines from “A New Hope” without falling apart is still a mystery to me.