My friend Paul has posted on Facebook of his hatred of Ewoks. I have known him since the Seventies and can remember that this hasn’t always been the case. He was quite enamored with Ewoks when Return of the Jedi came out. Not in a sexual way, obviously. We were only ten.
Did anyone else not play Star Wars with Star Wars toys? I can vaguely remember creating some sort of alternative universe with seven of my favorite aliens having various violent adventures. I devised a sort of special effect using lengths of cotton with a knot on the end which, when pulled out of a bit of Plasticine, gave a rough approximation of a bullet hit.
Apart from Yoda and the two droids, I didn’t have any of the main characters. I was a rather strange child.
My brother and I did repurpose toys for crossovers or our own imaginary worlds. I remember one Star Wars adventure that feature a He-Man character as a giant mutant they had to exterminate.
GI Joe figures were the same size as Star Wars, so that crossoever worked even better. Plus, we learned that you could unscrew GI Joe figures and mix and match the body parts. Just don’t lose the rubber band that holds the chest to the hips.
We also loved using Legos to build our own fantastical “laser hand guns” and then did a sci-fi sort of cops and robbers game using those instead of store bought guns. Frankly, we came up with better stuff, and we also appreciated the engineering challenge of building a long, thing gun barrel out of Legos that was strong enough to run around with.
A few of my Star Wars figures and vehicles met violent ends with the assistance of BBQ grills and firecrackers. Usually when they reached the end of their operational life. My best friend and I were pretty hard on our toys.
My discovery was that the character’s hands meant to grip a weapon also hung nicely on a kite string. So adventures always seemed to involve an escape of sliding down a rope from the tree to the sandbox.
And in my world, alignments did not match the movie. The coolest looking characters (i.e. the bounty hunters) were the good guys
