Boba Fett Blues

(This essay first appeared in The Rose & Thorn in The Fall of 2008)


So you want to know my earliest realization that I was just another boob consumer? Trace it back to my Star Wars Action figure days. Fish out the collapsible C3PO from a war-torn pile of crummy Jawas and Storm Troopers, no they're all out of Snaggletooth again, but don't fret there's another Woolworth over by Fresh Pond Road if I could finagle my mom into a ride over there. The tough part was getting an advance on my already advanced allowance.

The thing was, if you clipped off enough of those coupons from the back of the action figure packages you could get a really nifty limited edition something or another. Feast your eyes on Boba Fett, the badass bounty hunter, puppet-strings of Jabba the Hutt. I was way psyched to be the first kid on the block with the hot new toy, especially since I'd read all about the missile that shot from Boba Fett's backpack-launcher.

I played hooky in anticipation of the special delivery. Why waste a whole day through ho-hum math classes and those retarded fire drills when Boba Fett could be hiding in my mailbox? Mom's deal was that if I stayed home I had to clean my room, take out the garbage, and other crap like that. In return, she promised to write my teacher a phony baloney sick note. She was quid pro quo all the way.

The big day finally came, but when I tore apart the package, my action figure didn't have a launchable missile. It stuck there welded in place, without any buttons or levers to fire it out. I had to see for myself if it was possible to tweak the design to suit my bounty-hunting appetite. Equipped with a pair of pliers I fished out from under the kitchen sink, I went to work. Dislodging the missile was tricky. I started off gently and soon swung into a rhythm whereby my half-cranks turned into roundhouse yanks that finally stripped the ammo clean off Boba Fett's back. It left me with a weird numbing feeling. Maybe neuter was more like it. It's hard to say. As I sat there with the red, bean-sized missile in the pinch of my hand I just didn't feel like gluing the stupid thing back on.

My buddy Kenji, the only other spoiled brat I knew who got everything he whined about, told me some dickweed from Oshkosh messed up his cornea blasting Boba Fett missiles off his front porch and that was why all the second batch figures were shipped neutralized. Kenji also mentioned that the puny Boba Fett was nothing compared to the new line (if you'll pardon the pun) that was being launched, scheduled to hit the stores for the holidays. According to him the new line would be as tall as Rom the Spaceknight. This brawnier Boba Fett would fill the void of the inferior one loafing under my bed.

In the meantime Rom posed as my scab Boba Fett, until the bathtub incident whereupon the better part of his foot was caught and snapped off in the drain. Mom nursed Rom's foot with the gauze she used to bandage my hands when I hurt myself digging around for baseballs behind the old ball field. The rejuvenated Rom met his ultimate demise outside the fourth floor window of the boy's bathroom at my school. The parachute never opened.

When Kenji popped in the original Stars Wars on his Betamax, we made some startling discoveries: 1) it was Han Solo, not Luke who killed the Rodian bounter hunter Greedo — Kenji liked to call him Guido; 2) upon closer inspection it did look like Princess Lea had an armpit-sniffing fetish after she and Luke swung to safety by way of Luke's trusty grappling hook. 3) Jabba the Hutt had already made his first appearance despite Kenji's insistence that it was Return of the Jedi where the tub-of-slob made his debut.

In their own right each of these were fascinating discoveries, but what bugged me, after catching The Empire Strikes Back, was that Bosk, another mail-away bounty hunter, also had a nothing part. What was up with Kenner and their whole peddling enterprise gassing up kids' hopes, getting us all psyched up to covet their action figures when they took away the best features (AKA Boba Fett's missile-launcher)? And more importantly why were they pawning off these bit part bounty hunters? They didn't have any of the characters from the cantina, not a single one, though Kenji and I wrote numerous letters lobbying for them — to Kenner, the Star Wars Fan Club for Midgets, George Lukas, Obi-Won Kenobi, whoever. Our only reply smacked pomposity. Wait until the droid factory hits the shelves so you smart asses can build whatever figures you want. O.K. so maybe they didn't add that last part, but the sentiment was implied by the persnickety little ink-stamped signature on the bottom of the form letter.

We didn't want more figures for the heck of it. We wanted to preserve the real-world integrity of Star Wars. Sure we had imagination, but it was cool to have Hammerhead and Walrus Man to spice up our battles.

One day Kenji and I got into a fight because he thought I took his Luke Skywalker light saber, a very jaundiced weapon with part of the tip spliced off. I'd lost mine some weeks earlier and had inserted a colored toothpick into the aperture underneath Skywalker's wrist.

“I didn't take your stinking light saber,” I said, “If you don't believe me, here, take the toothpick. You should clean your teeth.”

That's just how I said it. Of course, it didn't go over well and that's when he called me a grub.

“Not only are you a moocher,” he said, “But a copy cat too. You always want what I have.”

At that moment, I was furious and hurt by the assessment. My integrity, manhood, and friendship were insulted. An only child tends to blast a floodlight inward when the looker only needs a flicker. I took it to heart. Later on when his mom offered us a plate of Oreos and two tall glasses of milk he apologized.

“Forget it. I was only messing with you,” he said.

The thing is that little squabble did mess with my head. I could take punches, noogies, and the occasional pile-driver, but it hurt more that he thought, even for that moment, I'd stoop so low and steal his figure. It wasn't the Jedi way.

I don't really know when something loses luster. The cherished toy underneath the Christmas tree has a short half-life and simple, honest, malicious words leave permanent marks. To this day, I have a sweet spot reserved for Star Wars, though I wonder what's at stake when I trade figures on Ebay. What stories belong to the Han Solos, Darth Vaders, and Chewbaccas? Did two buddies have a break-up? Who were the bullies, the nerds, and all the others who played with them? These things I consider when making trades. Playing with another kid's old figures slips me into a forbidden past.

Kenji and I stayed somewhat friends, saw each other now and then when we played ball, burnt ants, and honed our joystick waggling skills. We shied away from action figures. Maybe I keep up with the Star Wars studs because I'm trying to make up for lost time. Maybe I haven't grown up.

Guest Blog by Nannette Croce

(I'd like to welcome my friend the distinguished writer and editor Nannette Croce to Paper Cut. She is the founder and publisher of Zine Writer and will be guest blogging today on the changing face of the literary journals.)


Online Publishing at the Crossroads

When I started working with online publications at the end of the last century (that term still has me thinking horse & carriage), zine credits didn’t count much, if at all, when submitting to print. The literary cognoscenti equated the relative ease of starting an online publication, the primitive appearance of early websites, and the fact that most zines didn’t pay (now most print pubs don’t pay either) with being less selective.

In fact, many zines like The Rose & Thorn http://www.theroseandthornezine.com/ that started publishing in 1997 were already receiving more than enough submissions to choose only the best. At the same time the lack of competition from well-credentialed and (back then, less ubiquitous) MFA grads, made the Internet fertile ground for new skilled writers who, after years of rejection, just wanted their work to appear somewhere––anywhere––it could be read. And once past the “stigma” of having to publish online, those writers realized the distinct advantages it provided over print.

Once that piece had appeared in the current issue, it wouldn’t be dumped in the trash by everyone but the writer and his Mom; it would be archived online for people to read in years to come and where it could be linked to from a website. Publishing online provided an online presence so contacts could Google a writer’s name and find samples of her work. But by far the greatest advantage was that as more and more people started spending more and more of their time online, zines reached more readers in varying parts of the world than all but the biggest print publications.

It wasn’t long before credentialed writers began to catch on. While exclusively online literary zines still weren’t getting submissions from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, in my last couple of years working with The Rose & Thorn, we did receive many submissions from writers with credits from the “better” print journals. By then, though, it had become the credo of most zines to remain open to new writers and to ignore credentials when reviewing submissions. (My current employer Sotto Voce http://sottovocemagazine.com/index.htm attaches no names or bios to work under review.) Other characteristics specific to zines were accepting different genres and requiring a good story with good characters in addition to the well-crafted sentences and killer similes that seemed to take priority in most print journals.

Hence, for a short time, online publishing became the most perfect of worlds. Zines (though many dropped the old connotations of that term for “online journals”) had come to be considered valuable writing credits, while, at the same time, maintaining that level playing field where new and experienced writers competed solely on the quality of their writing.

Enter the big guns. It was just a matter of time before the big name print journals, facing a dwindling readership and difficult financial times, would see the benefits of publishing online. Many venerable print journals like The Kenyon Review http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro_full.php and Agni http://www.bu.edu/agni/ now publish online counterparts. Magazines like Narrative http://www.narrativemagazine.com/ have a mainly online presence with the print version being secondary. Narrative has brought to the web the afore mentioned Ms. Oates and other names like Rick Bass, Lorrie Moore, Robert Olen Butler, etc., etc.

This transition to where everyone will be publishing online has brought Internet publishing to a crossroads. Will these former print journals impose their hierarchy on the egalitarian web and relegate the online pioneers to where they were a decade ago, or will everyone have to open up to a broad range of writers and subjects? This will depend on readers and writers.

Readers vote with their clicks and every online journal I’ve been associated with received literally tens of thousands of page views per month. This would imply that people are reading online who never picked up a print journal. It’s hard to imagine that these people were biding their time waiting for Agni to come online.

Writers need to decide how important it is to appear in those “big names.” If tens of thousands of people read your work and it appears in a journal you respect, does it matter if the contributors’ names are Alice Munro and Rick Bass?

Only time will tell.

Nannette Croce was formerly Co-Managing Editor at The Rose & Thorn and is currently Assistant Fiction Editor for Sotto Voce. Her work has appeared in various online and print journals including The Rose & Thorn, Sotto Voce http://sottovocemagazine.com/index.htm, The Writers Post Journal, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her blogs are zine writer http://zinewriter.blogspot.com/: insider tips for getting your work published online and cross reference http://crossreferencebookreviews.blogspot.com/: a book review blog (where she recently reviewed Shades of Luz http://crossreferencebookreviews.blogspot.com/2009/10/shades-of-luz-by-john-gorman.html). She also runs CROSSxCHECKING http://crossreferencebookreviews.blogspot.com/2009/10/shades-of-luz-by-john-gorman.html an editing and critiquing service.