Currently, I’m working on the Raiders of the Lost Ark series and the Super Powers Collection (both by Kenner).

All I have to say is that FORM WILL ALWAYS FOLLOW FUNCTION.

This one line should suffice. I’m sure you’ve all heard the legend of the one-word, college-philosophy exam. The one word, WHY? One confident student writes down a two-word reply, turns the paper in and walks out. The two words, WHY NOT?

I only wish that I were that bold.

FORM ALWAYS FOLLOWS FUNCTION. Here’s my paper, Thank you and GOOD NIGHT.

Like any paper I need to give attribution to the work that isn’t mine. The aesthetic wisdom that I have given you belongs to Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor, Louis Sullivan. And even Wright’s most well known work, Fallingwater, serves a FUNCTION. It’s a home, a shelter; place to keep us dry from the rain, warm in the winter and until 3 years ago, a good investment. It’s a perfect example of FORM following FUNCTION.

Wilderness Survivalist Bear Grylls

But If you’ve ever paid attention to a body building competition, you’d realize that these athletes are trying to avoid this vital law. You might think that body builders are the ideal representation of how strength should appear in human form. The ridiculous posing and flexing only highlight the fact that you’re seeing men and women who have been starving and dehydrating themselves, so there muscles appear closer to their skin. Their waists and legs are skinny by comparison to their bee stung, swollen upper bodies. They are not the model candidates for pulling an airplane with a harness or placing Atlas stones on high platforms in record time. You clearly need a person named Magnus, Svend or Thor to do this kind of work; a person who still has fat reserves, a thick core and beefy, wide legs with a neck that matches in girth; someone who could defeat a bear in the wild with their naked hands. Speaking of bears in the wild. Bear Grylls may not be a hammer wielding Norse god, but I’m confident that he could get you safely through the woods to grandmother’s house. I don’t think that anyone with calf implants or an oiled chest could do that with ease that he could. Although grandmother better have mouthwash ready for you when you get there, just in case he’s made you drink your own piss after you’ve run out of water.

I’m obviously not a body builder, but I did start indoor Rock Climbing this year and what I realized is that women are naturally better than men. They aren’t trying to out muscle each other like men tend to do. They embrace the wall like a hug and move up the sheer surface with ease. Women climbers have “GO” muscles, not “SHOW’ muscles. The first time I heard that comparison I thought back to my dad when he was working at the mill. My friend Brandon was interning there while going to school at Tech. Tired of hearing my dad rib him with phrases like “hey, egg head, for a smart guy, you sure are a dumb ass”, Brandon, in a show of machismo, challenged my father to an arm wrestling match in the work cafeteria to try to assert his dominance in the blue collar arena. Brandon, who appeared larger and more muscular, was stunned when he didn’t win. He hadn’t considered that my dad’s chopping wood every night and taming wild horses for fun had rendered his wiry frame with practical “GO” muscles that out performed his younger, “SHOW” muscles. This was probably then first time that a conflict had been successfully resolved through arm wrestling since the classic 1987 Stallone film, “Over the Top.”

Chopping wood and taming wild horses can build up an appetite. You might be craving the most savory, boneless duck, stuffed inside a boneless chicken, deep fried within a turkey, or a half pound patty of the fattiest beef served between two glazed doughnuts, or you may just want dessert. Marscapone sculpted over layers of shortbread, Styrofoam and wooden dowels made to look like Hogwarts.

But before you get to eat that turducken, the Luther Burger or that award winning Harry Potter cake that gets noticed as a fantasy / nerd masterpiece, we must simply face the fact that it is food. Food that we MAY NOT need to eat, but food that is still transformed into energy that allows us to FUNCTION, energy that allows Stallone to triumph in the World Arm-Wrestling Championship and finally win the respect of his estranged son.

FUNCTION triumphing over FORM is also apparent with some dogs. Hunting and working dogs are bred for their intelligence, speed and instincts. Show dogs are bred to be… PRETTY. When we screw with nature for the desire of aesthetics, sometime the results aren’t so great. We get ATTRACTIVE, PURE BRED canines with hip dysplasia and general poor health.

Look, I’m not suggesting that WE start breeding for FUNCTION. This isn’t Sparta. I don’t want anyone throwing their sick babies off cliffs or taking their 8 year olds to the wilderness to fend for themselves, even with the help of Bear Grylls.

Before the Spartans were practicing eugenics, early man may have been tired of stepping on his hot, blacktop driveway just to get his junk mail, so he started covering his feet in leftover cowhide. Then he fashioned waffle souls, pumps and even the Reebok pump. Now we have small museums and art shows dedicated to the shoe. We’ve taken an item of FUNCTION and have pushed it past its limits to the point where the design has started to devolve into footwear like Crocs.

Clothing has lead to fashion design. SO in turn, FUNCTION has again lead to form.

Batman’s Utility Belt

And Tim Gunn need not critique superhero costumes. Batman doesn’t wear a flexible band across his mid section to divide the blacks and the deep blacks of his crime-fighting ensemble. He needs his freakin’ utility belt for beatin’ up the Joker and holding his shark repellant.

In the beginning, before dogs, footwear and even Batman, the earth was a formless void. Some say that God quickened the world with his own word and hung the stars in the night sky. Whether you believe in God or not, we can all agree that they stars were here WAY before us. Is their purpose only to shine or are they also here to guide us at night like a map? Are they just the remnants of an enormous mass that still generate heat and light? I don’t know.

“We are all made of stars” to quote the popular astrophysicist Moby, who in turn, was quoting Carl Sagan when he said “We’re made of star stuff.” Meaning the atoms and elements that were floating along in outer reaches from billions of years ago are in our bodies right now. My ancestors, my future child and his children’s children are, on a basic quantum level, made from the stardust of our universe’s past. Every creature on earth, everything with matter, shares this with each other. To me, this is one of the most romantic ideas that I’ve ever heard.

The long dead stars, whose light we still may be seeing, may have a grander purpose than illumination. Maybe their real FUNCTION is to remind us that we are all the same. All the beauty that you’ve ever beheld, will ever behold in your lifetime and all that our decedents will ever see, feel or create is related.

Form cannot exist without function, but function’s FUNCTION, if you will, is to support beauty, just as the canvas of a beautiful painting cannot be supported without the frame that it is stretched over. So, to the Philosophy Professors who ask WHY or to anyone else who asks why do you feel the need to create? The answer is simple. We are human, the children of star stuff, … simply,

IT IS OUR FUNCTION.

Darth Vader and Me

Black tie, white gloves, patent leather shoes, red velvet-lined cape, obsidian helmet with built in life-support. Wait, what? That’s right fanboys and girls, Vader knows how to kick it up a notch. He’s quite dapper when he wants to be.

In first grade, my friend Brennan’s dad performed a gig as Darth Vader for my elementary school’s Halloween function. How ahead of the game was he? Christmas, you get Santa. Halloween … Vader.

“He’s more machine now than man. Twisted and evil.… except when he steps out for social functions. Then he’s quite the gentleman, but still a machine nonetheless … a style machine”
― Obi-Wan Kenobi

The Good, The Bad, and the Boba

So the conclusion of part one of this article was to point out that in spite of the legendary level of cool now associated with him, if you look at the original Star Wars films, Boba Fett is really just a slightly goofy-looking, barely significant character who isn’t even named in his first film appearance. So how, we ask, did this character eventually manage to surpass most of the film’s primary cast in popularity? Our conclusion is, it’s all about the toys.

Keep in mind that the Star Wars trilogy pre-dated the common household availability of cable television and home video devices, much less broadband internet access. Back then, once a film left theaters, all you had were storybook images and memories. And, in the case of the Star Wars films, little plastic figures.

The Boba Fett figure was always destined to become a legendary toy. It was the first figure released from The Empire Strikes Back, and it was advertised before the film came out, giving fans a preview of things to come in the new film. Star Wars at that time was setting the precedent for pretty much every major toy line of the 80s and beyond by showing just how closely a product line could be tied in to the promotion of the media it was connected to. As a mail-away offer, the Boba Fett figure represented a double whammy, being not only an exclusive item not available in stores, but technically also free – the fact that four proofs of purchase actually represented a significant investment was a problem for the adults to worry about. Boba Fett was also the first Star Wars figure advertised with an action feature, a rocket-firing backpack, not only drawing more attention to the figure before it was released, but also making it a controversial item when it arrived without that feature.

Most importantly though, rocket-firing backpack or not, the Boba Fett figure was amazingly cool. The scale of the figure corrected the bobble-head look of the on-screen Fett, and the solid plastic construction eliminated the confusing inconsistency of the mechanic’s coverall / pieces of armor dilemma. The figure was much more detailed than previous Star Wars figures, allowing fans to see more of the character’s features rather than using memory to fill in bland sculpts – for as much as they are classic, industry-changing toys, a review of the first 20 figures reveals them to be fairly plain and a little vague on detail, probably because the company manufacturing them had little hope for success with the early figures, and a tight deadline to capitalize on their unexpected popularity with the second wave. The figures sculpted for the Empire line were made much more carefully with the secure knowledge of what a hugely popular line of toys they would be joining, and again, Boba Fett was the premiere item for that line. From the moment that figure arrived in the mail (or was bought in stores, for those late to the party), the image of Boba Fett would automatically be an impressive one.

As though reintroducing the concept of the mail-in giveaway to a whole new generation of consumers while simultaneously creating controversy over the not-as-advertised rocket pack (does anyone else have a vague memory of taking pliers to the little missile in the hopes that, like the Battlestar Galactica toys, the non-firing status could be remedied?) wasn’t enough, the 3 ¾” Boba Fett was just the beginning.

The 12” Boba Fett figure completely and inexplicably rewrote the large Star Wars figure line. For all their cool nostalgia, close examination reveals the earlier 12” figures to be either glorified Barbie Dolls or hollow plastic pieces of junk. The large figures were no more posable than their smaller counterparts, and other than removable clothing on a few dolls, accessories were limited or non-existent. While the attention to detail still surpassed many other toys of the time, the Star Wars films inspired so much imagination that the 12” dolls were an inevitable letdown. They made decent statues for display, but as far as playability, the 3 ¾” figures had more potential. The Boba Fett figure changed all of that, if only for a brief time.

Fully jointed, extremely detailed, and dripping with accessories, the figure surpassed anything else in the Star Wars toy line for accuracy and inventiveness. Along with elements visible in the film, the designers of the 12” Fett added creative details to increase playability, such as a string attaching the backpack rocket and a see-through eye lens similar to the Bionic Man doll. Again, the hard plastic construction allowed a fairly ridiculous costume design to appear tough and cool, and the legend of Boba Fett was secured.

By the time the character met his ridiculous end on screen in Return of the Jedi, the Boba Fett figure – and thus the character – had already achieved top spot on most kids’ and collectors’ list of favorites. Since then, every new line of Star Wars toys has included multiple versions of the character. High-end Boba Fett statues, props, costumes and artwork continue to be among the most expensive and sought after Star Wars collectibles, and the character’s name ranks among the six or seven most commonly used to make reference to the Star Wars films in pop culture settings – not bad for a character who has less than 20 minutes of screen time and only three or four lines in the entire trilogy.

Of course, most of those items take slight liberties with the character’s look. If you ever watch Empire Strikes Back and you notice that the poster on your wall or the menacing action figure adorning your computer desk is significantly tougher-looking than the bobble-headed guy in a grey mechanic’s jumpsuit tiptoeing along the corridors of Cloud City on his tiny, pointed shoes, just remember – the legend of Boba Fett didn’t come from the films. Like so much of what made Star Wars such a hugely significant part of childhood for so many of today’s thirty-somethings, it came from the toys.

For more on the Passion of the Fett, see Family Guy, Robot Chicken, the work of cartoonist Evan Dorkin, eBay, and the rhythmic stylings of MC Chris.

It’s Boba, not Bubba!

First, a disclaimer – Boba Fett is just about my favorite Star Wars character, for no other reason than when I was a kid, I thought he looked really cool. Not that I really even need to explain, because almost everyone readily agrees he’s one of the four or five coolest characters from the series. But when I saw the original trilogy on cable again recently, a question hit me – how does a character with minimal screen time, nonexistent back-story, and a costume that is at least 50% totally lame surpass almost the entire first tier cast from all three movies in popularity? I’ll give my answer in just a second.

But first, I need to silence the inevitable objections to the question itself. Most will recall that Boba Fett shows up in the ‘we don’t need their scum’ scene on Darth Vader’s star destroyer and goes on to be the only one of the bounty hunters to reappear. From that point on, he appears in only 4 or 5 extremely brief scenes for a total of easily less than 15 minutes of screen time. He only has two short lines, “He’s no good to me dead,” and “As you wish.” He is referred to only as ‘that bounty hunter,’ not even by name (at least until ROTJ). Darth Vader seems to be aiming the ‘No disintegrations!’ order at him, but that’s it for back-story.

Now for the really controversial part – while I’m the first to admit Boba Fett has been reinvented over the years into a pretty badass-looking character, the original costume is pretty lame. Cool helmet, sure, cool chest armor with shoulder pads and gauntlet things, cool rocket pack deal, sure. But the helmet is really over-sized, making the original character look a little like a bobble-head figure in close-up shots. The armor, while neat enough looking in design, is basically just attached to a shirt – which really calls into question its effectiveness. What if you’re running around in a space shootout and your chest armor starts flopping around all over the place? There’s a codpiece and a bunch of belts and puffy pouches, which gives him a really middle heavy look. The pants are a baggy cargo deal, but with tapered ankles. TAPERED ANKLES! The shoes (not boots, SHOES) are small and kinda pointy. I know it was the eighties, but baggy-pants-tapered-into really small converse hi-tops wasn’t really a tough guy look even then. Plus there is some kind of knee armor hanging off the pants – how much good is that really doing? Unless they are knee pads, but I’m not even going into the question of what an intergalactic bounty hunter might need with knee pads. Then there’s the half-cape thing on his shoulder. Is that some kind of wrap, in case he gets chilly during a long space-stakeout? Was he pulling that tightly around himself and sipping tea from his galactic thermos to stay warm while he waited for the Millennium Falcon to drop off the back of that star destroyer?

Sarcasm aside, yes, you have a really cool helmet and some vicious-looking gauntlets, but the rest of it could really be something left over from an old Adam and the Ants video. Don’t take my word for it, go watch the movies and see for yourself. Or look at pictures online, but stick to the pictures from the actual films. Because – and here’s where it gets interesting – there are tons of cool pictures of Boba Fett, but the best ones are not from the movies at all. So how does a character with a mostly lame costume and an almost insignificant role in the film become the most remembered character from Empire Strikes Back?
Answer: It’s all about the toys.

To be continued…

Batman, by Meg’s Brother

I knew exactly what she meant. I specifically remember a mural in my home town of Mickey and Donald at my day care center. I was always disappointed that they weren’t inside as if the crude day care mural was actually painted by stoned entry-level Disney artists and that they were really giant map markers indicating where you could hang out with the live-action versions of the cartoon characters. The interesting thing is that drug-influenced children’s art knows no geographic boundary. I grew up in middle Georgia, she in Tennessee.

Boys love to draw superheroes. It’s one of the first things that any artistic male child is drawn to sketch, right after explosions and right before nude breasts. It’s in the DNA.

While unpacking a steamer trunk that her mom packed years ago, Meg unearthed a true treasure, a Batman drawing given to her by her high school aged brother. She said that this particular picture hung in her bedroom for years. Who wouldn’t want the first thing that you see in the morning to be a caped-super hero wishing you a good morning?

I happen to think that this drawing is better than any demonic Disney character. It’s also ahead of the time considering that her 14 year old sibling was obviously influenced by the Neal Adams-styled Batman and the writings of Naomi Klein way before “No Logo” had even been written. Where’s Batman’s emblem?

Seeing this Batman drawing reminded me of one of my early drawings of Superman that my mom kept.  I came to a new realization while looking at this out of proportion masterpiece of markers and construction paper. I loved many of the heroes of my generation, but none like Superman and I think it may have been for one major reason. As much as I liked He-Man, Luke Skywalker and Bo Duke, they couldn’t hold a match to the Man of Steel. It’s not because I sported Underoos in public places like TG & Y with a homemade cape, but because Superman had dark hair just like me. Sometimes it’s the simple things that help us relate to imagined greatness. Even now as I enter my mid-thirties and my hair is thinning, I still sometimes think of myself as the kid in the superman t-shirt running down the aisles of the grocery imagining that I can do great things.

My fondness of “Small Wonder” must have been due to the fact that it was a show about a robot. I always wanted a robot and my obsession with them was well known in elementary school. So well that my school-aged peers nicknamed me “beep-bop boy”. No joke. I’m sure that I wished that I was a cyborg too, but I’m banking that it was because of the influence of 1985′s D.A.R.Y.L. I remember that movie being great as well so, it probably sucked, but it starred Barret Oliver, the actor who played Bastian from The NeverEnding Story. What happened to that kid?

My first encounter with Leslie Nielsen was with Airplane! and The Naked Gun movies. The Naked Gun had its roots in the Police Squad! series which had only lasted six episodes.  I remember watching those movies, along with Chuck Norris and Cynthia Rothrock videos with my dad. It was truly one of the best bonding experiences a young boy and his father could have outside of fishing and I was always a little apprehensive of taking catfish off of the hook in fear of getting my hands cut by the whiskers.  Neilsen’s performances were slapstick mixed with subversive lines that were delivered like an expert magician, with misdirection. Even though the comedies he was in by today’s standards are innocent, I felt at the time like I was in on the adult humor and was member of a club whose only members were me, my dad, and no one else.

Leslie Nielsen

Later, in high school, I caught Nielsen in an episode of Highway to Heaven that was filmed the year before the first ‘Naked Gun’. I was surprised to learn that at one time, Nielsen had been a dramatic actor.  I even learned that he cut his teeth in sci-fi. Before acting with accused murderer O.J. Simpson, the future Lt. Frank Drebin played opposite Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet.

My first introduction with Irvin Kershner happened years earlier. The experience wasn’t a particularly good one either. My mom and dad took me to the theater to see The Empire Strikes Back. I was four years old. Seeing Luke suspended in a rejuvenating chamber while hooked to breathing tubes shook me to my toddler core. Between the imagery of seeing my hero near death and the bombastic percussion of  the AT-ATs stomping through the icy Hoth landscape, I was crying in a way that makes your bottom lip tremble. As to not torture their only child psychologically, my parents promptly left the theater with me clutching their hands.

Years later, always on Fridays, my dad would rent a suitcase-sized VCR from Curtis Mathes along with a stack of VHS tapes for the weekend. My first rental tapes had been films or shows that I had been familiar with like G.I. Joe, E.T., and even The Care Bears. One Friday evening, my dad took me to the store after work and let me pick out a tape on my own. I remember grabbing the empty rental box for The Empire Strikes Back on the shelf and taking it to the counter to have it exchanged for the video. I was finally going to be a man and watch the movie that had caused my parents to leave the movie theater abruptly  just a few years ago.

What had scared me before intrigued me now. I sat down, this time by myself, and watched the entire film without pause or pausing. I had never seen a a cliffhanger and I had certainly never seen a movie where the bad-guys seemingly won.  I championed the heroes, felt empathy for Luke when he found out that his dad was a dick and wished desperately that I had a small green sage to teach me the ways of the Force instead of going to school on Monday. One dispelled myth at the time was that Yoda’s appearance was based on the likeness of Kershner. I still like to believe that this one is true.

Every time I’ve seen the movie since, I’ve appreciated it more and more especially in comparison to its subsequent sequels, prequels and cartoons. It’s many fan’s favorite of the movies and I imagine that the reason has a lot to do with Kershner’s direction.

Producer Gary Kurtz said this in an interview recently. “I took a master class with Billy Wilder once and he said that in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down,” Kurtz said. “ ‘Empire’ was the tree on fire. The first movie was like a comic book, a fantasy, but ‘Empire’ felt darker and more compelling. It’s the one, for me, where everything went right.”

Even now, an original ‘Empire’ poster hangs in my dining room. So every time I’m eating in there, I see his name in print. I haven’t really celebrated Kershner’s other movies the same way and I know what you’re thinking. “Surely, you can’t be serious”. I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.

My true, in depth introduction started with Season 5 at the behest of my friend Jason, and too my dismay I enjoyed it and was quickly hooked. I had been resistant years earlier after seeing pieces of an episode that aired on SyFy, then SciFi, that featured the 10th Doctor and some cheap-looking alien. At the time, Doctor Who preceded Battlestar Galactica, which I was adamant about. BSG was serious, had great looking dog-fights in space, and it was filmed documentary style. Documentary style, I mean “rapid zoom”, it couldn’t get more serious if Ken Burns had directed it. I didn’t have time for humor and terrible costumes in my science fiction. I wanted “realism”.

David Tennant in The End of Time

Well BSG, as much as I loved it at the time, disappointed me in the end. The last 30 minutes of its last episode to be precise were it’s swan song. Breaking the fourth wall should have been a no-no. After BSG’s bitter end and after a period of mourning that included denial (of the the last 30 minutes) I was open to watching the silly Doctor Who. After all it had time-travel. Over the course of a few months, I watched every episode of the new series and in doing so saw the full episodes

that I had only seen clips of before when I was in a different mood. And this time the aliens were more sinister, still goofy looking, but believable within context. (The ones I had seen in those early clips were the Sontarans and the Ood. I remember Kylie Minogue too, but she’s not silly looking.)

Everything I saw seemed charming. And as much as Ronald Moore proclaimed that the last episode of BSG would be character driven, Doctor Who put their money where their mouth was. It under-promised and over-delivered. Doctor Who was a great character and his supporting players were equally good.

The last episode for the 10th Doctor was no different. Even though much of the episode dealt with the Master, a character who I did not care for in his current incarnation, I still loved it. Another character heavily featured was former companion Donna Noble’s grandfather, Wilfred Mott. Wilfred is the grandfather you always imagined having, a star gazer who always believes in your potential outside of everyone else’s lowered or normal expectations. At the end the Doctor even turns to Wilfred and says “I’d be proud … If you were my Dad.” Hokey, but effective. Especially to me. I love Rom-Coms and I love clichéd sentiments in stories when they are done correctly and to great effect.

Without giving too much away, I will say that the last few moments with the Doctor and Wilfred together on screen reminded me of Spock’s last scenes with Kirk in Wrath of Khan. Hands on the glass, radiation, and a painful goodbye that’s isn’t exactly the end.

The last moments, although tearful, lead up to the 10th Doctor’s regeneration into the 11th. I saw the familiar face that drew me into the series and now my viewing experience had come full circle. And as Whovian’s say, you never forget your first Doctor, but I know that I will never forget the 10th.