As long as I was re-immersing myself in retro-70s and 80s nostalgia in this series of posts about my “City High” years, I thought—why not?
An era is not just about stories you can still recall. It’s really also about appreciating your reminiscences in the context of the total environment of those times—beyond the tedium of school work: the contemporary pop culture, the music, the arts and certainly the movies we watched.
We were in Second Year high school in 1977 when the first of the Star Wars trilogy came out (before creator George Lucas sold the franchise to Walt Disney).
I watched it in Session Theater with two of my closest high school buddies, Carlo Antiado and Renato Hufana—we cut classes one afternoon to do it.
Carlo paid for my ticket, Renato paid for the popcorn. It was their treat. These two had earned a handsome bit of money “shagging” down golf balls at Camp John Hay’s Driving Range on weekends.
Back in the day, every boy followed the Star Wars saga on comic books which we bought at the old Sunshine newsstand (at the corner grocery store run by the family of Mike del Rosario). We didn’t have to buy all the magazine issues—after all, there were many of us Star Wars fanatics. So each boy only bought one issue one week, another boy bought the next one the following week, and so on.
When we exchanged comic books around, we all got to read the running narrative seamlessly, despite each one of us having contributed only one magazine issue to the “komiks pool.”
We knew all the details of the adventures and exploits of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbaca, Yoda, Obi Wan Kenobi and those two cute androids C3PO and R2-D2 before these were even committed to script and movie screenplay.
That is to say when we went to see the movie, we knew what to expect in terms of the movie’s plot—and we were definitely not disappointed. The movie was amazing.
Granted computer graphic imaging (CGI) was still in its infancy, and George Lucas shot most of the scenes using 3D clay models of the space ships—the Millenium Falcon and the X-wing fighters—using a lot of forced-perspective photography, but we weren’t complaining.
In fact, I thought it was amazing that Lucas could animate all those flat colored comic page drawings we were so familiar with in a way that didn’t really conflict with how we visualized exploding galaxies and light sabre duels in our imagination.
Then George Lucas added an awesome new dimension—that glorious orchestral music weaving the Star Wars theme with a cacophony of fighting brass and haunting string ensembles overlaying this booming chest-thumping bass line that we were hearing for the first time from Session Theater’s new Dolby Surround Sound system.
What can I say? It was an unforgettable sight, sound and concussive experience.
So today, 46 years later, I wondered if I would still be as overwhelmed by Star Wars—after a taste of present day CGI film wizardy as James Cameron’s Avatar 1 and 2, or Marvel Film’s Avengers series?
I downloaded the first trilogy—Star Wars Episode IV (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983)—and invested a whole weekend watching all three.
I’ll be honest—maybe I was “easier to get” as an ‘audience’ when I was in high school. Today, all three movies—but especially the first one—look like an old 8-mm home movie with a decent-enough soundtrack.
It made me feel sad.
I had lost the sense of childish wonder I knew I had back in ’77.
Then it dawned on me: in 1977 the most popular arcade game was “Pong” which consisted of a small squarish ball that moved across a green cathode ray tube (CRT) television screen, bouncing back and forth between two “paddles” in what you might consider today the sorriest crude electronic impression of a “tennis” game.
And yet I distinctly remember “Pong” thrilling us for hours in that streetcorner “Fun House” on Perfecto Street beside Bob’s Dry Goods (where Tiong San Harrison is today). Certainly, “Pong” would scale down to a molecule compared to today’s computer games. It would be like comparing an apple with a mustard seed. The moral: If you immerse yourself in old-tech with a new-tech outlook, you will miss the point.
Suddenly, an idea came to me. I played the movies again—but this time I activated the subtitles. Voila!
I had quaintly managed to “reconvert” the movies BACK into comic books—and instantly I was awash with an unexplainable wave of nostalgia, enabling me to recapture a bit of that sense of sci-fi enchantment I once had as a little boy. SEEING the words of the dialog made a big difference.
I was no longer just watching a movie, I was READING like it was a comic book, only a really sophisticated one with sound and moving color. It reawakened all the stimuli in my brain that made me transcend those old still drawings and visualize them as entire sequences of action drama even more animated than the moving images of the movie itself.
Subtitles, especially hardcoded ones that you can’t turn off, are normally a bit of an annoyance. Not in this case. Instead of inside “talk balloons” the dialog words displayed on the lower part of the screen, like running captions, without really covering visual content. When the subtitles refreshed, it was analogous to turning a comic book on to the next page. Even the original movie release didn’t have those subtitles in 1977.
I was experiencing Star Wars in a whole different way again, even 46 years after I browsed the comic book version. Watching its filmization for the first time in 1977, I sat in quiet suspended judgment, waiting to confirm if the film was faithful to the comicbook.
This time, my mind was resting easy–I already knew the film had stuck to the correct storyline. I felt no hesitation or resistance letting the movie wash over my brain, allowing me to savor all those pivotal scenes again but this time with greater saliency and impact.
Like that iconic scene in The Empire Strikes Back, with Yoda and Luke Skywalker confiding by that swamp where Luke had crashlanded his X-wing fighter craft.
Yoda, the jedi master, challenged Skywalker to lift his craft out of the bog using pure telekinesis.
“Okay, I’ll try,” Skywalker said, triggering an instant rebuke from Yoda.
“NO! Try NOT!…DO…or DO NOT. There is no TRY!”
Skywalker barely managed to lift the heavy machine a couple of inches before giving up and sulking in one corner. Yoda completed the task, lifting the spacecraft clear out of the swamp and depositing it on dry ground right before the eyes of a disbelieving Skywalker.
“I don’t believe it!” Luke exclaimed.
“THAT,” Yoda mumbled in deep thought, “is WHY you fail.”
What an appropriate philosophy to soak in at this time–or any time in one’s life–but especially in this day and age when cynicism is the new normal. We’re all in search of something to believe in, for something real. In fact, we can make real–at least to ourselves–that which we focus our energies on to believe. Thought translated into action creates reality The best way to make your dream come true is to wake up and pursue it.
I heard it before too but, believe me, it’s a whole lot more profound and insightful when you READ the words.
Maybe that is the real takeaway from the whole exercise. When it comes to re-experiencing a memory we had somehow kept alive in our dormant subconscious, no technology can be more advanced than our human brain. Our brain can RESHOOT an entire movie, giving us a totally personalized version…in REAL TIME!
You must try it sometime. You won’t regret it.*
About the Author
The author is a writer and lawyer based in Baguio City, Philippines. Former editor of the Gold Ore and Baguio City Digest, professor of journalism, political science and law at Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF). He is a photographer and video documentarist. He has a YouTube channel called “Parables and Reason”