George Lucas, military genius

A couple weeks ago the first Star Wars was on Spike or something and I couldn't help but watch it. I'm talking about episode IV, "A New Hope," naturally, not the JarJar abomination.

I've seen this movie countless times. I don't remember whether I saw it in the theater, and I would have been about seven or something when it came out, so I probably wouldn't remember it anyway. But I remember it was a weird Tulip Craze type of obsession to talk about how many times one had seen it, and people would claim the most outrageous and financially unlikely things, like "I've seen it in the theater six thousand seventeen times," etc. My main recollection of it was that it aired on television in 1983 during the buildup toward what at the time was called Revenge of the Jedi (which I still call it to this day, since that was how I was introduced to it and it stuck).

So we recorded it on VHS from over-the-air, antenna-received broadcast, awesome commercials and all (I remember one particularly stupid one of a Mercury Cougar following people around for no clear reason but to remind them how Awesome it would be if they would buy a Mercury Cougar, and a bunch of Diet Pepsi ads where they basically refused to actually show the people doing the talking). My brother and I watched our VHS tape on a solid steel VCR which was almost as big as the 19" TV we were watching on, almost every day after school for about a year, just so we could increase our watch count. It was a preposterous waste of time, but fun nonetheless, and I grew up convinced that Star Wars was among the greatest cinematic achievements of all time (after the Indiana Jones movies, of course).

The general and acknowledged awesomeness of the movie notwithstanding, we always sort of winced at a lot of the dogfight-in-the-trench scene at the end, despite being kids and all. Among the reasons:

1. Gold Leader seemed really pompous and amused by his own dialog, in a Max Headroom kind of way. We always hated Gold Leader.

2. Gold Five sounded really dorky when he kept flatly insisting, in his angry monotone that Gold Leader "stay on target," prompting even the notorious tightass Gold Leader to tell him to "loosen up."

3. Gold Two just looked like a dork. His lips were like really fat and stuff. I had a hard time buying into him as a fighter pilot.

4. Y-wing fighters were also like really gay overall.

5. When Luke Skywalker switches off his targeting computer, his ground commander says "Luke, you switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong?" and Luke replies "Nothing, I'm all right," and no one decides that that non-explanation warrants any follow-up questions when some cornshucking sucker of a rookie pilot decides I'M GOIN' TO MANUAL right before an all-or-nothing weapons launch.

There were other reasons, but Indiana Jones flying in out of the sun and blowing the crap out of everyone with his lasers went a long way toward making up for the rest of this nonsense as far as my 1983 VHS-watching bad self was concerned.

What struck me when I watched this last week was how stupid all this scene was. They managed to get two three-fighter groups into the trench at different times, and both attempts played out mostly the same: one guy appointed as the only one who would take the shot, and the other two guys fly around behind him offering helpful suggestions ("stay on target") and getting shot down by tie fighters that got on their six, while attempting no evasive maneuvers of any kind. When Red Two gets hit and Luke instructs him "get out of there, you can't do any more good back there," I must say I have no idea what good he supposedly was doing before he got his dumb self hit. And Red Leader sounded altogether surprised when he said "they came at us from behind!" Do tell. And really, Indiana Jones is the only one who has his act together in this scene, flying in from above and catching Darth Vader too busy using the Force to even bother to check his instruments and notice a slow-moving freighter bearing down on him from above.

Then I noticed that the fat guy's name was actually "Porkins." You read that right. Good times.

I resumed making fun of the whole Gold Squadron of doofuses and suddenly became curious if any of these yahoos had ever acted again, or if the horrible weight of their collective sordid history as Gold Squadron had ruined their acting careers. Turns out Gold Leader was played buy a guy named Angus MacInnes, who has five dozen movie credits to his name after Star Wars and owns a pizza shop in Edinborough. Had I known that in 2005 when I was in Edinborough you can bet your sweet britches I would have popped in for a pie and reminded him to "stay on target."

Speaking of "stay on target," Gold Five (Graham Ashley) had already been dead four years when I started making fun of him. I feel kinda bad about that in retrospect, but kids can be so terrible. Gold Two (Jeremy Sinden) died in 1996, which also is sad and made me regret making fun of his character as a kid. Red Leader (Drewe Henley) more or less never acted again (one could argue the same is mostly true of Red Five). Porkins himself (William Hootkins) passed away in 2005, though not before becoming better known to Freebird as a character called U.S. Translator in the 2004 episode "Impact Winter" of the greatest television program (nay, the greatest fictional creation) since the days of Sophocles.

Not only did George Lucas create a movie with a climactic scene so militarily implausible as to invite doubt on the part of a 12-year old, but it seems like he singlehandedly ruined a bunch of careers too. The moral here, if there is one, is probably that it's not a good idea to become obsessed with an entertainment program, be it Star Wars or West Wing, because then you'll either waste all your money on boxed DVD sets of a crap television program or you'll waste all your time finding links to the personal back story of incidental characters on the sadly obsessive wookipedia.org just so you can populate your blog with them as you write three-decade-late critiques of thinly veiled francophilic explorations of the noblesse resiste during the Nazi occupation instead of doing honest work. Either way, it's just kinda sad.

Also, don't make fun of people, or you might one day regret it.

Tomorrow! The auto bailout? Or Al Gore's new pantaloons? Either way, you'll not want to miss it.