I understand that my pals The Cardboard Troopers had a wild time this past weekend. They arrived in Atlanta for the 2009 edition of Dragon*Con, but they couldn’t actually seem to find a trace of the convention and the hotel people kept looking at them funny. I sure hope that they come back for the 10:00am parade on Saturday, they always seem to enjoy that.

Which reminds me that last month the Fall issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine hit the stands and I was simultaneously delighted (97%) and mortified (3%) to read the article about me that staff writer Van Jensen composed after we met prior to my surgery this summer. Entitled “How Did That NERD on the Left Become That PIRATE on the Right?“, the article does a really nice job of catching people up with the kid who won the Batman contest back in the 80s… and the second page features a certain cardboard trooper standing in front of a line of “real” troopers at Dragon*Con.

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Last week our friend Bob announced that he was going to sell a few old Star Wars toys he had laying around his house. This of course piqued my interest, as I’m one of those millions of children who were imprinted with the plans for the Death Star back in the summer of 1977. Like many of those kids, my formative years were spent poring over pre-production illustrations by Ralph McQuarrie and building my own models of the ships out of balsa wood and styrene. Looking back, I thought that I had a pretty great collection of lovingly-used, carefully-protected toys and memorabilia packed away into boxes and sent off for storage.

I was so wrong.

What I’m leaving out is that “our friend Bob” is better known in Star Wars fan circles as “VaderPainter“; one of the premiere Darth Vader costumers in the nation. His Darth Vader costume has its own custom-made road case… something you’d expect to see during a load-in for a KISS concert. It has custom-cut foam receivers for Vader’s helmet. It has casters. It has reinforced sides and custom silkscreened artwork on the outside. It’s totally Rock-n-Roll, and it’s totally ready for tour… which is exactly what Bob uses if for because he has appeared all over the place as Vader and has more Imperial Stormtrooper friends than you can shake a gaffi stick at.

Knowing how seriously he takes his costuming it should have come as no surprise that his Star Wars collection might be “above average”.

What it turned out to be though is “beyond imagination“.

Bob’s house is a realization of every Star Wars toy collector’s dream: shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves filled with figures and spaceships and books and models and replica costumes and helmets and…….. there were so many toys and figures on hand that I honestly had a difficult time focusing on any one item because there were five more things right beside it that I wanted to see. I kept finding myself staring with my mouth open at things I’d only ever seen in magazines, like an art student walking through the Louvre admiring the care given to each piece of art on display. Just incredible.

The video I’ve posted here is of Captain Matt of ThePirateShip.com being given a personal tour of the collection by VaderPainter himself. Enjoy!

After yesterday’s visit to Bob’s sale I have to tell you: my collection is a joke. And I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m more than a bit relieved because now I won’t have to build a Star Wars museum of my own. As we were driving away my 78 year old Dad said “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a toy store in a house.”

Right on.

…

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Do you know what hyperbole is?
Do you know who Kirk Montgomery is?
Do you know what you get when you mix the two?

I just heard an advertisement for the new Star Trek movie in which Mr. Montgomery is quoted as saying that the new Star Trek is “this generation’s Star Wars”. ORLY? I thought it was supposed to be this generation’s STAR TREK!!!!

Cretin.

::sigh::

Following this new variation on logic I can only surmise that:

• “House” must be this generation’s “Gone With The Wind”.
• The new Will Ferrell remake of “Land of the Lost” must be this generation’s “French Connection”.
• “Transformers 2″ must certainly be this generation’s “Citizen Kane”
• and who could deny that “Operation Runway” represents this generation’s “From Here to Eternity”??

Alls I know is that THIS generation have their heads up their collective asses and that Mr. Montgomery is leading the charge. Just like Humphrey Bogart in “Ironman 2″.

Now THERE was a classic.

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I have a little present for you… keep reading!

Anyone who’s been within a mile of a geek is aware that the Star Wars franchise continues to exert its influence on popular culture. Yet, in the 30+ years since its initial release, I think that we’ve forgotten the ferocity with which that space opera seized our collective imagination… it was a massively incredible time to be a kid… a time when words like “wookie” and “darth” and “R2-D2” were alien and exotic and felt wrong and strange and wonderful when spoken aloud.

The First Age of Star Wars stretched easily from 1977 into 1978, and yet there was very little merchandise marketing to take advantage of the movie’s staggering popularity. In time, Star Wars and its ilk would pave the way for today’s relentless merchandise marketing machines, but in that very first year there was little preparation by the studio or its licensees and intellectual property theft was rampant. It was a time when you could glue the words “Star” and “Wars” onto your product and make a million dollars.

Take, for instance, the following treasure stored safely below ground in the depths of the Drewcave, replete with children-drawn illustrations of creatures and characters from Star Wars (click here to download (note!!! this is a 14.7MB PDF). This isn’t a joke or a fabrication, but a real scan of a real book given to our class for the 1977-78 school season… a rare first glimpse into a burgeoning Star Wars phenomenon that has endured and is nearly as popular today as it was back then.

How It Was Made
I removed the original staples of this book and set them aside before scanning in each page. After scanning, the pages were straightened in Adobe Photoshop and then broken into single pages and placed into Adobe InDesign, before being exported as a PDF.

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Unlike drinking, driving, voting and sex, Nostalgia is an ineffable experience that busybodies are unable to protest and politicians are unable to legislate. And try as they might to experience it, the young are entirely unable to appreciate the sensation of nostalgia blooming across their minds until they’ve actually reached an age where the magic works.

Not having studied psychology in college or for my professional career, I’m entirely unaware of the the established chronological demarcation points for the age at which we first begin to experience the pangs of desire for what went before. It’s certainly something that most of us begin feeling in our 30s, and I know that I missed things from my childhood by my mid-20s. But, regardless of the age at which it begins, you must admit that there’s an endorphic blast when you encounter some fundamentally iconic touchstone of your youth.

Like these tickets.

In but a second the sight of these movie tickets slammed me through 40 years of memories to the place where I had just experienced seeing a lightsaber for the very first time. The place where I first saw Darth Vader stride across the screen in all his menacing glory. The first time that I considered that machines might one day have awareness of themselves.

All of it. Every bit of the impact of that film on my mind and imagination.

That fundamental moment of change, all there in a tiny, tiny piece of paper. Incredible.

As my appreciation for the power of nostalgia continues to grow, I’ve started to consider all the other rewarding experiences of adulthood which balance out the “lost joys” of youth; like friendship and parenthood… both of which can provide even more opportunities to feed our love for nostalgia.

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But of course I didn’t.
It’s strange… sort of like when your inner hypochondriac insists that you have contracted some terrible, loping disease of the soul and yet you avoid going to the doctor to have him confirm your worst fears because if you don’t look for the problem, it doesn’t exist. Ladies, just in case you’re wondering, this is the mathematics, the physics if you will, that underlies the way that we guys think.

It takes something fairly significant to shake us out of this head-in-the-sand behavior…. something like a triple-digit, death-dealing, nation-gripping heatwave…. you know, like now.

So this morning I get the ladder and head up to investigate the state of my own small Star Wars figure collection, you know, for the Estate valuation and all. Waving my arms through steely black widow webs, crawling over the crushed bodies of a million ladybugs and brown beetles, I finally located the prize and retreated back to the comfort of air-conditioning holding the box over my head like an Academy Award envelope for Best Picture… pregnant with riches or ruin.

Imaginary drums rolled as I carefully sliced brown paper tape away from the heretofore hermetically sealed cardboard box. Inside the box were three smaller white boxes, also carefully labeled. This was interesting, I didn’t recall having spent this much time on these things….

By this point I’d become more interested in my own archival abilities than in the outcome of my geeky toy collection….. so I slid one of the three white boxes out and sat it on top of the big box.

Then I lifted its lid.
To my utter astonishment there were several dozen even smaller boxes inside the small white box. It was like the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy Duck wins the “Million Box” except that every one of my little boxes was labeled with a sticker and carefully taped shut. I looked at the inventory for the box and found that box #063 was “Luke Skywalker – earlybird figure (1 figure, 0 accessories)”. That’s the very first Luke Skywalker figure ever sold… the one that has a little plastic lightsaber that slides out of the toy’s arm… the only one that has an even smaller sliver of plastic that slides out of the first bit of plastic to replicate the extending blade.

I held my breath as I peeled the paper tape away from the tiny box’s edges and lifted the lid….

Sitting there, encased in bubble wrap, was a wholly intact figure.
Eat your heart out Howard Carter… my Early Bird Luke Skywalker is in mint condition!

And headed for new, safer digs as we speak!

Related posts:

1. VaderPainter’s Big August 2009 Sale

Before we begin I need to review the rules of Cardboard Costuming, namely:

The Fundamental Rule of Cardboard Costumes
If your cardboard costume looks really nice, you’ve done it really wrong. Your costume must look as though it were ripped from the inside of a garbage compactor. It should have strange, upside down logos. It should be hastily taped together with obvious seams, obvious mends and similar errors of construction. Basically: it should look thrown away.

Kids, get your parents and/or legal guardians to help you make your Chewboxxa costume because you shouldn’t play with sharp box cutters without adult supervision.

The Body
To build your Chewboxxa costume you’re going to need a rather large box, preferably a tall appliance box (in relation to your own size). If your first thought is “I know! I’ll use a refrigerator box!” you’re on the right track, but stop and think for a second: surely your body isn’t wide enough for your arms to comfortably poke out of the sides of a refrigerator box. Imagine how uncomfortable that would be. Consider taking a box that’s tall then cutting it open along one side then refolding it so that it keeps the height but reduces the side-to-side, front-to-back width. Arm comfort is always paramount when you’re wearing cardboard.

The Head
Booxiees are really, really tall. It follows then that their heads should be really, really way up their body, near the top… probably higher up than your own head. But what makes Booxiees funny is the fact that their head is part of their body, they don’t have a neck!

The Face
All you need to do is worry about your Booxiee’s face so go ahead and cut out some good looking eye holes way up above where your head will actually be. Your Booxiee’s intelligence will be inferred by its eyes. If they’re really close together it will look stupid. If they’re far apart it will look creepy and slow. I recommend trying different sized eyes and you should never, ever make the eyes square and even. Asymmetry is the window to a cardboard costume’s soul! Have fun with the mouth, which should be drawn with a fat, black marker.

Operator’s Vision
For you to actually see out of your costume you’re going to need to cut out some “practical” eye holes at the level at which your eyes will actually be located inside the costume. Better yet, I recommend that you cut a thin horizontal slit all the way across the front of your box, that way you’ll have a really good view of everything in front of you and the line might be lost to casual viewers in the cuts and folds and patches that make up your costume.

The Legs
The box should come down so far over your legs that you only need to create cardboard “spats” that cover your legs from the knee to the ankle. This should simply be a square cardboard tube big enough to slide over your lower leg. Do it with your shoes off then put your shoes back on. This will “lock” the spats in place on your leg.

The Arms
I’m going to do a write-up about how to make good cardboard arms in a later post. For now take a look at the drawing and you’ll get the basic idea.

The Bandolier
For a really “showy” look you might consider using Chocolate Pop-Tart boxes taped into place. But if you’re in a pinch why not just bend and fold your own clips and tape them in place. Remember, nothing on your costume should be glued on. A good cardboard costumer will always have a roll of duct tape with them, ready to be patched at any time. If your costume begins this way you won’t be surprised when something falls off and you’ll be much better prepared to repair yourself when the time comes.

Remember the Point!!!
This is to have fun! If you’re busy worried about tearing or staining your costume then you can’t have fun. Go on, eat, drink and spill all over your Booxiee costume, it’ll only get better!!!

I’d love it if some of you would like to post your comments below suggesting other costumes you’d like me to illustrate in subsequent posts leading up to September. I feel that this provides a valuable service to the fan community.

* Cardboardish: a term first identified by Alfeo “Lightspeed” Dixon, the “caution tape” trooper from 2006.

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