Reseda High School
Star Wars Memories
by Matthew Arnold Stern
In May 1977, as I was sitting at a bus stop on Sherman Way near Reseda, I
saw an ad for a new movie. I looked at the title and thought, "Star
Wars? What a stupid name for a movie." Little did I know that 28 years later,
my seven-year-old son would beg me to buy him every conceivable thing that has the
Star Wars logo on it. George Lucas should thank me for helping to fund his
retirement.
Today's kids don't realize that Star Wars has a history, and it's not
only that Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader. For those of us who lived a long
time ago in a suburb far, far away, Star Wars was a part of our growing
up.
After my classmates at Reseda High gave me their rave reviews, I decided
Star Wars didn't sound like such a stupid movie after all. So, my mother,
younger brother, and I went to the old Topanga Theatre in Woodland Hills to see
it.
Before Star Wars, we didn't go to the movies very often. That was
because there really wasn't anything for a 15-year-old to see. I couldn't
get into R-rated movies, and I was certainly too old for kiddie flicks, like those insipid
Benji movies. I did enjoy Jaws, which we saw at the Van Nuys Drive-in
Theatre. (Remember those?) But mostly, movies in the 1970s were too realistic
and gritty to be enjoyable. After spending all day in our miserable post-Watergate stagflation world,
who would want to spend money and two hours watching a movie about our miserable
post-Watergate stagflation world?
Star Wars was the first movie that I could really sit back
and enjoy. I felt like I was transported into a different universe with
spaceships that didn't look like plastic models, heroes I could root for, and
villains I could hate. (We didn't know that Darth Vader was Luke's father at
that point.) Film critics talk about suspension of disbelief, and that
definitely worked in Star Wars. I felt like I was actually flying in the
back seat of that X-Wing fighter with Luke and R2-D2. And when the Death Star blew up – Wow! I heard stories about how
magical movies used to be, but I didn't experience it for myself until Star
Wars.
 I indulged in some of the movie merchandising. I think I still have a Star
Wars comic book series that Marvel produced shortly after the film. I also
bought a novel inspired by the movie and a plastic model of a Rebel X-Wing
fighter. I didn't buy anything that would have made a killing on eBay.
In my creative writing class that year, there were a few of us who shared an
enjoyment of the film. Thomas Keiji Agawa was the dean of the Star Wars
fans. He was the editorial page editor and political cartoonist for our school paper, the Regent Review.
He would quote from memory various bits of dialogue and draw fantastic sketches
of various Star Wars characters. (I couldn't find any of his, but I found
one of mine, as shown on the left. He went out with Hillary Hansen, our resident Ayn Rand fan, thus
dispelling the stereotype of Star Wars geeks who can't get a date.)
Besides drawing pictures of Darth Vader, Thomas enjoyed putting hidden
messages into his political cartoons. In the April Fool's edition of the
Regent Review, he drew a picture of a gymnast, and the shading of the uneven parallel bars
spelled out in Morse code a popular two-word explicative. He also got in big
trouble with a hidden message that expressed his displeasure with the school
cafeteria.
I haven't heard from Thomas since high school. A Google search returned a
note about an exhibition from the Lowe Gallery, "A conceptual piece concerning
the culture of skateboards created around an interactive skateshop, with the
conceptual artist Thomas Keiji Agawa." I was glad to see that he continued
with his artwork. I wonder if he still puts hidden messages
in it.
For me,
Star Wars was a key part of growing up in the seventies. The
most special thing about it was how it made me feel. It was the first
movie in a long time when the good guys actually won. After Vietnam, we
Americans had stopped believing that the good guys would always win. So, we had movies
where the bad guys (who weren't as bad as the supposed good guys) won, the good guys
won by becoming bad guys, or both the good guys and bad guys lost in
gushers of blood. I could leave Star Wars feeling exhilarated and
uplifted. It was a movie that made me feel good.
This may be why I don't enjoy the newer Star Wars films as much. They
feature political intrigue and the tragic spectacle of a promising, talented,
and inherently good young person become corrupted by power and turn
towards the Dark Side. We have enough of that in the real world, Mr. Lucas.
So, when my son begs me to watch the new Star Wars movie, I'll rent the original movie – the real movie – and show him
what Star Wars is really all about.
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