I was born on December 5th 1978, The only way I got to see the first Star Wars movie in theaters was when they re-released it. My sister was eight years older than me and a full on geek herself, because of this I consider myself one who was literally born a Star Wars fan by default, because it has been with me, my whole life and was the backbone of many of my happier childhood moments. From sitting through commercials happily when the first film made it’s network television debut, and of course what I was waiting for was the light saber fight between Vader and old Ben. Those were always my favorite parts. I remember being two years old in the car at the drive in theater for “The Empire Strikes Back” and just picking up images here and there between naps, a star destroyer here, a little green dude waving his hand around and lifting a ship out of a swamp, Chewbacca doing his pissed off Wookie thing at a bunch of weird little pig aliens, but I remember my sister sitting there in the back seat with one of those clunky ass old tape recorders held up to one of those clunky ass old speakers that you hooked to your car window and she recorded the audio of the movie almost entirely, back then you had Beta IF you were lucky and back then you had to wait a year or more before anything would even come out on video, not like today where a movie comes out and three or four months later you have blu ray and week before that you have the digital copy that you can get. Hell these days you can take your phone into a movie theater and secretly record the whole damn thing and then boot leg it. It’s safe to say that technology has allowed such things to gravitate into the realm of thievery, but back then was a different time and I remember me, my mom and my sister listening to those tapes like old time radio. It never stopped being a part of my life, my world, from watching the first film years later as the very first thing aired on The SciFi channel, taking me back to the days that it made it’s original network debut. to reading the books for hours.
Whenever you hear about the death of someone famous, whose work you know and like there is always that “Damn, that sucks” moment, but when that person was a part of something that has been a part of your ENTIRE life, and it brings back the memories of that simpler time and you can not even imagine what your life would have been like without it, that is a death that can hit you pretty damn hard and you become one of those who literally have an emotional moment. I get it. That was someone you never met, being a character who isn’t real, but that time at the drive in, those arguments about “You ate the head off of my action figure, do you know what thing is worth now?” “You let a three and a half inch doll get into the hands of a toddler, what the Hell did you think would happen?” Sitting around a tape recorder and listening to a grainy audio track of a beloved film. Those moments are real moments in our lives that these people unwittingly have been a part of. I am usually the “Damn that sucks” kind of guy. Usually, but this one actually hurt.
There really is nothing else to say, The things she did for people fighting a mental disorder that I know all too well, the take no bullshit from anyone or anything attitude, the humor in the face of it all speaks for itself of a simple truth. Some people pretend to be heroes, some people actually are and all I witnessed over the years suggested that Carrie Fisher was NEVER Princess Leia, It was the other way around. And that is why she is the only Disney Princess that ever mattered in my eyes.
SIMPLE, TIMELESS, ELEGANT, FOREVER
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